m
 
 GOETHE: 
 
 HIS LIFE AND WORKS. 
 
 AN ESSAY. 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE H. CALVERT. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 LEE, SHEPARD AND DILLINGHAM. 
 1872.
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 
 
 GEORGE H. CALVERT, 
 in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 Cambridge : Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. WEIMAR AND ITALY . ' e 
 
 II. POETRY AND SCIENCE 39 
 
 III. SCHILLER 75 
 
 IV. FRIENDSHIPS 108 
 
 V. LOVES 140 
 
 VI. FAUST 196 
 
 VII. CONCLUSION 243
 
 GOETHE, 
 i. 
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 
 
 To the English-speaking public Goethe is 
 the great German Poet who wrote WertJier and 
 Faust, a large, nebulous, remote figure. A 
 smaller circle can call over the catalogue of his 
 principal creative works, prose-fictions as well 
 as poems, and knows that he has a name in 
 Science ; and that, surviving to be over four- 
 score, he lived his latter days in high state at 
 Weimar, the acknowledged primate of all Ger- 
 man literary dioceses, a sage as well as poet. 
 But few know that behind the poet, beneath 
 the writer and thinker, lying as solid founda- 
 tion to the splendid superstructure of sixty 
 printed volumes, is a practical man of business, 
 a vigorous, rigorous, methodical administrator, 
 who, as such, did better work and more of it 
 than was ever done, except by a few of the pre-
 
 6 GOETHE. 
 
 dominant lawgivers and wisest, long-lived rulers 
 of populous nations. 
 
 For more than fifty years the chosen, trusted, 
 appreciated friend of Carl August, Duke, after- 
 wards Grand-Duke, of Weimar, Goethe was for 
 the first. ten years of his long abode in Weimar, 
 from his twenty-sixth to his thirty-sixth year, 
 the chief minister of the wise young Duke, 
 and the virtual administrator of the ducal- gov- 
 ernment, reorganizing during that first decade 
 some of the most important of its departments, 
 and creating new ones. 
 
 No detraction is it from the breadth of the 
 principles he applied as political worker, that 
 Goethe's field was limited ; but fortunate for 
 the world that it was limited. The reorganiz- 
 ing of a Prussia or an Austria might have swal- 
 lowed up the whole man, or have absorbed so 
 much of his vitality for more years as to have 
 maimed the poet ; whereas, his ministerial 
 functions in Weimar, performed too as they 
 were through personal love for and enlightened 
 sympathy with the glorious young Duke, 
 were but a phasis in his unfolding, early lessons 
 that were an initiatory discipline for the poet 
 and thinker, strenuous exercises which de- 
 veloped, fortified, and mellowed the faculties 
 whose predestined field was literature. What-
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. J 
 
 ever Goethe did, saw, read, whatever he expe- 
 rienced in any shape, he made subservient to 
 his culture. In pains and pleasures, in the 
 most plodding labor and the -most fantastic 
 amusement, in all the passages of his daily life, 
 he kept his growth and improvement ever be- 
 fore him. From everything and everybody he 
 came in contact with he drew some food. Like 
 Prospero, he was 
 
 " All dedicate 
 To closeness and the bettering of his mind ; " 
 
 but he did not need, like Prospero, " to neglect 
 worldly ends ; " all such he made serve his 
 primary end of self-culture, moral, aesthetical, 
 intellectual self-culture. 
 
 In his twenty-eighth year, January 1777, lit- 
 tle more than a twelvemonth from his arrival 
 in Weimar, Goethe writes to Lavater : " Let 
 my present life continue so long as it will, at 
 any rate I have heartily enjoyed a genuine ex- 
 perience of the variegated throng and press of 
 the world, sorrow, hope, love, work, wants, 
 adventure, ennui, impatience, folly, joy, the ex- 
 pected and the unknown, the superficial and 
 the profound, just as the dice threw, with fetes, 
 dances, sleighings, adorned in silk and span- 
 gles, a marvelous manage ! And withal, 
 dear brother, God be praised, in myself and in
 
 8 GOETHE. 
 
 my real aims in life I am quite happy." About 
 the same time, in a letter from Weimar to a 
 friend, Merck says : " Goethe is the soul and 
 direction of everything, and all are contented 
 with him because he serves many and injures 
 no one. Who can withstand the disinterested- 
 ness of this man ? " Too earnest a man was 
 Goethe, too true and large a soul, to be flattered 
 by the privileges of high worldly position. 
 He took the chief place under the Duke, to 
 be useful to him and his people. He could be 
 uniquely useful, because he did 'not covet the 
 place, did not climb up to it from below, but 
 descended upon it a winged benefactor, who 
 folded for a time his wings, or rather made of 
 them magic arms with which all other arms 
 must willingly co-work. 
 
 Looking at the wide book-shelf, filled by 
 Goethe's printed works, and knowing their 
 range and achievement, it is at first hard to 
 figure to one's self that, in the first years of 
 his residence in Weimar, the writer of these 
 scores of teeming volumes would, for two or 
 three weeks, scour the whole ducal domain on 
 horseback to supervise the drawing of the men 
 for the war-contingent ; that at another time 
 he would accompany the master of the ducal 
 forests and farms over his wide field of duty ;
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 9 
 
 that, as controller of the finance^ not the light- 
 est of his tasks was to keep the liberal Duke 
 from overrunning the constable. To Goethe 
 may be applied what himself said of Frederick 
 the Great, that " Whatever he undertook he 
 went at with such zeal as though that alone en- 
 gaged all his activity, and as though he had 
 never brought anything else to pass." In those 
 days Goethe would start up from bed at a cry 
 of fire, and hurry to a neighboring village, re- 
 turning the next day with his hair singed and 
 feet blistered. The beautiful park at Weimar 
 was his creation, and in his thirty-second year 
 he was President of the Chambers. The en- 
 largement and elevation of the University of 
 Jena shared some of his attention, with the im- 
 provement of the public schools. He organ- 
 ized and then directed the theatre, and the ac- 
 tors he instructed and formed. Once when an 
 actor, accustomed to higher parts, refused that 
 of a trooper, Goethe brought him to by say- 
 ing : " If you will not play the trooper, I will." 
 Goethe was himself a capital actor. In the 
 like spirit he told his servant, Stadelman, that 
 if some cloths he had ordered for wiping books 
 and engravings were not in their place, he 
 should go out and buy them himself. These 
 incidents prove the thoroughness of his pro-
 
 IO GOETHE. 
 
 cedures, and at the same time they give 
 glimpses into the manly cordiality of his daily 
 life. He gave lectures on Osteology in Jena ; 
 he studied Anatomy with such insight as to 
 discover an intermaxillary bone in man, and 
 Botany to such purpose that his Metamor- 
 phoses of Plants is a valuable addition to the 
 discoveries and expositions of science. The 
 wide circle of Goethe's practical experience 
 had been incomplete had he not witnessed 
 
 " The grappling vigor and rough frown of war." 
 
 In the advance of the Prussians into France, 
 in 1792, the Duke of Weimar had a command, 
 and Goethe accompanied him. The next year 
 he was again the companion of his friend at 
 the siege of Mayence. 
 
 But during the ten years of active states- 
 manship, from 1776 to 1786, ever strong and 
 stronger within him was the consciousness of 
 his poetic and literary vocation. Amid the 
 most prosaic of doings poems sprang up, like 
 wild flowers in a wheat-field, not destined like 
 these to be cut down and cast aside, but to be 
 laid away as finally the best sowing of his lav- 
 ish hand. Of such high method was he, that, 
 without neglecting aught of his manifold un- 
 dertakings, many were the hours and the days
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. \\ 
 
 consecrated to finer and more congenial activ- 
 ity, hours sparkling with life and light, which 
 refreshed and strengthened him, and gave him- 
 courage for his coarser labors. But now was 
 come the time when, in the ordering of his in- 
 dustrious days, the more prosaic work was to 
 be secondary and the poetic primary. To the 
 public business of the Duchy he had given a 
 sure momentum ; he had, part designedly, part 
 unconsciously, by degrees cultivated his young 
 chief, who was six or seven years his junior, 
 and was of most arable stuff ; as friend and 
 subject, and as citizen, he had done a large 
 and arduous duty, and had done it well ; and 
 now he longed for freedom, and he yearned for 
 Italy. 
 
 Goethe was in his thirty-seventh year when 
 he set out on his journey southward. From 
 all, save the Duke, he kept his project secret, 
 and one day, late in the season, in 1786, he 
 disappeared from Carlsbad, his usual summer- 
 resort, and alone, and under an assumed name, 
 he crossed the Alps. Unencumbered by com- 
 panion or by his own fame, he wished to con- 
 front the longed-for land. Never did traveller 
 into crowded, illuminated Italy see more, learn 
 more, enjoy more, and, except his great coun- 
 tryman, Luther, three centuries earlier, profit
 
 12 GOETHE. 
 
 more for himself, and through him for the 
 world. The rare fullness of Goethe's endow- 
 ment, with the fineness of his organization, em- 
 powered him to see things as they are, to see 
 around and into them, especially things on 
 the plane of the beautiful, with a fidelity sel- 
 dom equaled. Never man had a clearer, surer 
 eye for the truth in most provinces of observa- 
 tion, thought, and action. Soon after his en- 
 trance into Italy, he wrote to one of his 
 friends : " How rejoiced I am that I have dedi- 
 cated my life to the True, as it is thence so 
 easy for me to pass over to the Great, which is 
 only the highest, purest point of the true." 
 The man who had a right to say that, and 
 whose high-strung faculties were busy for four- 
 score years, surely lived a great, a radiant life, 
 aye, and a blessed life, despite his share of sor- 
 rows and troubles, a full crop, from the very 
 richness of his passional and emotional nature.. 
 Goethe's first long halt in Italy was at Ven- 
 ice. For three weeks, eyes, senses, sensibili- 
 ties, aptitudes were plied as never before ; for 
 that Shakespeare visited Italy is only a sur- 
 mise. The morning was devoted to Iphigenia : 
 his heartiest, nearest companion was ever some 
 child of the brain, to whose unfolding he gave 
 his freshest hours. Art and nature, pictures
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 13 
 
 and architecture, men and their manners, do- 
 ings, traffic, amusements, these filled with life 
 the sunny noons and afternoons. Powerfully 
 was he impressed by the architecture of Ven- 
 ice : " It rose up before him," he said, " like a 
 ghost out of a grave." In the evening, one or 
 other of the theatres attracted and busied him, 
 and before sleeping he wrote to friends, or made 
 more secure with his pen some of the harvest 
 he had gathered during the long, lively day. 
 From Venice he hurried through Ferrara, Bo- 
 logna, Florence, Arezzo, Perugia, so eager was 
 he, as eager as Luther, to reach Rome. When 
 he first found himself within the walls, he did 
 not, like Luther, fall on his knees. Happily 
 for us and himself, Goethe had not been 
 brought up a monk : happily for himself and 
 for us, Luther had been. 
 
 On November ist, 1786, his first day in 
 Rome, Goethe writes in a letter to Weimar : 
 " Dreams of my youth I see here living before 
 me." At the end of a week, after having 
 partly familiarized himself with the more prom- 
 inent objects and scenes, keeping his eyes open 
 and coming again, he makes this practical re- 
 mark : " It is only in Rome that we can pre- 
 pare ourselves for Rome." Three days later 
 he writes : " I enjoy here a clearness and calm-
 
 14 GOETHE. 
 
 ness, of which for many a day I have had no 
 feeling. My practice of seeing and reading off 
 all things just as they are, my loyalty in letting 
 the eye be its own light, my entire renounce- 
 ment of all pretension, stand me once more in 
 good stead and make me very happy." This, 
 his calm, broad objectivity, is a chief source of 
 Goethe's literary and scientific faithfulness, of 
 his mastership. He was able not to allow his 
 individuality to refract the beams thrown upon 
 his mind by the object he gazed at. From its 
 depth as well as breadth, and from its having 
 been assiduously wrought and polished and 
 freed by culture from opacities and densities, 
 his intellect was a bright, clear, faithful reflec- 
 tor of what fell on it. 
 
 Goethe had that brisk joy in discovery, that 
 lively zeal for truth, which made it easy for 
 him to renounce his personality and to consti- 
 tute himself a medium, but a conscious, exhil- 
 arating medium for, not the transmission 
 merely of light, but, in its unobstructed trans- 
 mission, for its purification and focalization. 
 Behind none, the least or the largest of his 
 manifold labors and endeavors, was there ever 
 a sordid or a selfish motive. The stream of 
 his life he ever kept unmuddied by ambitious 
 aims : he never wrote a volume or a page for
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 15 
 
 pelf or power : he never sought the society of 
 an individual or a company to serve some 
 solely personal purpose, but always from the 
 pure impulse of feeding his affections, or from 
 the noble, never satisfied appetite for knowl- 
 edge and truth. Goethe was not an ambitious 
 man, he was an aspiring man. Plenty and to 
 spare there always are of ambitious men, men 
 who hugely desire and hungrily work for 
 worldly elevation, outward possession, and ap- 
 plause. Aspiring men are rare, men who 
 earnestly desire and zealously work for spirit- 
 ual elevation, for enlarged inward possession 
 and disinterested satisfactions. Our country, 
 with its broad possibilities, its vivifying abun- 
 dance, its unchecked movement, its free polit- 
 ical solicitations, is flooded, half swamped one 
 at times almost fears, with ambitious men. It 
 must be so. Observe at a station that for fur- 
 ther flight the wheels of the great locomotive 
 need gross greasing. But let the passengers 
 have an eye to the strength of the axles and 
 the competence of the conductor. 
 
 Towards the middle of December Goethe 
 writes : " This letter will reach you about New 
 Year. I wish you all happiness. Before the 
 end of it we shall meet again, and that will be 
 no small joy. The past year was the most im-
 
 1 6 GOETHE. 
 
 portant of my life ; whether I now die or last 
 a while longer, in either case it was good. 
 
 " The new birth, which is turning me inside 
 out, goes on. I counted upon learning some- 
 thing thoroughly here ; but I did not think I 
 should have to go so far back to school, that I 
 should have to unlearn so much, nay, to learn 
 the very opposite. But I am convinced of it 
 now, and have wholly given myself up to it, 
 and now the more I am obliged to abnegate 
 myself, the more is my joy." No wonder 
 Goethe knew so much and so well, he who 
 knew how at the age of thirty-eight to make 
 himself an obedient, eager pupil. Hence, too, 
 his fresh, boyish interest, to the last, in all 
 things, even the most familiar. He kept on 
 plying his inward sap, and thence never ceased 
 putting forth new leaves ; and so he enjoyed a 
 spring feeling even into his last months on 
 earth. Herder said that Goethe was all his 
 life a great child. Your self-assertor is a lim- 
 ited learner. He stiffens himself into impervi- 
 ousness against the rays that are ever stream- 
 ing from Nature's countless focuses, rays lib- 
 erated by the bold thought of open, humble 
 seekers. His self-esteem becomes a perverted 
 citadel, which warns off the approach of the 
 best friends. From the hard, smooth crust of
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 17 
 
 his self-sufficiency knowledge, especially new 
 knowledge, meets no open-armed, joyful hospi- 
 tality : light is beaten back. 
 
 Goethe was a man of the world, the chief fig- 
 ure at a princely court, a man steeped in the 
 passions and vexations of life ; and yet he was 
 the opposite of blast. In him there was 
 nothing of Chateaubriand's life-weariness, no 
 blunted sensibilities even at eighty, no marks 
 of exhaustion. At all stages of his prolonged, 
 strenuous career he had lived healthily. In 
 his latter decades, as in his earlier, a spring 
 of sound feeling gushed daily in his breast, 
 gushed still with force enough to flow outward 
 in sympathy and helpfulness. " I live on a 
 strict diet and keep myself tranquil, in order 
 that objects shall not find my soul over-excited, 
 but shall excite it. Thus is one much less ex- 
 posed to error." Thus he writes from Rome. 
 With what intelligent devotedness he worked ! 
 ever subordinating the lower to the higher. 
 And no one knew better than he the efficacy 
 of alternation in work. While seeing and 
 studying Rome and her treasures he wrought 
 at Tasso or Egmont or Faust, and continued 
 his botanical studies. Rome became sec- 
 ondary : he used it as a stimulant and fertilizer :
 
 1 8 GOETHE. 
 
 the atmosphere he there breathed quickened 
 his faculties to their best productiveness. 
 
 On the twenty-first of February he writes : 
 " To-morrow we [his friend Tishbein accompa- 
 nied him] set out for Naples. I rejoice in the 
 prospect of seeing so much that is new and is 
 said to be so unspeakably beautiful, and I hope 
 in that paradise to gain new freedom and will 
 to return to the study of Art here in earnest 
 Rome. 
 
 " Packing is easy to me : I do it with a 
 lighter heart than six months ago when I 
 parted from all that I so much love and value. 
 Yes, it is already a half year, and of the four 
 months passed in Rome I have lost not a mo- 
 ment ; which is, to be sure, saying a good deal, 
 but nevertheless not too much." 
 
 Two days after arriving in Naples he writes : 
 " I forgive any one who loses his senses in 
 Naples ; " and a week later : " That no Nea- 
 politan will budge from Naples, and that her 
 poets sing of the site in excessive hyperbole, 
 is entirely excusable." Already his eyes are 
 set towards Sicily : " The packet for Palermo 
 went off to-day with a pure, strong north-wind. 
 How my looks strai'ned after the full sails as 
 the vessel passed through between Capri and 
 Cape Minerva, and at last disappeared ! To
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 19 
 
 see a beloved person so depart would kill me 
 with very longing." " In these last days the 
 storms have shown us a glorious sea. There 
 we could study waves in due kind and shape. 
 After all, Nature is the only book which offers 
 us great contents on every page." " Naples 
 is a Paradise ; everybody lives in a kind of in- 
 toxicated self-forgetfulness. I scarcely know 
 myself; I seem to me another man. Yester- 
 day I said to myself Either thou wast for- 
 merly mad, or thou art so now." While in 
 Naples he went into company (which he had 
 not done in Rome), ascended three times 
 Vesuvius, then in full eruption, and saw the 
 celebrated Lady Hamilton, she whom a witty 
 Englishman some years later called Moll Cleo- 
 patra. 
 
 Head winds lengthened the Sicilian voyage 
 to four days. Lying in his berth, to keep sea- 
 sickness at bay, Goethe worked at Tasso. He 
 had not been long in Palermo when he felt 
 that this enchanting sea-girt scenery is the best 
 commentary on the Odyssey of Homer. He 
 bought a copy and read with such sympathy 
 that soon he was wrought to a productive 
 mood, and Nausikaa became the centre of a 
 tragic conception. Now, in his walks about 
 this Eden, he had to him the most welcome of
 
 2O GOETHE. 
 
 all companions, a lovely woman whom his 
 brain was rearing and adorning. But on the 
 seventeenth of April, a fortnight after landing, 
 he writes : " It is a real misfortune to be pur- 
 sued and tempted by various spirits. This 
 morning early I went to the public garden with 
 the fixed, quiet purpose to continue my poetic 
 dreams ; but before I was aware of it I was 
 seized hold of by another spirit which had been 
 haunting me for some time. 
 
 " The many plants which I was accustomed 
 to see in tubs and pots, nay, the greatest part 
 of the year behind glass, stand here fresh and 
 gay in the open air, and inasmuch as they 
 entirely fulfill their destination they become 
 more distinct to us. In the presence of so 
 many new and renewed forms the old whim 
 came upon me : could I not in this throng dis- 
 cover the Urpflanze, the original plant ? [that 
 is, the primary type of all vegetation.] Such 
 there must surely be. For, by what sign should 
 I recognize that this or that form is a plant if 
 they were not all formed on one model ? 
 
 " BafHed was my poetic purpose : the garden 
 of Alcinous had vanished, and in its place a 
 common garden opened before me. Why are 
 we moderns so pulled about ? Wherefore are 
 we stimulated to requirements which we can- 
 not fulfill?"
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 21 
 
 Homer, said Goethe to himself, while writ- 
 ing that beautiful book of Nausikaa in the 
 Odyssey, was not liable to be distracted from 
 his heavenly task by the allurements of a 
 scientific hypothesis, newly broached in his own 
 brain. Not he indeed. The poets of Greece, 
 and all other Greeks, were far enough from 
 being visited by scientific imaginations ; hardly 
 even when the poetic and the great age of 
 Greece had passed, and upon the clear mind of 
 Aristotle had dawned the prolific truth, that 
 only through her details are the wholes of Na- 
 ture to be comprehended, only through induc- 
 tion can Law be fully recognized and firmly 
 established. Now at last it is known, that even 
 minds of the deepest grasp and widest compass 
 cannot be sure of a generic conclusion without 
 the verification of facts. And Goethe, the 
 poet, has done not a little to the establishment 
 and fortification of this assurance. He was 
 both deductive and inductive. He was open to 
 vast a priori visions, and he was capable of 
 patiently putting them to the test of touch. 
 At once so large and so delicate were his en- 
 dowments, and thence through them so direct 
 and susceptible his rapport with Nature, that he 
 caught far-off glimpses of her secrets, at great 
 moments felt her throb through his arteries,
 
 22 GOETHE. 
 
 had presentiments of yet undiscovered lights. 
 From the chapter on " The Poet as a Man of 
 Science " in the very full and admirable Life 
 of Goethe, by Mr. Lewes, I take the following 
 paragraph : 
 
 " Place a flower in the hands of the cleverest 
 man of your acquaintance, provided always he 
 has not read modern works of science, -and 
 assure him that leaf, calyx, corolla, bud, pistil, 
 and stamen, differing as they do in color and 
 in form, are nevertheless all modified leaves ; 
 assure hinvthat flower and fruit are but modifi- 
 cations of one typical form, which is the leaf; 
 and if he has any confidence in your knowledge 
 he may accept the statement, but assuredly it 
 will seem to him a most incomprehensible para- 
 dox. Place him before a human skeleton, and, 
 calling his attention to its manifold forms, 
 assure him that every bone is either a vertebra, 
 or the appendage to a vertebra, and that the 
 skull is a congeries of vertebrae under various 
 modifications ; he will, as before, accept your 
 statement, perhaps ; but he will, as before, 
 think it one of the refinements of transcendental 
 speculation to be arrived at only by philoso- 
 phers. Yet both of these astounding proposi- 
 tions are first principles in Morphology ; and 
 in the History of Science both of these proposi-
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 23 
 
 tions are to be traced to Goethe. Botanists 
 and. anatomists have, of course, greatly modified 
 the views he promulgated, and have substituted 
 views nearer and nearer the truth, without yet 
 being quite at one. But he gave the impulse 
 to their efforts." 
 
 The plaint of Goethe at Naples was neverthe- 
 less sincere. So full was his being, that by nat- 
 ural equipment he was a Greek -and at the same 
 time a modern and a Teuton. In that warm 
 air and glowing landscape, reading the Odyssey, 
 which he says, " was to him now for the first 
 time a living word," the Greek was uppermost. 
 His plaintive interrogatory may however be 
 met with another question. Why was his 
 Nausikaa never finished ? And why did 
 Achilleis, and Prometheus, and Elpenor remain 
 fragments ? These, to be sure, were not his 
 only uncompleted undertakings ; for his mind 
 was so generative that in its fervent moods 
 subjects crowded upon him (he once wrote to 
 Schiller, " I can only think in so far as I pro- 
 duce "), subjects which in the glow of the mo- 
 ment rounded themselves to glistening wholes, 
 but which his imagination could not hold so 
 steadily and continuously in its grasp as to give 
 them aesthetic organization. But all the above- 
 mentioned he worked at for some time and then
 
 24 GOETHE. 
 
 abandoned. Is not this the cause of their 
 abandonment, that a Grecian hero will not bear, 
 being taken out of old Greece, cannot live but 
 on Grecian air ? Three thousand years, though 
 it be a small segment of the circle of humanity 
 on earth, and may imply nothing comparable 
 in degree to the change of physical conditions 
 from the miocene to the eocene periods in the 
 earth's growth, does imply a change in moral 
 conditions, and such a change, as we know from 
 social and historical facts, that the man of then 
 would find himself inadequately equipped for our 
 exposures, and the man of now would languish 
 in the grosser, and yet mentally less nutritive 
 atmosphere of the times of ^Eschylus as well as 
 of those of the earlier Homeric age. The 
 Greeks were not only unscientific, they were 
 comparatively unspiritual. The most unfortu- 
 nate of their heroes and thinkers had but lightly 
 borne the burden of the world, which is an in- 
 ward burden self-imposed, not laid on chiefly 
 by circumstances. Goethe, the greatest of the 
 later moderns, had been wrestling all his life 
 with this load, had sought (a seeking which 
 Homer would not have comprehended) to solve 
 life's mysteries. When he became so fascinated 
 with a Greek as to take him up aesthetically, 
 and attempted to reproject him on a poetic
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 2$ 
 
 plane, he found that the lungs of his beautiful 
 pagan were not expansible to his, Goethe's, 
 deeper breathings. And, however much a poet 
 may identify himself with his adopted person- 
 age, he must, to make him live, breathe into 
 him the essence of his own moral nature, or his 
 attempt ends in mechanism, not in creation. 
 Hence Achilleis is a fragment and a failure, and 
 Hermann and Dorothea a heavenly success. 
 
 Grecian heroes in the hands of modern poets 
 cease to be solar and become lunar. Not from 
 fresh heat is their light, but from the Sun of 
 Antiquity. That Sun, when it was a flaming, 
 present, daily centre, was fiery enough to im- 
 part a life which made them undying agents in 
 the universe of thought, and a light from which 
 the modern world still draws illuminating 
 beams ; but their elements cannot be reim- 
 pregnated by modern inspiration. Like our 
 earthly moon, they are cold and dead, without 
 atmosphere that can interchange with ours. 
 To us they are only serviceable in their primi- 
 tive existence, which is incapable of reanima- 
 tion. Only through the great poets who first 
 bodied them forth can they live that first life 
 infused into them by their age. In Troilus and 
 Cressida Shakespeare, with his plastic mastery, 
 shifts the characters and events of Homer from
 
 26 GOETHE. 
 
 an epic to a dramatic, and more than that, from 
 a tragic to a comic, form. Had Shakespeare 
 made of Agamemnon and his compeers Shake- 
 spearean Englishmen, he would so far have 
 denaturalized them ; but such Anglicanizing is 
 in this case mostly in the fancy of the modern 
 reader. Shakespeare took in hand the Homeric 
 heroes to get some fun out of them, leaving 
 them as he found them, except for a more dis- 
 tinct and brilliant outline, through the intellect- 
 ual light which inevitably fell on whatever he 
 gazed at. The comedy of Troilus and Cressida 
 is merely a recasting of noted Greeks into other 
 attitudes, with a sportive, if not a satiric, pur- 
 pose. 
 
 The Romans are much nearer to us. Shake- 
 speare could use Plutarch as he used Hollinshed. 
 The Romans whom he handles he exalts to the 
 plane of poetry without lifting them out of his- 
 tory. And note, that when he takes them in 
 hand they are purely historic figures, not po- 
 etic. The Greeks whom Goethe worked on 
 are not historic but purely poetic figures ; nay, 
 are poetic creations, individuals of whom we 
 should know nothing but for their poetic 
 makers. They have been made poetically and 
 are not to be re-made. Out of legend were 
 they uplifted, and Goethe cannot lift them any
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 2/ 
 
 higher ; nor could even Shakespeare, who could 
 and did uplift Coriolanus and Antony. And 
 this is even a weightier consideration than the 
 remote foreignness . of Goethe's Greeks. They 
 are not only pagan Greeks but mythological 
 Greeks, that is, Greeks who have been pro- 
 moted into the empyrean of semi-deified man- 
 hood, embodying poetically the quintessence 
 of ancient Grecian national life and belief. 
 Moulded by Beauty, they loom through the 
 ages in heroic stature, the idealized incarna- 
 tions of a vivid phase of human being. It is 
 well not to attempt to set them on modern 
 pedestals. 
 
 The only way in which the Gods of Greece 
 can be made plastic to modern creation is that 
 the poet, going behind them to that out of 
 which they all spring, the mind of man, 
 shall use them to depict the growth of the hu- 
 man spirit in its aesthetic evolution and heaven- 
 ward aspiration. This has been dene by Keats 
 in that majestic torso, Hyperion. In the 
 speech of Oceanus is the key to the broad, 
 original, and splendid conception of the young 
 English giant. Oceanus tells his defeated 
 brother Titans : 
 
 " We fall by course of nature's law, not force 
 Of thunder or of Jove."
 
 28 GOETHE. 
 
 " Mark well ! 
 
 As heaven and earth are fairer, fairer far 
 Then Chaos and blank Darkness, though our chiefs ; 
 And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth 
 In form and shape compact and beautiful, 
 In will, in action free, companionship, 
 And thousand other signs of purer life ; 
 So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
 A power more strong in beauty, born of us 
 And fated to excel us, as we pass 
 In glory that old Darkness." 
 
 In Hyperion is bodied forth with a breadth 
 and splendor of style, with an ideal grandeur, 
 and at the same time with a human fidelity 
 and a flushing warmth, which have never been 
 surpassed, the very spirit of mental and re- 
 ligious progress. In studying this divine frag- 
 ment, written at the age of twenty-four, one is 
 reminded of the answer of Goethe when Ecker- 
 man said to him that Faust bears evidence in 
 every line of most careful study of life and the 
 world : the reader, said Eckerman, takes it to 
 be the fruit of the amplest experience. " Yet," 
 replied Goethe, " had I not had the world in my 
 soul from the beginning, I must ever have re- 
 mained blind with my seeing eyes, and all ex- 
 perience and observation would have been dead 
 and unproductive. The light is there, and the 
 colors surround us ; but if in our own eyes we 
 bore nothing corresponding, the outward appa-
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 2$ 
 
 rition would not avail us." In this ." heart-lore," 
 as Coleridge calls it, speaking of Shakespeare, 
 Keats was most rich. 
 
 By the middle of May Goethe was back in 
 Naples, having narrowly escaped shipwreck on 
 the voyage from Palermo. On the seventeenth 
 he writes : " K^/st happy am I that I now carry 
 in my soul so clearly and vividly the great, 
 beautiful, incomparable image of Sicily. 
 
 "Now there is in the South no object which 
 is a cause of longing to me, as I returned yes- 
 terday from Paestum. 
 
 " The sea and the islands gave me joy and 
 grief, and I come back satisfied. 
 
 " Let me reserve details until my return. 
 Naples is not a place for thinking and remem- 
 bering. This region I can now describe to 
 you better than I did in my first letters. I 
 must see you so soon as possible : those, will be 
 bright days. I have laid away a vast pile, and 
 need quiet to work it off." 
 
 The first week of June found him again in 
 Rome hard at work, studying, drawing, com- 
 posing. Towards the end of June he writes to 
 Weimar : " I have handsome lodgings, good 
 servants. Tishbein is going to Naples, and I 
 take possession of his studio, a large, cool hall. 
 When I am in your mind, think of me as of
 
 30 GOETHE. 
 
 one who is happy. I will write often, and thus 
 we are and remain together. 
 
 " I have plenty of new thoughts and fancies. 
 I have refound my earliest youth, even to 
 trifles, since I am left entirely to myself ; and 
 at the same time the elevation and worth of 
 the objects around me carries me as high and 
 far as only my later being could reach. Noth- 
 ing clouds the atmosphere of my thoughts, ex- 
 cept that I cannot share my happiness with 
 those I love." 
 
 On the twentieth of July we have a letter of 
 more than usual biographical value. 
 
 " I have been able in these days to discover 
 two of my cardinal faults, which have been per- 
 secuting and tormenting me all my life. One 
 is, that I never could master the handicraft of 
 a thing I wished to work at. Thence it is that 
 with so much natural gift I have brought so 
 little to pass. The other fault, closely related 
 to this one, is, that I never could give to a 
 work or business as much time as it needed. 
 As I possess the happiness to be able to think 
 and combine much in a short time, a step by 
 step execution is to me irksome and unbear- 
 able." 
 
 By the first fault Goethe had lately been es- 
 pecially tormented, because he did not, perhaps
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 31 
 
 would not, discover till now that for success in 
 the plastic Arts he lacked the indispensable, 
 though subordinate, mechanical readiness. His 
 hand could not learn deftly and obediently to 
 give form to his conceptions, to the images in 
 his brain. In a letter written a few days before 
 the above, he had become at last so fully aware 
 that owing to this manipulating inadequacy he 
 could not be a painter, that, instead of rejoicing 
 as usual in his progress, he puts forth the mod- 
 est avowal, " With time I may become a con- 
 noisseur." But in his true calling, the literary, 
 and true because he was so complete in his 
 qualification, never was there poet or writer 
 whose genius was more fully and ably seconded 
 by his talents. Details, facts, words, images, 
 were abundantly at his command ; memory and 
 fluency were both remarkable ; his shaping 
 and constructive ability was ready and compe- 
 tent, and he had an Artist's eye for pictures 
 and proportion. In this, more favored than 
 his contemporary, Wordsworth, who lacked 
 both constructive art and verbal fluency, and 
 who embodied his conceptions by strength of 
 will, moved by a poetic presence so large and 
 vivid, that it would utter itself. Hence, the 
 dynamic force, so much exceeding the mechan- 
 ical facility, wrought its .effects with dispropor-
 
 32 GOETHE. 
 
 tioned tools ; which accounts for the occasional 
 baldness or dryness of Wordsworth, and per- 
 haps also, in some measure, for a frequent 
 diamond-like compactness and unsullied spar- 
 kle. Goethe's rare imaginative affluence and 
 mental fertility, and consequent eagerness to 
 give shape to his inspirations, this it was that 
 made him feel as an individual defect what 
 is a universal human incompetency. While 
 the mind can take wings and range instantly 
 to the uttermost confines of stellar space, the 
 body has to use legs, which are ever clogged 
 with earthward gravitation. He who would 
 give a body to the conceptions of his mind, 
 must submit to the laws of gravity. For this, 
 besides strong inward agitation, strong will is 
 needed. And so, Coleridge, lacking this will, 
 let many of his mind's creative suggestions ex- 
 hale in day-dream, or disperse themselves in 
 golden talk. His friend, Allston, similarly 
 gifted with poetic thought, was at times simi- 
 larly relaxed in will, and strove to content him- 
 self with pictures in the brain. When mildly 
 reproached with not finishing " Belshazzar's 
 Feast," he answered : " It is finished : I have it 
 here " (touching his forehead) : " all I have to 
 do is to transfer it to canvas." In any poetic 
 province that all is all of the work : the mental
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 33 
 
 creation is heavenly play. The difference be- 
 tween conception and execution is the differ- 
 ence between the spiritual and the material, 
 between the heavenly and the earthly. 
 
 His best hours in Rome Goethe gave to 
 some of his best works : Egmont, Tasso, Wil- 
 helm Meister, Faust. Towards midsummer 
 (1787) he determined to prolong his stay in 
 Rome to the following spring. He had the 
 ready consent of the Duke, who, besides feel- 
 ing that Goethe was entitled to this holiday for 
 his past services, had for him the disinterested 
 sympathy of a true friend, and knew moreover 
 the value of the work Goethe was doing, of the 
 stores he was gathering. But Weimar's " so- 
 ciety " grumbled at his long absence, and that 
 he should be drawing his whole salary ; as if 
 he had not earned it long ago, and was not 
 earning it now. Yet the complaint of Weimar 
 is creditable to her : she missed Goethe, and 
 that showed that she set some store by him. 
 She was like a large, well-appointed steamboat 
 with a small engine. The half of her motive 
 force was .absent : she felt empty. 
 
 To justify himself and reconcile his friends, 
 
 Goethe writes on the eleventh of August : " I 
 
 remain in Italy till next Easter. I cannot just 
 
 now break away from my apprenticeship. If I 
 
 3
 
 34 GOETHE. 
 
 hold on, I am sure that my friends will have 
 cause to be glad of it. You shall have letters 
 from me, and my writings I will send ; and so 
 you will have an image of me as of an absent 
 live man, instead of, what you used so often to 
 complain of having, a present dead one." In a 
 letter of the same date to another of his friends 
 he says : " I shall then have lived through, 
 clean finished, an important epoch, and can 
 begin again and strike in where is most urgent. 
 I feel such buoyancy of spirits, and am quite 
 another man from what I was a year ago." 
 
 Goethe lived by principles and for principles. 
 He always sought the essence and law of 
 things ; the temporary, the expedient, the su- 
 perficial, the showy, were distasteful to him. 
 Here is a significant passage from a letter of 
 the twenty-third of August : " I am now so 
 remote from the world and all worldly things, 
 that it seems strange to me when I read a 
 newspaper. ' The fashion of the world passeth 
 away : ' I wish to busy myself only with rela- 
 tions that are permanent, and thus, according 
 
 to the doctrine of , give to my mind its 
 
 first experience of eternity." 
 
 While Goethe was away in Italy, his friend, 
 Herder, was superintending an edition of his 
 works in eight volumes, four of which had just
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 35 
 
 been sent to him. On the twenty-second of 
 September he writes to Herder : " It gives me 
 an extraordinary sensation that these four thin 
 little volumes, the results of half a life, should 
 seek me out in Rome. I can truly say, there 
 
 ^ 
 
 is not therein a syllable which has not been 
 lived, felt, enjoyed, suffered, thought." 
 
 In strenuous, various, unintermitted work he 
 spent these precious months, part of the sum- 
 mer at Albano, Tusculum, castle Gandolfo. A 
 few sentences, detached from his letters, will 
 give glimpses into his doings, reflections, and 
 condition. " Now I hope that the time will 
 also come for making an end. But the making 
 an end lies very far off when one sees far." 
 " The life of a man is his character." "I have 
 had opportunities to reflect much on myself 
 and others, on the world and history, whereon 
 I shall have some good things to say, although 
 not new. Finally it will all be taken up into 
 Wilhelm Meister" "A new epoch is begin- 
 ning in me. Through so much seeing and 
 learning, my mind is so much expanded, that I 
 must now bound myself by some single work. 
 
 " The individuality of a man is an extraor- 
 dinary thing ; I have got to know mine well, 
 from having had this past year, on the one 
 hand, to rely solely on myself, and on the
 
 36 GOETHE. 
 
 other, from having had to consort with people 
 who are strangers to me. " " The splendor 
 of the greatest works of art dazzles me no 
 more. I behold them now with a genuine 
 discriminative knowledge." "I am permitted 
 to throw looks into the nature of things and 
 their relations, which open to me an abyss of 
 wealth." " There are more foreigners here, 
 with whom I sometimes go to galleries. They 
 remind me of wasps in my room, who fly 
 against the windows, mistaking the clear panes 
 for air, and then rebound and buzz upon the 
 walls." "My brain is distracted with much 
 writing, doing, and thinking. I grow no wiser, 
 exact too much of myself, and put too much 
 upon myself." "I am industrious and happy, 
 and so await the future. Daily it becomes 
 clearer to me that I was born for poetry, and 
 that for the next ten years, the most that I 
 can count upon to work, I ought to cultivate 
 this talent and yet bring something good to 
 pass, seeing that the fire of youth made me 
 often successful without much study." 
 
 On first reading this last sentence, one is 
 surprised that in Goethe should have been de- 
 layed to nearly his fortieth year the discovery 
 to himself of his poetic vocation. But he does 
 not say that now for the first time this has
 
 WEIMAR AND ITALY. 37 
 
 become clear to him : his words are, " D aily 
 it becomes clearer to me." An opinion, long 
 entertained, is braced to a certainty. The 
 expansion of his mind through the beautiful 
 novelties of Italy, the exhilarating change and 
 the freedom and independence in his occupa- 
 tions, and as a consequence of all this, the 
 quickening of his powers, clinched into a fast 
 conviction what he had often felt. The con- 
 sciousness of his poetic gift, instead of getting 
 weaker with the flow of years, had grown 
 stronger, giving thus proof not only of its own 
 genuineness and solidity, but of the reach of his 
 faculties. 
 
 In Goethe the fire of youth was not a mere 
 crackling of tender twigs, which give out a 
 momentary fury of flame and are then quickly 
 consumed, creating no permanent heat. In 
 him this inward fire, not fed solely on youthful 
 impulses, burnt on through his fourscore years, 
 because in his maturing faculties it found sap- 
 ful fuel to nourish it. The poet who is not a 
 thinker commands but part of the strings 
 of his wondrous instrument, touching faintly 
 those which give to verse its depth and sono- 
 rous compass. Thus his range is soon ex- 
 hausted, and the effect of what he does is 
 neither so incisive nor so enduring. The 
 broad survey, the well-proportioned combina-
 
 38 GOETHE. 
 
 tions, the intellectual insights of thoughtful 
 judgment, not only empower the poet to clasp 
 larger, more organic themes, they aid him to 
 give character to even his minor efforts, to 
 impart a more lasting, and a finer perfume to 
 single flowers of feeling rhythmically presented. 
 Now was come the hour of parting. On the 
 tenth of April (1788) Goethe writes: "My 
 body is still in Rome, not my soul. So soon 
 as the resolve was made to go, I took no 
 further interest in anything, and I would rather 
 have been off a fortnight since. I stay on for 
 the sake of Kayser and for the sake of Bury. 
 The days pass away, and I can do nothing 
 more, hardly see anything." His last days 
 were celebrated, one may say, with a grand, 
 and to him most acceptable pomp. For three 
 nights the moon, at the full, from the clearest 
 sky and through the calmest air, threw its 
 mystic light over the great city. " All that 
 is massive," writes Goethe on the occasion, 
 " makes a peculiar impression as at once sub- 
 lime and cognizable, and in such presence I 
 summed up the infinite sum of my whole resi- 
 dence in Rome. This, deeply and largely re- 
 ceived into an excited soul, awoke a mood 
 which I may call heroic-elegiac, out of which 
 an elegy was urgent to be embodied in poetic 
 form."
 
 II. 
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 
 
 WE say the body has ceased to grow when 
 the individual has reached the height allotted 
 him by Nature. A sound, well-conditioned 
 mind never ceases to grow. Goethe's did not, 
 and his memorable last words, " More light ! " 
 were symbolical of the life-long need of his 
 mind ; or, if not that, they were an exclamation 
 of joy at the glimpse vouchsafed his soul, ere 
 yet free of its earthly vesture, into that elysium 
 of transearthly activity he had earned, the cer- 
 tainty of which was among his stablest convic- 
 tions. Goethe's growth was of that solid dy- 
 namic kind where, the healthy ferment of nature 
 being directed and tempered by an art of rare 
 grasp and foresight, every stage is a vantage- 
 ground for further gain. Such especially was 
 that he had reached by his eighteen months in 
 Italy. He quitted Rome with eager, assthetic 
 appetites gratified, with an enlargement of his 
 mental horizon through the acquaintance he 
 had made with a gifted people, and with pos-
 
 40 GOETHE. 
 
 sessions which vitalized and mellowed the at- 
 mosphere of his thoughts. 
 
 During Goethe's absence Weimar had lacked 
 its animating spirit, had been abridged of its 
 chief privilege, the appropriation of such a 
 man. Weimar was now glad to have him back, 
 healthily glad, as people are, in their good 
 moods, for the bounties of Nature ; luxuriously 
 glad, as a company is when its emptiness has 
 just been filled by a choice repast. But the as- 
 piring poet, the self-improved man, the eager 
 votary whose finest happiness was to learn new 
 truth and to produce new thought and poetry, 
 he found little sympathy, little of that subtler 
 recognition which, next to the delight of crea- 
 tion, gives the poet his purest joy. Hear him- 
 self : " Thrown back out of Italy, so rich in 
 forms, into Germany, so barren in forms, 
 obliged to exchange cheerful skies for gloomy, 
 my friends, instead of comforting me and draw- 
 ing me again to them, drove me to despair. 
 My enthusiasm for remote objects, my suffer- 
 ings, my regrets for what I had left behind me, 
 seemed to offend them. They gave me no 
 sympathy ; no one understood my language." 
 The case looks indeed desperate, and Goethe, 
 without their support, would have felt as empty 
 as they had felt without his presence, had he
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 4! 
 
 not been Goethe. The poet's reliance, and the 
 thinker's, is within himself. Besides, as Goethe 
 had his uncommon individuality, he should 
 have reminded himself and no doubt did so 
 in his clearer moods that his friends and 
 neighbors had their common individuality, and 
 that every man must hold tightly to his own, 
 to himself; for, after all, a man's personality, 
 however small, is the best he has. In his dis- 
 tress Goethe threw himself passionately into 
 the pursuit of the typical plant. He sought 
 comfort in the " Metamorphoses of Plants." 
 A man who is open to such consolation is safe 
 against pity, as well as against despondence. 
 Moreover, he had now as ever to support him 
 his beautiful principle of self-renunciation. In 
 1780, while virtual sovereign of the Duchy of 
 Weimar, he had written : " In my present cir- 
 cle of activity I have little, almost no hind- 
 rance from without ; in myself much. Human 
 faults are right down tape-worms ; you tear off 
 some day a piece, and the original stock keeps 
 its place. But I will be master. None but he 
 who entirely renounces himself is worthy to 
 govern, is able to govern." This maxim, put 
 in practice, would it not empty Washington in 
 a week ? 
 
 Besides a lack of sympathy in his immediate
 
 42 GOETHE. 
 
 circle of Weimar, a circle which himself had 
 shaped and instructed, and to which therefore 
 he had a right to look for some apprehension 
 of the enlarged man, the now ripened artist, 
 so conscious himself on his return from Italy 
 of enlargement and a finer culture, besides 
 this disappointment, which high inward re- 
 sources and his use of disappointment, to- 
 gether with the devotion of the choice spirits 
 of Weimar, enabled him soon to overcome, he 
 had another, in the apathy of the larger circle of 
 the reading public. So few people had their 
 aesthetic eyes sufficiently open to see what was 
 in Iphigenia and Egmont, that the publisher of 
 the first complete edition of Goethe's works 
 complained of the slowness of its sale. To 
 aggravate this failure was the success of books 
 which belonged to what was called the " storm 
 and stress " period, a period which Goethe him- 
 self had fostered in his younger days with 
 Werther and Goetz, but which he had hoped 
 the times, like himself, had outgrown. Of this 
 class the most popular then were The Robbers 
 and Fiesko of Schiller, and the Ardinghello of 
 Heinse. It was an imprudent hope on the 
 part of Goethe. Does the larger reading pub- 
 lic ever outgrow the taste for what we now call 
 sensation-books, for novelties momentarily ex-
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 43 
 
 citing ? Goethes and Schillers, artists at once 
 capable and conscientious, they outgrow even 
 the power of producing such ; but how can 
 they expect that the crowd of the half-educated 
 and the miseducated should ? The function of 
 Goethes and Schillers and they both ful- 
 filled it faithfully and efficiently is to enlarge 
 by firm classical work the smaller circle of the 
 more finely appreciative, enkindling a light 
 which shall permanently radiate, and thus 
 tend to disperse the ignorance and crudeness 
 whence rises the atmosphere whereon shallow 
 literature is nourished. 
 
 Now, when Goethe has been gradually raised 
 to a height where all, who have a look for such 
 elevations, behold him shining among the half 
 dozen wealthiest heirs of creative genius, it is 
 curious, and not without instruction, to note 
 the ever- renewed battle he had to wage against 
 detraction and indifference, a battle waged not 
 by critical defenses of the book attacked, de- 
 fenses to which he never condescended, but 
 by the publication of another, and yet another 
 work, through a long series of years. Goetz von 
 Berlichingen and The Sufferings of Young Wer- 
 ther, his first ventures, made more than a sen- 
 sation, they made a deep impression, partly from 
 the power and originality wherewith they gave
 
 44 GOETHE. 
 
 literary utterance to the spirit of the age, and 
 partly from their contrast to the recent artificial 
 poetry and fiction of Germany, which wanted 
 not only power but life. Both Goetz and Wer- 
 tJier were variously assailed, and among others 
 by Lessing, a true and most serviceable critic, 
 but who lacked central glow fully to feel their 
 present power, and thence failed of the sympa- 
 thetic insight (a kind of literary second sight) 
 to recognize the promise they carried. Nicolai 
 of Berlin tried to turn Werther into ridicule ; 
 the current, or rather torrent, of its popularity 
 swept away for the time all opposition. An 
 anonymous writer declared that Stella, an in- 
 effective prose tragedy of Goethe, belonging to 
 his first period, was a case for criminal prose- 
 cution. Riemer, for many years a faithful in- 
 telligent secretary of Goethe, says that Iphige- 
 nia and Tasso were out a long time before any 
 one took notice of them. Novalis (the nom de 
 plume of Hardenberg) called Goethe a heathen, 
 and spoke of Frederick Schlegel as the first of 
 living poets ! Later, the two Schlegels, jeal- 
 ous of Goethe, tried to set up Tick as his rival, 
 which attempt drew from Goethe that memo- 
 rable comment. Tick, said Goethe to Ecker- 
 man, is a man whose great merits I readily 
 acknowledge, but when the Schlegels " tried to
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 45 
 
 raise him above his proper place, and spoke of 
 him as my equal, they made a mistake. I do 
 not hesitate to speak of myself as I am : I did 
 not make myself what I am. But I might, 
 with as much propriety, compare myself with 
 Shakespeare, who also is, as he was made, a 
 being of higher order than myself, to whom I 
 must look up and pay due reverence." 
 
 Wilhelm Meister was sharply criticised, and 
 but partially approved. What Wilhelm Meister 
 means people are yet puzzled to know, which is 
 surely excusable, seeing that its author himself 
 hardly knew. He said to Eckerman in 1825 : 
 "Wilhelm Meister is a most incalculable pro- 
 duction : I myself can scarcely be said to have 
 the key. The critic seeks a central point, 
 which is, in truth, hard to find. I should think 
 a rich manifold life, brought close to our eyes, 
 might suffice, without any determined moral 
 tendency which could be reasoned upon. But, 
 if this is insisted on, it may perhaps be found 
 in what Frederick, at the end, says to the hero : 
 ' Thou seemst to me like Saul, the sort of Kish, 
 who went out to seek his father's asses, and 
 found a Kingdom.' For what does the whole 
 say, but that man, despite all his follies and 
 errors, led by a higher hand, reaches some 
 worthy aim at last." And to the reader I
 
 46 GOETHE. 
 
 would say, that he too, in seeking a purpose, 
 may find within the covers of Wilhelm Meister 
 a literary Kingdom, rich in life and art, in pic- 
 tures, images, insights, rich in beauty and wis- 
 dom, all embodied in a variegated concourse of 
 personages, drawn with a Shakespearean dis- 
 tinctness and buoyancy and truthfulness, among 
 whom Mignon glistens with that pungent 
 sparkle which denotes genius of the first water. 
 Scarcely a book of Goethe's has been more 
 subject to ignorant detraction, to shallow mis- 
 representation than the Wahlverwandtshaften 
 (Elective Affinities), the key to which is given 
 in a remark of Reinhard of Dresden, who said, 
 he wondered that Goethe " should be so severe 
 on the subject of marriage, he who entertained 
 such free opinions on other subjects." The 
 book, unsurpassed among prose fictions for 
 aesthetic merits, may be regarded as a thrilling 
 protest against conjugal infidelity. The tragic 
 consequences of surrender to the counter cur- 
 rents of intersexual affinities are depicted with 
 such power and art, that the capable reader 
 closes the book impressed with the truth, that 
 here as elsewhere inviolable and supreme should 
 be the moral law of self-renunciation. Self- 
 renunciation is, at last, but the substitution of 
 one motive power for another, of a higher for a
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 47 
 
 lower. A spiritual and moral feeling, sense of 
 justice, of disinterested love, of dutifulness, rises 
 to such fullness that it floods the mind, and so 
 submerges the lower selfish feeling, that the 
 self, the whole self, now under control of the 
 higher self, is gratified, and enjoys a liveliness 
 and happiness of being only to be obtained 
 through such control. When the balance is 
 struck, no loss, no sacrifice is registered, but, 
 on the contrary, acquisition. There has been 
 no violence, no suppression ; there has been a 
 harmonizing through natural adaptation, and 
 thence an elevation, a culmination. 
 
 Hermann and Dorothea 1 had an immediate as 
 well as permanent success. Schiller was de- 
 lighted with it, and Goethe's habitual detractors 
 even had to give in. Its general acceptability 
 was owing largely no doubt to its subject, which 
 is German and contemporaneous, its scene be- 
 ing laid in the Rhine-land just after the French 
 Revolution. Goethe, in a letter to Schiller of 
 the third of January, 1798, thus alludes to it 
 with that delicate irony so easy to hirA : " As 
 regards the material, I have this once given the 
 Germans their hearts' desire, and they are 
 highly satisfied. I am now considering whether 
 
 1 We have an admirable American translation of Hermann 
 ind Dorothea by Ellen Frothingham.
 
 48 GOETHE. 
 
 one could not on this plan write a dramatic 
 piece which should be played on every stage, 
 and which everybody should pronounce admi- 
 rable, without the author needing so to re- 
 gard it". 
 
 When Goethe was at Naples (in 1787) a lady 
 of his acquaintance engaged him one day to be 
 at her house punctually at five in the afternoon, 
 to meet an Englishman who had something to 
 say to him about Wcrther. Contrary to his 
 habit Goethe arrived late, and as he was about 
 to ring the bell the door opened, and there 
 stood before him a handsome middle-aged man 
 who, the moment his eyes fell on Goethe, said, 
 " You are the author of Werther" Goethe 
 acknowledged that he was, and apologized for 
 not being punctual. " I could not wait longer, 
 but what I wish to say to you is very brief, 
 and can be said as well here on the door-mat, 
 as anywhere else. Whenever I think of what 
 was required for the writing of that book, I am 
 filled with new wonder." Goethe began to say 
 something, courteous in return, when the Eng- 
 lishman interrupted him : " I cannot stay a 
 moment longer : my desire is gratified, which 
 was, to say this to yourself. Farewell ; may 
 you be prosperous and happy." With that he 
 ran down the steps.
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 49 
 
 No one could have written Werther but 
 Goethe, that is, no one but the man who had it 
 in him to write the greater pages which he 
 afterwards wrote ; and the phrase of the Eng- 
 lishman applies with tenfold more emphasis to 
 Hermann and Dorotfea than to Werther. It 
 takes Shakespeare to write one of Shakespeare's 
 scenes ; but in a scene of Macbeth there is in- 
 finitely more of Shakespeare than in a scene of 
 Love's Labor s Lost. \Yritten twenty years later 
 than Werther, after a growth such as is known 
 only to sapful genius, Hermann and Dorothea 
 is the juicy fruit of the maturity of the master, 
 whose rare faculties had been cultivated by a 
 productively busy manhood, and whose aesthetic 
 culture had now received its decisive lesson by 
 a residence of eighteen months in Italy. In 
 Hermann and Dorothea there is a twofold world 
 of wealth, emotional wealth and intellectual, a 
 knowledge as accurate as it is varied, handled 
 with the tact and grace which can only spring 
 from a sensibility at once full and fine. 
 
 The landlord of an inn, with his wife and 
 son, the pastor and the apothecary of a small 
 town, where they all live in semi -rural quiet, 
 and a maiden these are the materials that 
 are moulded into a story which, by the deep 
 art of the poet, is made to embrace relations at 
 
 4
 
 50 GOETHE. 
 
 once the most vital and the most universal, 
 and, through the same art, to present a rounded 
 buoyant whole, glancing with light and shade, 
 and aglow with the warmth of a wise humanity. 
 By the transfiguring might of poetic genius, 
 the prosaic personages of a petty secluded town 
 and the impulses of a household life are made 
 to throb with aesthetic power, are expanded into 
 epic magnitude. With so much poetic truth- 
 fulness is the story told, that, simple as it is, it 
 has its suspensions and surprises, and an inex- 
 haustible depth, and a limpidity like that of the 
 spring into which Hermann and Dorothea 
 gazed together, and saw reflected therein them- 
 selves and the calm blue of the heaven above 
 them. 
 
 This poem, one of the masterpieces of litera- 
 ture, signally illustrates the power of Art. 
 Phidias takes up a ball of common clay. His 
 fingers work upon it a few hours, and then set 
 it before you a human head, with the look of 
 manhood upon it, with the thought and speech 
 of manhood within it, a shapeless, lifeless 
 lump, suddenly transmuted into a beaming hu- 
 man individuality. The persons of Hermann 
 and Dorothea, when Goethe first takes them in 
 hand, are the very finite figures, the cabined 
 personages, one meets in any small town. The
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 51 
 
 moment he busies himself on them, how they 
 begin to grow ! Into these prosaic burghers 
 he breathes the breath of poetic life. This 
 is the inexplicable, incommunicable magic of 
 genius. 
 
 Goethe is a born embodier : his imagina- 
 tions were not spent on the abstract ; they 
 ever sought to actualize themselves in the con- 
 crete, in palpable, lively being. To effect this 
 he had at his command the highest artistic 
 gift, that of characterization : and the posses- 
 sion of the gift urges him to its exhibition. In 
 the rare power of setting men and women to 
 talk, move, and act, so that you feel their pres- 
 ence and personality as though they were 
 audible, visible, tangible creatures, in this su- 
 preme gift it is not too much to say that 
 Goethe has never been surpassed : supreme I 
 call the gift, because it implies the poetic as 
 crowning faculty to other ripe faculties. 
 
 Goethe is preeminently a naturalist. To all 
 the pulsations of Nature his heart keeps time ; 
 his susceptibilities have been tutored by her 
 tendernesses ; his perceptions have been edu- 
 cated by her infinite differentiations ; his ideals 
 never transcend her scale. The naturalness of 
 each and all of the figures in Hermann and Dor- 
 othea is their chief charm, a charm which flows
 
 52 GOETHE. 
 
 from privileged insight into Nature's secrets, 
 and a giant's grasp of her amplitudes, com- 
 bined with subtlest observation of minute par- 
 ticularities. The pseudo-artists, the novelists, 
 succeed by not being naturalists, by drawing 
 one-sided men and women, by exaggerating 
 some qualities and features, thus giving carica- 
 tures instead of portraits ; and the general ac- 
 ceptability of their work is due in part to this 
 their incapacity to present personages that are 
 poised and modest, the vast majority of their 
 readers delighting in high colors and partiali- 
 ties, in extravagant situations and overstrained 
 feelings. A cardinal characteristic of Goethe 
 is his love of proportion, resulting not solely 
 from his artistic endowments, but in large 
 measure from equilibrium in his many gifts 
 and capabilities. In Goethe the purely poet- 
 ical does not predominate as it does in Words- 
 worth and Shelley and Shakespeare. 
 
 Ever true to Nature, from the richness and 
 fullness of his aptitudes, his movement has an 
 unfailing security, while the judgment of the 
 practiced thinker is deepened by the poet's 
 illuminating vision ; and to Hermann and Doro- 
 thea especially is imparted the mellowness of a 
 broad, genial humor, so genial as to involve the 
 whole in a cheerful light. Each personage,
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 53 
 
 compact and rounded, glistens with individual 
 life, and, through the constructive and unifying 
 power of the aesthetic master, through the skill 
 and firmness of his affiliations, they are all 
 bound into melodious harmony. 
 
 Hermann and Dorothea is the most exquisite 
 of Idyls, expanded to epic stature by breadth 
 of treatment and poetic significance, and to 
 epic grandeur by the French Revolution, out 
 of which it is in part wrought, a principal fig- 
 ure, and through her the chief incident, to the 
 quiet burgher story, being furnished by that 
 great upheaval, which makes a dark lurid back- 
 ground to the picture. The declaration of 
 Hermann that, 
 
 " Good men are surely oft warned by a spirit from heaven," 
 
 we may take as a recognition of the super- 
 earthly element, the distinct recognition of 
 which is deemed essential to epic complete- 
 ness. 
 
 Goethe's autobiography was published late 
 in his life, under the title, Ans meinem Leben : 
 DicJittmg und Wahrheit (" Out of my Life : 
 Poetry and Truth "). The second title might be 
 better rendered by " Imagination and Fact," for 
 the meaning is, that in such a work the auto- 
 biographer's imagination will unavoidably color
 
 54 GOETHE. 
 
 many statements, and so there will be a mix- 
 ture of facts with things imaginatively repre- 
 sented. The book was so caviled at, especially 
 the title, that Goethe, soon after its publication, 
 wrote in 1813 to a friend: "The Germans 
 have this peculiarity, that they cannot take a 
 thing as it is given to them. Do you present 
 them the handle of the knife, they find that it 
 is not sharp : do you offer them the point, they 
 complain of being wounded." The Germans, 
 with all their culture, are like Frenchmen, 
 Englishmen, Americans, the most of them, 
 even those of good education one-sided, and 
 such can but partially see a many-sided man 
 like Goethe. Hence by some he is reproached 
 with being too exclusively intellectual, by oth- 
 ers with being too sentimental. Some even 
 call him cold ! There are people who, if a por- 
 trait in profile is shown them, will begin to 
 pity the original for having but one eye. 
 
 There were critics, half critics (whole critics 
 are rare), who could not, or would not, see the 
 fresh and rare merits of the collection of short 
 poems in twelve books called West-oestlicher 
 Divan (West-eastern Divan), written also late 
 in life. Its origin is peculiarly characteristic 
 of Goethe. In 1813 the translation, by von 
 Hammer, of the Poems of Hafiz fell into his
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 55 
 
 hands, and by these he was so affected that, in 
 his own words, he " had to become productive, 
 in order not to be overwhelmed by them." 
 The strong effect was much owing to his sym- 
 pathy, especially now in his autumnal life, with 
 the serenity and cheerfulness and wisdom of 
 the famous Persian Poet. In 1819, just after 
 the publication of the Divan, Goethe, then in 
 his seventieth year, sending a copy to Zelter, 
 says : " The Mahometan religion, manners, 
 mythology, give scope to a poetry such as suits 
 my years. Unconditional resignation to the 
 unfathomable will of God, cheerful survey of 
 the restless bustle on the earth, ever repeating 
 itself in circling and spiral movement, love, in- 
 clination swaying between two worlds, all the 
 real made clear, resolving itself symbolically 
 what more would the grandpapa have ? " 
 
 The poems of Hafiz moved Goethe to em- 
 body in verse with an Oriental coloring much 
 that lay stored and ripened within him, waiting 
 just for this stimulus. Goethe did not need 
 threescore years to learn wisdom : he began 
 manhood wise : whoever does not so begin will 
 not end wise even at fourscore. But life and 
 experience, so deep and manifold for him, mel- 
 lowed his judgments and enlarged their field. 
 Now was the natural time for him to do what,
 
 56 GOETHE. 
 
 to be sure, he had always been doing, but to do 
 it with more directness and more zest, that is, 
 to array wisdom in poetry. From the pages of 
 the Divan is more apparent than elsewhere 
 that Goethe is the more wise for being a poet, 
 and the more of a poet for being wise. Wise 
 words can with sincerity proceed but from one 
 capable of wise conduct ; for wisdom may be 
 described as the transfusion of spiritual princi- 
 ples into daily practice. A knowing man is 
 one who cleverly accommodates his doings to 
 the demands of expediency : a wise man is one 
 who makes his bearing towards his fellow-men 
 adjust itself to the sweep of the broadest eter- 
 nal principles. In discerning and baffling the 
 designs and petty aims of expediency in others, 
 Goethe was a knowing man : in his own ends 
 and means he was a wise man. 
 
 The Divan, lifted on the gradually self-refin- 
 ing judgments of criticism, has now taken its 
 lasting place among the choice creations of 
 poetic Art, uniquely enjoyed because, under a 
 capitivating mask of Orientalism, it combines 
 solidity with grace, depth with lightness, wis- 
 dom with wit. By some of Goethe's contempo- 
 raries it was disparaged as unpatriotic and far- 
 fetched : unpatriotic, because begun during the 
 war of liberation in 1813 ; far-fetched, on ac-
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 57 
 
 count of its Eastern dress. But Goethe was 
 usually much in advance of his public, and the 
 appreciation of him to-day has been reached 
 through the culture which his own writings con- 
 tributed the most to give. To Goethe public ap- 
 proval was grateful, but not necessary as a spur 
 to production. He wrote because he must write : 
 he yielded to a strong inward motion : when 
 his mind was full it overran in fresh streams of 
 verse or prose. His whole life's experience 
 taught him that the first utterances about new 
 poetry are little apt to flow from sympathy 
 chastened by judgment, and are often the voice 
 of ignorance envenomed by envy, of semi-cul- 
 ture perverted by conceit. Goethe wrote for 
 himself and his friends. He makes Tasso say : 
 
 " Who does not see the world in his few friends 
 Deserves not that the world should hear of him." 
 
 Among Goethe's cardinal qualities was his 
 capacity for and joy in admiration. To discover 
 excellence is the best function of criticism. 
 Culture will not make a clever man a good 
 critic, unless he have the gift of admiration. 
 Only he who can admire has the right to cen- 
 sure ; for, imperfection or defect implying a 
 perfection or wholeness, the critic must first be 
 able to perceive this wholeness before he can 
 discern wherein it has been fallen short of.
 
 58 GOETHE. 
 
 This principle is the life of ethics as of aesthet- 
 ics. The man who values not the good and 
 great is no judge of conduct. False admira- 
 tions abound in this as in other provinces, and 
 false admirations are another source of bad 
 criticism. Good criticism involves admiration 
 enlightened by cultivated intellect, and Goethe, 
 himself the prince of critics, is the best mas- 
 ter one can go to, to learn how to judge 
 of Goethe's proficiencies and felicities, and 
 through them of his failings. The range of 
 his aesthetic performances, and of his successes, 
 is wider than that of any worker in literature. 
 He is not less abundant in comment than crea- 
 tiveness. By precept as well as by practice he 
 gives the highest lessons in the art of literary 
 appreciation. Among the various genera of 
 poetic forms he leaps from peak to peak with a 
 winged ease which surprises the critic into ad- 
 miration. Let the student, who is equipped for 
 such alterations of atmosphere, read IpJiigenia 
 after finishing Hermann and Dorothea, or pass 
 from Werther to the Divan, and consider the 
 span of the life-arc, both in time and mental 
 orbit, which unites these two, or lay down 
 Tasso to take up Faust, or, after an hour spent 
 over the finest lyrics in the world, enjoy a score 
 of pages in the Metamorphoses of Plants.
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 59 
 
 Genius will not be circumscribed. But 
 Goethe could not escape the law of life, that 
 the spirit breathed into the poet from his 
 infancy to his manhood is the one he must 
 breathe out again, and with the more force and 
 veracity the higher and the more passionate is 
 his poetic mood. With all his admiration of 
 Grecian Art he could not write a Greek trag- 
 edy, that was a psychical impossibility ; and 
 so, to appease his yearning, he snatched from 
 the Greeks one of their most illustrious hero- 
 ines, and made a Christian of her. 
 
 Was the original Iphigenia, the daughter of 
 Agamemnon, so large and lofty an individual- 
 ity that she belongs not to Greece but to man- 
 kind ? By no means. But Goethe re-created 
 her, and in so doing he necessarily unpaganized 
 her. Besides belonging to the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth centuries, Goethe was personally too 
 deeply dyed with tenderness, too saturated with 
 the milk of human kindness, not to make the 
 divine principle of love dominate in a conjunc- 
 tion like that in Tauris between Thoas and 
 Iphigenia. To strike him with horror, and 
 thus oblige him to desist from his purpose of 
 making her his bride, Goethe's Iphigenia says 
 to King Thoas : 
 
 " Listen : of Tantalus' dark breed am I."
 
 6O GOETHE. 
 
 Then is evolved to his ears the series of ter- 
 rific crimes committed by her ancestors, crimes 
 whose bloody ruthlessness and ferocious egotism 
 make a very matrix for tragedy ; in this case, 
 tragedy so tangled, that the sole issue out of it 
 is by heaping death upon death. But all this 
 lurid gloom forms but a remote background 
 for the scene. Goethe's Iphigenia has not in 
 her an artery, not the finest capillary, pulsating 
 with this turbid, guilty blood. She is a beau- 
 tifully spiritual impersonation, and illustrates, 
 as though she were designed for the purpose, 
 the contrast between the grim fatalism of 
 Greece and the fair possibilities of a genuinely 
 Christian control. During her long services as 
 priestess in Diana's temple she has made Thoas 
 forego his cruel custom of the sacrifice ot 
 strangers who happened upon his shore, and 
 finally that of her brother Orestes and his 
 friend Pylades, with whom he allows her to de- 
 part in peace, after a concluding scene of sur- 
 passing beauty, deeply imbued with purest 
 sentiment. Goethe's work is an exquisite mod- 
 ern poem (written by a poet of these latter 
 times, it could not be exquisite were it not 
 modern in spirit) wrought out of ancient mate- 
 rials into the form of a drama. In its outpour- 
 ings of passionate personal feelings it is su-
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 6 1 
 
 perbly lyrical, in its narrative passages grandly 
 epic. If it be rather a lyric expansion in dia- 
 logue than a drama, it is nevertheless a gen- 
 uine and a classic poem, classic not because its 
 theme and form are ancient, but through the 
 chasteness of its execution, through the fine 
 fitness of language to thought and sentiment 
 ranging on a high plane of mental endeavor in 
 a warm atmosphere. In Iphigenia Goethe ful- 
 fills the requirements which Milton put into a 
 parenthesis, that poetry should be " simple, sen- 
 suous, and passionate ; " and he fulfills other 
 and higher requirements. Out of these Gre- 
 cian materials Goethe, by the potency of his 
 art, has wrought a genuine poem ; nevertheless, 
 to put into the mouth of the daughter of Aga- 
 memnon, of Iphigenia in Tauris, the senti- 
 ments she here utters, and to make her rule 
 herself by them, is an historical solecism. 
 
 Tasso and Iphigenia, because they belong to 
 the same period of Goethe's poetic activity, are 
 generally ranked together. Like IpJiigenia, 
 Tasso is its own justification. Its inspiration 
 is equal to its art. It is full of the life of char- 
 acter, full of wisdom, of intuitional beamings, 
 and of golden sheaves of experience, full of in- 
 tellectual and sentimental delicacies and brill- 
 iancies. But it is not a drama proper ; it is a
 
 62 GOETHE. 
 
 poem in dialogue, the dialogue being divided 
 into acts instead of chapters. It is an evolution 
 of feeling in words, and in deeds too, but it has 
 not, any more than Iphigenia, the lively, con- 
 tinuous, booming action which drama implies. 
 Its dominant tone being lyrical, it has no dra- 
 matic shock of incidents, no shifting interac- 
 tion of conflicting personages, each striving for, 
 and striking for his own ; but it has a deep and 
 captivating interplay of strong emotions, the 
 shock of inward conflicts, the overflow of pas- 
 sionate feeling, wrought into scenes vivid and 
 varied, and stamped with beauty of form. One 
 would not have it other than it is, being, as it 
 is, an original poem shaped into clear, warm 
 utterance. 
 
 In Tasso there are only five personages. To 
 draw the two principal, the antagonistic char- 
 acters, Tasso and Antonio, Goethe split himself 
 into two. Without the poetic gift and the hu- 
 mane feelings which chasten it, Goethe were 
 an Antonio ; without the keen, practical under- 
 standing, he were a Tasso. 
 
 On his return to Weimar from Italy Goethe 
 was relieved from the heavier ministerial du- 
 ties. Control over the Scientific and Artistic 
 Institutions he retained, over Museums, Mines, 
 Libraries, the Botanical Garden in Jena, and
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 63 
 
 the theatre. Before leaving Italy he wrote to 
 the Duke expressing a wish such as only a 
 Goethe could entertain, characteristic alike of 
 his breadth and his dutifulness : " I should 
 like, immediately on my return, to travel all 
 through your territory as a foreigner, so that I 
 might be able to form a judgment with fresh 
 eyes, practiced in the survey of other countries. 
 After my fashion I should get a new image of 
 the whole, attain a complete conception, and 
 thus qualify myself, as it were anew, for any 
 kind of service which, your kindness or your 
 confidence might require of me." 
 
 A man of genius, to be himself, to have joy 
 in his being, must submit him to the demands, 
 even to the delicate hints, of genius. For his 
 own peace' sake he must strive, through what- 
 ever obstacles, to satisfy his mental yearnings. 
 Most fortunate is he whom, thus genially pos- 
 sessed, outward circumstances favor, instead of 
 hampering and obstructing. Thus favored was 
 Goethe. As minister and chief member of the 
 court of Weimar, he had at times to go with 
 and to do with others, when he would rather 
 have been self-wrapped and secluded. But this 
 was for him a small forfeiture, enjoying as he 
 did the full sympathy, as well as the consider- 
 ate friendship, of the Duke. In our day we
 
 64 GOETHE. 
 
 have seen the illustrious Humboldt bound by 
 much coarser cords to the military, prosaic 
 court of Berlin. Moreover, the poet and the 
 man of science, Goethe not only carried his 
 better self always with him, he put the rudder 
 into the hands of this better self, even when 
 conditions seemed adverse. We saw him on 
 the voyage between Naples and Palermo fasten 
 upon his Tasso. In the summer of 1790 he 
 had to attend the Duke to a military camp in 
 Silesia ; but here, instead of wasting his time 
 on princes and field marshals, he gave up the 
 whole of him to Comparative Anatomy. Amid 
 the sounds of trumpets, the stir of reviews and 
 marchings, in the focus of a gay, showy, ani- 
 mated, socially elevated circle, he lived the life 
 of a hermit. His devotion to this department 
 of Natural Science dated its first impulse from 
 Venice, where, walking one day on the Lido, 
 he fell upon a sheep's skull, " so favorably cleft," 
 he relates, " that it not only confirmed me in a 
 discovery I had already made, namely, that the 
 bones of the skull are transformed vertebrae," 
 but pointed to other new and valuable observa- 
 tions, and strengthened his belief, founded on 
 experience, " that Nature has no secret which 
 she does not somewhere lay bare before the 
 eyes of the attentive observer." The attentive
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 6$ 
 
 observer here implies one furnished in a more 
 than ordinary degree with what may be called 
 the scientific faculty par excellence, that high 
 intellectual gift, namely, which enables the be- 
 holder to seize analogies. This gift, be it here 
 said, united with his imitative instinct, con- 
 tributed largely to the remarkable elasticity of 
 Goethe's style. 
 
 One of Goethe's enduring delights was, to 
 watch and hearken to sleepless, life-bubbling 
 Nature, learning her benignant laws, noting her 
 prodigalities, how her procedures are always as 
 logical as they are beautiful. And so he too 
 had a right to say, as his great countryman 
 Kepler said : " I think the thoughts of God." 
 I stated just now that Goethe was fortunate 
 in his surroundings ; and that surely he was, 
 after full allowance has been made for what 
 himself did towards creating and moulding 
 them ; for in Goethe there was so much life 
 that he awakened and attracted life. He was 
 a centre about which congenial men liked to 
 move. Thus he had as correspondents men 
 of science and men of letters, and early friends 
 and later friends and men of the world, whom 
 his genius and character drew to him and held 
 to him, and to whom he could outpour his best 
 without restraint and be sure of interest and 
 5
 
 66 GOETHE. 
 
 recognition. But besides this he had near him 
 (a purely fortuitous proximity) the Duchess 
 Louise, the wife of his chief, to whom, as well 
 as to the Duke himself, he could impart his 
 profoundest or subtlest suggestions and con- 
 clusions, assured, through intimate knowledge 
 of her, that they would be hospitably received. 
 In 1786 he writes to the Duchess: "The 
 smallest product of Nature has the round of its 
 consummation complete within itself; and I 
 only need eyes to see that it is so, to discover 
 all its conditions, and to feel sure that within a 
 small circle there lies inclosed an entire, real 
 existence. A work of Art, on the contrary, 
 has its consummation without itself; the best 
 of it is in the idea of the Artist, which he 
 seldom or never reaches ; all the rest is in 
 certain accepted laws which, to be sure, are 
 derived from the nature of Art and handicraft, 
 but which are still not so easy to comprehend 
 and decipher as the laws of living Nature. As 
 to works of Art much is tradition ; works of 
 Nature are always like a freshly uttered word 
 of God." Happy Duchess, who had such a 
 poet-friend ! Happy poet, who, in the wife of 
 his sovereign, had such a woman-friend ! 
 
 At the opening of his literary career, be- 
 fore he quitted Frankfort for Weimar, Goethe
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 67 
 
 planned Egmont, working on it at intervals 
 and finishing it in Italy. As in Iphigenia and 
 Tasso, there is in Egmont an unfolding of 
 character and events from within, by quiet 
 talk, rather than by diversified, oppugnant ac- 
 tion. The reader has a masterly picture of the 
 state of Brussels just before and after the 
 arrival of Alva, of the conflicting interests, 
 parties, personages, but not presented through 
 deeds and lively collisions. To be effective as 
 dramas, historical subjects should cover some 
 space, so as to have occurrences enough to 
 give room for variety of outward movement, 
 the dramatist artfully compressing a succession 
 of events into one frame, foreshortening them 
 for dramatic unity and picturesque effects. 
 Egmont, like Goethe's other higher works, is 
 admirable as a poetic creation (poetic though 
 Egmont is written in prose) ; but as a drama 
 it does not keep that balance between the out- 
 ward and inward, the keeping of which is one 
 of the secrets of Shakespeare's mastership. 
 Goethe's tragedies are too inward for dramatic 
 effectiveness ; the will is not put forth muscu- 
 larly enough, one might say. For the drama, 
 not for narrative prose fiction, his person- 
 ages lack sinew. One need for a dramatic 
 success is condensation ; characteristics being
 
 68 GOETHE. 
 
 evolved gradually, it may be, but, in the midst 
 of profluent action, breaking through in acts as 
 well as smiting lines. 
 
 The lyrical proclivity of Goethe is exhibited 
 in the intrusion of Claerchen into this play. 
 Here is an historical tragedy, wrought out of 
 one of the most 'momentous and most tragic 
 crises in European annals, where all hearts are 
 stirred to their depths by strongest passions, 
 passions personal, political, religious ; and now 
 the protagonist of this great epoch, whose 
 whole soul should be engrossed with his high 
 duties and difficulties, him the dramatist drags 
 aside, and makes him the hero of a love epi- 
 sode, and a fictitious love episode, diverting 
 attention from the rapid current of tumultuous 
 minatory movements, to fix it upon Claerchen. 
 Is not this as false in Art as it is untrue to 
 history? Goethe executed all love-stories so 
 admirably, and through them the characters in- 
 volved, that his power and partiality tempted 
 him to bring into Egmont a tender element, as 
 extraneous as it is unseasonable. Owing too to 
 this, Egmont as an historical personage is not 
 fully drawn. His brave, heedless side is given 
 in the following sentences, which translate 
 themselves readily into verse :
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 69 
 
 "Already dead is he who only lives 
 For his dear safety's sake." 
 
 " As if by unseen spirits whipped, speed on 
 Time's sun-steeds with the light car of our fate." 
 
 Claerchen, whose presence is a blotch on an 
 historic tragedy, turns out to be its chief 
 beauty, through the perfectness of her presen- 
 tation. In her song Goethe does what is the 
 essence of all song : he takes the soul of a feel- 
 ing and flings it up to the surface in a glitter- 
 ing, transparent spray. It is a foam snatched 
 from the heave of a deep ocean, through whose 
 momentary crest a heavenly light is made to 
 flash. The following translation will at least 
 help the reader to form a notion of this famous 
 song. 
 
 "Joyful 
 And doleful, 
 
 With thoughto'erful brain ; 
 Yearning 
 And burning 
 In mutable pain ; 
 Heaven-high shouting, 
 To death now depressed ; 
 Happy alone 
 Is the soul by love blessed." 
 
 Thirty years ago I knew at Pisa, among 
 other Professors in the University there, one 
 of the youngest and ablest, Silvestro Centofanti. 
 Signor Centofanti lectured on the history of
 
 yo GOETHE. 
 
 philosophy, and at times with a warm and 
 sonorous eloquence that thrilled his audience. 
 In treating of the Ionian philosophers he had 
 opportunities, of which he availed himself 
 copiously, to hold before his hearers the price- 
 less blessings of freedom, and, by the example 
 of the Greeks, to inculcate what sacrifices a 
 people should make for national independence ; 
 thus nobly using his chair to instill into the 
 youth of Italy principles of duty and patriot- 
 ism. He was one of those thoughtful, high- 
 souled Italians who boldly sowed the precious 
 seed which has since yielded so rich a harvest. 
 The manly, fervid nature of Alfieri, and his 
 patriotic spirit, besides his great literary services 
 to Italy, so won the consonant heart of Signor 
 Centofanti, that he had just published an edi- 
 tion of the tragedies and the autobiography of 
 Alfieri. In a critical introduction, describing 
 the literary procedure of the Italian dramatist, 
 he states that each of his tragedies Alfieri first 
 wrote out fully in prose, and then versified it, 
 thus translating, as it were, the whole, line for 
 line, from prose into verse. I said to the Pro- 
 fessor, " Is that the way to write poetry ? " I 
 repeat the question here. Could one in the 
 mood, the visionary mood, in which alone 
 poetry can be written, write in prose what is
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. . 71 
 
 worthy of rhythmic verse ? If he puts down in 
 prose what is ' thus worthy, is it not solely be- 
 cause he is not enkindled, cannot be enkindled, 
 to the due temperature for poetry ? Is Alfieri 
 a poet in the truest, closest sense of the word ? 
 Is he one who, through imaginative intensity 
 of grasp, from inward vivacity and fullness, re- 
 creates, and freshly projects, in forms of beauty, 
 scenes and passions and personages ? Was his 
 not rather an energetic, fervent, aspiring na- 
 ture, with more of passion than emotion, of a 
 poetic temperament, but with rhetorical rather 
 than poetic gifts ? 
 
 Goethe wrote Ipkigenia and Tasso first in 
 prose. But why did he so ? Because, he says 
 at the time, " Our prosody is in the greatest 
 uncertainty. It is striking that in our language 
 we have few syllables which are decidedly short 
 or long : the others one uses according to taste 
 or caprice." He found on trial that he could 
 soon get such mastery over the iambic blank 
 verse, the best dramatic medium, as to give it 
 the stability he required ; and no doubt he was 
 urged to the trial by the poetic mood which 
 the loving, beaming, presence of two such 
 themes awakened. The. themes are both, as 
 subjects for drama, limited in action and the 
 number of participant personages. This is
 
 72 GOETHE. 
 
 even the case with Egmont. The drama pre- 
 fers a wider field and more numerous -agents, 
 in order to give scope to various movement 
 and accumulating action. The absence of this 
 scope in Goethe's dramas proves a lyrical pre- 
 ponderance in the flow of his aesthetic currents. 
 In depicting persons and passions his genius 
 delighted more in the inward than the outward. 
 With all his full interior springs of passion and 
 sensibility, he brought to his aesthetic work 
 some of the calm contemplativeness of the man 
 of science. At the same time, his characteriza- 
 tion that touchstone, on one side, of dra- 
 matic competency is, in his best delinea- 
 tions, not even surpassed by Shakespeare. In 
 Goethe's pictures and impersonations there is 
 an outfilled, vivid roundness, a buoyancy and 
 healthiness, which are due to the arterial vital- 
 ity and the manifoldness of" his faculties, all 
 made elastic and malleable by the warmth of 
 his sensibility to the beautiful. Shakespeare's 
 preeminence comes mainly from the oceanic 
 occult movement beneath, an incessant heave 
 of power which imparts itself to all the multitu- 
 dinous agitation of the surface, an infinite 
 latent motion, which underlies and penetrates 
 the definite, diversified, external play. In Goethe 
 this heave is only less powerful than in Shake- 
 speare.
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE. 73 
 
 Like Shakespeare's, Goethe's knowledge 
 came to him at first hand, through the warm, 
 active, unintermitted commerce of his heart and 
 intellect with the worlds of fact and feeling. 
 He was always growing, because his resources 
 of sensibility were inexhaustible. Men, women, 
 girls, boys, babies, woods, flowers, fields, light 
 and shade, storm and calm, sea and land, sor- 
 row and joy, war and peace, pictures and 
 statues, all the spectacles and mutations of life, 
 its triumphs, cares, disappointments, successes, 
 all of minute, infinite being taught him inces- 
 santly and abundantly, because he saw it not 
 with the cold eye of the intellect alone, but also 
 with the glowing eye of feeling. Of Goethe it 
 may be said, that he enjoyed all sights and sen- 
 sations, the poet accepting even the painful as 
 pearls snatched from the heart of the man to 
 be thrown into the casket of the Artist. He 
 somewhere says that a man cannot enter a 
 room where hangs an engraving, and go out 
 with his mind in the state it was when he came 
 in. What may be the effect of sorrow he has 
 told in those four simple great lines which were 
 a consolation to the Queen Louise of Prussia 
 in her crushing afflictions : 
 
 Wer nie sein brod mit traenen ass, 
 Und weinend auf dem bette sass
 
 74 GOETHE. 
 
 Die langen kummervollen naechte, 
 
 Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himlischen Maechte. 
 
 Which may be literally translated without 
 much loss : 
 
 Who ne'er his bread with tear-drops ate, 
 And weeping on his bedside sate 
 Through the long night's grief-laden hours, 
 He knows you not, ye heavenly Powers.
 
 III. 
 
 SCHILLER. 
 
 FROM what he beheld and went through 
 Goethe carried away so much, because he 
 brought with him so much. We have seen how 
 large and varied was his experience in the first 
 ten years at Weimar, what stores he gathered 
 in Italy. I have now to record a quickening 
 modification of his being through contact with 
 one man, a contact which took place at an 
 age when most men are past modification ; 
 for Goethe was forty-five (Schiller thirty-five) 
 at the beginning of their correspondence and 
 friendship. 
 
 For several years after Goethe's return from 
 Italy, he avoided Schiller. Schiller was yet in 
 a stage of literary development and activity 
 which Goethe had so outgrown that on his own 
 products of that term he looked, especially since 
 his aesthetic enlargement in Italy, with distaste, 
 almost with aversion. In vain their friends 
 tried to bring them together. Schiller, on a 
 visit to Weimar, lodged near Goethe : Goethe
 
 76 GOETHE. 
 
 did not seek or see him. The first time they 
 met, and for several years the only time, was 
 in 1788 at Rudolstadt, in general company, a 
 few weeks after Goethe's arrival from Rome. 
 Schiller, in a letter to Koerner, thus describes 
 Goethe as he appeared to him on that occa- 
 sion : 
 
 " I can at last tell you something about 
 Goethe. I passed nearly the whole of last Sun- 
 day in his society, on which day he paid us a 
 visit with Madame Herder, Frau v. Stein, and 
 Frau v. S. His appearance greatly lessened 
 the idea I had conceived from hearsay of his 
 imposing and handsome person. He is of 
 middle height, and looks and walks stiff. His 
 countenance is not open, but he has a beaming 
 eye. The expression of his countenance is 
 serious, at the same time that it is benevolent 
 and kind. He has brown hair, and appears 
 older than I should say he really is. His voice 
 is exceedingly pleasing, and his conversation 
 flowing, lively, and amusing. It is a pleasure 
 to listen to him ; and when he is in a happy 
 mood, which he was on this occasion, he is 
 fond of talking, and takes an interest in what 
 he says. Our acquaintance was soon made, 
 without the slightest formality on either side. 
 The company was too numerous, and all were
 
 SCHILLER. 77 
 
 too eager to catch a word from him, for me to 
 be much alone with him, or to allow me to 
 speak with him on other than commonplace 
 topics 
 
 "Altogether, the high opinion I had con- 
 ceived of him is not in the least degree les- 
 sened by his personal acquaintance ; but I 
 doubt if we shall ever draw very close to each 
 other. Many things that are still of interest 
 to me, that I have still to wish and to hope for, 
 have had their day with him. He is so far 
 ahead of me, not so much in years as in ex- 
 perience of the world and self-development, 
 that we cannot meet on the road. His whole 
 life from the very beginning has run in a con- 
 trary direction to mine : his world is not my 
 world : our notions on some points are dia- 
 metrically opposed. But from so short an in- 
 terview it is hard to form a judgment. Time 
 will show." 
 
 Six years after this interview, at the close of 
 a lecture on Natural Science in Jena, happen- 
 ing to come out together, they engaged in talk 
 about the lecture. Goethe was pleased to hear 
 Schiller declare that this piecemeal treatment 
 of Science is not the way to make it attractive ; 
 whereupon Goethe said that there might be a 
 way to present Nature, not cut up and isolated,
 
 78 GOETHE. 
 
 but living and actively striving out of the whole 
 into the parts. Schiller expressed a doubt that 
 such a presentation could spring out of experi- 
 ment. By this time they had reached Schiller's 
 door. Interest in the conversation carried 
 Goethe in. There with animation he explained 
 his theory of the metamorphoses of plants, and 
 with a pen made a typical plant appear before 
 Schiller's eyes. With the liveliest interest 
 Schiller listened and looked ; but at last, shak- 
 ing his head, he said : " That is no result of 
 experiment, that is an idea." Goethe was stag- 
 gered, but collecting himself he rejoined : " I 
 ought to be very thankful that I have ideas 
 without knowing it, and can even see them with 
 my eyes." Schiller was assuredly right : that 
 out of which sprang the typical plant was an 
 idea, if ever there was one. Nay more, with all 
 his capacity for minute, patient observation and 
 experiment, Goethe would never have written, 
 or thought of writing, or been able to write, a 
 page of his Metamorphoses, had he not been 
 far more capable than most men of such ideas. 
 But the ice was broken. In the warmth of 
 close personal contact thawed suddenly the 
 coldness which had kept them so long apart. 
 Describing, long afterwards, the interview, 
 Goethe said : " The attractive power of Schil-
 
 SCHILLER. 79 
 
 ler was great : he held fast whoever came near 
 him. His wife, whom from childhood I had 
 known and loved, did gladly her part to bind us 
 together ; our friends on both sides were re- 
 joiced ; and so, through the never-to-be-recon- 
 ciled conflict between object and subject, was 
 sealed a union that has remained unbroken, and 
 has wrought much good for us and for others." 
 Goethe is called a realist and Schiller an 
 idealist ; but in this very matter of the typical 
 plant Goethe unconsciously shows himself an 
 idealist. In one of his first letters to Goethe, 
 that remarkable fourth letter in which he sets 
 forth with so much distinctness and penetra- 
 tion his, Goethe's, mental characteristics, Schil- 
 ler speaks of his intuitional power, that is, his 
 power of insight independent of experience and 
 collected details. In fact, this commanding 
 genial power of intuition it was which enlarged 
 and vivified Goethe's capacity of experience. 
 Some men, not without pretension and merit, 
 have a limited capacity of experience ; they do 
 not keep learning, still less do they continue 
 ever purifying their knowledge ; and this 
 limited capacity of experience and progression 
 arises in great measure from their incapacity 
 of ideas. Goethe had a great capacity of ex- 
 perience, but it was his capacity of ideas that 
 made him generative, expansive, original.
 
 80 GOETHE. 
 
 Goethe was both subjective and objective : he 
 was an idealist as well as a realist. The only 
 safe idealist is your thorough realist, thorough, 
 from having so many and such clear intellectual 
 inlets, that realities stream upon him in all their 
 variety and fullness, upbearing his idealism on 
 a firm body of facts. Your mere realist is no 
 realist ; for realities cannot be seen just as they 
 are without some light from the ideal, that is, 
 from the imaginative heaven within. On the 
 other hand, your mere idealist is no idealist ; 
 for his imaginations are not valid, idealism need- 
 ing to be colored by injections from the earth's 
 arteries, needing to be fortified by the stabili- 
 ties of tried possibility. 
 
 The much that Goethe saw and partook of 
 he could appropriate and assimilate because 
 he felt so profoundly. His countless relations 
 with the world of men and of things never con- 
 fused or tyrannized over him, because he ruled 
 all his resources from the throne of thought. 
 He was ever drawing magnetism out of the 
 earth, to mingle with the positive current flow- 
 ing from his great interior battery, largely ad- 
 justed out of reason and sensibility. The col- 
 lision it was of these two magnetisms, touched 
 by the spark of the beautiful, which in science 
 as well as in poetry flamed before the world
 
 SCHILLER. 8 1 
 
 delineations and discoveries that are a beauty 
 and a benefaction to his fellow-men forever. 
 
 On the nineteenth of June, 1794, three or four 
 weeks after their meeting and talk in Jena, 
 Schiller writes to Goethe inviting him, in the 
 most cordial and flattering terms, to be one of 
 the contributors to a new literary monthly Jour- 
 nal, The Hours, just about to be established, 
 of which Schiller was to be Editor. In a note 
 Goethe accepts in similar terms the invitation. 
 Thus was begun a correspondence which was 
 actively kept up for ten of the busiest, most 
 productive years of both, ending only with the 
 life of Schiller, and which is the richest episto- 
 lary treasure in literature. In his note, Goethe 
 says : " A closer connection with such sterling 
 men as the undertakers of this work will, I am 
 sure, give new life to much that is now stagnant 
 within me." And just this The Hours did 
 for Goethe. What his friendship with Schiller 
 did for him he states four years later in a letter 
 to Schiller, which stands nearly midway be- 
 tween the beginning and the end of their cor- 
 respondence, being numbered 401, and the last, 
 dated April 24th, 1805, from Schiller to Goethe, 
 being 971. "The friendly bond between us," 
 writes Goethe in 1 798, " has already been of 
 great service to us, and I hope that it will con- 
 6
 
 82 GOETHE. 
 
 tinue to be so. If I have been to you as the 
 representative of many objects, you have drawn 
 me from the too close observation of outward 
 things and their relations, and thrown me back 
 upon myself. You have taught me to look 
 more discerningly at the manysidedness of the 
 inner man ; you have obtained for me a second 
 youth, and made me a poet again, which I had 
 as good as ceased to be." 
 
 A cordial relation and correspondence being 
 established between them, they sought each 
 other, and had long discussions on the high 
 topics that were the mental aliment of both. 
 After a visit of Goethe to Jena, Schiller writes 
 on the twenty-third of August, 1 794 : " On 
 much in regard to which I could not obtain 
 perfect harmony within myself, the contempla- 
 tion of your mind (die Anschauung Ihres 
 Geistes), for thus I must call the full impres- 
 sion of your ideas upon me, has kindled in 
 me a new light. I needed the object, the body, 
 to many speculative ideas, and you have put 
 me on the track of it. Your observing look, 
 which rests so calmly and clearly on all things, 
 keeps you from getting into the by-roads into 
 which speculation, as well as an arbitrary im- 
 agination, obeying only itself, so easily goes 
 astray. In your correct intuition lies all that
 
 SCHILLER. 83 
 
 analysis so laboriously seeks, and only because 
 it lies in you as a whole, is your own wealth 
 concealed from yourself; for, alas ! we only 
 know that which we can take to pieces." 
 
 - The fifth letter, dated August 2/th, is from 
 Goethe to Schiller, acknowledging the preced- 
 ing one. I copy nearly the whole of it, it is so 
 autobiographical. 
 
 " For my birthday, which falls in this week, 
 no more acceptable present could have come to 
 me than your letter, in which, with a friendly 
 hand, you give the sum of my existence, and 
 through your sympathy, encourage me to a 
 more assiduous and active use of my powers. 
 
 " Pure enjoyment and real benefit can only 
 be reciprocal, and it will give me pleasure to 
 unfold to you at leisure what my intercourse 
 with you has done for me, how I, too, regard 
 it as making an epoch in my existence, and 
 how content I am to have gone on my way 
 without particular encouragement, as it now 
 appears as if we, after a so unexpected meet- 
 ing, are to proceed forward together. I have 
 always prized the honest and so rare earnest- 
 ness that is visible in all that you have written 
 and done, and I may now expect to be made 
 acquainted by yourself with the progress of 
 your mind, particularly in the last few years.
 
 84 GOETHE. 
 
 Shall we have once made clear to each other 
 the points to which we have thus far attained, 
 we shall then be the better able, without inter- 
 ruption, to work on together. 
 
 " All that relates to me, and is in me, I will 
 gladly impart. For, as I feel very sensibly 
 that my undertaking far exceeds the measure 
 of the faculties of one earthly life, I would wish 
 to depose much with you, and thereby give it 
 not only endurance, hut vitality. 
 
 " Of how great profit will be to me a closer 
 intercourse with you, yourself will soon per- 
 ceive, when, on a near acquaintance, you dis- 
 cover in me a kind of obscurity and holding 
 back, which I cannot entirely master, notwith- 
 standing I am perfectly conscious of it. Like 
 phenomena are often found in our nature, to 
 whose government- we unwillingly yield, when 
 she is not too tyrannical. 
 
 " I hope soon to pass some time with you, 
 and then we will talk over much together." 
 
 In dealing with these precious letters the 
 difficulty is not to choose but to abstain. 
 Here is an invitation from Goethe to Schiller, 
 making part of a letter, dated September 4th, 
 1794. 
 
 ".And here I have a proposal to make to you. 
 Next week the court goes to Eisenach, and
 
 SCHILLER. 85 
 
 for a fortnight I shall be alone and independ- 
 ent, as I have not a prospect of being soon 
 again. Will you not, during this period, visit 
 me, and lodge with me ? You would be able 
 to occupy yourself in quiet with any kind of 
 work". At convenient hours we should talk to- 
 gether, see such friends as were the most con- 
 genial to us, and would part not without profit. 
 You should live entirely after your own fash- 
 ion, and be as much as possible as if you were 
 in your own house. In this way I should be 
 able to show you what is most valuable in my 
 literary store, and many threads of connection 
 would be joined between us. After the four- 
 teenth you will find me free, and ready to re- 
 ceive you. 
 
 " Until then I will reserve much that I have 
 to say, and in the mean time I wish you all 
 happiness." 
 
 Here is Schiller's answer, at the opening of 
 a long letter. 
 
 "JENA, >]th September, 1794. 
 
 " With pleasure I accept your kind invita- 
 tion, but with the earnest request, that in* no 
 particular of your household arrangements will 
 you make any change with reference to me : for, 
 alas ! my spasms oblige me commonly to devote 
 the whole morning to sleep, because they let
 
 86 GOETHE. 
 
 me have no rest at night, and, indeed, I am 
 never well enough to be able in a whole day to 
 count upon a fixed hour. I must, therefore, 
 beg that I may be in your house as one who 
 is not to be cared for, so that by being thus 
 left to myself, I may escape the embarrassment 
 of making any one else dependent upon my 
 state of health. The arrangement which would 
 make any other man comfortable, is my worst 
 enemy ; for, the being obliged to do a certain 
 thing at a particular time is sure to render me 
 unfit to do it. 
 
 " Pardon these preliminaries, which I must 
 first settle, in order to make my staying with 
 you even possible. I will request the poor lib- 
 erty of being permitted to be an invalid in your 
 house. 
 
 " I was just about to propose to you to pay 
 me a visit when I received your invitation. 
 My wife has gone with our child to spend 
 three weeks at RudolstadJ, to avoid the small- 
 pox with which Mr. Humboldt has had his 
 children inoculated. I am quite alone, and 
 could lodge you very comfortably. Except 
 Humboldt, I seldom see any one, and for a 
 long time no metaphysics have crossed my 
 threshold."
 
 SCHILLER. 87 
 
 The interest of these letters lies as much in 
 the exhibition of the cordial and courteous 
 familiarity between two such men, as in the 
 abundance and brightness of the good things 
 that are interchanged on the high themes 
 which first drew them together, the living in 
 and for which made the chief joy of their lives. 
 Poets and thinkers both, earnest, active, con- 
 scientious literary workers, both, at the open- 
 ing of their correspondence and friendship, in- 
 tent on giving character to a new journal, the 
 choice topics in art, literature, philosophy, in 
 addition to piquant personalities and witty 
 thrusts, naturally come often up in their let- 
 ters, to be touched with epistolary buoyancy 
 and grace, but at the same time with the firm- 
 ness and judgment of sterling criticism. 
 
 The following brief note from Goethe shows 
 how thoroughly he did his work. 
 
 " For the Advocate, who here appears, I wish 
 a good reception. 
 
 " Have the goodness to send it soon back to 
 me, because I want to go through it several 
 times more for the sake of the style. 
 
 " I am working everything out of the way 
 that might hinder me from soon enjoying and 
 instructing myself by your side. 
 
 "WEIMAR, ityh March, 1795."
 
 88 GOETHE. 
 
 With easy fullness and certain grace flowers 
 tip with light a whole zone of stalks in spring ; 
 but what avast, mysterious, constructive might 
 lies behind this facile beauty ! So with shin- 
 ing thoughts in the extemporaneous utter- 
 ances of genial minds : they come forth with a 
 happy readiness which diverts us from think- 
 ing of the divine depths whence only can such 
 be upthrown. 
 
 The temptation to make many long extracts 
 I withstand, as not suited to the compass of 
 the present volume, and select a few gems of 
 criticism or comment, whose rays reveal the 
 interiors whence they issue. Goethe thus 
 closes a letter of May i4th, 1795 : "Have you 
 seen the treatise on style in the plastic arts in 
 the April number of the Mercury ? That on 
 which we are all agreed is very well said ; but, 
 that the writer should assert that genius, which 
 exists in the philosopher prior to all experi- 
 ence, does not pull him and warn him when 
 with imperfect experience he sits down to 
 prostitute himself!" 
 
 On sending Schiller a distich, Goethe says : 
 " How serious every trifle becomes the mo- 
 ment one treats it according to the principles 
 of Art, I have on this occasion again experi- 
 enced."
 
 SCHILLER. 89 
 
 To Lawrence Stark, a novel by Engel, very 
 current just then, Schiller gives a loud slap : 
 " It has the merit of having a light tone, but it 
 is rather the lightness of the hollow than- of the 
 beautiful. When minds like E.'s wish to be 
 true and naif they run such danger of being 
 flat. But, most divine flatness ! that is the 
 very thing that recommends them." 
 
 Both were dissatisfied with what Herder said 
 of German Literature in a volume just pub- 
 lished. Goethe concludes a paragraph on the 
 volume with words which can hardly be too 
 often reprinted : " It may be owing to my 
 mood at the time, but it seems to me that, as 
 well in treating of writings as of actions, unless 
 one speaks with a loving sympathy, a certain 
 partial enthusiasm, the result is so defective as 
 to have very little value. Pleasure, delight, 
 sympathy in things, is all that is real, and that 
 reproduces reality : all else is 'empty and in 
 vain." 
 
 At the close of a letter of July Qth, 1796, we 
 . get a cheering look into Goethe's heart and 
 household : " Greet your dear wife. Could you 
 not, in case of an increase of your family, send 
 Charles over here ? Augustus would give him 
 a hearty welcome, and he would be very happy 
 in the company of the many children that as- 
 semble at my house and garden. Farewell."
 
 9O GOETHE. 
 
 One of those base and malignant natures, 
 whom the facilities of the press enable to aim 
 their dirt (it never reaches its aim) at the 
 worthy and the exalted, had written about 
 Goethe some personality so low that Schiller 
 calls it "filthy." Goethe thus ends a short, 
 calm comment thereon : " How little this kind 
 of people even dream in what an inaccessible 
 castle that man dwells who is always in earnest 
 in regard to himself and everything around 
 him." 
 
 The union of Goethe and Schiller in literary 
 as well as personal friendship, amicable, animat- 
 ing, reciprocally serviceable rivals, being united 
 at the top through their aspirations, this 
 union, while it quickened their productiveness, 
 stimulated detraction. Prosaic, incompetent 
 writers (whose name is always legion), envious 
 because incompetent, presumptuous because 
 prosaic, could ill brook the growing predomi- 
 nance of two such men. In journals, in pam- 
 phlets and other forms, the two were pertina- 
 ciously assailed. Against such attacks the best 
 weapon is witty ridicule ; and so, in the shape 
 of what they called Xenia, a term borrowed 
 from Martial, Goethe and Schiller launched 
 at their detractors showers of epigrams, pinning 
 to the wall with a distich many a scribbling
 
 SCHILLER. 91 
 
 wasp. In the German literary world of that 
 day the Xenia made a lively stir. Of the epis- 
 tolary comments which the two friends inter- 
 changed on these assailants I make room for 
 the following, from Goethe in December, 1 796 : 
 " To be candid, however, the conduct of these 
 people is altogether what I wish ; for it is a 
 policy not sufficiently known and practiced, 
 that whoever makes pretensions to any posthu- 
 mous fame, should force his contemporaries to 
 out with whatever they have against him. The 
 impression made thereby he always effaces by 
 his presence, his life and activity. Of what 
 avail was it to many a discreet, meritorious and 
 clever man, whom I have outlived, that, through 
 incredible compliance, passiveness, flattery, ad- 
 vancing and retiring, he obtained a tolerable 
 reputation during his life ? The instant he is 
 dead, the Devil's attorney plants himself by the 
 side of the corpse, and the angel, who is there 
 to be his counterpart, wears mostly a very sor- 
 rowful visage." 
 
 The two brothers Schlegel, Augustus Wil- 
 liam and Frederick, did good service in their 
 day to literature, and A. W.'s History of Dra- 
 matic Literature (written, however, long after 
 this period) has deservedly survived. They 
 were both prone to pretend beyond their de-
 
 92 GOETHE. 
 
 serts, an amusing instance of which pretension 
 is related in Moore's Diary. At a dinner at 
 the Marquis of Lansdowne's, in London, in 
 1832, on the death of Goethe being announced, 
 and some one saying that Germany had now 
 no great poet left, A. W. Schlegel exclaimed : 
 "I am a German Poet ! " In May, 1797, Schil- 
 ler thus writes of Frederick Schlegel : " Have 
 you read Schlegel's critique on Schlosser? It 
 is, to be sure, in its fundamental principles, not 
 untrue, but the evil intent and party spirit are 
 much too apparent in it. This Mr. Frederick 
 Schlegel is really getting too bad. He lately 
 told Humboldt that he had reviewed Agnes in 
 the journal Germany, and very severely too ; 
 but that now, since he hears that it is not by 
 you, he regrets that he handled it so roughly. 
 So the coxcomb thinks it his duty to take care 
 that your taste fall not off. And this impu- 
 dence is coupled with such ignorance and shal- 
 lowness, that he really took Agnes to be your 
 work. 
 
 " The gossip about the Xenia continues. I 
 am constantly meeting with a new title of a 
 book, wherein an essay or something similar is 
 announced against the Xenia. Lately I found 
 an article against them in a journal called An- 
 nals of Suffering Humanity"
 
 SCHILLER. 93 
 
 Writing to Goethe's friend Meyer in July, 
 1797, Schiller thus speaks of Hermann and 
 Dorothea and its author : " Nor have we in the 
 mean time been inactive, as you know, and 
 least of all our friend, who in the last few years 
 has really surpassed himself. His epic poem 
 you have read : you will admit that it is the 
 pinnacle of his and all our modern art. I have 
 seen it grow up, and have wondered almost as 
 much at the manner of its growth as at the 
 completed work. Whilst the rest of us are 
 obliged painfully to collect, in order slowly to 
 bring forth anything passable, he has but gen- 
 tly to shake the tree, in order to have fall to 
 him the most beautiful fruit, ripe and heavy. It 
 is incredible with what ease he now reaps upon 
 himself the fruits of a well-bestowed life and 
 a persistent culture ; how significant and sure 
 now all his steps are ; how the clearness as to 
 himself and as to objects, preserves him from 
 every idle effort and beating about." 
 
 From Frankfort Goethe writes in August of 
 the same year : " It struck me as very remark- 
 able what the peculiar character of the public 
 in a large city is. It lives in an incessant tu- 
 mult of getting and spending, and that which 
 we call high mood can neither be produced nor 
 communicated. All pleasures, even the the-
 
 94 GOETHE. 
 
 atre, are intended only to distract (zerstreuen}, 
 and the great fondness of the reading public 
 for journals and novels arises precisely thence, 
 that the former always, and the latter mostly, 
 bring distraction to distraction. 
 
 " I even think I have remarked a kind of shy- 
 ness towards poetic productions, or, at least, in 
 so far as they are poetic, which, from these 
 causes, appears to me quite natural. Poetry 
 requires, nay, exacts, collectedness ; it isolates 
 man against his will ; it forces itself on the at- 
 tention repeatedly, and is ^n the broad world 
 (not to say the great world) as inconvenient as 
 a faithful mistress." 
 
 The important critical judgment uttered in the 
 subjoined extract, condemns some of Goethe's 
 own dramatic practice, and no doubt his in- 
 fringement of a fundamental principle helped 
 to make its truth so clear to him. The principle 
 is, that a subject which is not capable of lifting 
 itself into rhythm is not a fit subject for dra- 
 matic treatment. It may be that he lays down 
 the law too strictly, and that comedy and farce 
 can be genuine in prose. But he is backed by 
 Shakespeare, who, as if to authorize and em- 
 phasize the principle, besides making verse 
 predominate in most of his comedies, intro- 
 duces it into several scenes even of the Merry
 
 SCHILLER. 95 
 
 Wives of Windsor. The mere prose drama 
 creeps along the ground among the individuali- 
 ties of a subject, the bustling crowd of details, 
 weaving its texture out of a succession of occa- 
 sions. The poetic drama, dealing with effects 
 and causes, not with mere occasions, converts 
 many particulars into a few generalities. By 
 extracting the essence out of much, the spirit 
 out of a pile of material, it rises to the plane 
 of poetry. Thus the truly poetic drama be- 
 comes representative, unlimited, unconsciously 
 symbolical. The letter of Goethe is so alive 
 with sound criticism, as sound and in much as 
 applicable to-day as in 1797, that I give a large 
 portion of it. This letter is dated November 
 
 2$, 1797- 
 
 " For letter and package, which I have this 
 moment received, I thank you cordially, and 
 only say in haste and . impromptu, that I am 
 not only of your opinion, but even go much 
 further. Whatever is poetical should be treated 
 rhythmically. That is my conviction, and the 
 belief, that by degrees a poetical prose might 
 be introduced, only shows that the difference 
 between prose and poetry is entirely lost sight 
 of. It is no better than if some one should 
 order to be made in his park a lake that could 
 be drained, and the landscape-gardener endeav-
 
 g6 GOETHE. 
 
 ored to execute the order by forming a marsh. 
 What is neither one thing nor the other is for 
 amateurs and dabblers, just .as marshes are for 
 amphibious animals. In the mean time the evil 
 has become so great in Germany, that no one 
 any longer sees it ; nay, like that scrofulous 
 people that is told of, they rather look upon a 
 healthily made neck as a punishment from God. 
 All dramatic works (and perhaps comedy and 
 farce generally) should be rhythmical, and we 
 should then sooner see who could do some- 
 thing. For the present, however, nothing is 
 left to the dramatic poet but to accommodate 
 himself to public taste ; and in this sense you 
 could not be blamed if you chose to write your 
 Wallenstein in prose ; do you however regard 
 it as a self-dependent work, then it must neces- 
 sarily become rhythmical. 
 
 " At all events we are obliged to forget our 
 age, if we wish to work according to our con- 
 victions ; for, such a shallow vulgarity in prin- 
 ciples as at present prevails has assuredly never 
 before been in the world." 
 
 One more extract I must make from these 
 hearty, thoughtful, wise, lively letters, the 
 opening of Schiller's answer to the above, dated 
 November 28, 1797. We know with what mod- 
 esty Goethe spoke of Shakespeare : here we
 
 SCHILLER. 97 
 
 have a glimpse of how the greatest of poets im- 
 pressed Schiller : " With your Elegy you have 
 again given us great pleasure ; it belongs so 
 truly to the pure poetic species, as through so 
 simple a means, through a sportful use of the 
 subject, it stirs up the deepest and points to 
 the highest. May many such moods cheer you 
 in these gloomy, oppressive days, which to you 
 also I know are so fatal. I need all my elas- 
 ticity, in order to make myself air and room 
 against the down-weighing heavens. 
 
 " I read lately the Shakespearean pieces 
 which treat of the War of the Two Roses, and 
 am now, after finishing Richard the Third, 
 filled with amazement. This last is one of the 
 sublimest tragedies that I know, and at this mo- 
 ment I could not say whether even any other 
 one of Shakespeare can rank before it. The 
 great destinies, woven in the preceding pieces, 
 are ended in this in a truly great manner, and 
 they connect themselves together according to 
 the most sublime idea. That the subject of 
 itself excludes entirely the tender, the melting, 
 the tear-moving, assists this high effect : every- 
 thing therein is energetic and great ; naught 
 common disturbs the pure aesthetic emotion ; 
 and it is, as it were, the pure form of the dread 
 tragic that one enjoys." 
 7
 
 98 GOETHE. 
 
 Through passages cited from their letters the 
 reader knows what the two thought they had 
 learnt one from the other, how much they had 
 been to each other. The expression of their 
 obligations was probably heightened by pro- 
 found personal esteem and reciprocal admira- 
 tion. The passage from Goethe, recording 
 what he deemed he owed to Schiller, is from a 
 letter dated in the fourth year of their correspon- 
 dence. Something, doubtless, each gave to his 
 friend, the strong side of one supplementing, in 
 some degree, the weak side of the other. But 
 the most teemful consequence of their friendship 
 was the stimulus it lent to their powers through 
 earnest, incessant, close cooperation. The great 
 service Literature owes to their intimacy is, 
 that it brought out of each the best there was 
 in him. The sympathy of such a friend as a 
 Goethe was to a Schiller, and a Schiller to a 
 Goethe, warmed the faculties of either, kindling 
 the inward man to his utmost heat. Their 
 joint high, zealous endeavors after poetic ex- 
 cellence braced and pruned the strength of 
 either by uniting them as one man, while each 
 kept to his own path. When they got on the 
 slippery track of the Xenia they were as thor- 
 oughly interfused as hostile Indians on a trail : 
 their shrewdest foes could not distinguish their
 
 SCHILLER. 99 
 
 footmarks. Sometimes one named the subject 
 and the other executed it : sometimes one wrote 
 the first line, his friend the second. 
 
 When in 1797 Goethe came back from a 
 journey to Switzerland, he brought, among 
 other poetic booty, hints for an epic poem on 
 William Tell. By often talking over the plan 
 and scenery with Schiller, the subject took 
 such hold of his friend, that Schiller projected 
 a drama with Tell for the hero, while Goethe 
 the subject having lost its novelty, and the to 
 him indispensable secrecy as a poetic theme 
 readily gave it up to Schiller, who wrought out 
 of it one of his best tragedies, weaving in with 
 fidelity and effect, through Goethe's descrip- 
 tion, the grand physical lineaments of the Four 
 Cantons. When Schiller was writing his 
 Wallenstein, Goethe inspirited him with his 
 sympathy : Schiller gave the same refined aid 
 to Goethe in his Wilhelm Meister. 
 
 In the literary lives of Goethe and Schiller 
 the year 1797 is called the Ballad year. In 
 friendly rivalry the two wrote some of their 
 best ballads ; and for getting a clear view of 
 the aesthetic difference between them there is 
 no readier way than to study these. Schiller's 
 ballads are incidents poetized, incidents with 
 feeling in them, for else they could not be poet-
 
 100 GOETHE. 
 
 ized. Goethe's are feeling actualized in poetic 
 forms. With Schiller the main thing is the in- 
 cident, with Goethe the sentiment. Hence 
 Schiller's ballads are momentarily more excit- 
 ing than Goethe's, but not so warm, and not so 
 significant. In the best of Goethe's there lies 
 coiled a deeper, a more generic moral meaning, 
 or, through the awe they cause, they make the 
 reader feel the unseen. Goethe had a bound- 
 less faith : he held firmly to that invisible chain 
 which binds man consciously to the unknown. 
 Faith may be called a spiritual gravitation, 
 which holds us to our place relatively to the 
 creative power whence we are. 
 
 Compare two of the shorter ballads, The 
 Glove, by Schiller, and The Faithless Boy,\>j 
 Goethe. Love is the subject of both. In The 
 Glove, the court of the French king and 
 knights and ladies sit in an amphitheatre to 
 witness a combat between lions and tigers and 
 leopards. A lady drops her glove between a 
 lion and a tiger crouching near each other, and 
 then mockingly challenges her lover to fetch 
 the glove. The knight descends into the 
 arena, picks it up, and, in answer to the warm 
 smile of love from the lady, tosses the glove in 
 her face. This ballad has been translated by 
 Merivale, and by Dwight in his admirable vol-
 
 SCHILLER. 10 1 
 
 ume. The Faithless Boy, by Goethe, is given 
 in the joint volume of his " Poems and Ballads," 
 by Aytoun and Martin. I make the following 
 translation, which is, I think, closer to the text 
 and to the simplicity of the original : 
 
 There was a stripling, saucy, bold, 
 
 From France he came but newly, 
 Who oft a poor young girl did fold 
 
 In the arms of love too truly ; 
 Had pressed her fondly to his side, 
 And jested of her as his bride, 
 
 And after all deserted. 
 
 When the girl learnt she was betrayed, 
 
 Her senses from her parted ; 
 She laughed and wept, and swore and prayed, 
 
 And thus her soul departed. 
 That was to him a heavy day, 
 It turned his hair from brown to gray, 
 
 And drove him forth to wander. 
 
 He struck the spurs into his steed, 
 
 Through every cross-road gliding 
 Hither and thither, with wildest speed ; 
 
 Can find no rest by riding. 
 Seven days and seven nights he rode : 
 It lightened, thundered, crashed and blowed ; 
 
 The floods are out and raging. 
 
 He rides into the lightning's teeth, 
 
 Up to a wall he rideth, 
 And ties his horse and creeps beneath, 
 
 And from the rain he hideth. 
 And as he taps from side to side,
 
 102 GOETHE. 
 
 Right under him the earth gapes wide : 
 He plunges down a hundred fathom. 
 
 And as he comes to from the blow, 
 
 He sees three tapers blinking, 
 He lifts him and he crawleth low j 
 
 The lights go further winking : 
 This way and that they lead him round, 
 Now up, now down, and underground, 
 
 Through broken, dreary caverns. 
 
 Then, of a sudden, in a hall 
 
 By hundred guests he's greeted ; 
 Their hollow eyes smile on him all ; 
 
 They nod him to be seated. 
 And there among them meets his sight 
 The maiden dear, all clad in white, 
 
 She turneth 
 
 What homeliness and simplicity are here, and 
 at the same time what ideality ! How the ele- 
 ments are made to fulminate against a breach 
 of the most sacred of trusts ! Could human 
 voice proclaim with more emphasis, with a 
 deeper cry of the soul, " You are above, you 
 justicers ? " And how rapid is the action : in 
 only forty- two short lines what a tale and what 
 a moral is compressed ! And, as it ever should 
 be in poetry, the moral lies modestly nestled 
 behind the aesthetic beauty and grandeur. 
 Poetry, says Goethe, " is the true expression of 
 an excited, exalted soul without aim or purpose." 
 The soul, in its uplifted states, will, without aim
 
 SCHILLER. IO3 
 
 or purpose, and more surely than with them, 
 utter the deepest moral and spiritual truth. 
 The legitimate effect of a poem, as of all gen- 
 uine Art, is, to impart to the reader or beholder 
 some of that exaltation out of which it sprang. 
 Thus it lifts him above himself, and so, becomes 
 effectively and nobly moral in its influence. 
 Only in these elevated, inspired, and therefore 
 self-forgetting moods can true poetry be pro- 
 duced ; and then deep meanings come spon- 
 taneously, often deeper than the writer knew 
 of at the moment of writing. He who strives 
 to say deep things never says them. So of the 
 beautiful : if a man of thought and feeling be in- 
 wardly illuminated by his susceptibility thereto, 
 this illumination will show itself outwardly in 
 fresh, exquisite images and conceptions, which 
 come to him unsought and unexpected. 
 
 In Goethe the inward depth was deeper than 
 in Schiller, and hence the richer meaning, the 
 wider bearing, of his ballads and other shorter 
 poems. Schiller worked more through the 
 understanding in conjunction with the sense of 
 the beautiful ; Goethe more through the sen- 
 sibilities. Thence Schiller was always cast- 
 ing about for subjects, for incidents or life- 
 passages, which while they are striking have 
 enough generic quality and sentiment in them
 
 IO4 GOETHE. 
 
 to bear being versified. Goethe experienced no 
 such want of subjects, because his were drawn 
 from an inexhaustible within. Subjects, indeed, 
 crowded upon him more numerously than he 
 could execute. " No one," he declares, " can 
 furnish subjects to the poet : nay, he often 
 blunders in choosing them himself." 
 
 Schiller's poetic procedure was to realize his 
 ideal through the individual, a procedure which 
 is sound and successful when you have individ- 
 uals to idealize. The power of individualiza- 
 tion is the creative power. This lies at the base 
 of all thorough poetic work. The individual, 
 whether thing, sentiment, incident, or person, 
 being first clearly conceived, must be held in 
 the grasp of the mind, distinct, organic, specific, 
 and then, by means of poetic imagination, that 
 is imagination illuminated by the beautiful and 
 steadied by the generic reason, he or it is 
 brightened to the best whereof he or it is ca- 
 pable. In all poetry and Art this, is the only 
 legitimate idealization ; for hereby, in your 
 subtlest and loftiest ideals, you cling to the 
 truth of nature. This power of individualiza- 
 tion, in which lay the primary strength of 
 Goethe, Schiller somewhat lacked. Hence 
 Goethe's personages have in them more pulse 
 and presence than Schiller's : among them-
 
 SCHILLER. 105 
 
 selves they are differentiated distinctly ; nor 
 are they at all prosaic as individuals. If your 
 personage is not specifically individualized, he 
 is liable, when you descend upon him from your 
 ideal heights, to be enveloped in a magnifying 
 mist which, even if a golden mist, obscures 
 and dislocates his lineaments, leaving him at 
 the end a vague, loose figure, whom we can- 
 not closely embrace with the arms of our love 
 and admiration. The personages of Schiller's 
 dramas partake, more or less, of this character ; 
 hence they have been called thought-creatures : 
 they are somewhat hollow and unreal. Those 
 of Goethe's are more soul-creatures, and thence 
 more actual. As the ideal cannot be realized 
 without the mind being first able to give birth 
 to concrete individuals, so the real cannot be 
 idealized, which was Goethe's procedure, 
 without an idealizing and generalizing power. 
 Goethe made the particular, the individual, 
 represent, or at least point to, the universal ; 
 and he did this because the universal and abso- 
 lute was organically native to his mind. The 
 individual products of the earth you cannot see 
 without the one universal Sun ; and when by 
 its light you are enabled to perceive them, you 
 cannot fail to find that the Sun has been busy 
 with them and all their parts.
 
 106 GOETHE. 
 
 In the beginning of 1805 Goethe and Schiller 
 were both ill. Goethe had a presentiment that 
 one of them would die. One day, when they 
 had not met for several weeks, Schiller, having 
 partly recovered, entered Goethe's sick room. 
 They walked up to each other and earnestly 
 embraced. For a time both rallied. At the 
 end of April Goethe went to see Schiller : he 
 found him just about going to the theatre. 
 Goethe was not well enough to accompany him. 
 The two friends parted at Schiller's door, never 
 to meet again on earth. 
 
 A man of Goethe's sensibility, and of his 
 affectionateness of nature as shown in many re- 
 lations with his fellow-men, would of course be 
 deeply moved by the loss of such a friend as 
 Schiller. When, on the ninth of May, 1805, 
 Schiller died, Goethe was enfeebled by long 
 illness. Hereby his nervous tone was lowered. 
 This depressed condition accounts for the 
 touching manifestations of grief recorded just 
 before Schiller's death. One day, during Schil- 
 ler's illness, a friend of Goethe found him in 
 tears pacing up and down his garden, and at 
 night he was heard weeping. This record has 
 its value, but is not needed to prove the gen- 
 uineness and strength of Goethe's love for 
 Schiller ; and it testifies to the morbid state of
 
 SCHILLER. TO/ 
 
 one whose discipline it was to bear up calmly 
 under bereavement. 
 
 To Zelter, Goethe wrote : " I thought to lose 
 myself, and instead of that I lose a friend, and 
 in him the half of my being." In order to en- 
 gross his mind, to divert his thoughts from his 
 loss, to continue co-working with his friend, 
 and thus keep him still genially present, he 
 resolved to take up and finish Demetriiis, a 
 tragedy which Schiller had begun. They had 
 often talked over the plan together, so that 
 Goethe knew thoroughly Schiller's design. It 
 was to be a monument to Schiller such as 
 Goethe, and Goethe alone, could raise. But 
 he could not set himself to the chosen task : 
 his mind was unstrung for such work. The 
 following extract from Goethe's Year-Book for 
 1805 describes his condition when he found he 
 could not take up Demetrius : " Now for the 
 first time I felt that he was gone : insupport- 
 able sorrow seized me ; and as my bodily 
 sufferings cut me off from all company? I was 
 left in the saddest loneliness. My journals tell 
 nothing of that period : the blank leaves denote 
 the inward emptiness, and such minutes as are 
 found testify that I just kept by the side of 
 current occupations, without interest, and let 
 them lead me instead of my leading them."
 
 IV. 
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 
 
 BEFORE and after the ten years of intimacy 
 with Schiller, as well as contemporaneously 
 with that, Goethe had other friendships, to 
 warm and expand him. In youth, among his 
 friends were men older than himself; in ma- 
 turest age, younger men. Friends he had, and 
 could not be without, all through a long, prolific 
 life. Sociable, kindly, and eminently attractive 
 he was, and of that cheeriest hospitality which 
 opens not doors only, but the mind. He had 
 much to give, and he gave gladly to all who 
 could receive his gifts. As in his intellectual 
 structure there was capacity for broadest grasp 
 and generalization, with acute talent for ob- 
 serving, in his feelings he united sympathy for 
 all human being, enjoying or suffering, a con- 
 stitutional love for man, with a ready attach- 
 ment to individual men, and sharp preferences 
 among those nearest him. " Pity," wrote Jung 
 Stilling, one of his Strasbourg friends, " that so
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 109 
 
 few are acquainted with this noble man in 
 respect of his heart." 
 
 Through a supreme instinct genius seizes its 
 proper food, rejecting what is unserviceable 
 or noxious. Goethe was thrown early upon 
 himself. He was not seventeen when he en- 
 tered the University of Leipzig. The student 
 at a German University is his own master : 
 the precious, priceless hours are his, to do with 
 them what he will. Leipzig, besides being the 
 seat of a University, was a lively commercial 
 centre. To young men, just emancipated from 
 pedagogic discipline and parental presence, 
 such a town is profuse of opportunities, of invi- 
 tations, of enticements. That of these Goethe 
 yielded mostly to the fair, and from the foul 
 got experience and no permanent tainture, was 
 due, not solely to the healthy natural selection 
 of genius, but to a fundamental rectitude of 
 nature, which, through all the extravagancies 
 and seeming lawlessness of his youth, kept him 
 from damaging aberrations, and held him to a 
 forward and upward course. A boy in years, 
 he was a man through native common sense 
 and precocious thoughtfulness, as well as from 
 an interior tropical glow of temperament. 
 
 A youth, overflowing with animal spirits, 
 full of life, curiosity, geniality, impressible and
 
 HO' GOETHE. 
 
 beautiful, would not fail to attract and be at- 
 tracted. Around him was soon a circle of the 
 ripe and the unripe, of both sexes, to whom he 
 gave and from whom he received. His most 
 serviceable friend was Frau Boehme, wife of a 
 professor, one of those paragons of womanly 
 being enfolded in an atmosphere of grace, 
 through which shine intelligence and feminine 
 helpfulness. By her the untamed youth was 
 subdued to conformity in his dress and bear- 
 ing ; and through her he also learnt the worth- 
 lessness of the poets he admired, and of his 
 imitations of them. How fortunate was he, 
 to have come within the radiance of such a 
 woman : how blest was she, to meet in the 
 wild student one so accessible to her fine 
 instruction. Young people are so apt to be 
 obtuse towards happy opportunities. 
 
 For what he learnt from Oeser, Director of 
 the Drawing Academy, Goethe was grateful 
 through life. Oeser had been the teacher and 
 friend of Winckelman. In after years Goethe 
 wrote to him : " What do I not owe to you for 
 having pointed out to me the way of the True 
 and the Beautiful ! " Another Leipzig friend 
 was Behrish, older than Goethe by a dozen 
 years, who fed other wants of his hungry na- 
 ture, his love of jokes and v of mystification.
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. Ill 
 
 Imaginative and sprightly, the strength of 
 Behrish lay however, like that of Merk, a later 
 friend of Goethe, on the negative side. 
 
 That he might become a thorough lawyer, 
 Goethe was in his twentieth year transferred 
 by his father from the University of Leipzig to 
 that of Strasbourg. There, too, he became the 
 centre of a circle which he animated. There, 
 too, the most valuable friendship he formed was 
 with one older than himself, with Herder. 
 That, notwithstanding Herder's peevishness 
 and jealousies, this friendship lasted till his 
 death, was probably owing to the strong hold 
 Goethe got in Strasbourg on his heart. Her- 
 der had come to Strasbourg on account of a 
 disease of the eyes. When an operation was 
 performed on them, Goethe was at his side, 
 and sat with him twice a day, morning and 
 'evening, during a long convalescence. Later, 
 when they had both lived years in close prox- 
 imity, Herder wrote to Knebel of Goethe : 
 " He carries his head and his heart always in 
 the right place, and in every step of his life he 
 is a man." 
 
 Easy fidelity to the conditions and duties of 
 friendship was a marked trait in Goethe. In 
 Rome, when his friend Moritz broke an arm, 
 Goethe nursed him. Of this he wrote thus
 
 112 GOETHE. 
 
 characteristically : " What I have experienced 
 and learnt as watcher, confessor, and confidant 
 of this sufferer, as his finance-minister and 
 private secretary, may be of service to me 
 hereafter. In those days the sharpest sorrows 
 went hand in hand with the noblest enjoy- 
 ments." But let any one try to do these acts 
 so devotedly just for the sake of self-culture 
 and the good it may bring him ! 
 
 Goethe yearned for fellowship. He pub- 
 lished, not so much for the public, as for friends 
 who were, or whom he longed to have, in sym- 
 pathy with him. His poems are confidential 
 outpourings to himself from his inmost spirit, 
 impartings from the eternal me to the daily 
 me. Into this secret dual solo he loved to 
 draw a third person, or persons, who would 
 feel with the other two, with the man and with 
 the poet. The creative mind is lonely, courts 
 solitude : its work is as silent and inapproach- 
 able as is the renovating energy of Nature in 
 crescent spring. Its depths are in the unseen, 
 in the heavenly spontaneous ; and the more 
 genuine the inspiration, the less responsive is 
 it to superficial solicitings. But when genius 
 is conjoined to an affectionate and a social 
 personality, its possessor will hasten, with the 
 eagerness of a child, to show its new gifts, to
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 1 3 
 
 communicate its fresh figments. The going 
 out of one's self into another, the throwing of 
 one's life into other lives, is the highest privi- 
 lege, the consummate virtue, of a man's being ; 
 and the poet's revelations of his inmost is a 
 form of this self-giving. 
 
 We have seen what a source of genial joy 
 and of intellectual stimulus to Goethe was the 
 friendship of Schiller. From his boyish and 
 youthful companionships at Frankfort and the 
 Universities, to the intimate ties between him 
 and his several secretaries in his latter years, 
 the friendly bonds that were necessary to his 
 well-being were most of them strengthened by 
 these finer aesthetic threads. So with his long 
 attachment to Meyer, a zealous, capable writer 
 on Art, who was at different periods an in- 
 mate of Goethe's house for weeks and months 
 at a time. At Rome we saw him quickly 
 united. with Artists. But neither with Schiller 
 nor with any of the many others could these 
 relations have been so close and enduring, had 
 there not been in Goethe, beneath the genius 
 and the active thinker, tlie hearty man who 
 needed to love and to be loved. 
 
 Goethe says, that for the flowering of the 
 best natural gifts, circumstances must be pro- 
 pitious. But the paramount function of the
 
 114 GOETHE. 
 
 gifted is to resist old circumstances and create 
 new ones, to break through the surroundings 
 and fences of timorous custom, and leap into 
 new fields. Wanting this stout corps of born 
 pioneers, men who get their exceptional mo- 
 mentum from the powers behind their birth, 
 wanting these, humanity could not unfold 
 itself, would be doomed to arid stationariness. 
 Goethe, himself a leader in the pioneer corps, 
 knew no one better its expansive virtue. 
 By the favor of circumstances, he meant those 
 opportunities and facilities for culture and 
 recognition which are, especially to the Poet 
 and Artist, important for the play and pros- 
 perous projection of their inborn superiorities. 
 He himself would doubtless have been cramped, 
 and would have failed to reach his proper alti- 
 tude, in Iowa or Arkansas, or perhaps even in 
 his native Frankfort. He felt that he had been 
 favored by what, as regards an individual, seem 
 the accidents of fortune ; favored in the time 
 and place of his coming upon the stage of life ; 
 especially favored in his parents, whose marked 
 and contrasting qualities were so happily fused 
 to compound the many-sidedness of their son ; 
 and favored by meeting the young Duke of 
 Weimar. But here comes in Goethe's own 
 winning personality. Had he not been just
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 1 5 
 
 the Goethe that he was, the meeting would 
 have been barren. On the other hand, few 
 young sovereign Dukes would have had the 
 respondent magnetism to feel at once the 
 power of a young Goethe, and having urgently 
 invited the brilliant Doctor of laws to visit him 
 in Weimar, would have had, when he got him 
 there, the clear solidity of judgment to weigh 
 him so accurately. Before the expiration of a 
 year the Duke raised his young friend to a 
 high official post. And when the court and 
 town cried out against this sudden unexampled 
 elevation, the prophetic boy (he was not yet 
 twenty) added with his own hand to the pro- 
 tocol of the acts of his ministers, the following 
 intelligent and noble justification : " Enlight- 
 ened persons congratulate me on possessing 
 such a man. His genius and capacity are well 
 known. To employ a man of such a stamp in 
 any other functions than those in which he can 
 render available the extraordinary gifts he pos- 
 sesses, is to abuse them. As to the observa- 
 tion that persons of merit think themselves 
 passed over : I observe, in the first place, that 
 nobody to my knowledge, in my service, has a 
 right to count on an equal degree of favor ; 
 and I add that I will never consent to be gov- 
 erned by mere length of service or rotation, in
 
 Il6 GOETHE. 
 
 my choice of a person whose functions place 
 him in such immediate relation to myself, and 
 are so important to the happiness of my people. 
 In such a case, I shall attend to nothing but 
 the degree of confidence I can repose in the 
 person of my choice. The public opinion, 
 which perhaps censures the admission of Dr. 
 Goethe to my Council without having passed 
 the previous steps of Amtman, Professor, 
 Kammerrath, or Regierungsrath, produces no 
 effect on my judgment. The world forms its 
 opinion on prejudices ; but I watch and work, 
 as every man must who wishes to do his 
 duty, not to make a noise, not to attract the 
 applause of the world, but to justify my con- 
 duct to God and my conscience." 
 
 Of all Goethe's friendships this with the 
 Duke of Weimar was the longest and most 
 prolific, and more prolific to the Duke himself 
 than to Goethe. It lasted more than half a 
 century, having begun in 1775 and ended with 
 the death of the Duke, in 1828. 
 
 For a few months after Goethe's arrival in 
 Weimar the two friends led a wild, corybantic 
 life together, hunting, dancing, masquerading, 
 skating, sleighing, flirting, fooling. But in the 
 midst of this jovial exuberance business was not 
 forgotten. Already, before his formal official in-
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 17 
 
 vestiture with the title and duties of Councilor, 
 Goethe was playing towards his younger friend 
 the part of a Mentor- Pylades. As a sample of 
 the force of animal spirits, the two one day 
 stood in the market-square of Jena smacking 
 great cart-whips for a wager. Casting our look 
 a half century forward, we see, in contrast with 
 that feat, the same Duke, in August, 1827, en- 
 tering the study of his friend, accompanied by 
 the King of Bavaria, who comes to pay homage 
 to the renowned poet, offering him the order 
 of the Grand Cross. Goethe, turning to the 
 Duke, replies, with doubtless as much of arch 
 playfulness as of punctiliousness : " If my gra- 
 cious sovereign consents." To which Carl 
 August rejoins : " Come, old fellow, no non- 
 sense." 
 
 The Dowager Duchess, the mother of Carl 
 August, the sprightly, sociable, unceremonious 
 Amalia, who chose Wieland to be tutor to her 
 boys, and during their minority administered 
 the Duchy dutifully and capably, she would not 
 fail to be a friend and admirer of Goethe. 
 How cordial their relations became is learnt 
 from one of his notes to her. Herder, whom 
 Goethe had induced the Duke to call to Wei- 
 mar as court-chaplain, had to maintain a large 
 family on slender means. The Duke took
 
 Il8 GOETHE. 
 
 upon him to provide for one of the children, 
 and Goethe wrote to the Duchess Amalia, beg- 
 ging her to do the same for another. This 
 Goethe did too at a time when Herder showed 
 no friendliness towards him. Not receiving 
 prompt answer to his appeal, Goethe wrote 
 again, telling the Duchess that if she did not 
 provide for the child, he should do it himself. 
 On the death of Amalia, in 1807, Goethe said 
 at her funeral : " It is the privilege of the no- 
 bler natures that their passing away to higher 
 spheres works blessing, as did their abode on 
 earth ; for, like stars, they shine towards us as 
 points of light, by which in our storm-tossed 
 voyage we may steer our course." 
 
 Two or three years before coming to Wei- 
 mar Goethe wrote a satirical farce, called 
 Gods, Heroes, and Wieland, dashing it off at a 
 single sitting, with a bottle of Burgundy by his 
 side. So little malevolence was there in it, 
 that on the third day after Goethe's arrival in 
 Weimar, Wieland met him by invitation at a 
 friend's house, and was so charmed with him 
 that he wrote to Jacobi : " Dearest little 
 brother, what have I to tell you ! How wholly 
 is the man after my heart ! I fell in love with 
 him at first sight as at dinner I sat beside the 
 superb youth." On the day of Wieland's fu-
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 1 9 
 
 neral, thirty-eight years after this first meeting, 
 Falk found Goethe much affected. He spoke 
 of the continuance of existence after death as a 
 thing of course. " And what do you think," 
 asked Falk, " is at this moment the occupation 
 of Wieland's soul ? " " Nothing petty, nothing 
 unworthy, nothing out of keeping with that 
 moral greatness which he all his life sustained. 
 It is something to have passed a life of eighty 
 years in unblemished dignity and honor; it is 
 something to have attained to that pitch of re- 
 fined wit, of tender, elegant thought, which pre- 
 dominated so delightfully in Wieland's soul ; it 
 is something to have possessed that industry, 
 that iron persistency and perseverance, in 
 which he surpassed us all. The destruction of 
 such high powers of soul is a thing that never, 
 and under no circumstances, can even come 
 into question. Nature is not such a spend- 
 thrift of her capital. Wieland's soul is one of 
 Nature's treasures, a perfect jewel." 
 
 I come now to a friendship of Goethe, which, 
 like that with Schiller, was formed in his ma- 
 ture years, and which fed a correspondence 
 more voluminous than that, covering, as it 
 does, many more years. " Of all rare gifts," 
 says Goethe, "the rarest is the gift to be a 
 friend." Among the many proofs he gave of
 
 120 GOETHE. 
 
 himself possessing this gift, none is stronger 
 than his friendship for Zelter. 
 
 Zelter entered manhood in Berlin as a stone- 
 mason, and then master-builder, but was so 
 attracted to music, that he soon abandoned a 
 vocation for which he had much fitness, for 
 one for which he had still more. He became 
 Director of a public singing school, through 
 which he did good service in Berlin, stimulat- 
 ing many to the cultivation of music, and edu- 
 cating some excellent musicians. The cele- 
 brated Mendelssohn was his pupil. By his 
 capacity and character he won the good-will 
 and friendship of distinguished men and high 
 officials. 
 
 With Goethe Zelter's acquaintance began 
 through music, Zelter having composed airs to 
 some of the poet's songs. He speaks of his 
 " agreeable fright " on hearing that Goethe 
 liked them. The first letters were exchanged 
 in 1799. In 1801 Zelter sent Goethe a bio- 
 graphical notice he had just printed of a friend 
 and musician. Goethe, in the letter acknowl- 
 edging it, writes a sentence weighty, like so 
 many others of his, with a fresh wisdom. The 
 sympathetic, vivid portrait drawn by Zelter he 
 contrasts with the performance of those necrol- 
 ogists who, immediately on the death of a man
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 2 1 
 
 of note, "go busily to work to balance the good 
 against the evil in his life, and with hypocrit- 
 ical justice set forth his so called virtues and 
 faults, thereby destroying a personality far 
 more effectually than death can do it ; for, a 
 personality can only be conceived in the lively 
 conjunction of such opposite qualities." 
 
 In 1 802 Zelter, by a visit to Weimar, tight- 
 ened, through face to face intercourse, the ties 
 that already bound him to Goethe. Thence- 
 forth their letters are more frequent and more 
 intimate. The subjoined extract, from a letter 
 of Goethe to Zelter, April ist, 1802, I should 
 not make were it only a proof of the increased 
 intimacy between them ; but it illustrates a trait 
 in Goethe, and one which is essential to a fuller 
 likeness of him. Friendly services of this kind 
 were habitual to Goethe : through good-will 
 and principle he amply obeyed his own pre- 
 cept, and did " the duty nearest him," whether 
 it were small or large. 
 
 " One of our most thorough business-men, of 
 the subordinate class, has destined his son to 
 be a carpenter. The young man has served an 
 apprenticeship of three years, and has worked 
 three quarters of a year as journeyman. They 
 wish now to send him abroad, and they think 
 that in Berlin he would have an opportunity of 
 learning much.
 
 122 GOETHE. 
 
 " Would you have the goodness to give me, 
 out of your knowledge, some good advice. Of 
 course the young man, while learning his trade, 
 would like to earn something, and an addition 
 can be furnished him from home. But it were 
 desirable that in a large, seductive city there 
 were some one to have an eye on him." 
 
 A quarter of a century from the opening of 
 the correspondence and friendship between 
 Goethe and Zelter, Chancellor von Mueller of 
 Weimar, in his valuable report of conversations 
 with Goethe, makes the following entry : " This 
 morning the admirable, honest Zelter gave me 
 by his visit a couple of most delightful hours. 
 How clear, vigorous, incisive is everything he 
 says. ' People often wonder,' said he, ' how it 
 is that I am on so good a footing with Goethe, 
 who is so much higher and deeper than I. I 
 am rough, even rude, go straight ahead, am 
 willful, impetuous ; but I have a soul and an 
 open eye. I have been obliged to hew my own 
 way : what I am, I am through slow, close, 
 hard work, from the time I was a journeyman- 
 mason. But I know Goethe thoroughly, and 
 have often rightly divined the obscure passages 
 in his poems, sometimes through my setting 
 them to music. Goethe is like a child, he 
 gives whatever he has. The philister-savants
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 2 3 
 
 cry out that he dabbles in everything. Now, 
 if you already knew what he has done in 
 science, or something better, why, you asses, 
 did you not give it to us.' " 
 
 That was it : Zelter had more soul than most 
 men, and thence saw many things more clearly. 
 Having been drawn into contact with him 
 through the skill wherewith he set songs to 
 music, Goethe found in Zelter's honesty and 
 heartiness what attached his affections, and in 
 Zelter's intelligence and earnest activity what 
 enlarged his own intellectual sphere, and put 
 him in fructifying relations with more men and 
 fresh circumstances. In the latter part of his 
 high career a correspondent like Zelter was 
 just what Goethe needed. From continuous 
 confidential communications with suth a man 
 he drew comfort and strength. To have a 
 strong-headed and, at the same time, genial 
 friend to whom, from his ever-replenished full- 
 ness, he could familiarly pour out thoughts, 
 opinions, judgments, feelings, was a boon to 
 one who so enjoyed utterance as Goethe did. 
 Posterity has to thank Zelter for inner views of 
 Goethe which but for this sympathetic friend 
 we should never have had. Here is a bio- 
 graphical stroke which could be made by no 
 pen but the autobiographical. In 1807 Goethe
 
 124 GOETHE. 
 
 writes : " Your reiterated invitation makes my 
 heart heavy. That I have not yet become ac- 
 quainted with your institution [the Singing- 
 Academy at Berlin] is unpardonable ; but, for 
 some years past I have a clinging to home, 
 which comes chiefly from this, that there is in 
 me so much that is stirred up and yet not 
 worked up. Thus I am busy the whole year, 
 in order to get only here and there a clear in- 
 sight ; without counting care of health and cur- 
 rent circumstances. Yet these would not be 
 enough to restrain me. But at bottom the 
 cause is, that I am afraid of new influences and 
 excitements, and thence purposely forego many 
 an enjoyment." 
 
 Ever a conscientious, earnest student of Art, 
 Goethe evidently believed with Aristotle that 
 the most weighty and philosophical human 
 product is poetry. Hence he was through life 
 frequently offended by the shallow pretensions, 
 the false aims, of writers who, because they 
 have some poetic sensibility and some gift of 
 expression, believe that sentimental effusion in 
 verse and unshaped utterance and rhetorical 
 coloring are poetry. From his constructive 
 thoughtfulness and varied sagacious practice, 
 Goethe knew that a poem, to be a poem, must be 
 organic ; that is, in order to put and keep life in
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 12$ 
 
 it, it must have, not a body merely, but a self- 
 proportioned body ; must, in one word, have a 
 soul ; for, having a soul, the soul will build for 
 itself a suitable body: 
 
 He had recommended to Zelter a young 
 musician of Weimar. In 1 808 he thus writes : 
 " Take my best thanks, dear friend, for that 
 which you are willing and able to do for young 
 Eberwein. The world of Art lies, indeed, all 
 too much in the difficult and severe, that a 
 young man should so easily become aware 
 what there is to do. They ever seek it else- 
 where than there where it is to be found, and 
 even when they do get sight of the source, 
 they cannot find the road to it. 
 
 " Thence I am brought to despair by a half 
 dozen young poets who, with much more than 
 common natural gifts, will not bring much to 
 pass that I can take satisfaction in. Werner, 
 Oehlenschlseger, Arnim, Brentano and others 
 keep constantly at work ; but what they pro- 
 duce runs into the formless and characterless. 
 No one will understand, that the highest and 
 only operation of Nature and of Art is, to give 
 shape, and in the shaping specification, in order 
 that each production be and remain individual 
 and significant." 
 
 To scientific contemporaries Goethe owed a
 
 126 GOETHE. 
 
 grudge for the indifference and even contempt 
 wherewith the most of them treated his Theory 
 of Colors, to the study of which in the latter 
 half of his life, he gave much time, the exposi- 
 tion of which fills several volumes of his works, 
 and with which he made pretension to have 
 overthrown the Newtonian theory. This pre- 
 tension, scientifically and elaborately set forth, 
 deserved a scientific examination, a thorough 
 experimental refutation or confirmation. Such 
 examination it seems never to have even yet 
 received. 
 
 Inventions are far more rapidly successful 
 than discoveries : they are nearer to the com- 
 mon mind. The inventions consequent on the 
 discovery of the force of steam have spread all 
 over Christendom, and beyond it, while the dis- 
 covery of the physiology of the brain, moment- 
 ous beyond expression, and made about the 
 same time, not being diffusible through inven- 
 tions, continues yet unacknowledged by the 
 very classes who are, or ought to be, most con- 
 cerned for its cultivation ; and so, metaphysi- 
 cians and psychologists and moralists keep 
 swinging round in the twilight circle of con- 
 sciousness, into which if they would but let the 
 light of Gall's splendid insight, their half-truths 
 would be illuminated into whole truths, and
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. I2/ 
 
 deep problems be solved which, without such 
 light, must remain insoluble. This discovery is 
 just the objective that is wanted for the meta- 
 physical subjective. 
 
 When, in 1805, Gall came to Halle to ex- 
 pound his new discovery, Goethe happened to 
 be there on a visit to his friend, Professor Wolf; 
 and he gladly seized the opportunity to be so 
 " profoundly instructed." He not only at- 
 tended Gall's lectures, but sought long inter- 
 views with him. The result was, that he ac- 
 cepted the discovery, and he devotes several 
 pages of the Diary to its fundamental posi- 
 tions. As Director of the theatre in Weimar 
 he rejected a farce, sent him by a friend, called 
 the " Skull-scholar," because he would not " on 
 general grounds give countenance to anything 
 which tended to bring ridicule or contempt 
 upon the praiseworthy investigations of a man 
 like Gall." 
 
 The mathematicians, Goethe thought, were 
 especially obtuse against his doctrine of colors. 
 In a long letter to Zelter, in 1811, he touches 
 off at them a triple-shotted field-piece : " For 
 the rest, on this occasion, what I have lopg 
 known becomes plainer to me than ever, 
 namely, that the culture which the mind gets 
 from Mathematics is extremely one-sided and
 
 128 GOETHE. 
 
 limited. Nay, Voltaire makes bold to say 
 somewhere, J'ai toujours remarqut que la 
 Geometric laisse I' esprit oil elle le trouve. And 
 Franklin distinctly expresses his especial aver- 
 'sion to mathematicians in social converse, find- 
 ing unbearable their pettiness and spirit of con- 
 tradiction." 
 
 Sending Zelter, in 1812, the second part 
 of the autobiography, " of my life," he writes, 
 " freshened up or warmed up, whichever people 
 may choose to call it," he concludes with the 
 following confidential declaration : " How much 
 in this little book is directly addressed to you ! 
 Had I not my absent friends present to my 
 mind, where should I get the mood to write 
 such things ? " 
 
 The friendly relations between Goethe and 
 Zelter, founded on sympathy and mutual es- 
 teem, which had subsisted for a dozen years, 
 were still further strengthened through an inci- 
 dent which occurred in 1812. A step-son of 
 Zelter committed suicide. It was a heavy blow 
 to Zelter, who loved the young man as though 
 he were his own. The day after the act he 
 wrpte to Goethe a simple, touching account of 
 it, finishing with these words : " No, it is hard, 
 cruel ! If he knew how I loved him, he could 
 not be happy where he now is ! Say to me a
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 29 
 
 healing word ! " How was this tender appeal 
 answered ? Goethe was not a man of phrases. 
 In the Diary he says : " Through all my life I 
 have guarded myself against nothing so firmly 
 as against empty words ; and a phrase in which 
 there is nothing individually thought or felt is 
 to me, in others unbearable, in myself impossi- 
 ble." To Zelter he wrote a long letter, one of 
 his longest, of which I translate the opening 
 paragraphs, less than one third of the whole. 
 A letter of condolence of Goethe, then in his 
 sixty-third year, to one who, with literal truth, 
 may be called an intimate friend, will be worth 
 keeping. What warmth there is under its 
 calmness, and withal how judicious. Thou, in 
 German, whether written or spoken, is a mark 
 o.f affection : it comes warm from the nursery, 
 is used by parents towards children, between 
 brothers and sisters. Goethe used it to some 
 of the companions and correspondents of his 
 younger days. It is not exchanged between 
 him and Schiller, genuine and cordial as were 
 their personal relations. But now, out of the 
 fullness of his sympathy, he seals a bond of 
 friendship of some years' standing with this en- 
 dearing form of address towards one whom he 
 had first known after himself was past fifty. 
 The sturdy Zelter counted upon this letter ;
 
 130 GOETHE. 
 
 when it came into his hands he felt that now 
 he should have soothing words, such as no 
 other could give him. But what must have 
 been the joy of his tender, manly heart when 
 he read the first word, expressive of so much, 
 itself a consolation. The letter is dated No- 
 vember 3d, 1812. 
 
 " Thy letter, my dear friend, which announces 
 to me the great affliction that has come upon 
 thy house, found me engaged in very earnest 
 reflections upon life : it has much dejected, 
 nay, bowed me down, and only on thee have I 
 been able to brace myself up again. On the 
 black touchstone of death thouhast spread thy- 
 self like refined gold. How grand is a charac- 
 ter when it is so penetrated with soul, and how 
 admirable must a talent be which rests on such 
 a ground ! 
 
 " About the deed or misdeed itself I know 
 not what to say. When the tcedium vita 
 seizes a man, he is only to be pitied, not to be 
 reproached. That all the symptoms of this 
 extraordinary disease, at the same time natural . 
 and unnatural, once raged through my inmost 
 being, any one can learn from WertJier. I 
 know well enough what resolutions and strug- 
 gles it then cost me to escape from the billows 
 of death, as likewise from how many a ship-
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 3 1 
 
 wreck I have since with difficulty saved myself 
 and painfully recovered. Just the same are all 
 the stories of seafarers and fishermen. After 
 the night-storm the shore is regained, and the 
 half-drowned dries himself, and the next morn- 
 ing when the glorious sun again steps forth on 
 the glittering waves, ' the sea has its old appe- 
 tite for the faint-hearted.' 
 
 " When one sees how the world generally, 
 and particularly the younger portion of it, is 
 not only given up to its lusts and passions, but 
 how at the same time, by the earnest follies 
 of the times, the higher and better in them is 
 obstructed and wasted, so that what should 
 lead to blessedness becomes damnation, with- 
 out taking into account unspeakable outward 
 pressure, when we see this we no longer 
 wonder at misdeeds whereby man outrages 
 himself and others. I could write a new Wer- 
 ther which should make people's hair stand on 
 end even more stiffly than the first did. Let me 
 add one more remark. Most young people who 
 feel they have something good in them, make 
 too great demands upon themselves. To this 
 they are however impelled and obliged by their 
 gigantic surroundings. I know a half dozen 
 such who are sure to come to naught, and 
 whom it were not possible to help, even if one
 
 132 GOETHE. 
 
 could make them understand their true inter- 
 est. Few people reflect that reason and a brave 
 will are given us in order that we hold our- 
 selves back not only from what is evil, but also 
 from excess of what is good." 
 
 The rest of the letter Goethe devotes to top- 
 ics such as were ordinarily exchanged between 
 them. From Zelter's answer I copy a few 
 lines : " I have gained while I lost, and believed 
 that I should hardly recover from the loss ; and 
 so life stirs within me again with manly anima- 
 tion, and I will willingly acknowledge I have 
 felt joy once more." A letter written a month 
 later, acknowledging one just received from 
 Goethe, Zelter thus opens : " My sweet friend 
 and master ! my beloved, my brother ! What 
 shall I call him whose name is ever on my 
 tongue, whose image is reflected in all that I 
 love and honor ! When the Weimar envelope 
 comes up my steps, the whole house is illumi- 
 nated. The children scramble for which of 
 them shall bring it to me, in order to see the 
 father's face at its brightest, and I then hold it 
 long unopened, looking at it to see if it is what 
 it is." 
 
 The extracts last made are from the begin- 
 ning of the second volume of the letters between 
 Goethe and Zelter. The whole correspondence
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 3 3 
 
 fills six volumes ; and from them might be 
 culled many pages of paragraphs and sentences 
 deserving to be memorable for their wisdom, or 
 loaded with personal significance, or beaming 
 with criticism or sentiment. The limits im- 
 posed by the scope of this volume oblige me to 
 be content with a few of the most notable pas- 
 sages, which, giving a rare light to the volumes, 
 put the reader in closer, clearer contact with 
 the mind whence the light issues. 
 
 " Art, where it manifests itself through the 
 highest Artist, creates a form so powerfully 
 vivid, that it ennobles and transforms any ma- 
 terial." 
 
 " State-Councilor Hufeland has sent me, in 
 the name of Prince Radzivil, a very friendly in- 
 vitation to Berlin this winter. Such expedi- 
 tions are becoming more and more impossible 
 to me. I should be a burden to myself and to 
 others. My well-being demands the greatest 
 evenness in living and enjoying." May, 1816. 
 
 " I have learnt immensely from Linneus, 
 but not botany. Except Shakespeare and 
 Spinoza, I know of none of the departed who 
 has had such influence upon me." 
 
 " Nothing is more natural than Nature, 
 which lies ever there where we don't look : we 
 seek the horse on which we are riding."
 
 134 GOETHE. 
 
 " Here is also a letter from my mother, 
 which you wished to see. In it, as in every 
 line she wrote, shines forth the character of a 
 woman who, in old-testamental fear of God, 
 lived a robust, hearty life, full of trust in the 
 people's and family's God, and who, when she 
 came to die, gave such minute orders for her 
 own funeral, that the kind of wine and the size 
 of the hard-cake wherewith the attendants 
 were to be refreshed, were exactly prescribed." 
 
 " I have never concealed what a deadly 
 enemy I am to all parody and travesty, but 
 only on this account am I so, because this base 
 brood pulls down the noble, the beautiful, the 
 great, in order to annihilate them." 
 
 " I am editing my correspondence with 
 Schiller, from 1794 to 1805. It will be a great 
 gift to be offered to the Germans, nay, I may 
 say, to man. Two friends of that kind, who 
 mutually upraise each other while they are 
 ever unbosoming themselves one to the other. 
 It affects me strangely, for I learn what I once 
 was. 
 
 " But what is most instructive is its showing 
 the condition of two men who pursue their 
 aims as it were by compulsion, and, through 
 inward overactivity, through outward excitation 
 and interruption, split up their time ; so that,
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 135 
 
 after all, nothing is brought to pass fully worthy 
 of their powers, talents, and purposes. It will 
 be highly edifying ; for every stout fellow will 
 find consolation in it." 
 
 The letter from which the above extract is 
 made was written in 1824. The last paragraph 
 expresses a mood, not a fact. At an earlier 
 date, and at the earliest, that is, during the life 
 of Schiller, Goethe, we have seen, estimated 
 differently, and, I think, far more justly, the 
 reciprocal effect of their relations to one an- 
 other. Now, in his seventy-sixth year, reposing 
 in the sunshine of his elevation, the struggles 
 of a quarter of a century before looked dark 
 "with the smoke and dust of conflict, as he read 
 of those struggles in this correspondence ; but 
 those very conflicts were fuel to the light in 
 which he now basked. In Goethe's rivalry with 
 Schiller there was nothing unwholesome. It 
 was not poisoned by envy, it was not distorted 
 by personal resentment ; and so, it did not lead 
 to false aims or overstraining. The cordiality 
 of their intercourse kept it an invigorating 
 tonic. It helped to unfold Goethe's powers, it 
 did not force or misdirect them ; and without 
 it the height from which he now looked serenely 
 round on the wide domains of his renown would 
 have lacked somewhat of its eminence.
 
 136 GOETHE. 
 
 Is not the subjoined passage a verbatim re- 
 port of what, only the other evening, we all 
 heard, less choicely expressed, from the plain- 
 tive tongue of an " ultra " conservative old gen- 
 tleman ? Nevertheless, it is found in a letter of 
 Goethe to Zelter. Pity that the electric tele- 
 graph had not been in time for Goethe. The 
 beauty and scientific grandeur of the discovery 
 might have reconciled him to its prosaic uses, 
 and possibly have opened his eyes more hope- 
 fully towards the future ; for here the triumph- 
 ant marriage of the aspiring thought of man 
 with deep, susceptible nature is even more 
 momentous as prophecy than as fulfillment. 
 The letter is dated June 6th, 1825. 
 
 " But, my dear friend, everything is now 
 ultra ; in thinking and in acting every one 
 rushes on headlong. No man knows himself 
 any more, no one understands the element in 
 which he moves and works. Of true simplicity 
 there is no longer any question ; of silly stuff, 
 called simple, there is plenty. 
 
 "Young people are set agoing much too 
 early, and are then swept into the whirlpool of 
 the times. Riches and swiftness are what the 
 world most admires, and for which every one 
 strives. Railroads, fast coaches, steamboats, 
 and all possible facilities of communication,
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 3 7 
 
 these are what engross the more cultivated 
 classes, in order to over-cultivate themselves 
 and thereby to get no further than mediocrity. 
 And one of the results of generality is, that a 
 medium culture is common ; thither tend Bible- 
 societies and Lancastrian school-methods, and 
 I know not how much else. 
 
 " This century is for the clever heads, for 
 quick-witted, practical men, who, endowed with 
 a certain activity, feel their superiority over the 
 crowd, although they are not gifted for the 
 highest." 
 
 Here is a critical precept well worth reiterat- 
 ing : " Whoever would gain the right road 
 must have faith in simplicity, in the simple, in 
 the primitively productive. To do this is how- 
 ever not given to every one ; we are born into 
 an artificial condition, and it is much easier to 
 make this more artificial than to turn back to 
 the simple." 
 
 Of rarely gifted writers, of those with highest 
 and fullest endowment, it is a characteristic, 
 that in their best outgivings they are at once 
 general and specific. Thus, the chief person- 
 ages of Goethe's dramas and narrative fictions 
 combine mostly breadth with individuality : 
 they are neither grandly vague nor pettily 
 limited. While distinctly individual, they are
 
 138 GOETHE. 
 
 symbolical, and hence they are poetical. And 
 this virtue belongs to most of Goethe's writings. 
 His mind being very true and very full, a short 
 poem, a paragraph, a sentence, will often be 
 laden with a meaning and applications far be- 
 yond its mere occasion. In a letter of 1830 he 
 complains to Zelter that " Good, well-meaning, 
 sensible people wish to take my poems to 
 pieces, regarding it to be indispensable that 
 they get hold of the most special facts out of 
 which they grew ; instead of which they should 
 be content that a poem has so raised the spe- 
 cial up to the general that they can easily take 
 it into their own individuality." 
 
 Only eleven days before his death Goethe 
 wrote to Zelter his last letter, dated March 
 nth, 1832. Zelter's last to Goethe was dated 
 March 22d, the day of Goethe's death. Chan- 
 cellor Mueller announced to Zelter the death 
 of his great friend. On the 3ist Zelter con- 
 cludes a letter of acknowledgment to the Chan- 
 cellor with these words : " Pardon me, noble 
 friend ! I ought not to complain, but my old 
 eyes will not obey. I once saw him, too, weep : 
 that must be my justification." Two years 
 earlier, Zelter, referring to some legal arrange- 
 ments between them, by which Zelter wished 
 to provide that his. share of the proceeds from
 
 FRIENDSHIPS. 1 3 9 
 
 the publication hereafter of their correspond- 
 ence should go to his two unmarried daughters, 
 ends the paragraph as follows : " I write this 
 with some emotion, as I cannot conceal from 
 myself, that one of us two will find himself here 
 alone, while I would wish to be where thou art 
 and to go where thou goest." And his wish 
 was fulfilled. As though the earth had lost for 
 him its daily charm when Goethe had gone 
 from it, he followed him in a few weeks. 
 
 Many of Goethe's friends survived him, and 
 among them deserve especially to be men- 
 tioned three in Weimar, Riemer and Eckerman, 
 his two secretaries, and Chancellor Mueller. 
 All three have left records of their intercourse 
 with Goethe which are of rare value as bio- 
 graphical data, all three being intelligent, culti- 
 vated men of high character. That the remi- 
 niscences or minutes of such men, with their 
 intimate opportunities through a long series of 
 years, should glow, in rivalry of one another, 
 with devotion and admiration, is but corrobora- 
 tive testimony as to the solid worth as well as 
 personal attractiveness there was in the one 
 object of their unique homage.
 
 V. 
 
 LOVES. 
 
 As to his feelings man is an exquisite instru- 
 ment, thrilled by a breath or a touch from with- 
 out or from within. The poet is poet only 
 because he is more finely strung than other 
 men, and thence more capable of the heart's 
 music. Especially is he more liable to myste- 
 rious, unbidden motions from the interior self. 
 More imaginative, because fuller of illuminated 
 sensibility, which adds a so " precious seeing to 
 the eye," the poet both gives more to, and takes 
 more from, the object of his feeling ; and thence 
 in him joys and griefs work livelier than in men 
 less genially endowed. The attractions that to 
 life give beauty and very being, draw him more 
 magnetically. 
 
 The primal, paramount attraction, the love of 
 man for woman, of woman for man, the parental 
 source of all other attractions, the central fire, 
 in whose creative glow dance in embryo all the 
 passions and powers of humanity, to this great 
 attraction, irresistible, next to omnipotent, the
 
 LOVES. 141 
 
 poet should be peculiarly susceptible, he who, 
 through a keener consciousness of life, a clearer 
 light of soul, is the privileged interpreter of the 
 heart and its world of loves. And that he is 
 thus susceptible the lives and writings of most 
 of the greater poets prove. Be the biograph- 
 ical traditions about Shakespeare true or not, 
 from his works we know how strong in him was 
 the sexual feeling, that feeling so pure and 
 precious in its healthy play, so foul and baleful 
 in its perversion. In Goethe it was equally 
 strong. 
 
 Goethe's first love does not fall at so early a 
 period as Dante's. He was nearly fifteen when 
 he met with Gretchen. His poetical gift it 
 was that brought him in contact with Gretchen. 
 Already he wrote verses, and the circulation of 
 these by a young friend led to companionship 
 with some youths below him in the social scale 
 of Frankfort. At one of these gatherings in a 
 kind of restaurant, the wine having given out, 
 call was made for the serving-maid. Instead 
 of by her the call was answered by a girl with a 
 most graceful figure, delicate neck, exquisite 
 mouth, whose beauty and bearing so fascinated 
 the boy-bard that her image haunted him from 
 that hour. Goethe draws a living picture of 
 this humble, lovely girl, who gave him good ad-
 
 142 GOETHE. 
 
 vice as to the company he was then keeping, 
 who bore herself always with modesty and self- 
 respect, who would not allow him or any of 
 them to touch her or even shake hands with 
 her, but who, while he would be reading aloud 
 one of his pieces, would gently put her arm on 
 his shoulder and look over his paper, the woman 
 evidently pleased with the handsome gifted boy, 
 and, woman-like, honestly enjoying her fasci- 
 nation over him. Goethe carried with him 
 through life the sweet memory of Gretchen. 
 Besides the immortality she shares with others 
 in the Autobiography, her name is burned into 
 the most pathetic pages of Faust. 
 
 In the midst of his account of this affair, 
 Goethe thus opens a paragraph : " The first 
 love-motions of an uncorrupted youth take an 
 entirely spiritual direction. Nature seems to 
 wish that one sex shall become through the 
 other sensuously aware of the good and the beau- 
 tiful. And so to me, through the beholding of 
 this girl, and my love for her, was opened a 
 new world of the beautiful and the excellent." 
 
 Gretchen was suddenly snatched from his 
 sight forever. Several of the jovial circle were 
 suspected of petty crimes and were arrested. 
 Gretchen was fully acquitted, but left Frank- 
 fort. Goethe had the mortification of being 1
 
 LOVES. 143 
 
 examined as a comrade of the criminals, and, 
 what to a love-sick youth was a far deeper 
 mortification, he had to hear that Gretchen, 
 when questioned as to her relations with him, 
 had stated that she looked upon him as a boy, 
 and felt towards him only as a sister. Never- 
 theless, his young heart had to suffer for a time 
 those sweet love-pangs wherewith it was his lot 
 to be often visited all through youth and man- 
 hood, and even into his old age. 
 
 At this early season, love, the love for woman, 
 was an unusually active element of Goethe's 
 being ; perhaps, in one so richly organized, a 
 requisite stimulant to his mental growth. He 
 had not been long at Leipzig ere the place in 
 his heart first held by Gretchen was filled by 
 Kaetchen Schoenkopf, the daughter of respect- 
 able parents in whose house he was domes- 
 ticated as a boarder. Is there a melody in 
 these two conjoined words, or does her name 
 catch a music from its immortality, as being 
 that of one who loved and was beloved by the 
 student Goethe, whose name therefore is to be 
 handed down through the ages, each successive 
 generation freshening the sound with its inter- 
 est and sympathy ? 
 
 It looks as though Nature designed that at 
 that blossoming period Goethe should learn
 
 144 GOETHE. 
 
 more from the love and companionship of 
 women than from those whom his father sent 
 him to Leipzig to learn from, the Professors in 
 the Faculty of Law. The current however of 
 his love for Kaetchen did not always run 
 smooth, of which probably Goethe was more 
 the cause than she. Soon after his return to 
 Frankfort he had to learn of her engagement 
 to one whom he had introduced to her. This 
 was a trial. There never had been a prospect 
 of marriage between them : she was three years 
 older than Goethe, and he was still a boy : but 
 love, unless it reach the highest spiritual 
 phase, is ever an appropriator, and in such a 
 case looks upon itself as robbed. Hence the 
 extremities and crimes of jealousy. But to- 
 wards his Kaetchen Goethe was wise and gen- 
 erous. In his last letter to her he said : " That 
 I live peacefully is all that I can say to you of 
 myself, and vigorously, and healthily, and in- 
 dustriously, for I have no woman in my head. 
 Horn and I are still good friends ; but, so it 
 happens in the world, he has his thoughts and 
 ways, and I have my thoughts and ways, and so 
 a week passes and we scarcely see each other 
 once. But, everything considered, I am at last 
 tired of Frankfort, and at the end of March 
 I shall leave it. I must not yet go to you, I
 
 LOVES. 145 
 
 perceive ; for if I came at Easter you could not 
 be married. And Kaetchen Schoenkopf I will 
 not see again, if I am not to see her otherwise 
 than so. At the end of March, therefore, I 
 go to Strasbourg ; if you care to know that, as 
 I believe you do." 
 
 When the body and mind are in the quick 
 ferment of growth, between the ages of fifteen 
 and twenty, there is not yet depth of soil or 
 steadiness of motion enough for the great pas- 
 sion to take strong and fast hold : its wounds 
 are healed and covered by rapidity of expan- 
 sion. If Frederica was not the first love of 
 Goethe she was the first love of the man, 
 Goethe. He was turned of twenty when he 
 went to Strasbourg. Had Goethe first met 
 Frederika in the city of Strasbourg, the wo'rld 
 would probably have lacked the most beautiful 
 love-idyl ever penned, and which draws its 
 beauty and effectiveness from its reality, the 
 poet relating, as only poet can relate, a true story 
 his own story. The secluded country parson- 
 age at Sesenheim, the hearty smiles of hospi- 
 tality, the sudden illumination of a rural house- 
 hold by infrequent visitors, the very isolation of 
 the simple-minded family and its limitation to 
 the pastor and his two daughters, all this made 
 a propitious environment and accompaniment,
 
 146 GOETHE. 
 
 and gave a bloom to Frederika's cheek and a 
 sparkle to her innocent eye, which helped not 
 a little to captivate a young poet. It is a 
 touching testimony to the vividness of the 
 memory Goethe retained of Frederika, that, 
 when dictating to his secretary, more than forty 
 years after the event, his account of it, he was 
 unusually affected, stopped often in his walk up 
 and down the room, paused in the dictation, 
 and then after a silence, ending in a deep sigh, 
 continued the narrative in a lower tone. 
 
 Why did Goethe not marry Frederika? 
 This question may be quickly and reproachfully 
 answered by the hasty, or the thoughtless, or 
 the ill-disposed. The well-disposed will recall 
 the golden precept, Judge not, or as Goethe 
 says, with a totally different reference, in one 
 of his letters to Frau von Stein : " Judge not 
 until you have stood in his place." And it is 
 not easy to put one's self in the place of Goethe. 
 Not half of the love-affairs among the youth 
 of Christendom end in marriage. Human des- 
 tinies are not spun off so smoothly. Exter- 
 nally all things may seem to fit, melted to closer 
 fitness by mutual affection, as in this case ; and 
 yet, behind the apparent circumstances which 
 all urge marriage, there may lie effectual, unap- 
 parent influences which forbid it, especially in
 
 LOVES. 147 
 
 deep prolific natures like Goethe's. Enough 
 that we have the fact that Goethe did not marry 
 Frederika. I shall not be the one to have the 
 absurd audacity to thrust my posthumous wish 
 against the recorded judgment of Providence. 
 I will not be guilty, even in thought, of the im- 
 pertinence to crumple up, like an indignant 
 hand an offensive note, the most variably 
 fruitful life that Literature possesses, by desir- 
 ing to give another direction to its stream so 
 near its source. 
 
 As to blaming Goethe, how easy that is we 
 all know from the daily practice almost every- 
 body has of blaming friends and neighbors, and 
 of ordering other people's affairs to our own 
 entire satisfaction. In this case we may save 
 ourselves from the commonness and offense of 
 censure by listening to words of condemnation 
 from the only one who has a full right to use 
 them. Goethe thus berates himself : " Frede- 
 rika's answer to the letter in which I had bid- 
 den her adieu, tore my heart. I now, for the 
 first time, became aware of her bereavement, 
 and saw no possibility of alleviating it. She 
 was ever in my thoughts ; I felt that she was 
 wanting to me ; and, worst of all, I could not 
 forgive myself! Gretchen had been taken 
 from me ; Annchen had left me ; but now, for
 
 148 GOETHE. 
 
 the first time, I was guilty ; I had wounded, to 
 its very depths, one of the most beautiful and 
 tender of hearts. And that period of gloomy 
 repentance, bereft of the love which so invig- 
 orated me, was agonizing, insupportable. But 
 man will live, and hence I took a sincere inter- 
 est in others, seeking to disentangle their em- 
 barrassments, and to unite those about to part, 
 that they might not feel what I felt. Hence I 
 got the name of the ' Confidant,' and also, on 
 account of my wanderings, I was named the 
 - Wanderer.' Under the broad, open sky, on 
 the heights and in the valleys, in the fields and 
 through the woods, my mind regained some of 
 its calmness. I almost lived on the road, wan- 
 dering between the mountains and the plains. 
 Often I went, alone or in company, right 
 through my native city, as though I were a 
 stranger in it, dining at one of the great inns 
 in the High Street, and after dinner pursuing 
 my way. I turned more than ever to the open 
 world and to Nature ; there alone I found com- 
 fort. During my walks I sang to myself 
 strange hymns and dithyrambs. One of these, 
 the Wanderers Sturmlied, still remains. I re- 
 member singing it aloud in an impassioned 
 style amid a terrific storm. The burden of this 
 rhapsody is, that a man of genius must walk
 
 LOVES. 149 
 
 resolutely through the storms of life, relying 
 solely on himself." 
 
 Here is a translation, not of the Wanderer s 
 Stormsong, which is rather long for insertion 
 here, but of that other brief, grand Wanderer s 
 Nightsong, which was written at this or some 
 similar period of tumultuous unrest : 
 
 Thou who dost in heaven bide, 
 
 Every pain and sorrow stillest, 
 Him whom twofold woes betide 
 
 With a twofold solace fillest, 
 O, this tossing, let it cease ! 
 
 What means all this pain, unrest ? 
 Soothing peace ! 
 
 Come, O, come into my breast ! 
 
 How many a Frederika, before and since, 
 has bloomed and loved in rural retirement (or 
 in urban privacy), her love serving only to un- 
 fold the girl into the woman, its warm prophe- 
 cies doomed to exhale in sighs, she living un- 
 wedded, her story unbruited and unknown, 
 while the pangs of the pastor of Sesenheim's 
 daughter have ever the sympathy of the most 
 cultivated hearts in Christendom, a sympathy 
 so close that many have to brace them with the 
 divine precept, Judge not, to keep off hard 
 thoughts about him to whose genius we solely 
 owe our tender, purifying participation in her 
 tears. What a shrewd thrust that is of Lewes
 
 I5O GOETHE. 
 
 at the close of his Sesenheim chapter : " And 
 so farewell Frederika, bright and exquisite 
 vision of a poet's youth ! We love you, pity 
 you, and think how differently we should have 
 treated you ! " 
 
 The fact, affirmed to be indubitable, that not 
 many months after the departure of Goethe, 
 Frederika exchanged vows with Lenz, a friend 
 of Goethe, will be learnt with pleasure or with 
 pain, according to the age, temperament, and, 
 in most cases, sex of the reader. In him the 
 wound seems to have been deeper than in her. 
 But they had the satisfaction of meeting eight 
 years later with most kindly feelings on both 
 sides, there being no troublesome traces left in 
 either of their youthful love. 
 
 Goethe's father, now that his son was Doctor 
 farts, being determined to make a thorough 
 lawyer of him, -sent him to Wetzlar, that he 
 might gain some insight into the practice at 
 what was then the great Chancery of all Ger- 
 many, where twenty thousand cases still waited 
 decision, some of which had been in court a 
 century and a half. As at Strasbourg Goethe 
 had busied himself not much with law, but with 
 Gothic Architecture, Bayle, Giordano Bruno, 
 waltzing, fencing, Faust, Herder, Goetz, Shake- 
 speare and Frederika, so at Wetzlar he followed
 
 LOVES. 151 
 
 too the instinct of his expanding faculties, 
 helped his friend Gotter to translate Gold- 
 smith's Deserted Village, published short poems 
 in Boie's Annual, and fell in love with Char- 
 lotte Buff. Charlotte was already engaged to 
 another. At the same time there resided in 
 Wetzlar, secretary to one of the legations, a 
 young man named Jerusalem, of melancholy 
 moods and a theoretical defender of suicide. 
 Jerusalem was in love with the wife of one of 
 his friends ; and this unhappy passion, aggra- 
 vating a natural morbidness, led him to shoot 
 himself. Out of his own and Jerusalem's still 
 more unfortunate passion, together with the 
 generally unhealthy, rebellious feeling of the 
 times, Goethe created Werther, Wcrtlier, a 
 titanic shriek in the desert of the eighteenth 
 century, so full of Goethe, Goethe the un- 
 tamed, so full of pictures, of pathos, of poetry, 
 and so full of heart and of wise insights. 
 
 He tore himself away from Wetzlar and 
 Charlotte. A characteristic of Goethe \vas a 
 demand for sensuous presence in the object of 
 his interest. He required personally to feel, 
 or to have felt, a passion or emotion in order to 
 represent it poetically. And the range of his 
 representations is so wide because the gamut 
 of his sensibilities was so full and fine. Cer-
 
 152 GOETHE. 
 
 tain passions and conjunctions had not been 
 deeply experienced because they had been re- 
 sisted. Near enough he had calmly stood to 
 be singed by the flame and smoke of volcanoes, 
 whose craters he would not explore to the bot- 
 tom ; he had gazed into abysses whose depths 
 he withheld himself from sounding. To the 
 poet this was enough : it gave him a clear right 
 of usufruct. He could not rest until he had 
 seen Italy, and had stood face to face with its 
 bays and mountains, its sun and moon, and its 
 marvels of Art. His imagination asked for 
 solid stuff, palpitating reality, out of which to 
 shape its creations : it could not snatch men 
 and women from the air. Both the perceptions 
 and the affections of Goethe were keen and 
 strong : and while they fed his larger faculties 
 of thought and emotion, they upheld and 
 strengthened each the other. He loved a per- 
 son the more for seeing him or her : presence 
 bred love, and love throve on presence. This, 
 to be sure, is according to a law of human or- 
 ganization : out of sight, out of mind ; but in 
 Goethe the law found exceptional .exemplifica- 
 tion. And being, from the wealth of his sym- 
 pathies and vivacity of temperament, very im- 
 pressible, new objects made themselves readily 
 welcome. By no means were the old lost or
 
 LOVES. 153 
 
 effaced, but for the moment their place was sup- 
 plied. Add to this his joyousness, his activity 
 of intellect, his practical sense, his self-control, 
 and we can understand how he could, in most 
 cases, inwardly master what he felt ought to be 
 mastered. Thus, when on quitting Wetzlar 
 and walking down the Lahn, he paid a visit in 
 Coblenz to Frau von Laroche, Wieland's 
 earliest love, the black eyes and other charms 
 of her daughter, Maximiliane (the future mother 
 of Bettina Brentano) consoled him wonderfully 
 for the loss of Charlotte. 
 
 On his return to Frankfort he threw himself 
 upon Literature and Art and upon Law, the 
 last to the delight of his father, who, in amaze- 
 ment at the multiplicity of his son's occupa- 
 tions and devotions, spoke of him as " this sin- 
 gular creature ; " but to the completeness of 
 Goethe's daily being a " maiden " was essen- 
 tial. In one of the earlier letters of Werther 
 he exclaims : " To the heart what is the world 
 without love ? What a magic lantern is with- 
 out its light." Love lifted him, not above the 
 earth : by no means ; but high enough to float 
 him over the prosaisms and platitudes of week- 
 day life. He writes to his friend Kestner, the 
 betrothed of Charlotte: "Tell Lotte (Char- 
 lotte) there is a certain maiden here whom I
 
 154 GOETHE. 
 
 love heartily, and whom I would choose above 
 all others if I had any thought of marriage." 
 This refers to Anna Antoinette Gerock, then 
 only fifteen. Again he writes to Kestner : 
 " Yesterday I skated from sunrise to sunset. 
 And I have other sources .of joy which I can't 
 relate. Be comforted that I am almost as 
 happy as people who love, like you two, that I 
 am as full of hope, and that I have lately /<?# 
 some poems. My sister greets you, my maiden 
 also greets you, my gods greet you." 
 
 Goethe was attracted to the buds of woman- 
 hood. Was it that " sweet sixteen " is more 
 fragrant with the poetry of feminine beauty ? 
 By successive attachments to fresh, unformed 
 girls he became charged with this poetry. From 
 his twentieth to his twenty-fifth year Goethe's 
 heart was busied and charmed and warmed by 
 the constant presence in it of one or other 
 lovely, innocent young creature : Frederika, 
 Charlotte, Maximiliane, Antoinette, Lili. It is 
 a striking, significant phenomenon. It denotes 
 healthiness of feeling, if nothing more. The 
 images of these tender girls sweetened the im- 
 agination of the expanding poet. Constancy 
 is not always a virtue ; and if it were, it were 
 one with which some excellent people are not 
 born. If the capacity to harbor so many loves
 
 LOVES. 155 
 
 in succession in one heart, proves rather that 
 heart's inconstancy than its largeness, it is at 
 least a presumption of its purity. 
 
 She who in the autobiography is called Lili, 
 was a pretty, graceful blonde, the daughter of a 
 rich Frankfort banker. Goethe, being already 
 a man of note (he had just published Wertker, 
 and Goetz von Berlichingen shortly before), was 
 a seductive mark for the sparkling looks of a 
 fashionable debutante. Lili's attempt to flirt 
 with Goethe resulted in her becoming so in- 
 terested in him, that later, when the families on 
 both sides pertinaciously opposed the match, 
 she is said to have offered to go with him to 
 America. In such an attempt there was more 
 than the usual danger ; for the great, lustrous 
 eyes of Goethe shone from a countenance of 
 rare manly beauty, and from his fluent tongue 
 flowed what to the other sex is peculiarly fas- 
 cinating, the speech of a glowing, imaginative 
 mind, and this, backed by bounding animal 
 spirits, an imposing presence, and the magnet- 
 ism of genius : a combination formidable in 
 itself, and which became irresistible when forti- 
 fied by the attraction women feel towards one 
 whose delight in woman and in beauty flushed 
 his whole bearing and drew, out of him his 
 best.
 
 I$5 GOETHE. 
 
 How fortunate for posterity that from his 
 boyhood to his latest years Goethe was so 
 copious a correspondent. Here, in a letter to 
 Augusta von Stolberg, is a picture of himself 
 at the height of his Lili-fever : " If you can 
 imagine a Goethe in braided coat, from head to 
 foot in the gallantest costume, amid the glare 
 of chandeliers, fastened to the card-table by a 
 pair of bright eyes, surrounded by all sorts of 
 people, driven to endless dissipation from con- 
 cert to ball, and with frivolous interest making 
 love to a pretty blonde, then will you have a 
 picture of the present Carnival-Goethe." 
 
 Goethe once related how, over a friend of his, 
 on the way to church, seated by his betrothed, 
 there suddenly came such a dread, that he 
 ordered the carriage to turn back. The cere- 
 mony and contract that awaited him in the 
 church loomed upon him so formidably that he 
 recoiled from facing them. When in his 
 seventy-seventh year Goethe wrote this to 
 Zelter, was he casting his thought back more 
 than half a century, and embodying in a pointed 
 story his own feelings ? Between him and Lili 
 it went so far that they became engaged. Still, 
 the opposition of their families was scarcely 
 relaxed ; and the opposition triumphed, having, 
 doubtless, a powerful secret ally in what seemed
 
 LOVES. 157 
 
 an instinct of Goethe against the captivating 
 bond. The giving Lili up was a long pang. 
 He tells how, after the rupture, he would 
 wander at night beneath her window. Once 
 she was singing at the piano, and he recognized 
 the words of a song he had written to her. 
 
 But Goethe was not " a marrying man," and 
 in this case it was ^probably well that he was 
 not ; for, unless Lili had been an uncommonly 
 clear-headed and sound-hearted girl, which 
 does not appear, she would not have escaped 
 the perverting influences of unleavened, unen- 
 lightened opulence. When people live much 
 more on money than on mind, as rich 
 bankers, poor fellows, are obliged mostly to do, 
 their natures are liable to get belittled and 
 distorted by artificialities and frivolities and 
 ostentations. Through the daily pressure of 
 superfluous wealth, especially sudden wealth, 
 the whole being is apt to get contracted and 
 materialized and denaturalized. In our present 
 social organization, to be reared, encircled from 
 childhood by all the facilities and temptations 
 of riches, is a doom for which people should be 
 commiserated, instead of being, as it is mostly 
 regarded to be, a good fortune to be envied. 
 For Goethe the circle of a rich Frankfort 
 banker would not have been helpful.
 
 158 GOETHE. 
 
 Five years later, when he made a tour with 
 the Duke of Weimar and visited Frederika, 
 Goethe also saw Lili. She lived in Strasbourg, 
 was happily married, and, her mother by her 
 side, she received Goethe with a. baby of seven 
 weeks old in her arms, the most comfortable 
 way in which a young mother can receive a 
 past admirer. Lili, no doubt, made him kiss 
 the baby. 
 
 In a letter to Jacobi, written from Weimar in 
 his thirty-third year, Goethe, referring to the 
 past ten years of his life, says : " Here I am, 
 dedicated to my old fate, suffering where others 
 enjoy and enjoying where others suffer. What 
 I have gone through cannot be told. When 
 you see on the furnace hearth a glowing mass 
 of iron, you don't think of the dross that lies 
 hidden in it, and which only shows itself when 
 the mass comes under the big hammer. It 
 seems as if a "powerful hammer had been neces- 
 sary to free my nature from much dross and 
 make my heart pure. And how much, how 
 much that is perverse sticks in it yet." 
 
 The glowing mass had to bear yet many a 
 hammering. The richer and more various the 
 mental powers are, that is, the powers both 
 of head and heart, the more tempering they 
 need by collisions. Of these Goethe had more
 
 LOVES. 159 
 
 than the common share, being a man of more 
 than common sensibility, throbbing with pas- 
 sion and sympathy and aspiration, a man of 
 action as well as a student and poet, practical 
 and outwardly enterprising as well as thought- 
 ful and meditative and poetically inventive. 
 
 While he was still suffering from the loss of 
 Lili came the invitation to Weimar, where, as 
 we have seen, he was in the first years to serve 
 a high laborious apprenticeship, such as poet 
 never served before ; and where lived a lady 
 who desired to know him and whom he longed 
 to know. 
 
 In one of his excursions on the Rhine in 
 1774, Goethe fell in with Dr. Zimmerman (the 
 " Zimmerman on Solitude ") who showed him 
 a portrait, set by the Doctor in such encomiums 
 of the original that, what with the effect of the 
 painter's lines and color and the Doctor's rhap- 
 sody, Goethe is said to have been sleepless for 
 three nights. Your poetically imaginative man 
 is sometimes more moved by the distant than 
 by the present* and so may it have been even 
 with Goethe. The three sleepless nights are 
 however questionable, or even one : that must 
 be a playful extravagance of the Doctor. More- 
 over, Goethe, impressible though he was, was 
 too healthy, physically and psychically for such
 
 l6o GOETHE. 
 
 effect from such cause. When Frau von Stein 
 (the fascinating portrait was of her) learnt this 
 from Zimmerman, she wrote that she would 
 gladly hear more of Goethe, and should like to 
 see him. 
 
 Frau von Stein, wife of Baron von Stein, 
 Master of the Horse, was one of the chief ladies 
 of the court. She was a woman captivating 
 from her appearance, her manners, her intelli- 
 gence, her accomplishments, her culture. The 
 mother of seven children, she was thirty-three 
 years of age when Goethe came to Weimar, 
 six or seven years older than he was. Goethe 
 arrived in Weimar on the seventh of November, 
 
 1775. His second note to Frau von Stein (the 
 first is without date) is of the third of January, 
 
 1776. On the twenty-eighth he writes to her : 
 " Dear Angel, I am not going to the con- 
 cert. For I am so well that I don't wish to see 
 the crowd. Dear Angel, I sent for my letters, 
 and it pained me that among them there was 
 not a word from thee, not a word in pencil, no 
 good evening. Dear lady, suffer me to love 
 you so much. When I can love any one more 
 I will tell thee : will leave thee unplagued. 
 Adieu, Gold. Thou understandst not how 
 much I love thee." 
 
 With all the fervor of his nature Goethe gave
 
 LOVES. l6l 
 
 himself up to this new passion. The calm, 
 discreet, self-possessing object of it knew how 
 to keep it alive without letting it consume him 
 or herself. Frau von Stein in Weimar did for 
 the man what Frau Boehme in Leipzig did for 
 the boy : she tamed his wildness, she tempered 
 his exuberance. Feminine sympathy was al- 
 ways a need with Goethe, and here he had it 
 from an experienced, cultivated, fascinating 
 woman of the world, older than himself. That 
 in the beginning she had much to do to keep 
 him within bounds, the following note from 
 Goethe on the fourteenth of April shows : 
 
 " Wherefore should I worry thee, dearest 
 creature ! Why deceive myself and plague 
 thee, and so forth. We can be nothing to one 
 another, and are too much. Believe me, were 
 I to speak with perfect openness to thee, thou 
 wouldst in all agree with me. But just because 
 I see things as they are, that sets me dis- 
 tracted. Good night, dear Angel, and good 
 morning. I will not see thee again only 
 thou knowest all I have my heart All that 
 I could say is naught. Thenceforth I will see 
 thee as one sees the stars ! Think of that." 
 
 Where was the Baron Stein, the father of 
 those seven children ? Well, the Baron was 
 hardly at home once in a week. He and his
 
 1 62 GOETHE. 
 
 wife were very good friends ; but there was no 
 love lost between them. At that period there 
 was in Germany great facility and frequency of 
 divorce. It is related that one evening, in a 
 goodly German city, at a large card-party, a 
 lady sat down to a table with three husbands, 
 one in possession and two renounced, the four 
 playing together a very amicable game of whist. 
 A lady friend suggests that a fourth husband 
 was probably hovering round the table. The 
 story is representative, even if it be not ocu- 
 larly true. Such being the state of law and 
 opinion on marriage, Goethe and Frau von 
 Stein might have come together as man and 
 wife, if the disparity in years between them 
 had been reversed, if those seven children of 
 Stein had not been born to her, and other ifs 
 whose contingencies are not at this distance of 
 time distinctly discernible. While Goethe was 
 in Italy, ten years later, there was a report 
 about such a marriage, mentioned by Schiller 
 in a letter to Koerner of November 23d, 1787 : 
 " It is said Goethe will remain at Naples, 
 and has resigned his office. He wished to 
 marry Frau von Stein, and demanded a title of 
 nobility of the Duke in order to do so. Her 
 family, however, opposed it. This is said to 
 have disgusted him with his situation and with 
 Weimar."
 
 LOVES. 163 
 
 Several months before, in August, Schiller 
 had written as follows about Frau von Stein : 
 " A truly original and interesting person ; and 
 I can readily understand why Goethe is so de- 
 voted to her. You cannot call her beautiful, 
 but her face has an earnest and frank expres- 
 sion which is charming. She is a person of 
 much feeling combined with great common 
 sense. She has received more than a thousand 
 letters from Goethe, and from Italy he writes 
 to her every week. It is said that the connec- 
 tion between them is perfectly pure and blame- 
 less." That the relation between them was of 
 this character, the tone and substance of 
 Goethe's letters to her through those many 
 years go to confirm. He opens one of his 
 plaintive missives with these words : " And 
 so this relation, the purest, most beautiful, 
 truest, that I ever had with any woman except 
 my sister, this too is to be broken up." 
 
 What would one not give for only half a 
 dozen love-letters of Shakespeare ? From 
 Goethe we have more than a thousand, filling 
 three volumes. The title of the volume is, 
 Goethe s Letters to Frau von Stein, from 1776 
 to 1826. But only those written from '76 to '86 
 can properly be called love-letters. These ten 
 years, to be sure, occupy two and a half of the
 
 164 GOETHE. 
 
 three volumes. Goethe not only loved Frau 
 von Stein, he enjoyed her society intellectually. 
 She could understand him : he could be confi- 
 dential with her, and be sure of an intelligent 
 sympathy. 
 
 The larger number of his written communi- 
 cations to her are notes, many of them very 
 brief, sometimes in pencil, just asking how she 
 is, sending flowers or fruit or vegetables ; but 
 the shortest ends or begins with words of en- 
 dearment. One " ends : " Adieu if I only 
 could live without loving." In the middle of 
 another he comforts himself with having had 
 " glorious hours with Wieland." A day or two 
 afterwards, July 24th, 1776, he writes from the 
 mining district at Ilmenau, forty miles distant : 
 " Didst thou think of me as I of thee ! No, I 
 will not have it so ! will feed on the melancholy 
 of my old fate, not to be loved where I love." 
 A fortnight later, still in Ilmenau, he writes : 
 
 " Ah, when thou art near 
 I feel I ought not to love thee. 
 Ah, when thou art far away 
 I feel, I love thee so much." 
 
 And in the same letter : " Dear Angel ! I have 
 been writing on my Falcon. My Giovanna will 
 have much of Lili in her : but thou wilt allow 
 me to pour in a few drops of thy being, just
 
 LOVES. 165 
 
 enough to tinge it. Thy relation to me is so 
 holy, singular, that I now for the first time 
 feel it cannot be expressed with words : people 
 cannot perceive it." 
 
 Frau von Stein, the most distinguished 
 woman in Weimar, would have been distin- 
 guished anywhere. A token of this was the 
 especial friendliness towards her of the Duke 
 and Duchess, themselves by nature both so 
 highly gifted. The following note from Goethe, 
 February 2Oth, 1777, shows the footing on 
 which she stood with the Duke, and gives an 
 insight into the easy, simple manners of Wei- 
 mar at that period : " I have advised the Duke 
 to dine with you to-day : he is not in the best 
 spirits. If you will have us, we will come to- 
 wards one. But don't have any formality. 
 Herewith I send old wine. Addio." 
 
 A year later Goethe writes to her : " It is 
 handsome of you that you wish to feed with 
 preserved fruit him whom you no longer love. 
 I thank you for it, although it looks as though 
 you sent me good things in order that I may 
 not come to eat them with you." 
 
 In the spring of 1778 Goethe made a journey 
 with the Duke to Leipzig and Dessau. The 
 following is the close of a letter written from 
 Woerlitz : " I perceive that with men I have far
 
 1 66 GOETHE. 
 
 less intercourse than formerly. And I seem to 
 get nearer and nearer to the goal of the dra- 
 matic, as I get clearer insight into how the 
 great play with men, and the Gods with the 
 great. Adieu. Don't fail to write to me to 
 Leipzig. Greet the Duchess, Stein, Waldner, 
 the Prince, and Knebel." Knebel, through a 
 long life a staunch friend of Goethe, was tutor 
 to the Duke's brother. 
 
 Goethe has been reproached with being too 
 conservative, and with having too much defer- 
 ence for rank. Conservatism was a necessary 
 ballast to keep his eager faculties from rushing 
 with dangerous swiftness before the impulse of 
 a bold, powerful, originating mind. The con- 
 servatism which in one less richly endowed 
 might'have been narrowness, in him became a 
 broad virtue. His respect for rank never made 
 him do or say anything unbecoming an honest 
 and an honorable man. In these respects he 
 had traits in common with Washington ; and 
 where are two men of their generation who did 
 so much to overthrow established conditions 
 and initiate new epochs ? No one saw men and 
 things with a surer eye than Goethe ; and even 
 when the subject was Saxon Dukes, of Meinin- 
 gen, Gotha, etc., cousins of his beloved chief, 
 he spoke what he thought to one with whom
 
 LO^ES. 167 
 
 he was on the intimate terms he now had got 
 to be with Frau von Stein. ' In the autumn of 
 1778 he writes from Eisenach : " To-morrow the 
 hunting will be swinish, nor do four or five 
 Saxon Dukes in a room make the best conver- 
 sation. I have just come from Wilhelmsthal. 
 On the way I talked much with you, dear Gold, 
 which I wished to write in full : but it has all 
 vanished. I have had again all kinds of disap- 
 pointments, as you can well conceive. At the 
 same time I have fine hopes for my thirtieth 
 year : In my twenty-ninth I am still such a 
 child." 
 
 Between Fritz, one of the children of Frau 
 von Stein, a year or two old when Goethe came 
 to Weimar, there grew up a warm friendship. 
 Goethe kept the child with him, sometimes for 
 days and weeks, and when he came to be seven 
 or eight years of age, took him on excursions 
 and short journeys. Goethe thus opens 1779 : 
 " Fritz woke me before four and prattled in the 
 New Year. I send a happy New Year, dearest, 
 and sweet-cake. Fritz wishes to be off again. 
 Will you have me to-day at dinner ? " 
 
 Titles are much prized in Germany : they 
 constitute a kind of sub-nobility. The obtain- 
 ing of one is an event in the life of a German 
 burgher ; and even to Goethe, at that phasis
 
 1 68 GOETHE. 
 
 "of his career, it was important, and from the 
 earliness with which it was conferred on him, 
 very significant, that the highest title, below 
 titles of nobility, and one which the numerous 
 nobles with the prefix von are far from despis- 
 ing, should thus almost in his youth be be- 
 stowed on him. He bore it for the remaining 
 fifty-two years of his life, and thus announces 
 to his beloved friend the new honor : " N. B. 
 The Duke has given the title of Geheimerrath 
 [Privy Councilor] to Schnaussen, Lynkern and 
 me. It seems strange to me that I, as it were 
 in a dream, in my thirtieth year, come into the 
 highest dignity that a burgher in Germany can' 
 reach. On ne vajamais plus loin que quandon 
 ne sait ou Fon va, said one of the famous climb- 
 ers of the earth." 
 
 On Sunday morning, the fourteenth of May, 
 1780, Goethe writes : " Have the goodness to 
 send me three chocolate cups and chocolate for 
 three persons. I have visitors. I beg to come 
 to you as guest to dinner." 
 
 In the September following he is at Ilmenau. 
 He was endeavoring to revive activity in the 
 mines, which for some time had been neglected. 
 Here is an extract which shows what he was 
 doing and thinking and feeling : " The seventh ; 
 evening. We mounted to the high summits
 
 LOVES. 169 
 
 and crept into the depths of the earth, and how 
 rejoiced we should have been to discover the 
 nearest traces of the great forming Hand. The 
 man is sure yet to come who will see clearly. 
 We wish to prepare the way for him. We have 
 discovered beautiful great things which give 
 the soul a swing and expand it into the truth. 
 Could we but soon give occupation and bread 
 to the poor moles here ! On the Snowtop the 
 view is very fine. Good night : I am tired. 
 Thinking and chatting were still possible, but 
 not writing. Pretty incidents good night : 
 it is idle to try to narrate. 
 
 " Friday, 8th September. After a ten hours' 
 sleep I awoke in good spirits. O, that it were 
 my calling to be always in motion and in the 
 open air. Willingly would I bear all the annoy- 
 ances incident to this kind of life. Afterwards 
 I talked over and looked into various matters. 
 The curse that should fall upon the serpent, 
 presses upon men, who creep on their bellies 
 and eat dirt. Then, for a washing and purifi- 
 cation, I read some Greek." 
 
 From a letter dated Zillbach, a few days 
 later, here is another characteristic passage : 
 "We arrived late, because princes and prin- 
 cesses can never get away from a place at the 
 right hour, as Stein [her husband] remarked as
 
 I/O GOETHE. 
 
 the time pressed heavy upon him, while his 
 Serene Highness was trying guns and pistols. 
 As for me, I took out my Euripides and sea- 
 soned this insipid quarter of an hour. 
 
 " Then the greatest gift for which I have to 
 thank the Gods is, that through the rapidity 
 and variety of thoughts, I can split a clear day 
 like this into a million parts, and thus make a 
 small eternity. 
 
 " Like a cheerful Mirza I travel to the famous 
 Fair of Cabul : nothing is too small or too large 
 for my eyes or my wishes, and when I have 
 bargained and paid my money, I fall in love 
 with the Princess of Cashmere, and now enter 
 upon the great journeys through deserts and 
 forests and mountain-gorges, and thence to the 
 moon. Dear Gold, when at last I wake out of 
 my dream, I always find that I love thee still, 
 and long to be with thee." 
 
 Towards the end of February, 1781, he thus 
 announces the death of Lessing : " Scarcely 
 could anything sadder have happened to me 
 than the death of Lessing. Not a quarter of 
 an hour before the news arrived I was planning 
 to pay him a visit. We" lose much, much in 
 him, more than we believe." 
 
 January, 1783, opened for Goethe with an 
 invitation from the Duchess of Gotha in an
 
 LOVES. I/I 
 
 autographic note, of which here is a transla- 
 tion : 
 
 " GOTHA, zd January. 
 
 " Although you have already given a declin- 
 ing answer, I nevertheless venture once more to 
 invite you to our ball on Thursday. Nobody 
 here knows a word of this invitation but Frau 
 von Seckendorf. If you wish to be very oblig- 
 ing, come Thursday noon, because we dine 
 with Prince August. Till then, farewell, and 
 come, and that early. CHARLOTTE." 
 
 The Duchess Charlotte would have been a 
 benefactress to Prince August and his dinner- 
 party had she brought Goethe with her ; and 
 in justice to that ducal and titled company be 
 it said, the great plebeian's talk would have 
 been listened to with delight and deference. 
 It is related that once at the palace in Weimar 
 nearly the whole company had gathered round 
 the poet in another room, leaving the Duke 
 almost alone. "Come," said he, "we must do 
 like the rest ; " and he joined the circle of 
 listeners around Goethe. 
 
 The note of the Duchess of Gotha Goethe 
 sends to Frau von Stein, writing on it a com- 
 ment : " I have just received this letter, dear 
 Lotte, by an estafette. What a restlessness in
 
 1/2 GOETHE. 
 
 princely limbs : they can neither sit still them- 
 selves nor let others sit still. If there were a 
 French turnpike ; but a road like the passage 
 of the Red Sea by the Israelites, according to 
 the description of Lessing's critic. There is a 
 thaw-wind blowing, and what is worse than all, 
 I don't feel like it. Do say that I had better 
 not go, in order to settle me. I will write her 
 a kind letter ; that, I hope, will satisfy her. Be- 
 fore spring no one gets me out of my nest for 
 pastime. 
 
 " Send me my books. Keep the engravings. 
 
 "The wind has spoilt a skating party. I 
 hoped also to welcome thee before or after din- 
 ner on the smooth element. Adieu, beloved. 
 Write me a word." 
 
 With no other correspondent was Goethe so 
 confidential as with Frau von Stein. Warmth 
 of affection will melt into liquid flow feelings, 
 opinions, convictions, which otherwise run into 
 no mould of words. Through her his inmost 
 was stirred, and took delight in coming to the 
 surface for her eye. The year 1782 is one of 
 the richest in letters and intimate confidences. 
 I translate a few short passages or sentences, 
 giving the dates. 
 
 " I have my head full of ideas and cares. No 
 cares on my own account, for to me Fortune
 
 LOVES. 173 
 
 blows right upon my back ; but so much the 
 more for others, for many. For one's self one 
 can, after all, find the right road ; for others 
 and with others it seems to be almost impossi- 
 ble." January 20. 
 
 " Dearest, don't wonder that the rich are so 
 sick and miserable : I wonder that they even 
 keep alive." Gotha, March 3 . 
 
 " Wilt thou, dear Lotte, have me some dinner 
 prepared to-day : my people are so busy, and I 
 wish to stay at home. I will send for it to- 
 wards one." May 25. 
 
 " How much better were it for me if, clear of 
 the strife of politics, I could, dearest, devote 
 myself near thee to Science and Art, for which 
 I was born." June 4. 
 
 " I was made for private life, and cannot un- 
 derstand why fate has patched me into the ad- 
 ministration of a state and a princely family." 
 September 17. 
 
 " The snow is welcome ; it brings to my 
 memory past winters, and many a scene of thy 
 friendliness. Farewell, thou sweet dream of 
 my life, thou cordial of my pains. To-morrow 
 I have a tea-party." November 21. 
 
 " If I have not ever new ideas to work up I 
 become as though I were ill." December 28. 
 
 " I have not gone out to-day, but have been
 
 1/4 GOETHE. 
 
 looking into old papers and books, and in a 
 wilderness of formality have found much that 
 is human-." February i, 1783. 
 
 " I am hard at work, and concern myself 
 about the things of the earth for the sake of 
 the earthly. My inner life is with thee, and my 
 kingdom not of this world. Adieu, best one. 
 Send me a note if possible. Adieu. 
 
 " Fritz has just come back in high spirits 
 from his coal-works, and will write some more 
 on his letter. Adieu. I love thee in him, and 
 him in thee." April 16. 
 
 "The court takes away all joy, and never 
 gives joy." April 20. 
 
 " How much T owe and shall' owe to thee, 
 dear benefactress, and wherewith can I thank 
 thee ? I am well ; only it is a hard task when 
 one undertakes to bring the discord of the 
 world into concord. The whole year through 
 I hardly come upon a single satisfactory busi- 
 ness, and am ever pulled hither and thither, by 
 people's troubles and ineptitudes." April 24. 
 
 " Here I found what was to be expected. 
 The people of the court complain of tedious- 
 ness, of walking, of driving, of standing, of 
 dust, heat, hills, etc. They praise the scenery 
 highly, and have no enjoyment of it. 
 
 " To my great delight the elephant's skull
 
 LOVES. 175 
 
 has arrived from Cassel, and what I seek for is 
 beyond my expectation visible in it. I keep it 
 hidden in the little inner room, in order that 
 people may not think me crazy. My hostess 
 believes there is porcelain in the huge box. . . . 
 
 " I am to receive one of the earliest copies 
 of Voltaire s Memoirs, and will send it to you 
 at once. You will find, it is as/ if a God (say 
 Momus) or a low God were to write about a 
 king and what is elevated in the world. This 
 is generally the character of all Voltaire's witty 
 writings, and is stamped upon these pages. Not 
 a drop of human blood, not a spark of sym- 
 pathy or propriety. On the other hand, there 
 is a lightness, a fineness of mind, a firmness, 
 that are enchanting. I say fineness of mind, 
 not elevation. He may be likened to a balloon 
 which, through a peculiar floating power, swings 
 itself above everything and sees beneath it 
 plains where we see mountains." Eisenach, 
 June 7, 1784. 
 
 " Fritz sends you this charade : 
 
 " I keep me ever beautiful and cannot see, 
 And my companions are dejectedness and smart : 
 I am both old and young, an aged child I be : 
 Now, reader, guess me quick, I bide within the heart." 
 
 February 2, 1785. 
 
 " Greet Stein. Since your departure I have
 
 1/6 GOETHE. 
 
 not seen him : he was never at home when I 
 sought him." September 1 1, '85. 
 
 " I am diligent, am busy with something that 
 interests me, and shall give the day to it. For 
 the evening I look forward to the joy of going 
 through Hamlet at thy side, and of explaining 
 to thee what thou already understandest better 
 than I." January 8, 1786. 
 
 It was on the third of September of this 
 year that Goethe set out for Italy. Six weeks 
 later he writes to Frau von Stein : 
 
 "TERNI, October 27, 1786. Evening. 
 
 " Sitting again in a cave, which a year ago 
 suffered from an earthquake, I turn my prayer 
 to thee, my dear guardian Angel ! How spoilt 
 I am, I feel now for the first time : to live ten 
 years with thee, beloved by thee, and now in a 
 strange world. I said to myself it would be 
 so, and nothing but the highest necessity had 
 power to force me to take the resolution. 
 
 " Let us have no other thought than to pass 
 our lives together." 
 
 This may be interpreted to hint that there 
 was some truth in the rumor which Schiller 
 reported to Koerner. And there are similar, 
 one might say significant, expressions of devo- 
 tion for months before he started for Italy.
 
 LOVES. 177 
 
 Her letters to him would throw light upon this 
 interesting point ; but it may have been on that 
 very account chiefly that she withdrew from 
 Goethe all her letters and destroyed them. 
 How pertinent would be, for example, her 
 answer to this gush from Goethe in a letter of 
 more than a year earlier, the eighth of Septem- 
 ber, 1785 : " Love me, thou best of all the femi- 
 nine beings that I have ever become acquainted 
 with ; keep me in thy love, and believe that I 
 am thine, and will and must remain thine." 
 
 About a year after his arrival in Italy, while 
 spending part of the summer at Castle Gan- 
 dolfo, near Rome, Goethe was fascinated by a 
 young lady from Milan. Frau von Stein was 
 far away, and in the easy, free life of a pub- 
 lic resort he was thrown much with the fair 
 Milanese, and, as .the common, expressive 
 phrase is, he fell desperately in love. Did this 
 imply effacing of the image of his long-cherished 
 correspondent in Weimar ? He could carry 
 two, three poems, Faust, Tasso, Iphigenia, in 
 his brain at the same time, working on this or 
 that one according as moods were propitious. 
 Could he carry two fair creatures in his heart 
 without their jostling one another ? Perhaps 
 the gentlemen of Utah could help us to an- 
 swer this psychological question. It turned out
 
 1/8 GOETHE. 
 
 that the lovely Milanese was already betrothed. 
 From some cause, not, so far as we know, con- 
 nected with Goethe, the match was broken off; 
 but nothing matrimonial came of Goethe's at- 
 tachment. 
 
 On his return from Italy personal relations 
 with Frau von Stein were renewed ; but they 
 were only friendly. He wrote notes, not with- 
 out some of the old words of endearment ; but 
 they were less frequent, and lacked the former 
 glow. In one of them he thanks her for a 
 breakfast she had sent him ; but it is evident 
 that he had not eaten it with the gusto of a 
 lover. To have such a lover cool, after ten 
 years of tender devotion, was a trial, and Frau 
 von Stein had been a woman of extraordinary 
 equanimity not to be deeply pained by the 
 alienation, and of extraordinary magnanimity 
 not to show how deeply she was wounded when 
 his love for Christiane Vulpius came to light. 
 This caused a rupture. Some years later 
 friendly relations were resumed, and they cor- 
 responded at intervals until her death. On her 
 death-bed, January, 1827, in her eighty-fifth 
 year, she requested that the funeral procession 
 should make a detour from its natural course, 
 so as not to pass under Goethe's windows, fear- 
 ing that the sight of it would give him pain.
 
 LOVES. 179 
 
 Goethe's first note to her was written in the 
 opening days of 1 776 ; his last, on the twenty- 
 ninth of August, 1826. Here it is: "The 
 accompanying poem, my dearest, ought prop- 
 erly to end as follows : ' but to see affection 
 and love maintain themselves through so many, 
 many years between near neighbors, is the high- 
 est that can be given to man.' " 
 
 One is rejoiced to see that the great and still 
 fresh old man can at seventy-eight cast in this 
 particular instance so gratifying a glance over 
 the past fifty years, and pleasantly summon 
 Frau von Stein to share the gratification ; but 
 the above passage cannot be cited as one of 
 those wise, happy generalizations that are so 
 often met with in his pages. 
 
 Of a poetic feeling-full nature, one of the 
 urgent needs is sympathy, and fortunate was 
 Goethe that, in the prodigal vigor of his early 
 manhood, he had a Frau von Stein to at once 
 cordially and thoughtfully listen to his intimate 
 confidences. A clear-minded, cultivated wom- 
 an, in high position, who was proud of his 
 love for her, and who, while keeping him at a 
 certain personal distance, eagerly followed his 
 aspirations, and was able to value his gifted 
 nature, and into whose ready ear he could pour 
 his latest thoughts on whatever, from without
 
 180 GOETHE. 
 
 or from within, interested or troubled him : it 
 was a rarely-enjoyed prerogative of genius, and 
 helped to keep his mind in abounding activity, 
 and at the same time at ease. An important 
 section it was of his adult education. She at 
 once stimulated and calmed him ; she kept him 
 at 'a healthy glow. With some tempering of 
 the Italian's phrase, Goethe might almost say 
 of his Lotte what Petrarca said of his Laura : 
 " The little that I am, I am through that lady, 
 and if I have any fame or glory, I should never 
 have reached it, had she not cultivated with 
 such noble feelings the very small seed of virtue 
 which nature had deposited in me." 
 
 Capacity of growth, of endless growth, is a 
 distinctive quality of the human being. To 
 man's bodily and to his animal increase there 
 is a quick bound, as there is to that of all other 
 bodies and animals of the earth. But spirit- 
 ually and, through his spirit, intellectually, there 
 is no cognizable bound to his expansion and 
 improvement. In this expansibility there is 
 among men, as among tribes and races of men, 
 a tall scale of degrees. Goethe was one of those 
 who ever keep growing ; his being unfolded 
 itself continuously ; he had an -insatiable curi- 
 osity in far as well as near directions ; his soul 
 sought to satisfy itself by seeking satisfactions
 
 LOVES. l8l 
 
 out of itself. Such growth is through the 
 higher sensibilities. In a man's mental nature 
 these are the hungry elements that feed them- 
 selves daily, and through this feeding (in which 
 they use the intellect as their spoon) add to his 
 mental breadth and stature. What gives appe- 
 tite and momentum to these elements is of 
 course the central vitality, the inward eagerness 
 and thirsfiness. But this internal movement 
 may be much obstructed or much furthered by 
 outward surroundings. Considering Goethe's 
 impressible and passional nature, it may be 
 looked upon as a happiness for him and his 
 unfolding that during those ten initiatory years 
 he was linked by such warm devotion to a Frau 
 von Stein. 
 
 Many, even true, estimable, intelligent men, 
 do not grow continuously, at least not on earth. 
 After middle life they are quiescent, they ex- 
 perience no fresh thirsts ; they get merely more 
 shrewdness, and more skill in manipulation on 
 the old tracks ; the man as man hardly ad- 
 vances. Long years ago, while studying the 
 discoveries of Gall, I met with the remark that 
 few professional men can take up with new 
 ideas when they have reached forty. After 
 that age most men harden in their early opin- 
 ions and beliefs. Some, and they not always
 
 1 82 GOETHE. 
 
 without intellectual vivacity, grow, as the boys 
 say, like a cow's tail downwards. 
 
 A few weeks after his return from Italy, 
 while walking in the Park at Weimar one sum- 
 mer day, Goethe " was accosted by a fresh, 
 young, bright-looking girl, who, with many rev- 
 erences handed him a petition." The petition 
 entreated the good offices of the great poet in 
 behalf of a young author then earning a scanty 
 livelihood in Jena by translating French and 
 Italian stories. The young author was Vul- 
 pius, and the blooming girl who presented the 
 petition was his sister Christiane, who from 
 that moment added another, and a most impor- 
 tant one, to the loves of Goethe. 
 
 " Her father," says Mr. Lewis, " was one of 
 those wretched beings whose drunkenness 
 slowly but surely brings a whole family to 
 want. He would sometimes sell the coat off 
 his back for drink. When his children grew 
 up they contrived to get away from him, and 
 to support themselves : the son by literature, 
 the daughters by making artificial flowers, wool- 
 len work, etc. It is usually said that Chris- 
 tiane was utterly uneducated, and the epigram- 
 matic pen glibly records that " Goethe married 
 his servant." She never was his servant. Nor 
 was she uneducated. Her social position in-
 
 LOVES. 183 
 
 deed was very humble, as the foregoing indica- 
 tions suggest : but that she was not unedu- 
 cated is plainly seen in the facts, of which 
 there can be no doubt, namely, that for her 
 were written the Roman Elegies and the Meta- 
 morphoses of Plants ; and that in her company 
 Goethe pursued his optical and botanical re- 
 searches. Plow much she understood of these 
 researches we cannot know : but it is certain 
 that, unless she had shown a lively comprehen- 
 sion, he would never have persisted in talking 
 of them to her. Their time, he says, was not 
 spent only in caresses, but also in rational talk. 
 This is decisive. Throughout his varied cor- 
 respondence we always see him presenting 
 different subjects to different minds, treating 
 of topics in which his correspondents are in- 
 terested, not dragging forward topics which 
 merely interest him ; and among the wide 
 range of subjects he had mastered, there were 
 many upon which he might have conversed 
 with Christiane, in preference to science, had 
 she shown any want of comprehension of sci- 
 entific phenomena. . . . While, however, rec- 
 tifying a general error, let me not fall into the 
 opposite extreme. Christiane had her charm ; 
 but she was not a highly gifted woman. She 
 was not a Frau von Stein, capable of being
 
 1 84 GOETHE. 
 
 the companion and the sharer of his highest 
 aspirations. Quick mother-wit, a lively spirit, 
 a loving heart, and great aptitude for domestic 
 duties, she undoubtedly possessed : she was 
 gay, enjoying, fond of pleasure even to excess, 
 and, as may be read in the poems she in- 
 spired, was less the mistress of his mind 
 than his affections. Her golden-brown locks, 
 laughing eyes, ruddy cheeks, kiss-provoking 
 lips, small and gracefully rounded figure, give 
 her the " appearance of a young Dionysos ; " so 
 says Madame Schopenhauer, not a prejudiced 
 witness. Her naivett, gayety and enjoying tem- 
 perament, completely fascinated Goethe, who 
 recognized in her one of those free, healthy 
 specimens of nature which education had not 
 distorted with artifice. She was like a child of 
 the sensuous Italy he had just quitted with so 
 much regret ; and there are few poems in any 
 language which approach the passionate grati- 
 tude of those in which he recalls the happiness 
 she gave him. 
 
 " Why did he not marry her at once ? His 
 dread of marriage has already been shown ; 
 and to this abstract dread there must be added 
 the great disparity of station : a disparity so 
 great that not only did it make the liaison scan- 
 dalous, it made Christiane herself reject the
 
 LOVES. 185 
 
 offer of marriage. Stahr reports that persons 
 now living have heard her declare that it was 
 her own fault her marriage was so long de- 
 layed ; and certain it is that when Christ- 
 mas, 1789 she bore him a child (August von 
 Goethe, to whom the Duke stood godfather), 
 he took her with her mother and sister to live 
 in his house, and always regarded the connec- 
 tion as a marriage." 
 
 In an exceptional proceeding of this kind a 
 decisive question to be answered is, in how far, 
 surrender having been at first made to passion, 
 duty afterwards atones : in how far did the 
 higher sentiments mingle with and sanctify im- 
 pulses ? Suppose that Goethe had sent Chris- 
 tiane and her infant to a remote town with a 
 small stipend, he would have done what in 
 such cases is mostly done by men of his 
 worldly elevation, and what the world tacitly 
 sanctions. In taking Christiane to his house 
 to cherish her there as though ' she were his 
 legal wife, he obeyed the dictates of a truer 
 manliness, a nobler self-respect, a higher cluti- 
 fulness, than if, with a worldling's cold and vir- 
 tually immoral regard for the convenances, he 
 had hidden her away out of sight, and thus 
 seemingly broken (for essentially it never can 
 be broken) the sacred bonds which bind to-
 
 1 86 GOETHE. 
 
 gather the parents of a child. Had he married 
 her at once, considering where he was and 
 what he was, he would have done an act of 
 heroism. He did the next best thing to that. 
 What he did he has told in one of his short, 
 exquisite lyrics, which I attempt to regive in 
 the charming simplicity of its verse and phrase. 
 
 FOUND. 
 
 I roamed at random 
 Athrough a wood, 
 To seek for nothing 
 That was my mood. 
 
 I did in shadow 
 
 A flow'ret spy ; 
 
 As stars 'twas lustrous, 
 
 Or a wee eye. 
 
 I wished to break it ; 
 Then soft it said : 
 Shall I be broken 
 Quickly to fade ? 
 
 With all its rootlets 
 Dug from the loam 
 To my own garden 
 I bore it home. 
 
 In a still corner 
 I gave it room ; 
 And there it thriveth 
 Ever in bloom. 
 
 Goethe of course, like other men, did things 
 and said words he had better not have done
 
 LOVES. IS/ 
 
 and said ; but few men are so apt to repent of 
 such as he was, striving ever to amend. And, 
 spite of the facts involved in this long chapter, 
 not often is a man of so much, passion so well 
 controlled. 
 
 To have and to hold before ourselves a moral 
 standard, is one of our precious and most sig- 
 nificant human privileges ; but a standard, to 
 be a standard, must be swung high and free, 
 not nailed to creed or custom, and especially 
 not held in the palsied hand of Phariseeism. 
 We are all given to quick condemnation of the 
 errings of our neighbors ; and this is perhaps 
 a form of self-fortification, and the self-compla- 
 cency accompanying our censure may be a 
 form of self-protection ; but let us beware that 
 the feeling shoot not into presumption or self- 
 righteousness, for then we wound ourselves. 
 When the fellow-man whom we bring before us 
 happens to be one whose fellowship is to us an 
 honor and an exaltation, let us pause and sum- 
 mon to our aid all the best there is in us ; and 
 then, if there be any of the best in us, we shall 
 in the place of judgment put sympathetic re- 
 gret that our great brother has been so self- 
 inflicted with trouble. In that case we shall 
 be the better for his trials ; but if we cry out 
 for judgment, we shall be the worse.
 
 1 88 GOETHE. 
 
 For his manly treatment of Christiane in 
 taking her to his house Goethe suffered socially 
 in Weimar. Had he at once married one so 
 much below him in station, the ostracism would 
 only have been moderated. He was not con- 
 demned because he had violated right or duty, 
 but because he had defied custom and conven- 
 tionalities. In spite of his high solid position, 
 he could hardly have held out but for his lively, 
 inexhaustible, internal resources, literary and 
 scientific and personal. 
 
 Goethe's love for Christiane was not a mo- 
 mentary passion, a transient fancy. Ten years 
 after their first meeting, in a letter to her, 
 written on a journey, he regrets not having 
 taken something of hers with him, were it only 
 her .slipper, that he might feel less lonely. And 
 when she died, in 1816, he was overcome with 
 grief ; kneeling at her bedside he exclaimed : 
 " Thou wilt not forsake me ! No, no ; thou 
 must not forsake me ! " He concludes a letter 
 to Zelter on the eighth of June, 1816, with these 
 words : " When I tell thee, thou stout, sorely 
 tried son of earth, that within these few days 
 my dear little wife has left me, thou wilt know 
 what that means." 
 
 During the partial sack of Weimar, after the 
 battle of Jena, in 1 806, Christiane showed her
 
 LOPES. 189 
 
 usual devotion to Goethe, helping to protect him 
 against some French soldiers who got into his 
 house. On this dangerous occasion she gave 
 proof of remarkable courage and management. 
 Whether this brought to a head a resolution 
 before formed, in order to legitimate his son, or 
 that troublous times make duties press more 
 urgently upon the heart, whatever the moving 
 cause, five days after the battle of Jena Goethe 
 married Christiane, their son being then seven- 
 teen. 
 
 Yet, during the latter half of their union of 
 twenty-eight years, Christiane was one of 
 Goethe's sorest trials. From her father she 
 inherited the tendency and habit which lost 
 him. Goethe bore with her with exemplary 
 forbearance, for he was a patient man and a 
 dutiful, and of great tenaciousness of attach- 
 ment. This too was a part, and not the least 
 serviceable part, of his discipline on earth. 
 Throughout his prolonged life Goethe was doing 
 for himself, and, through the transfusion of 
 himself into his writings, for others, what, 
 by an able critic of Jowett's Plato in the Edin- 
 burg Review, is said to be the purpose of Plato's 
 Dialogues : he was educating the soul. A man 
 who consciously educates his soul, unfolds and 
 uplifts his moral and spiritual being, for this
 
 GOETHE. 
 
 being is the very nucleus of a soul ; and thus 
 he satisfies in so far as his individuality can 
 satisfy the demands of justice, of piety, of 
 love. 
 
 Goethe has been called a pagan, and there is 
 perhaps a little more truth in the designation 
 than that it merely implies his manysidedness. 
 In his mental make there was great wealth of 
 sensuosity. To illustrate Goethe by contrast, 
 in Wordsworth there was deficiency of sensu- 
 osity : Wordsworth was not at all pagan, not- 
 withstanding the magnificent exclamation at 
 the close of one of his greatest sonnets : 
 
 " Great God ! I'd rather be 
 A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
 
 So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
 Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
 
 Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea ; 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 
 
 And Wordsworth, unlike Goethe, was the 
 opposite of manysided ; nor do we wish that 
 he had been manysided. Nor would we have 
 Goethe less of a pagan. There is something 
 of sacrilege in touching, even with so impotent 
 a modifier as a wish, one of these chosen or- 
 ganisms, which the divine breath has moulded 
 to finest issues. 
 
 Of Goethe's paganism the Roman Elegies
 
 LOVES. 191 
 
 are a resplendent exemplification. Inspired by 
 Christiane, the easy, graceful vesture for them 
 was furnished by his recent studies and delight 
 in Ancient Art, and by the images and sensa- 
 tions supplied by his luxuriant residence in the 
 epicurean climate, amid the glowing scenery, 
 of southern Itlay. Observe in some of the 
 best of the Elegies how mere animal feelings 
 are spoken out, naively and innocently, because 
 shame as yet is not, shame being born when 
 the spiritual has grown strong enough to rule, 
 or, if not to rule, to warn, the animal. The 
 essence of classical paganism is, that the soul 
 is not wakened to full consciousness and sense 
 of regality. (Is it yet wide awake ?) That 
 Goethe could so vividly reproduce the classic 
 pagan feeling, shows the Greek side of his 
 manysidedness, and that Christiane inspired 
 just a pagan love. The Roman Elegies are 
 more antique than Goethe's Iphigcnia. Chris- 
 tiane turning out fat and gross, what a com- 
 ment on and moral to the Roman Elegies ! 
 And what a retribution for a pagan love. Had 
 Goethe not been much more than a pagan, 
 when the gross and not the refined in Chris- 
 tiane grew with years, he would not have bound 
 himself to her by the legal bond of marriage, 
 but would have treated her as many modern
 
 IQ2 GOETHE. 
 
 pagans would have treated her. But in Goethe, 
 besides and above the classical pagan, was the 
 Christian man and the honorable gentleman. 
 
 On the fifteenth of January, 1813, Goethe 
 thus concludes a letter to Zelter : " Mr. Pfund 
 I had great pleasure in seeing, although only 
 for a short time. His chief recommendation 
 to me was his attachment to thee. His bride 
 I began to love when she was a child of eight 
 years, and in her sixteenth year I loved her 
 more than was reasonable. Thou wilt, per- 
 haps, on this account be more friendly towards 
 her when she comes to you. 
 
 " And now the heartiest farewell." 
 This was Minna Herzlieb, the adopted 
 daughter of Fromman, a bookseller of Jena, 
 and a valued friend of Goethe, who spent in 
 Fromman's family circle many happy hours. 
 It was about seven years before the date of the 
 above letter that Minna was sixteen. (Sweet 
 sixteen again). The fascination was mutual. 
 We smile now while reading of the affair : but 
 at the time it was the cause of pain and alarm 
 to friends on both sides. The two lovers had 
 to be parted ; and this was effected by sending 
 Minna away to school! To this, Goethe's pe- 
 nultimate love, we owe The Elective Affinities. 
 Minna is the original of Ottilie.
 
 LOVES. 193 
 
 As Goethe was a born poet, so was he a born 
 lover. His nature demanded that he should 
 ever carry about with him in his brain some 
 image of womanhood to cheer him and agitate 
 him. One might think that, when he had gotten 
 to be seventy-four, he had reached the period 
 wished for by Socrates, when he would be no 
 longer subject to such solicitations. But Goethe 
 seems to have been of the marrow of the Patri- 
 archs, the type of whom is still extant, Sir 
 Samuel Baker telling of a Sheik in Abyssinia 
 who leaped alertly down from his white camel to 
 greet him, and who, now in his eightieth year, 
 had just taken another wife, aged fourteen. I 
 saw Goethe in 1825, when he was seventy-six. 
 Neither in his countenance nor carriage did he 
 then bear any detracting signs of age. He 
 was one of those men in talking with whom 
 you have no thought of their years. 
 
 In the summer of 1823 Goethe met at Ma- 
 rienbad Fraulein von Lewetzow. Mr. Lewis 
 thus records his last love : " A passion grew 
 up between them, which, returned on her side 
 with almost equal vehemence, brought back to 
 him once more the exaltation of the Werther 
 period. It was thought he would marry her, 
 and indeed he wished to do so ; but the repre- 
 sentations of his friends, and perhaps the fear 
 13
 
 194 GOETHE. 
 
 of ridicule, withheld him. He tore himself 
 away ; and the Marienbad Elegy, which he 
 wrote in the carriage as it whirled him away, 
 remains as a token of the passion and his suf- 
 fering." 
 
 Thus, for sixty years had Goethe's mind been 
 warmed and inspired by his loves. His feeling 
 for woman was a subterranean heat which fer- 
 tilized his being, breaking out at times into 
 flames which will ever be a beauty and an illu- 
 mination to mankind, and which were some- 
 times a terror to himself. Not a woman of the 
 many whom he loved and by each one of 
 them he seems to have been beloved in return 
 ever complained that she had been trifled 
 with or wronged. We have seen how Fred- 
 erika and Lili received him in after years ; how 
 tenderly regardful was Frau von Stein on her 
 death-bed ; how devoted to him was his wife. 
 When he was sixty-seven, Kestner's wife, who 
 more than forty years before had so troubled 
 his heart that he could depict with a pen of 
 fire the " sufferings of the young Werther," 
 she, now a widow and the mother of twelve 
 children, visited him at Weimar. 
 
 But there was one love to which his fidelity 
 was unswerving, with whom he never had a 
 coldness or a quarrel, and whom to have de-
 
 LOVES. 195 
 
 serted would have been his ruin. Who she 
 was he tells in the following 
 
 PARABLE. 
 
 When I to the market hie 
 
 Through the throng, 
 And the pretty maiden spy 
 
 The crowd among ; 
 Go I here she comes to me, 
 
 But above ; 
 
 No one can about us see 
 " How we love. 
 
 " Old man, wilt thou ne'er be quiet ? 
 
 Ever maiden ! 
 In the time of youthful riot 
 
 'T was a Kaetchen. 
 Who is 't now makes thy days sweet ? 
 
 Say, old youth." 
 Look there, how she me doth greet, 
 
 It is TRUTH.
 
 VI. 
 
 FAUST. 
 
 FAUST is the poetical reverberation of 
 Goethe's individual life, an artistic transfigure- 
 ment through a many-toned song by one 
 who had a genius for such singing of the 
 passions, thoughts, strivings, doubts, conflicts, 
 acquisitions, upreachings, of a great poet and 
 a great man, a deep-thoughted, warm-souled, 
 well-poised man, whose profuse gifts were 
 crowned with a rare literary gift of fullest, fin- 
 est, most perspicuous expression. In earliest 
 manhood Goethe conceived his Faust y and fin- 
 ished it in his eighty-second year, thus carry- 
 ing it in him and with him for sixty years of 
 the most variably productive, and the most 
 continuously and methodically active life, and, 
 may it not be added, the most successful in the 
 achievement of its many high aims, that was 
 ever lived on earth. 
 
 Goetz von Berlichingen was no sooner con- 
 ceived than it was begun, no sooner begun 
 than it went rapidly to completion. ' Goetz was
 
 FAUST. 197 
 
 local and partial. Werther, too, swung in a 
 small circle, albeit one with the 'intensity of a 
 whirlpool. These two, sent forth before Goethe 
 was twenty-four, launched him upon the world, 
 and gave the first strong impulse to the fame 
 which, at first hanging round him like a caress- 
 ing breeze, strengthened with every decade of 
 his lengthened career, and to his tomb blew in- 
 cense from all the highest hearts in Christen- 
 dom. 
 
 Egmont was begun about the same time ; 
 but here Goethe felt that greater knowledge of 
 history was needed than he then had, and, what 
 is more, knowledge of the spirit of history, which 
 only years of active, storied living can bring. 
 Thence he did not finish Egmont till twenty 
 years later. Faust was conceived among the 
 first, but not published till 1 790, and then as a 
 fragment, its author soon discovering that the 
 compass which such a subject demands for its 
 fitting presentation, demands too the multiform 
 experience of an abounding, earnest life. 
 
 When in 1 808, in his fifty-ninth year, Goethe 
 published the First Part complete, he dedicated 
 it, not to the present or to a future, but to a 
 past generation, to those dearly-remembered 
 ones, the companions of his early manhood, the 
 most of whom had already passed from the 
 earth :
 
 198 GOETHE. 
 
 " They hear them not, the following songs, 
 The souls to whom the first I sang-" 
 
 Overmastered by such memories and by Faus- 
 tic visions, he concludes : 
 
 " What I possess I see as in the distance, 
 And what is gone comes back in firm consistence." 
 
 In all Goethe's pages there is hardly a strain 
 purer, warmer than this dedication, so tender 
 and deep is it, so instinct with the heart's life, 
 so graceful and dirge-like. 
 
 Next to the Dedication tomes a Prelude in 
 the theatre, the three interlocutors being the 
 manager, the poet, and the representative of 
 fun. Thus to present in contrast what is pop- 
 ular and what is excellent, what fills the thea- 
 tre and what delights the capable auditor, what 
 draws and what lasts, this is the conception of 
 a poetic brain ; and to put it into the words 
 we find here, implies, besides a poet, a high 
 poet who had practiced the function of Director 
 of a theatre. The Manager calls upon the 
 poet to furnish him a piece which shall make 
 the crowd fight round the ticket-office for seats, 
 like a hungry throng round a baker's shop 
 for bread in a famine. The Poet's answer 
 opens : 
 
 " O speak not of that motley crowd 
 At view of which the spirit flags ;
 
 FAUST. 199 
 
 Hide it from sight, the billowy, loud, 
 That us, unwilling, downward drags : " 
 
 and ends with one of those generic distichs 
 often met with in Goethe : 
 
 " What shines is only for the moment good : 
 The genuine is for future ages food." 
 
 One speech of the " Poet " I translate in full, 
 it is so characteristic and so fine : 
 
 " Then me too give the times once more 
 When I myself was still a-growing, 
 When streams of song from swollen core 
 Unceasingly were lifeful flowing, 
 When the world still by mist was shrouded, 
 And every bud with wonder fraught, 
 When I the thousand blossoms sought 
 That all the scented valleys crowded. 
 Nothing had I, yet all was mine ; 
 Deep, yearnful happiness, illusion fine. 
 Give me untamed those quick desires, 
 The never quenched thirst for truth, 
 The strength of hate, love's mighty fires ; 
 O give to me again my youth." 
 
 It was Swift, I believe, who said that no wise 
 man ever wished himself younger. The say- 
 ing is so significant it deserves to be said by a 
 wiser man than Swift. Goethe being one of 
 the wisest, this wish for a return of youth could 
 not be the expression of a permanent mental 
 state in himself. Of the poetic mind the most 
 precious privilege is, that, to its last day, buds
 
 2OO GOETHE. 
 
 are " with wonder fraught," that Nature looks 
 ever fresh and blooming, and that the mystery 
 in which all things are shrouded has even a 
 diviner look as insight deepens with years. 
 One mark of genius is " the carrying on of the 
 freshness and feelings of childhood into the 
 powers of manhood." This is said by Cole- 
 ridge, and the saying draws import from his 
 profound and poetic consciousness. That 
 Goethe did not intend the longing for youth to 
 be taken as representative of the poetic char- 
 acter is shown by the ironic comment of the 
 comic personage, which thus begins : 
 
 " Of youth, dear friend, thou sure hast need 
 When in the battle foemen press thee, 
 When lovely girls, with tender deed, 
 
 Hang on thy neck and would caress thee." 
 
 This prelude and dedication are, by their 
 beauty and significance, a becoming prolusion 
 to the great tragedy which, as Goethe said to 
 Eckerman, " ranges from Heaven through Earth 
 to Hell," and, it may be added, reascends at 
 the close of the Second Part to whence it 
 started. The " Prologue in Heaven," for which 
 there is example in the first chapter of Job, is 
 a poetic invigoration of the Faust legend. By 
 the concurrent judgment of all the most aesthet- 
 ically competent, the Hymn of the Archangels
 
 FAUST. 201 
 
 has long since taken its place as one of the 
 grandest poems in literature. The following 
 translation, first printed forty years since, I 
 have studiously revised, and offer it as one of 
 the scores of attempts that have been made to 
 render into English this " astonishing Chorus," 
 as Shelley calls it. 
 
 THE LORD ; THE HEAVENLY HOSTS ; afterwards MEPHIS- 
 
 TOPHELES. 
 
 The three Archangels come forward. 
 
 RAPHAEL. 
 
 The Sun in wonted guise is sounding 
 
 With brother-spheres co-rival song, 
 On his predestined journey bounding 
 
 With thunder's ordered movement strong. 
 The sight to Angels vigor lendeth, 
 
 Though none his being fathom may ; 
 The works whose reach our thought transcendeth 
 
 Are grand as on Creation's day. 
 
 GABRIEL. 
 
 And swift and swift the earth is streaming, 
 
 With changeful pomp of gloom and light ; 
 In hues of Paradise now beaming, 
 
 Now deep enwrapt in awful night ; 
 The sea, against broad rivers striving, 
 
 On rock upheaves its foam and wrath, 
 And rock and sea are onward driving 
 
 In the swift globe's eternal path.
 
 2O2 GOETHE. 
 
 MICHAEL. 
 
 And storms in conflict wild are pouring 
 
 From land to sea, from sea to land, 
 And form, while raging fierce and roaring, 
 
 Of purpose deep a circling band. 
 There flashes lightning's baleful glaring 
 
 Before the coming thunder's way 
 But these, O Lord, thy orders bearing, 
 
 Revere the calm gait of thy day. 
 
 ALL THREE. 
 
 The sight to Angels vigor lendeth, 
 
 Though none thy being fathom may ; 
 Thy works, whose might all thought transcendeth, 
 
 Are grand as on Creation's day. 
 
 The voice of Mephistopheles, right upon the 
 close of such a Chorus, is a leap from light into 
 sudden darkness. Mephisto is a cross between 
 Voltaire and Caliban ; an irreverent, witty 
 mocker, like Voltaire, but truncated of Vol- 
 taire's humane sensibilities and his aspiration 
 for the beautiful, in place of which he has the 
 utterly unlighted moral nature of Caliban, 
 " which any print of goodness will not take." 
 Having the intellect of the higher type of man 
 unilluminated by the higher sympathies, he 
 exhibits the cynical bitterness consequent on 
 spiritual deprivation. In his first speech to the 
 Lord, after aiming ironically at the " high 
 words " of the Angels, he adds, " My pathos
 
 FAUST. 2O3 
 
 sure would make thee laugh." But most dis- 
 tinctly he shows us what he is in his picture of 
 human nature, he, with his utter moral and 
 spiritual deficiency, being able only to see 
 man's littleness. His speech to the Lord he 
 thus concludes : 
 
 " A little better would he live, 
 
 Him wouldst thou not the show of heaven's light give ; 
 
 He calls it Reason, and uses it to be 
 
 Beastlier than any beast you see. 
 
 He seems to me, saving your reverence, 
 
 Like one of these long-legged grasshoppers, 
 
 Which ever flies and flying springs, 
 
 And in the grass its old song sings. 
 
 If only he would in the grass lie close ; 
 
 But he in every dirt-hole sticks his nose." 
 
 Mephisto is a boundless resource, giving 
 Goethe great freedom of play, because Goethe 
 had it in himself to stretch behind Mephisto, as 
 background, a far sun-lit horizon of humanity. 
 
 From the puppet-plays seen in his boyhood, 
 and from the current legends and printed narra- 
 tives of the doings of Doctor Faustus, Goethe 
 got the first hint of his Faust. Goethe's Devil 
 is another personage from the Satan of Job. 
 Mephisto has the benefit of modern culture, 
 especially that of the eighteenth century. He 
 is a polished, well-bred man of the world. Lord 
 Chesterfield might have invited him to dinner,
 
 2O4 GOETHE. 
 
 to give his son an exemplification of the man- 
 ners of a gentleman. Nor would he have pro- 
 tested angrily against the tissue of Meph- 
 isto's talk. Nor to-day would his Lordship's 
 many well-dressed pupils so protest. Instant 
 arrest, by a sneer, of any jet of aspiration, iron- 
 ical flings at any pretense to purity and inno- 
 cence beyond the age of childhood, sensual- 
 ity draped with a captivating veil, thrown over 
 it so that it shall not offend a drawing-room 
 taste, persiflage accepted as the best criticism : 
 need we go back to Chesterfield and European 
 courts of a hundred years since, to find social 
 gatherings where such is the tone, where an 
 invisible Mephistopheles is the sprightliest 
 guest ? The detractive, down-pulling, cynical, 
 negative element in our human mixture is ever 
 active, and is ever embodied in excess in in- 
 dividuals who, sunk into the petty self, where 
 they find no folds for expansion, discountenance 
 virtuous effort, scorn enthusiasm, jeer at all 
 plans for the betterment of human conditions. 
 
 But Mephistopheles has a deeper quality and 
 function. When Goethe, like the author of 
 Job, gives up. Faust to the temptations of the 
 Devil, he makes the Lord say : 
 
 " Sleep man's activity is aye a wooing, 
 Easily he takes to unconditioned rest ;
 
 FAUST. 20$ 
 
 Thence, one will be as comrade 'mong the best 
 , Who goads him, and as Devil must be doing." 
 
 Here Mephisto represents the animal nature 
 of man, his vis a tergo, the driving power of 
 desire, which, pushed to extreme, brings him to 
 ruin, but, here on earth, shares his being in an 
 'indissoluble partnership with his upper powers 
 of reason and emotion. And these powers 
 would languish but for the fire of animal im- 
 pulse, which they in turn temper and guide. 
 Possibly in man's struggles for and in the flesh 
 the soul is braced and tutored for the higher 
 phase, when, free of the body, it shall glow with 
 more steadiness and brilliancy through an early 
 earth-drawn vigor. 
 
 On earth the motive power of self-seeking 
 desire drives man into culpable aberrations, 
 from which an innate capacity for the better 
 retrieves him, or has in the long run the re- 
 source to retrieve him. Thus the Lord, when 
 giving Mephisto leave to try himself on Faust, 
 tells him he will stand abashed when he is 
 defeated ; for, 
 
 " A worthy man, even in his darkest wrath, 
 Has yet a consciousness of the right path." 
 
 And now Faust makes his entry in that long, 
 plaintive, self-tormenting soliloquy, which ends 
 by his throwing himself desperately upon nee-
 
 206 GOETHE. 
 
 romancy. Necromancy is a bootless effort to 
 get, by a short cut, insights to divine knowl- 
 edge, which can only be.got through the nobler 
 capabilities of reason and spirituality. With a 
 feverish hope he unclasps the book of the great 
 magician, Nostradamus. This scene opens 
 with Faust seated at his desk, late in the night, 
 in a narrow, high-vaulted Gothic room. He 
 thus begins his wail : 
 
 " Ah me ! Have now philosophy, 
 Juristic jargon, medicine too, 
 And even, alas ! theology 
 All have I studied through and through ; 
 And, wretched fool ! with all my lore 
 Am no bit wiser than before." 
 
 Goethe's own mental restlessness in early 
 manhood, his disappointment with life at its 
 threshold, his depression from yearnings un- 
 satisfied by his studies, all this, told in his auto- 
 biography, formed a prerequisite matrix for the 
 conception and moulding of Faust. This youth- 
 ful discontent may be morbid as well as 
 healthy : it may result from feebleness and 
 want of balance, as well as from streaming full- 
 ness of faculties. In Goethe, who from his 
 childhood had been eagerly gathering knowl- 
 edge, and whose nature was forth-reaching, 
 aspiring, imaginative, it betokened the intellect-
 
 FAUST. 207 
 
 ual genius and the naturalist, the naturalist in 
 the broadest, finest sense ; the man who looked 
 to Nature and her resources, so vast and so 
 minute, so prodigal and so definite, so material 
 and so spiritual, for precepts and solutions. 
 He was a naturalist as poet, as man of science, 
 as practical worker. How sound and import- 
 ant, and how naturalistic is his maxim, that we 
 can only thoroughly know what we have prac- 
 ticed or felt. 
 
 Nature, with her infinite and beautiful phe- 
 nomena and her unfailing laws, laws at once 
 simple and subtle, Nature is God's book. 
 What poor Faust, and, in large measure, Goethe 
 too, had been giving all his time to, was man's 
 books, and books that were not man's calm, 
 conscientious, religious, disinterested interpre- 
 tations of God's book, but shadowy substitu- 
 tions for that book, and substitutions which, 
 while they were utterly insufficient, were arro- 
 gant and worldly-minded. In one of Mr. Bay- 
 ard Taylor's many valuable elucidative notes to 
 his translation of Faust is the following : 
 
 " In the Augsburg puppet-play, Faust ex- 
 claims : ' I, too, have long investigated, have 
 gone through all arts and sciences. I became 
 a Theologian, consulted authorities, weighed all, 
 tested all, polemics, exegesis, dogmatism. All
 
 208 GOETHE. 
 
 was babble : nothing breathed of Divinity ! I 
 became a Jurist, endeavored to become ac- 
 quainted with Justice, and I learnt how to dis- 
 tort justice. I found an idol, shaped by the 
 hands of self-interest and self-conceit, a bastard 
 of Justice, not herself. I became a Physician, 
 intending to learn the human structure, and 
 the methods of supporting it when it gives 
 way ; but I found not what I sought, I only 
 found the art of methodically murdering men. 
 I became a Philosopher, desiring to know the 
 soul of man, to catch Truth by the wings and 
 Wisdom by the forelock ; and I found shadows, 
 vapors, follies, bound into a system.' " 
 
 The man who wrote that was a worthy pre- 
 cursor of Goethe, and was wise much beyond 
 his generation, aye, and beyond our so vaunted 
 age. He who studies only man's books, whether 
 medical, juridical, philosophical, or theological, 
 gets further from, instead of nearer to God .and 
 his will. (And the wish to get nearer to God 
 is a divine, irrepressible instinct in the breast 
 of man, which all healthy studies would further.) 
 Thence man's mind, as at once the great spring 
 and reservoir, gets partially dried up, and turbid 
 and unhealthy. 
 
 When, through the forms of Nostradamus's 
 book of magic, Faust, with terrible agitation,
 
 FAUST. 209 
 
 invokes the spirits, a red flame leaps out of the 
 air, and in the flame a spirit, from which Faust 
 recoils, exclaiming, with averted face, " Horrible 
 Visage ! " The spirit so taunts him for his 
 fears that he gains courage to answer in kind : 
 
 " Flame-seed, shall I thee fear ? 
 'Tis I, 'tis Faust, thy peer." 
 
 Then it is that the spirit, who is the earth- 
 spirit, describes his function in those com- 
 pressed, buoyant, meaning-full lines, ending 
 with that magnificent couplet, in uttering which 
 the great poet seems to have caught hearing of 
 the boundless music of creation : 
 
 " I foam life's flood, act's bubbling blood 
 With a stormful breath, 
 In a ceaseless motion ! 
 Be it birth or death, 
 An eternal ocean, 
 Or shirting or fleeing, 
 A fiery being, 
 
 I ply the resounding great loom of old Time, 
 And work at the Godhead's live vesture sublime." 
 
 The spirit soon vanishes, and in a few mo- 
 ments there is a knocking at the door of Faust, 
 who exclaims : 
 
 '* O death ! I know it that is my famulus." 
 
 The famulus was half student, half servant, 
 and in this one Goethe would represent the 
 14
 
 210 GOETHE. 
 
 dull, prosaic, acquiring, but not aspiring, still 
 less, inspired, industrious gatherer. Wagner is 
 the spokesman of the flattest commonplace, of 
 shallow philistinian self-complacency, a literary 
 man in a Pickwickian sense, without soul for 
 strength or originality or poetry, one who lives 
 on the husks of thought. Faust, though almost 
 unbearably bored, treats the poor fellow with 
 respect, and before he dismisses him, on ac- 
 count of the lateness of the hour, utters, in 
 answer to his platitudes, much good irony, of 
 which take this as a sample : 
 
 ' A sealed book are the Annals of the past ; 
 What you the spirit of the ages find 
 Is but the writer's individual mind, 
 In which the bygone times are glassed." 
 
 The departure of Wagner is followed by a 
 long, rather too long, soliloquy in the same tone 
 of despondency, in which he winds himself up 
 to the pitch of suicide. He has raised the 
 deadly bowl to his lips, when his hand is ar- 
 rested by the breaking forth of Easter bells 
 and a chorus of Angels : 
 
 " Christ is arisen ! 
 Joy to him bringing, 
 Whom the stain-flinging, 
 Inherited, clinging 
 Faults did imprison."
 
 FAUST. 211 
 
 In the scene " Outside the Gate," Goethe 
 presents pictures drawn with the sharp fidelity 
 of frequent, thorough study from nature, lighted 
 with that penetrating, divulging light which 
 streams only from the poetic mind. The mov- 
 ing concourse of apprentices, servant-girls, stu- 
 dents, tradesmen's daughters, soldiers, citizens, 
 beggars, issuing out of a German town for a 
 Sunday-afternoon walk, passes before us so dis- 
 tinctly, though rapidly, that their various na- 
 tures and characteristics are laid bare, and 
 through a medium of humor and irony that 
 gives the picture an everlasting charm. The 
 comfortable, self-satisfied citizen has no misgiv- 
 ings but that he is disclosing a perfectly.proper 
 feeling when to his companion he says : 
 
 " Naught better know I, on Sundays and holidays, 
 Than talk of war and the fierce deeds of war, 
 When away there, off in Turkey afar, 
 One fighting people on another one preys." 
 
 A little further out we come upon peasants 
 dancing under the linden trees. After a char- 
 acteristic song, such as only Goethe could 
 write, they gather round Faust, an old peasant 
 being spokesman, to utter thanks to him for 
 having, with his father, saved so many from the 
 plague shortly before. When Wagner, gaping 
 philistine that he is, congratulates Faust, as
 
 212 GOETHE. 
 
 they pass further, on the feelings he must en- 
 joy at receiving the homage of this crowd, 
 Faust, with sad retrospect, tells him how less 
 than little they did, concluding with that bitter 
 self-denunciation which should be printed in 
 letters of gold where all medical students could 
 daily read it : 
 
 " And thus with most infernal pills, 
 Among these valleys and these hills, 
 
 Far worse than did the pest we blazed. 
 Thousands did I the poison give ; 
 They withered oS, and I must live 
 
 To hear the audacious murderers praised." 
 
 Faust comes home accompanied by a strange 
 poodle-dog, who turns out to be Mephistopheles. 
 Through scenes of magical diablerie, enacted 
 by Mephisto according to the popular legend, 
 at his first interview with Faust, there peep 
 subtle satiric meanings. Finally Faust makes 
 his compact with Mephistopheles. The reader 
 may scarcely be aware how close this comes to 
 himself. In Faust is only presented with the 
 ingenuity and the richness of invention, and 
 the breadth, beauty, and power of a great poet, 
 what we are all of us doing in a greater or less 
 degree, namely, selling ourselves to the DeviL 
 
 A man who tries to reach contentment and 
 happiness by giving the reins to his greeds and
 
 FAUST. 213 
 
 his lusts, is attempting as possible a thing as 
 he who would make a torch out of an icicle. 
 Every time the glittering spear is thrust into 
 the flame to be lighted, some of its substance 
 is melted off; and the hotter the flame, the less 
 will the icicle become a torch, and the more 
 rapid will be the dissolution. Faust, under the 
 fascination of Mephistopheles, makes the futile 
 attempt ; but he, through inward higher re- 
 sources, recovers in time to save himself, as, 
 in the first scene between the Lord and Meph- 
 istopheles, it was declared he would. Faust 
 sows his wild oats with a sublime prodigality. 
 
 But many people, of less passionate and pow- 
 erful natures than Faust, do not recover on 
 earth, but, through habitual, even petty, selfish- 
 ness, go down to the grave (for with them it is 
 a going down) under the grip of Mephistoph- 
 eles. Others are so fascinated by the prom- 
 ises of desire and selfishness, which are the 
 deceitful devil within us, that they prostitute 
 themselves to indulgence and active egotism 
 their whole earth-life long ; while Mephisto, 
 with the heartless irony for which he is noted, 
 makes them follow on foot through the mire, he 
 sitting on his fearful steed with that careless 
 security so well given by Retch in his outline 
 of the ride of Faust and Mephistopheles.
 
 214 GOETHE. 
 
 Whenever a man tries to help himself at the 
 cost of another ; whenever he heaps 'within 
 himself sensual and worldly fruition ; when- 
 ever he postpones the needs of the soul to the 
 luxuries of the senses ; whenever, in short, he 
 strives to make a torch of an icicle, he has sold 
 himself, in so far, to the Devil. In this com- 
 pact there is one clause certain to be fulfilled, 
 and that is the forfeiture exacted by the Devil 
 for his services ; in other words, the unfailing 
 loss of so much spiritual power, the sinking of 
 the higher flame, for every excess of sensual or 
 selfish gratification. So that those who keep on 
 selling themselves, from day to day and year to 
 year until Death seizes them, get into such un- 
 manly, unheavenly habits on earth, that in the 
 sphere beyond they have to serve a lengthened 
 term of purgatorial disinfection before they can 
 find heaven there. 
 
 This is the deep moral of Faust masked be- 
 hind a mediaeval legend set forth with the glit- 
 tering, gorgeous pomp of superlative poetry. 
 
 I will not dwell on every scene of the won- 
 derful diorama unrolled by the poet, albeit each 
 is as tempting as the one before it. That 
 where a student comes to consult the renowned 
 Doctor Faust as to his studies, and Mephisto 
 puts on Faust's gown and receives him, is one
 
 FAUST. 21$ 
 
 of the richest in humor, wit, and keenest satire. 
 Of the soliloquy of Mephisto, when Faust has 
 retired and the student has not yet entered, 
 I make room for four lines, the first two and 
 the last two, which compress the whole dozen 
 lying between them : 
 
 " Science despise, and Reason's light, 
 Which are of man the highest might, 
 Then e'en had he not sold him to the Devil, 
 He still would surely come to evil." 
 
 The compass of the first line is contracted by 
 the word Reason, the only one we have in Eng- 
 lish to render the German Vernunft ; but Ver- 
 nunft embraces far more than, and other than, 
 the highest intellectual power, Reason ; it 
 implies with this the highest spiritual power 
 in man, his emotional capacity. 
 
 The first place Faust and Mephisto visit 
 when they set forth on their adventures is a 
 famous resort in Leipzig, familiar to Goethe 
 in his student-days, called Auerbach's Cellar, 
 " where every day's a festival." This scene is 
 admirably low comic, and gives Mephisto a 
 field for his necromantic tricks. By its rollick- 
 ing fun it forms, too, an artistic counterpoise to 
 the dread tragedy that is about to begin. The 
 next scene, in the Witches' Kitchen, plays a 
 similar part, besides having the practical end of
 
 2l6 GOETHE 
 
 getting the Witch to brew the draught that shall 
 renew Faust's youth. Both scenes show the 
 flexibility of Goethe's powers, and the truth to 
 nature which, through the most fantastic sport, 
 underlies every presentation. And even such 
 scenes show his accurate and multifarious 
 knowledge of life, a knowledge gathered by the 
 persistency of many talents and a rare capacity 
 of observation, enlightened, sharpened, refined 
 by genius. 
 
 And now we come to the chief, the great 
 personage of the drama, the marvelous Mar- 
 garet. Here we have the resources and attrac- 
 tions and the transmuted harvests of feeling, 
 exhibited with the trueness of a deep, sure sen- 
 sibility, and the clearness of the brightest Art, 
 exhibited through a representative of wom- 
 anhood in its terrible liabilities. In our hu- 
 man life-drama on earth woman is the protag- 
 onist of feeling. 
 
 Margaret is one of those creations that as- 
 tonish us forever by their simplicity. A girl 
 with only the education that is to be had in the 
 narrow lodgings in the back street of a German 
 town ; whose circle of thought hardly reaches 
 to the larger thoroughfares ; whose life is a con- 
 tented routine of spinning and cleaning in the 
 plainest home, this girl, without losing her
 
 FAUST. 217 
 
 homeliness (in the pure original meaning of 
 the word), without enlarging her very lim- 
 ited vocabulary, or purifying her provincial 
 speech, except in the last tremendous scene, is 
 made to shine with an immortal radiance, a 
 lleautiful possession to the world forever, a fig- 
 ure, a power, added to the higher literature of 
 all nations. Listen to her love-song : 
 
 " My peace is gone, 
 My heart is sore ! 
 I'll find it, ah ! never 
 And never more. 
 
 " Where him I can't have 
 There is my grave, 
 For me is all 
 Turned into gall. 
 
 " Ah ! my poor head ! 
 I've lost my wits, 
 And my poor brain 
 Is all in bits. 
 
 " My peace is gone, 
 My heart is sore ; 
 I'll find it, ah ! never 
 And never more. 
 
 " For him only look I 
 Out on the street, 
 From home only go I 
 Him to meet. 
 
 " His lofty gait, 
 His noble size.
 
 21 8 GOETHE. 
 
 His mouth's sweet smile. 
 His powerful eyes. 
 
 " And of his speech 
 The flowing bliss, 
 His hand's warm clasp, 
 
 And, ah ! his kiss. 
 
 I 
 
 " My peace is gone, 
 My heart is sore, 
 I'll find it, ah ! never 
 And never more. 
 
 " My bosom yearns 
 For him so dear. 
 Ah ! could I clasp 
 And hold him here ! 
 And kiss him, kiss 
 Just as I would, 
 Upon his kisses 
 O ! die I could." 
 
 The songs in Faust, tender and pathetic, 
 like this one> or religious, like those that usher 
 in Easter, rustic or jovial, like those of the 
 peasants and the boon companions in Auer- 
 bach's cellar, or the wild, wailful outpourings of 
 the spirits, show, besides the far range of 
 Goethe's sympathies, the lyrical quality of his 
 genius. This, indeed, is shown in the structure 
 and character of the whole work, which, though 
 dramatic in form and in the colloquial develop- 
 ment of the personages, is not dramatic in its 
 build and foundation. It is not an unbroken
 
 FAUST. 219 
 
 evolution through events caused by collisions 
 between the participants, events intimately 
 chained together in necessary sequence by the 
 individualities of the agents. Faust is a lyrical 
 drama, and as such has a less compactly con- 
 secutive evolution. That it is so detracts not 
 an iota from its worth. Its worth is bound up 
 in that of its author's genius, which was by no 
 means exclusively, but was predominantly, 
 lyrical. Goethe, giving here freest play to all 
 his powers, lyric, epic, dramatic, produced one 
 of the masterpieces of literature, hardly second 
 to any other masterpiece. I put in hardly, be- 
 cause every time I look anew into Faust, its 
 deeps seem deeper, its beauties fresher, its va- 
 riety still infinite. In Shakespeare's master- 
 pieces, and only in them, there is a warmer 
 resplendence of diction, a more voluminous roll 
 of rhythm, a bolder and readier leap of thought 
 when in its finest fervors poetic imagination 
 makes metaphor its sudden steed. 
 
 Of dramatic capacity, Margaret herself is a 
 high exemplification. And Martha, too ; do we 
 not see her and know her as distinctly as any 
 one we daily meet in the flesh ? Her picture 
 is in those two lines of Mephisto after he has 
 told her, no doubt with his subtlest leer, that he 
 might, on conditions, himself exchange rings
 
 22O GOETHE. 
 
 with her, and she, no doubt with her best smile, 
 answers him, showing no reluctance. 
 
 MEPHISTO (aside). 
 
 u 'Tis high time now I stirred : 
 
 She's one would hold the Devil himself to his word." 
 
 The stains of Martha are not wholly from 
 within. The world she lives in did much to 
 dye them into her, and to deepen them. Under 
 better conditions she might not have been a 
 go-between, nor have driven her husband from 
 his home. Martha has much need of our 
 charity, and, rightly read, even she will help us 
 to know that the least stained of us need charity 
 too. 
 
 Those two garden scenes, how simple and 
 natural and how profound they are ! I pause in 
 the second one to give my readers the famous 
 passage which may be called one of Goethe's 
 confessions of faith. Margaret, very woman- 
 like, questions Faust as to his belief in God. 
 He answers : 
 
 " Who dares Him name, 
 And who proclaim, 
 I believe in Him ? 
 Who that may, 
 Feeling, say, 
 I believe in Him not ? 
 The all-infolder, 
 The all-upholder,
 
 FAUST. 221 
 
 Holds and upholds He not 
 
 Thee, me, Himself? 
 
 Arches not heaven there above ? 
 
 Lies not the earth here firm below ? 
 
 And mount not up eternal stars 
 
 Friendly twinkling over us ? 
 
 Behold I thee not eye to eye, 
 
 And is not all 
 
 Pouring through head and heart, 
 
 And weaving in eternal mystery 
 
 Invisibly visible around thee ? 
 
 Fill to its utmost scope therewith thy breast, 
 
 And when thou'rt wholly in the feeling blest, 
 
 Call it then what thou wilt 
 
 Call it bliss ! soul ! love ! God ! 
 
 I have no name for it ! 
 
 Feeling is all in all : 
 
 Name is but sound and smoke, 
 
 Curling round heaven's glow." 
 
 As supplement to this I translate from 
 Chancellor von Mueller's Conversations a pas- 
 sage which is a still fuller confession of faith. 
 On the twenty-ninth of April, 1818, the Chan- 
 cellor drove with Goethe out to Dornburg, near 
 Weimar, where, in presence of a lovely land- 
 scape, animated by the beauty of the sights and 
 odors of spring, Goethe was in one of his best 
 moods. Among other things said by him 
 Mueller reports the following : " The power to 
 ennoble the sensuous, and to give life to the 
 deadest material through marriage to the idea, 
 is the fairest guarantee of our supersensuous
 
 222 GOETHE. 
 
 origin. Man, much as the earth attracts him 
 with her thousands of phenomena, lifts his look 
 inquiringly and longingly to the heaven which 
 arches over him in immeasurable space, because 
 deep within himself he feels clearly that he is 
 a citizen of that spiritual kingdom, belief in 
 which we cannot set aside or give up. In this 
 forefeeling lies the secret of the incessant striv- 
 ing after an unknown end ; it is, as it were, the 
 lever of our searching and thinking, the tender 
 bond between poetry and reality." 
 
 The passage from one of the Garden Scenes 
 of Faust I have translated line for line and 
 word for word, clinging closely to the metre as 
 well as to the thought of the original. But the 
 feminine or double rhymes I have not sought 
 to preserve, except where they came easily. 
 Thus, in the very first lines, for the German 
 double rhymes, nennen and bekennen, I have 
 the single rhymes, name and proclaim. When 
 translating German verse, to insist on finding 
 in English a double rhyme to match in every 
 case the German double rhyme seems to me a 
 mistake, and a procedure which defeats its own 
 purpose. The first fidelity required of a trans- 
 lator is fidelity to the idiom and habits of his 
 own language. Now, in the matter of double 
 endings, the German and English languages
 
 FAUST. 223 
 
 are not only unlike but opposite. In German 
 nearly all infinitives of verbs as well as their 
 inflections, all plurals of nouns and adjectives, 
 besides many other words, have no accent on 
 the last syllable ; and thence double rhymes 
 are so abundant that the verse-writer cannot 
 avoid the very frequent use of them. Open a 
 miscellaneous collection of German poetry, and 
 you will find that one half the rhymes are 
 double. Sometimes in a whole poem of over a 
 hundred lines every line ends with a double 
 rhyme. In German this frequency of double 
 rhymes, being an unavoidable result of the 
 structure of the language, is natural to the ear, 
 used from childhood to the double ending of so 
 many words. Such verse is melodious and 
 fluent because it is in accord with the genius 
 of the German tongue. Not so in English, for 
 here double rhymes are not abundant ; and 
 thence in an English Anthology you have to 
 look sometimes through several pages to find a 
 single pair of double rhymes. They are not 
 organic in our tongue. Hence, when in trans- 
 lating from German you wish to keep pace with 
 the German abundance of double rhymes, you 
 have to strain hard at phrase or meaning, to 
 substitute roundabout for direct constructions, 
 even to quit the track of faithfulness to the
 
 224 GOETHE. 
 
 meaning, to sacrifice sense to sound. And 
 then, after all your labor and sacrifice, even 
 when you have succeeded in holding to the 
 sense, without additions or suppressions, you 
 have a page which sounds un-English, a page 
 through which there runs a debilitated tone. 
 Nay more, a long unbroken succession of double 
 rhymes, not being accordant with the structure 
 and habits of our English tongue, has an un- 
 healthy sound, and therefore does not render 
 faithfully the healthy German sound ; and so, 
 at last, after all your efforts, your bendings and 
 forcings, you fail of your main purpose. 
 
 Of all poets Goethe is the most direct in his 
 diction, the simplest in his words. He seldom 
 transposes words, he never overloads them or 
 with them. His style is so admirable because, 
 besides issuing out of a richly-endowed poetic 
 mind, it is the easy result of most intimate 
 union between what he has to say and the how 
 to say it. His thought clings closely to the 
 substance, whether that substance be in a sen- 
 timent, an object, a sensation, an idea ; and 
 his words are the immediate, transpicuous in- 
 terpreters of his thoughts. The translator of 
 Goethe, besides other qualifications, should have 
 his pen stored with the fullest vocabulary of 
 Anglo-Saxon English. If he runs much into
 
 FAUST. 22$ 
 
 Latin-English, whether for meanings or rhymes, 
 he runs away from his original, especially if 
 that original be Faust. 
 
 Another point may as well be mentioned. 
 Goethe is frequently irregular in the placing of 
 rhymes and in the length of lines. In this he 
 suited the wants or the flow of the thought. 
 He would be the first to allow the translator 
 the same liberty for the same motive, and would 
 not strictly require him to be irregular in all 
 cases just where the original is so. By this 
 freedom, as by the frequent rejection of double 
 rhymes, the translator gains in ease and natu- 
 ralness, and in essential fidelity. 
 
 I pass over two short scenes, each full of life 
 and significance, one at the fountain and one 
 before the shrine, to come to the first death, 
 after which the deep tragedy flows rapidly to 
 its end. Valentine, a soldier, the brother of 
 Gretchen, comes home to find the name of his 
 dear beautiful sister tossed about on the tongue 
 of scandal. Mephistopheles and Faust he sees 
 under Gretchen's window, where Mephisto sings 
 a song to a guitar. Valentine rushes forward, 
 smashes the guitar, and in the fight which 
 ensues is run through the body and slain, 
 reproaching poor Gretchen, who comes out 
 15
 
 226 GOETHE. 
 
 of the house, with her shame and his death. 
 Mephisto and Faust fly. 
 
 Now is the time, after seduction and blood- 
 shed, for the Walpurgisnight on the Brocken in 
 the Hartz Mountains, the Witches' Festival. 
 For what does this caldron of bestiality and 
 extravagance, of juiceless fun and gloomy in- 
 sights, of the grim and the grotesque, stand for, 
 except the dregs which lie at the bottom of the 
 human heart, and now and then blow them- 
 selves up into momentary bubbles, the foul 
 imaginations of Hamlet, the black, jointless 
 fancies that will haunt us, like waking night- 
 mares ? Roots in the mind this ghastly phan- 
 tasmagoria has, or it could not grow into a 
 popular legend to be hung by a great poet upon 
 the Brocken. 
 
 Faust is momentarily busied into forgetful- 
 ness ; but at the end of the diabolic spectacle 
 how tragically imaginative is the glimpse of the 
 spectre of Gretchen with a thin red ribbon 
 around her neck ! 
 
 Gretchen (Margaret), as poetic creation, that 
 is, an invented personage combining fidelity 
 to every-day truth with features heightened 
 through genial transfiguration, combining vital 
 individuality with generic breadth, is not below 
 any woman in Shakespeare : not second to
 
 FAUST. 
 
 227 
 
 Juliet, or Imogen, or Ophelia. By her intense 
 feminine loveliness she holds all hearts, and so 
 deeply does she throb with humanity, that we 
 love her not for her beauty and tenderness only, 
 or her sufferings, but, through our fellow-feeling, 
 for her very crime. This is the test of Goethe's 
 Art, whose roots are in the depths of his 
 own deep being, that by the fearful deed of 
 infanticide the whole previous structure is not 
 shattered. It receives a drapery of mourning, 
 and instead of repelling the sympathetic reader, 
 draws from him only warmer tears. 
 
 In the last transcendent scene, Gretchen, in 
 prison the day before her execution, half blind 
 with the soul's terrible darkness, does not 
 know Faust, who comes to rescue her : she is 
 busied, not about herself, but about her brother, 
 her mother, her child, all of whom have come 
 to their death through her. Her awful half- 
 madness, how sublime it is, the night in her 
 soul illuminated with an auroral streaming, her 
 terrible words fitted by clear intelligence, 
 whereby after a few moments she knows Faust, 
 and knows herself with fearful vividness ! She 
 heeds not Faust's urgent prayer to fly with 
 him. At last he cries : 
 
 " Dearest ! dearest ! the day is waking.
 
 228 GOETHE. 
 
 MARGARET. 
 
 Day ! Yes, it is come ! The last day is breaking ; 
 
 My wedding it was to have seen ! 
 
 Tell no one thou'st already with Gretchen been. 
 
 Alas for my crants ! 
 
 Well, so let it be ! 
 
 We again each other shall see ; 
 
 But not at the dance. 
 
 The crowd is pressing, so silent all. 
 
 The square, the street, 
 
 Hold not their feet. 
 
 The wand is snapt, hear the bell's call ! 
 
 Hand on me now they've laid ! 
 
 To the block already I'm lashed. 
 
 At my neck flashes the blade 
 
 That at others so often has flashed. 
 
 Dumb lies the world as the grave ! 
 
 FAUST. 
 O ! Had I never been born ! 
 
 MEPHISTOPHELES. 
 
 Up ! already 'tis morn, 
 
 This talking, and staying delaying 1 
 
 My horses are neighing. 
 
 Come, come ! or you're lost. 
 
 MARGARET. 
 
 What rises there so like a ghost ? 
 He ! He ! send him away : 
 What seeks he on this sacred day ? 
 He seeks me. 
 
 FAUST. 
 Thou shalt live.
 
 FAUST. 229 
 
 MARGARET. 
 Judgment of God ! Myself to thee I give ! 
 
 MEPHISTOPHELES. 
 Come, come ! or I leave you with her in the lurch. 
 
 MARGARET. 
 
 Thine am I, Father ! Save me ! 
 Ye Angels ! Ye holy ones, guard me, 
 Camp ye around here to ward me. 
 Henry ! I shudder for thee ! 
 
 MEPHISTO. 
 She is judged. 
 
 VOICE, from above. 
 Is saved ! 
 
 Mephistopheles, representing the animal pas- 
 sions and greeds, unpurified by the emotions 
 and having the understanding at their call, 
 how .ready he is to condemn, to pass sentence, 
 to punish ; while from the upper region of 
 Love comes the voice, " She is saved." 
 MEPHISTOPHELES to FAUST. 
 Here to me ! 
 Vanishes with FAUST. 
 VOICE from within, dying away. 
 Henry ! Henry ! 
 
 And the curtain falls on a scene unsurpassed, 
 among the everlasting splendors of Poetry, for
 
 230 GOETHE. 
 
 truth and pathos, and simple beauty, and aes- 
 thetic fineness. 
 
 Margaret is saved, and Faust, now carried 
 off by Mephisto, he too is to be saved. And 
 so we come to the Second Part of Faust. 
 
 Faust is to be saved through activity, through 
 a high activity, and finally a disinterested ac- 
 tivity. This busy career carries Faust along 
 all the broad highways of life, the political, the 
 aesthetic, the scientific, Art, Nature, History. 
 What Goethe had witnessed, participated in, 
 practiced, mastered, meditated on for sixty 
 years, here is the stage (a far broader stage 
 than in the First Part) to present it all, com- 
 pressed, and moulded into poetic forms. 
 
 The Second Part of Faust is at bottom a 
 commentary on life, civilized life, in its divers 
 phases, its multifarious aspects, shapes, expres- 
 sions, conformations, and a commentary by one 
 who had lived in and through more of these 
 phases and forms, and more thoroughly, than 
 any other man of his time or of any time ; and 
 he at once a practical worker and a ceaseless 
 thinker, and, to crown all, a sovereign poet. 
 
 Faust and Mephistopheles are the pegs on 
 which to hang this commentary. We of course 
 wish to know how Faust is saved, but it is 
 more for the sake of learning Goethe's philoso-
 
 FAUST. 231 
 
 phy of life than from interest in Faust. In- 
 deed, Faust loses what little individuality he 
 had, and he and Mephisto, who is still occa- 
 sionally sparkling, are both become mere 
 mouthpieces, mouthpieces, to be sure, with 
 musical voices of a precious quality. 
 
 I shall give a rapid sketch of the unfolding 
 of the several acts, if unfolding can be said of 
 parts between which there is no necessary con- 
 nection, except as each one is an arena, and 
 that but partially, for the activity of Faust him- 
 self. The sketch will be rapid because the 
 first and great part has already taken up more 
 space than was apportioned to the two. 
 
 The first scene opens with Faust lying rest- 
 less, weary, on a flowery turf at twilight, at- 
 tended by Ariel and Fairies. Ariel sings him 
 to sleep, and so steeps him in Nature's balsams 
 as to take away even the stings of remorse. 
 Faust awakes refreshed, renewed. 
 
 Then we are transported to the Imperial 
 Court, the Emperor on his throne surrounded 
 by his Ministers and courtiers, with the As- 
 trologer on his right hand. But the Emperor 
 misses and asks for the Fool, whose place is on 
 the other side of him. The Fool is reported to 
 have just fallen- down drunk. At that moment 
 Mephisto appears, and through a most polished
 
 232 GOETHE. 
 
 and successful impudence, as is the way with 
 gentlemen of his stamp, gets possession of the 
 Fool's place. Then we have successively from 
 the Ministers picture on picture of the universal 
 dilapidation and impoverishment and of the 
 woful mismanagement of public affairs. Weak- 
 ness and emptiness are everywhere. Even the 
 Emperor's cellar is exhausted. This of course 
 is just the element for Mephisto, who cannot 
 refrain from putting in a word, having as little 
 modesty as any other political adventurer. But, 
 through that coincidence there is between 
 merely worldly and prudential sagacity and the 
 higher spiritual wisdom, Mephisto says wise 
 things. He prompts the Astrologer to utter 
 this among other sound precepts : 
 
 " Who good would have, must first be good : 
 Who joy would have, must cool his heated blood." 
 
 And, after telling them out of his own mouth 
 how in their distress money is to be gotten, he 
 concludes : 
 
 " And ask you who shall bring this gold to light : 
 A man gifted with mind and Nature's might." 
 
 Whereupon the Chancellor exclaims : 
 
 " Nature and Mind ! To Christians this should not be said. 
 Thence has the ban on Atheists been laid, 
 Because great danger is in speech like that. 
 Nature is sin, Mind is the Devil's self:
 
 FAUST. 233 
 
 They nurse between them Doubt, the Elf, 
 Their misbegotten, mongrel brat." 
 
 Goethe, even in his comparatively advanced 
 day, felt the blight of the blasphemous theolog- 
 ical teaching, that " Nature is sin, Mind the 
 Devil's self." Nay, do we not still feel it sorely, 
 even in this, the freest country on the globe ? 
 Are not the free in thought and inquiry and 
 speech, earnest seekers in Nature's inexhausti- 
 ble, beautiful domains, still liable to be branded 
 as Infidels and Atheists by formal Christians, 
 by pharisaical Christians, by pew-paying Chris- 
 tians, by all pseudo-Christians, whose name is 
 many Legions ? The belief that Nature is sin 
 and the free use of mind dangerous, is by no 
 means shut up in the Middle and darker Ages. 
 
 Nature, what is Nature ? All that is, from 
 the clod under your foot, to the furthest star 
 over your head, from the commonest impulse 
 of the heart to the finest aspiration of the soul. 
 All phenomena, mental and physical, psychical 
 and sensible, spiritual and corporal, are em- 
 braced in Nature, are all manifestations of the 
 Supreme Mind ; and we who, with our marvel- 
 ous faculties, are the highest manifestation of 
 the Supreme Mind that we can know of, we are 
 endowed with power to observe and decipher 
 these phenomena, with power to learn the laws
 
 234 GOETHE. 
 
 which govern them, laws spiritual as well as 
 physical, moral laws as well as intellectual, and, 
 through the discovery of law, with power to 
 learn the will of God. And the sure, true way 
 is this, to learn that will ; for the tribunal is ever 
 open to all, and witnesses are always waiting to 
 be called, and have in them nothing but the 
 truth. Some of the old Stoics were shrewd, 
 when in their philosophical classification they 
 put the study of the nature of things and the 
 study of the nature of Deity into one and the 
 same division ; and that was a fine insight of 
 Epictetus, when he said that, besides the power 
 of seeing things as they are, a grateful disposi- 
 tion is needed to understand Providence. 
 
 Men, or, I should say, some of the clearer, 
 manlier thinkers among men, are beginning to 
 be aware that Law, that is, the will of God, is 
 discoverable in the spiritual and moral region 
 as it has been and is discovered in the physical, 
 and by the same means, by the observation and 
 collation of phenomena, in a truth-loving spirit. 
 That the domain is deeper, subtler, gives it 
 only a higher claim to the best method. What 
 resistance was made in times past to discoveries 
 in the physical domain, and are still made, we 
 all know. Read the ridicule thrown on Morse, 
 in Congress, for his telegraph. Still stronger
 
 FAUST. 235 
 
 will be the resistance in the moral and spiritual 
 domain ; for here rooted beliefs in theological 
 inventions which teach that " Nature is sin," 
 and the vested interests of Priesthoods are to 
 be overcome. But those who believe cordially 
 (not with a mere notional belief) in God and 
 good, must believe that in the end truth will 
 triumph over the most stubborn resistance. 
 Forty years ago who could have dreamed that 
 the feat of Ariel, of putting a girdle round the 
 globe in forty minutes would be surpassed by 
 human science ? Enlightened men, men en- 
 lightened through purest religious sensibilities 
 steadied by reason, are now girdling Heaven, 
 binding Heaven to the Earth ; and in less than 
 forty years, effects will be wrought by this bind- 
 ing to which those of the terrestrial telegraph 
 will be fleeting and superficial. Let us return 
 to Faust, who, as one of the inventors of the 
 mighty Art of Printing, will not have been im- 
 patient at the interruption. 
 
 The Imperial German Court of the Middle 
 Ages is but nominally the scene of the first 
 Act. The reality is taken from France at the 
 end of the reign (reign over rottenness) of Louis 
 XV., of which, together with that of Louis XVI. 
 and the French Revolution, Goethe was born 
 in time to be an adult witness.
 
 236 GOETHE. 
 
 Mephisto not only amuses the king and 
 court, he lifts them out of their starving dis- 
 tress, by inventing paper-money. A fine satiric 
 lunge is that, to make the Devil the inventor 
 of paper-money. The Emperor, emboldened 
 by the display of Mephisto's resources, demands 
 of him a sight of Helen and Paris. This de- 
 mand Faust warmly abets. Helen is made to 
 represent the Beautiful, through which in part 
 is to be wrought the salvation of Faust. Then 
 comes the " Classical Walpurgis Night " which 
 is a species of graduation, relatively to beauty, 
 of the minor figures of the Greek mythology, 
 through whom and their fantastic movements 
 and speech Faust has to pass to reach the high- 
 est antique beauty, represented by Helen. The 
 interlude of Helen takes up the third Act. It 
 was part of the legend that Faust was married 
 to Helen. Of this Goethe avails himself to 
 symbolize by this marriage the' union of an- 
 cient and modern thought, representing modern 
 Poetry by Euphorion, who is the offspring of 
 the union. 
 
 At the opening of Act IV. we are glad to 
 have Mephisto himself again. In the second 
 and third Acts he had been obliged, much 
 against the grain, to accommodate him to clas- 
 sical forms. In the third he appeared as Phor-
 
 FAUST. 237 
 
 kias, who is a kind of antique she-Mephisto, a 
 rebel against the good and the beautiful. Faust 
 and he come to the aid of the Emperor, who, 
 by misgovernment and shallow selfishness, has 
 caused a civil war. They enable him to over- 
 come the hostile faction, and to Faust, in re- 
 ward of his services, he gives a domain on the 
 sea-shore, where Faust finds scope for a be- 
 neficent activity in dyking out the ocean, thus 
 adding a vast area of land for the comfortable 
 habitation and support of men. 
 
 In the bargain with Mephisto at the begin- 
 ning of the First Part, Faust bound himself 
 that (I here borrow from the translation of 
 Mr. Brooks) 
 
 " Whenever to the passing hour 
 I cry : O stay ! thou art so fair ! 
 To chain me down, I give thee power, 
 To the black bottom of despair." 
 
 And now, in his old age, thinking of the good 
 and durable work he has done, he feels such 
 contentment that he does exclaim to the mo- 
 ment, " O stay ! thou art so fair ! " And so, 
 having forfeited the bond, he sinks down, and 
 dies. And now ensues a contest between 
 Mephisto and his devils with descended angels 
 for his soul, in which contest the angels tri- 
 umph, and carry Faust up to meet Margaret 
 who awaits him, herself a blessed spirit.
 
 238 GOETHE. 
 
 The Second Part of Faust is to the First 
 what the reflex of a rainbow is to the primi- 
 tive, grand, beautiful phenomenon. It has the 
 same colors, and the same arch hung between 
 earth and heaven, but it is comparatively pale 
 and indistinct, having only a reflected, not a 
 primary life. Feeling being the matrix in 
 which and out of which poetry is moulded, it 
 becomes a law of aesthetics that feeling must, 
 in poetry, generate the thought, not thought 
 the feeling. Feeling is the soft, deep moisture, 
 acting upon which genius makes the rainbow 
 spring. Out of a dry atmosphere the most 
 potent sun can evoke no bow in the heavens ; 
 nor with the juiceless materials of the intellect 
 can the greatest poet produce thorough poetry. 
 Some admixture of feeling there must be ; and 
 in the most effective poetry feeling is para- 
 mount. In the Second Part of Faust the in- 
 tellect tries to be the poetic creator, instead of 
 being the cooperative agent. In all symbol- 
 ism the intellect is primary and sovereign, and 
 mimics poetic production. In the Second Part 
 of Faust symbolic personages represent ideas 
 and purposes, ideas and purposes political, ar- 
 tistic, scientific, and through them the attempt 
 is made to give the life and discipline of Faust. 
 Suppose that Faust had been subjected to
 
 FAUST. 239 
 
 earthly, flesh-and-blood struggles with fellow- 
 workers, competitors in the pursuit and prac- 
 tice of Art, Science, Politics, and that groups 
 in life-like complications had been drawn, with 
 various characterization, such as Goethe the 
 Poet, and the genial worker in all these prov- 
 inces, had at command, an apprenticeship 
 like that Wilhelm Mejster went through, only 
 Faust's would be deeper and on a more poetic 
 plane : then we should have had vivid, passion- 
 stirred pictures and personages, instead of the 
 spectral forms which now provoke our curios- 
 ity without awakening our sympathy. As it 
 is, Faust himself is become a shadow among 
 shadows. 
 
 In the First Faust the principal personages 
 and scenes are passionately real and present ; 
 in the Second they are intellectually real, and 
 therefore not so present. In the First the per- 
 sonages represent theniselves ; in the Second 
 they represent something else. They are not 
 beings pulsating with their own hearts' beat, 
 but abstractions, symbols ; and thence, not 
 having primitive passions and affections, we 
 cannot lay hold of them with our passions and 
 affections. 
 
 This taking up the Greek mythology for pro- 
 longed, minute manipulation, is second hand
 
 240 GOETHE. 
 
 work, intellectually curious ; clothing the fig- 
 ures with symbolical drapery is ingenious ; the 
 whole procedure exhibits a vast amount of 
 knowledge, great mastery of the resources and 
 machinery of Art, and little inspiration. The 
 attention is fixed on what the figures mean, not 
 on themselves. This is wearisome. One re- 
 move from prose through poetic exaltation and 
 transfiguration is enough, as much as the read- 
 er's mind can follow and keep its poise ; and 
 when to this is added allegory and symbolism, 
 the poetry evaporates in the allegory, and the 
 substance in the two. In the Second Part of 
 Faust one is irritated with an unending intel- 
 lectual hunt the slipper. The shell is often 
 glancing with light, but the kernel, when found, 
 hardly pays the search. The personages are 
 reflex, remote, mostly thin, and even cold. 
 When Goethe spins threads out of his brain 
 (and only Shakespeare has spun more and 
 stronger ones) we seize them with joy and fol- 
 low them to the end, sure of a prize ; but the 
 seizing, if one can seize them, of filaments 
 fine as gossamer, brings no adequate reward. 
 
 Except in relation to ancient Greek mind 
 and activity, Grecian mythology is dead. Into 
 modern relations and literature it cannot be 
 brought and preserve its animation, and who-
 
 FAUST. 241 
 
 ever attempts so to bring it and work it falls 
 into commonplace, - ancient commonplace. 
 Goethe was right to call Helen, when first pub- 
 lished separately, a Phantasmagoria. Of the 
 Second Part Helen is the best, except the last 
 scenes, after the bodily death of Faust ; and 
 Helen is dream-like, phantasmal, because she 
 is not brought forward on her own account, but 
 is used as a representative, a symbol. To tell 
 one's dreams is forbidden in good company. 
 On paper, whether in verse or prose, dreams, 
 even of kings and heroes, are, to speak plainly, 
 a bore. A great poet cannot animate them, 
 unless, like that of Clarence in Richard III. the 
 dream be short, deep, and portentous. Like 
 most of the Second Part Helen is unreal, faint 
 as the shadow of a candle-flame thrown on the 
 wall by another candle. 
 
 With such a plan, the whole is unavoidably 
 overlaid with detail, not detail of fact, but of 
 conception, and therefore hard to grasp and still 
 harder to clasp. The figures are graceful, pol- 
 ished automata, and therefore without succu- 
 lence. Then one is ever importuned by riddles 
 which, when guessed, lack significance. 
 
 As to symbols, there is only one kind com- 
 mendable, namely, material symbols ; an eagle, 
 a shield, a trident, a thunderbolt, a flag. Putting 
 16
 
 242 GOETHE. 
 
 a symbol into words dissolves it : one is tanta- 
 lized as by a vanishing vision. It is like wading 
 through a morass for flowers, which often sink 
 out of sight as you reach forth to pluck them, 
 carried down by your very approach. 
 
 Is this judgment on the Second Part of 
 Faust unjust and untenable ? Possibly it is. 
 But to back it I summon Mephistopheles. In 
 the height of the joy of Faust and Helen, at 
 the very crisis in the production of the new 
 spirit, Mephisto addresses wise words to the 
 ancient Chorus. From a cave is heard a fresh, 
 deeply melodious music, the breath of mod- 
 ern poetry, to which all listen with emotion. 
 Then Mephisto exclaims : 
 
 " Listen to the charming song, 
 Quickly from you Fables cast ; 
 All your Gods, the musty throng, 
 Let them go, for they are past. 
 
 " Henceforth no one you will know, 
 We demand a higher spell ; 
 From the heart must freshly flow 
 What upon the heart would tell."
 
 VII. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 IF through the foregoing chapters, fragment- 
 ary as they are, some readers shall have a fuller 
 -and livelier image than they previously had of 
 Goethe as man and poet, as worker and thinker, 
 my grateful task will be well-nigh accomplished. 
 There only remains that, to get a survey of his 
 life as a whole, I bind into a succinct epitome 
 the successive epochs of his fruitful career. In 
 doing this there will, too, be opportunities for 
 supplying additional traits or facts in illustra- 
 tion of this or that side of the manysided man. 
 
 Entering life in 1749, and living until 1832 
 in the active enjoyment of his high faculties, 
 his large, clear mind mirrored in great measure 
 the agitations and aspirations of the most con- 
 vulsive, upclimbing, electrical half century that 
 History had yet recorded. In 1755 the earth- 
 quake at Lisbon, with its volcanic, instantane- 
 ous ingulfing of sixty thousand lives, stirred his 
 thought to interrogations which, in a child of 
 six years, were as strange as they were far-
 
 244 \ GOETHE. 
 
 reaching, A little later, during the war waged 
 so brilliantly by Frederick the Great against 
 France, Austria, and Russia, all banded against 
 him, a French army was quartered upon Frank- 
 fort ; and the boy was obliged to hear his hero, 
 Fritz, vilified every Sunday, when he dined at 
 his grandfather's table. "As in my sixth year," 
 he writes in the Autobiography, " the earth- 
 quake at Lisbon had brought the goodness of 
 God into suspicion, so I began now to doubt 
 the justice of the public towards Frederick II. 
 My mind was naturally inclined to reverence, 
 and there needed a great shock to shake my 
 faith in anything that is venerable." In his 
 youth and first manhood, brilliant intellects 
 were throwing off startling sparks from that 
 general mental ferment which precedes revo- 
 lutionary purifications. While a student at 
 Strasbourg he saw, as she first touched French 
 territory, the lovely Marie Antoinette, then only 
 fifteen, smiling and happy, and playful like the 
 child that she was, going, wreathed with flowers 
 and a diadem, to be an illustrious victim in the 
 terrible and sublime sacrifice made to humanity 
 by the French Revolution. In the early man- 
 hood of Goethe Washington rose to eminence, 
 and passed from the earth, crowned with his 
 unique glory, ere Goethe had passed out of his
 
 CONCLUSION. 245 
 
 middle age. He saw the rise and fall of the 
 giant Napoleon, who, in his monstrous half- 
 ness, did his utmost to " circumvent God." 
 Goethe did not clearly see the ugly side of this 
 halfness, overestimating and overadmiring the 
 ruthless Corsican despot ; and thence, not fully 
 sympathizing with or appreciating the moral 
 power latent in the masses of a great people, 
 at the breaking out of the German war of lib- 
 eration in 1813, he was not hopeful. With the 
 French Revolution in 1830, which expelled for- 
 ever the elder Bourbons, he had little sympathy. 
 When the news of it reached Weimar, and was 
 in everybody's mind and mouth, Goethe, then 
 in his eighty-first year, gave it but a transient 
 heed, so absorbed was he by a scientific revo- 
 lution going on in Paris at the same time, 
 whereby, he declared, that " thenceforth in the 
 scientific investigations of the French the syn- 
 thetic mode of looking at Nature will prevail, 
 and mind rule over matter." 
 
 Goethe's childhood was a beautiful bud, 
 whose peeping petals gave hardly a hint, even 
 to the most loving and partial, of the perfume 
 and fruit and powerful seed that lay de.eply en- 
 folded within them. And yet, his childhood 
 was brilliant and precocious. Most happy was 
 he in his parents, in the substantiality of their
 
 246 GOETHE. 
 
 characters and intellects, and in the contrasts 
 between them, these rich contrasts being in 
 their son melted into harmonious wholeness by 
 the divine fire which gives to poetic genius its 
 vivid individuality. His father was a devotee 
 to knowledge ; by study and travel he had 
 cultivated himself with zeal to the utmost of his 
 capacity ; a man curt and laconic, very method- 
 ical, and ruled, somewhat too stiffly at times, 
 by strict principle. Goethe's mother was one 
 of the most genial of women, fine-tempered, 
 sportful, witty, practical. She was the loving, 
 watchful, pliable protectress of the children 
 against the straight discipline or occasional 
 harshness of the father. 
 
 Never was there more hungry learner than 
 Goethe. From infancy to octogenarian age, 
 he was a daily, eager, painstaking gatherer of 
 knowledge. To second this early curiosity and 
 zeal, close at hand were his father's acquire- 
 ments and lively appreciation of scholarship. 
 The gift of story-telling Goethe inherited from 
 his mother. In his youngest years she culti- 
 vated the gift by her sprightly, fanciful inven- 
 tions, to which the delighted child listened with 
 his big eyes as well as his ears. He was 
 healthily precocious, and at eight could write 
 in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German.
 
 CONCLUSION. 247 
 
 At the earliest date he was equally peculiar in 
 his feelings and ways. When but three or four 
 he could hardly be brought to play with other 
 children of the same age, unless they were 
 pretty. One day at a neighbor's an ugly child 
 so affected him that he began to cry, exclaim- 
 ing : " Take away that black child, I can't bear 
 him." He would not be pacified, and had to be 
 carried home. He began early to write, and 
 when his little brother Jacob died, showed a 
 quantity of papers on which in his ninth year 
 he had written stories and lessons intended for 
 Jacob. The most extraordinary instance of 
 premature thought ever recorded was his com- 
 ment on a sermon about the Lisbon earth- 
 quake, so extraordinary, that one finds it 
 almost incredible. The preacher had attempted 
 to exhibit, by this catastrophe, the goodness of 
 God. Wolfgang's father asked him (he was not 
 yet seven) what he thought of the sermon. 
 " It may, after all," he answered, " be a much 
 simpler matter than the clergyman thinks : 
 God knows very well that an immortal soul can 
 receive no injury from a mortal accident." 
 
 Goethe was taught at home. In this, too, he 
 was happy. Except for a short period, during 
 the French occupation of the house, he had no 
 experience of schools, and that experience gave
 
 248 GOETHE. 
 
 him a hatred of them. The schools of Frank- 
 fort were then coarse and imperfect. But even 
 were schools more healthily organized and more 
 humanely conducted than they are yet any- 
 where, a boy who- is sensitive, genial, highly 
 gifted, is better out of them until he gets into 
 his teens. 
 
 When thirteen Goethe added English to his 
 list of languages, and studied Hebrew. This 
 led him into the Jews' quarter, where he looked 
 inquisitively into their habits and customs. 
 Studios of painters he already had begun to 
 visit, and he was fond of frequenting the work- 
 shops of artisans, and of learning something of 
 their crafts. Before he was fifteen he got 
 admitted behind the scenes of the theatre, and 
 into the green room. With open eyes and 
 open heart the glowing boy was an observer 
 and student of men. As he advanced in years 
 his studies expanded. When he got to be fif- 
 teen he had reached Morhof's Polyhistor (a 
 book to which Dr. Johnson acknowledged pro- 
 found obligations), Gessners Isagoge, and Bayles 
 Dictionary. His feelings, too, gave signs of the 
 coming man : he fell in love with Gretchen. 
 
 As child, as boy, as youth, as man, Goethe 
 was the object of love and favor with men, 
 women, and children* He was himself full of
 
 CONCLUSION. 249 
 
 love and sympathy, and full of truthfulness. 
 People of all ages and conditions made him a 
 confidant. Of life in its countless phases, no 
 one ever saw so much so intimately as he did, 
 beginning so young. In the Autobiography is 
 the following remarkable passage as to the 
 tragic depths of his experience before he was 
 seventeen : " Through my adventure with 
 Gretchen and its consequences, I had early a 
 glimpse of the strange labyrinths by which in 
 cities society is undermined. Religion, morals, 
 law, rank, connections, custom, all rule only the 
 surface of city existence. The streets, bordered 
 by splendid houses, are kept neat, and every 
 one conducts himself when abroad properly 
 enough ; but in-doors, it often seems only so 
 much the more disordered, and a smooth ex- 
 terior, like a thin coat of mortar, plasters over 
 many a mouldered wall that tumbles in the 
 night, the effect of whose crash is the more 
 frightful that it comes in the midst of a state 
 of repose. How many families had I not 
 already seen, either overwhelmed in ruin or 
 hanging on the brink of ruin, by bankruptcies, 
 divorces, seductions, murders, robberies, poison- 
 ings ; and, young as I was, I had often lent a 
 helping hand. For as my frankness awakened 
 confidence, and my discretion was known, and
 
 250 GOETHE. 
 
 as my activity shunned no sacrifice, and even 
 preferred the more dangerous occasions, I had 
 many opportunities to mediate, to hush up 
 matters, to divert the lightning-flash, and do 
 what could be done. Whereby it could not but 
 be that, as well in my own person as through 
 others, I came to the knowledge of many afflict- 
 ing and humbling facts. As a relief to me I 
 planned many plays, and sketched the most of 
 them. But as the plots were full of troubles, 
 and almost all of these pieces threatened to end 
 tragically, I let them drop one after another." 
 
 These deep and sacred confidences, made to 
 one so young in years, came to him through 
 the attractions of his character. He inspired 
 love and trust. He had in him so much of the 
 soul of humanity, that any afflicted member of 
 it who came in contact with him felt his broth- 
 erhood. This, his warmly plenteous endow- 
 ment, gave mellowness and close texture to his 
 thoughts and truthfulness to his poetic embod- 
 iments. 
 
 Goethe's father had long made up his mind 
 that when his son should be ready for a Uni- 
 versity he should go to Leipzig. He had been 
 to Leipzig himself. As the time approached, 
 the son preferred Goettingen. Heyne was 
 there, and Michaelis, and other Professors at
 
 CONCLUSION. 251 
 
 whose feet he wished to sit. For his intellect- 
 ual longings were all towards literature. But 
 the father was not to be moved, neither by the 
 wishes of his son nor the representations of 
 friends. The obstinacy which thus thwarted 
 the secret desires of the son confirmed him in 
 those desires. He inwardly resolved to rebel 
 against Law, and to set up Literature in its 
 place. . He had an instinct of his vocation. 
 Goethe was seventeen when he went to Leip- 
 zig, an early age for the freedom of a Ger- 
 man University. At Leipzig he belonged 
 nominally to the Law Faculty, but virtually he 
 was a student in the Faculty of human nature, 
 learning, for the most part unconsciously, from 
 men, women, children, social gatherings, fellow- 
 students, his chief lecture-rooms being the 
 streets, the theatre, and the haunts of lively 
 Leipzig. 
 
 We have seen that in after years the one 
 grateful back look that he gave to the Profes- 
 sors of Leipzig was to Oeser. He at once ap- 
 preciated Oeser's teaching, for early in 1770, 
 just after he had quitted Leipzig, and before he 
 went to Strasbourg, in a letter to the bookseller 
 Reich he expressed in clear language his 
 thankfulness to Oeser for having started him 
 on the right track in regard to the Beautiful.
 
 252 GOETHE. 
 
 With his fine susceptibilities, behind a keen in- 
 tellect, which they perpetually stimulated, he 
 would have found this track for himself. But 
 it is the main use of teachers, whether indi- 
 vidual instructors or the lights diffused through 
 an age, that they give each generation a 
 start from the elevation to which culture has 
 reached as each comes on the stage. 
 
 In pursuit of Law Goethe's father, who had 
 a maggot of jurisprudence in his head, sent his 
 son, when he was twenty, to another Univer- 
 sity. He himself had been at two. At Stras- 
 bourg Goethe continued on a more manly scale 
 his studies of humanity, and gave time enough 
 to his father's favorite Faculty to get a degree 
 as Doctor of Law. More valuable to us than 
 his thesis on that occasion is a discourse he de- 
 livered on Shakespeare to a Shakespeare Soci- 
 ety, a remarkable discourse from a young man 
 of twenty-one, showing how strongly he already 
 felt the power and beauty of the greatest of 
 Poets. 
 
 From the fullness and readiness of his pow- 
 ers, Goethe was enabled to gratify his father 
 while yielding to the stream of his own mental 
 predilections. At the same time that his best 
 thoughts were given to studies higher than 
 jurisprudence, he had no difficulty in achieving
 
 CONCLUSION. 253 
 
 the degree of Doctor of Law. The man of 
 poetic mind leads two lives : the one interior, 
 within his conceptions and poetic imaginings, 
 the other exterior, the life of daily prosaic ne- 
 cessities. By the calls from the lower he often 
 feels interrupted in his higher life, even when 
 he can do practical work and duties better than 
 most men. Into poems he can put more of the 
 best of him than into tangible week-day do- 
 ings. Shakespeare, the efficient director of a 
 theatre, as there is reason for believing that he 
 was, and a successful manipulator of money, 
 was probably often fretted at being drawn away 
 from the everlasting Hamlets and Desdemonas 
 he was winding out of the inward rapture of 
 his mighty brain, to look after the costume or 
 elocution of the very temporary Hamlet or 
 Desdemona who was to appear in the evening 
 on the boards of the Globe Theatre. 
 
 In minds of this high quality there are, 
 moreover, resources that come not to the sur- 
 face even in their best work. Goethe speaks 
 openly, bares many secrets of the heart ; but 
 in a deep, busy brain like his there are undi- 
 vulged movements of which men of less pro- 
 found consciousness have no inkling. While 
 he revealed more than most men, he also with- 
 held more. In the recesses of such minds are
 
 254 GOETHE. 
 
 subtleties and flames that never come directly 
 to view, but are kept for inward illumination 
 and refinement. 
 
 To please his father, Goethe, Doctor of Law, 
 went from Strasbourg to Wetzlar, the then seat 
 of the highest Law-Court of Germany. To 
 please himself, he translated, while there, Gold- 
 smith, and wrote songs, and wrought into his 
 heart the tragedy of Werther, which, in a year 
 or two was to burst upon the world and sud- 
 denly conquer for him a European renown. 
 
 At this period Goethe made acquaintance 
 with Lavater and Jacobi, two men noted in 
 their day, whose work has hardly survived to 
 ours. With both he opened a correspondence, 
 which continued for ten years with Lavater, and 
 many more with Jacobi. But Goethe so rap- 
 idly outgrew them both that the friendship 
 with them cooled. A more important friend, 
 through intimate intercourse and his influence 
 on Goethe at this time, was Merk, a superior 
 man, somewhat negative in nature, but finely 
 critical, who early seized the character and im- 
 port of Goethe's genius. Herder, the Duke of 
 Weimar, Wieland, all valued Merk highly and 
 corresponded with him. Wieland once de- 
 clared : " Should it ever come to such a pass 
 with me as no longer to be able to love, . I
 
 CONCLUSION. 255 
 
 should nevertheless still love Goethe and 
 Merk." 
 
 With inward consciousness of power and 
 genius, strengthened by the fame, which 
 streamed upon him in torrents after the publi- 
 cation of Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther, 
 with mind aglow through animal and intellect- 
 ual exuberance of life, overflowing with hopes, 
 projects, wants, aspirations, radiant with per- 
 sonal beauty, Goethe at twenty-five presents a 
 grand, almost ideal image of youthful man- 
 hood. 
 
 Doering, one of his German biographers, 
 concludes the opening paragraph of his volume 
 with this sentence : " The man who is to be 
 depicted in the following work was by the 
 happy concurrence of accidental circumstances 
 early upraised to be not only one of the most 
 renowned poets, but also to the high, brilliant 
 position in life which he maintained for more 
 than a half century." A grosser biographical 
 blunder was never committed. The commis- 
 sion of it just there is the more remarkable 
 from the soundness of the immediately preced- 
 ing sentence : " All that we admire in a man 
 rests partly on his inborn capacities, partly on 
 outward influences." Of course ; and had 
 Goethe been the son of a Cadi in Adrianople,
 
 256 GOETHE. 
 
 he surely never would have been the Goethe 
 we now have, and possibly never would have 
 been known beyond the walls of Adrianople. 
 Nay, had he been born in Moscow or Madrid, 
 he doubtless would have been a very different 
 man from the German poet and thinker of that 
 name, and would probably have fallen much 
 short of his attained altitude. You must have 
 soil, and rich soil, for the largest oaks to thrive 
 in. The gifts of a Goethe need an atmosphere 
 and auxiliary adjacencies in order that they 
 have room to expand. He must have oppor- 
 tunities, but these don't make him ; he enriches 
 them. To another they would not be oppor- 
 tunities. Everything depends on the life and 
 force within. A Goethe, with his inward life 
 and force, cannot be the mere creature of cir- 
 cumstances ; he is their creator. And were 
 there not such creators of circumstances, civil- 
 ization would stagnate, and then retrograde. 
 Nay, without them, humanity would not rise 
 above savagery, could not go forward and 
 upward. 
 
 Werther could not have been written except 
 in Germany in the latter half of the eighteenth 
 century. But who could then and there have 
 written it except Goethe ? Who but he could 
 have concentrated the lurid heats of the period
 
 CONCLUSION. 257 
 
 into the focus of such an intensifying, trans- 
 figuring genius ? Another than he might have 
 had his head turned by the fame Werther and 
 Goetz brought him. Goethe was not to be 
 spoiled. Circumstances he took advantage of, 
 not they of him. He did not allow them to rule 
 him or tyrannize over him : the inward man 
 was too strong for that, too self-subsistent. So 
 with his meeting with the Duke of Weimar, a 
 meeting apparently accidental, which opened 
 into a new, large field of circumstances. What 
 made that meeting prolific, what but the per- 
 sonality of the man, the magnetism of his pres- 
 ence, the fascination of his tongue, the manly 
 grace of his bearing ? And when he got to 
 Weimar, the novel surroundings there might 
 have been dazzling, or debilitating, or even 
 smothering, and they would have been, would 
 have diverted him from his high aims and as- 
 pirations, but for his unique resources, his con- 
 trolling mind, his self-respect, his shaping crea- 
 tiveness. The intellect, will, geniality, persist- 
 ency, superiority, of the individual man, Goethe, 
 it was that sowed this new field of circum- 
 stances with fresh facts and principles, with 
 doings and sayings and writings which make 
 the quiet little Saxon town sparkle on the map 
 of Germany with a solitary radiance. 
 17
 
 258 GOETHE. 
 
 Goethe was not a man to rest or stop. So, 
 in the flush of his Werther fame, he wrote 
 .Clavigo and other minor dramatic pieces. 
 These were rather relaxations after the strain of 
 tense work than solid work themselves. When 
 he made Clavigo known ' to Merk, the clear- 
 sighted, plain-spoken friend said : " Such dirt 
 thou must not write any more of : others can 
 do that." Goethe could not but throw off what 
 was on his brain, whether the mood or subject 
 were the best or not. His greatest works he 
 inwardly hugged and carried about with him 
 for years, as we have seen. But from his abun- 
 dant utterance, and his overflowing fullness of 
 facts and conceptions, he was led to write 
 scores of pages, not only of prose, but of verse, 
 some of which have not the singleness and 
 rounded compactness, the tightness which will 
 let nothing in and nothing out, the organic 
 unity of poems in the stricter sense, of poems 
 such as are so many of his. 
 
 A decisive act of Goethe's opening manhood 
 was his visit to Weimar, a visit which soon 
 became an abode, and an abode for a long life. 
 When the capabilities and character of the man 
 are taken into account, they may be deemed a 
 good fortune for him, those Weimar surround- 
 ings and opportunities. The full friendship of
 
 CONCLUSION. 259 
 
 a man like the Duke of Weimar was a provi- 
 dential boon to a man like Goethe. Had it not 
 been so, he, with his warm instincts and con- 
 scious proclivities, would soon have discovered 
 that his growth was obstructed, that the satis- 
 faction to aesthetic and intellectual wants was 
 not what it might be ; and then surely he would 
 have sought other conditions. In his occa- 
 sional miffs with the Duke, and temporary dis- 
 contents with his position, he always felt that 
 he could on any day strike his tent and remove 
 to another ground ; and at such moments he 
 may have thought, with a justifiable pride, that 
 the removal would be a greater loss to others 
 than to him. We have seen that he carried 
 with him from Frankfort, already conceived in 
 his brain, at least two of his larger works, Faust 
 and Egmont. Had he believed that Weimar 
 was not the best place to hatch them in, he 
 would have built for himself a nest elsewhere. 
 
 The unfolding of Goethe's powers and char- 
 acter during his first decade in Weimar, the 
 reader will have been able to trace in the pre- 
 ceding chapters ; still more distinctly the effect 
 upon him of twenty months' residence in Italy. 
 
 When he came back from Italy, Goethe gave 
 himself up to literature and science, resigning 
 his chief political functions as Minister. Of
 
 260 GOETHE. 
 
 practical work he had, as relaxation from poetry, 
 what would have filled full the daily life of 
 most men ; he had the theatre, the mines in 
 Ilmenau, the University at Jena. The Univer- 
 sity, for which he did so much, was to him a 
 resource and an aid. A man of such activity 
 and breadth needs co-workers, auxiliaries. In 
 1794 began his acquaintance with Schiller, 
 ripening into intimacy, which, he says " brought 
 a new spring into my existence." 
 
 Goethe was ever renewing himself, from the 
 earth and the sky, from all Nature, with her daily 
 unworn greetings to the open-hearted, from liv- 
 ing men and men living in books, from the in- 
 visible spiritual promptings that ply around 
 brains of fine susceptibility. All these jets, 
 shooting about him, the fiery beams from his 
 own yearning alert soul were ever touching 
 into flame to quicken him with fresh illumina- 
 tions. A still fuller inward source of renova- 
 tion Goethe had, the warmest blessing to 
 any life, namely, love for his fellow-men, a 
 love making itself felt, through kindness and 
 services, in small things and large. Let me 
 beg the reader to read, in Mr. Lewes' s full 
 and noble life of Goethe, the chapter called 
 " The Real Philanthropist." Acts of sympathy, 
 practical love, enrich the years of Goethe as of
 
 CONCLUSION. 26l 
 
 few men. In this chapter is laid bare a perfect 
 exemplification of fraternal helpfulness, show- 
 ing how Goethe relieved a man destitute of 
 means and friends, a stranger to him, living at 
 some distance ; and kept on relieving him for 
 six years with counsel through letters, with 
 money, giving him yearly a portion of his own 
 moderate income (it was between the years '78 
 and '85), treating him in the letters he wrote 
 him with brotherly consideration, with thought- 
 ful delicacy. After reading this account, with 
 its authenticated details, one can understand 
 Wieland's enthusiastic exclamation, " I could 
 have eaten Goethe for love ! " 
 
 When Schiller died, Goethe was fifty-six. 
 Just after that came the battle of Jena, with its 
 immediate horrors in the partial sack of Wei- 
 mar, and its more remote disastrous conse- 
 quences in the subjugation of Northern Ger- 
 many. 
 
 There is what may be called the historical 
 sense, a discernment of the unfolding of hu- 
 manity through progressive stages of political 
 transformation. The constitutional history of 
 England presents the clearest example of this 
 unfolding, which is, however, to be traced in 
 the history of all Christian nations, and be- 
 fore them in that of those chosen peoples, the
 
 262 GOETHE. 
 
 Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, who parentally 
 preceded the Christian nations. This sense 
 Goethe somewhat lacked ; and hence he failed 
 to seize in the political and social conditions of 
 man, not the idea of progress, for that he had, 
 but of progression through revolt and revolu- 
 tion, as the only means of clearing the atmos- 
 phere when the moral and social equilibrium 
 has got to be much and chronically disturbed. 
 Hence he did not fully prize Luther, or per- 
 ceive the necessity for the French Revolution. 
 His organization made him averse to violence. 
 This quality he inherited from his mother, who, 
 when she engaged a new servant-maid, forbade 
 the reporting to her of anything tragical or dis- 
 tressing or disturbing. In the midst of the 
 mutinous ferment in Germany, caused by the 
 French Revolution, Goethe writes in his Diary 
 that he "held to what is established, and 
 looked to bettering and vivifying it by intelli- 
 gent direction. In this sense I have worked, 
 consciously and unconsciously, all my life." 
 
 With such an organization, the conservatism 
 natural to age made him in his latter days un- 
 sympathetic with popular political wishes and 
 efforts for further liberation through revolution. 
 He felt that to co-work for such was not his 
 part. And let us not owe him a grudge for
 
 CONCLUSION. 263 
 
 not doing what it was not in his nature to do, 
 but rather, let us be even thankful that he did 
 not attempt what, with his mental constitution, 
 would have ruffled that aesthetic calm which 
 was needed in order that he should do the 
 great things of his high calling. The prosper- 
 ity of the world demands many, and many 
 kinds of well-doers. Surely it were unseemly 
 to wish, to the extraordinarily long list of 
 Goethe's benefactions to add deeds which oth- 
 ers could do who could not do his. If it was a 
 fault in him, this want of sympathy with revo- 
 lutionary movement, let us bethink us that the 
 virtues and bountiful achievements of such men 
 weave a luminous veil through which their faults 
 ought to be but partially seen, and that very 
 faults are often the alloy which gives to pure 
 metal its practical tenacity. 
 
 And so, during those hard Napoleonic years, 
 between 1806 and 1813, he comforted himself, 
 not by issuing patriotic songs and pamphlets, 
 but with Botany and Optics, with working at 
 his Theory of Colors (the very revolutionary 
 enterprise of trying to dethrone Newton), with 
 writing the Elective Affinities, and preparing to 
 write the West-eastern Divan. 
 
 For his old age Goethe laid up stores in the 
 love of men, far and near, in the affectionate
 
 264 GOETHE. 
 
 devotion of the many in contact with him, in 
 the warm good-will of neighbors and fellow- 
 workers, in the widening and deepening circle 
 of a great renown, and especially in his intel- 
 lectual delight in Nature, whose intimacy he, 
 with singleness of purpose, had cultivated from 
 youth onward, and who now on his advanced 
 age smiled her deep benignant smile, and still 
 soothed him, as in his tempestuous years she had 
 early soothed the tumult of his spirit. To the 
 last he had the active, inward resources of an 
 indefatigable curiosity and of a genial produc- 
 tiveness. 
 
 Ever a learner, besides the variegated, al- 
 ways expanding fields of Science, the fresh 
 growths in all the Literatures of Europe wafted 
 to him their perfume and profit. In his Art 
 Journal, Ktinst uud Alterthum, he published 
 notices of new books from France, England, 
 Italy. He worked at the Second Part of Wil- 
 helm Meister, at the Second Part of Faust ; re- 
 vised his works for the final edition. 
 
 His son and daughter-in-law lived with him, 
 and his grandchildren played about his. knees. 
 Near and far around him, part of the reward 
 for his life-long work, was the homage of the 
 cultivated, the enlightened, the wise of Chris- 
 tendom. He worked on with the zest of his 

 
 CONCLUSION. 265 
 
 earlier days. In 1828, in his seventy-ninth 
 year, he writes to Zelter : " In my garden I 
 pass many a delightful hour ; for there I collect 
 myself, ancl through harmony and inwardness 
 get many a productive mood." Again in 1830 
 he writes to the same friend : " I may say it to 
 you in your ear : I have the happiness that in 
 my high age thoughts spring up in me, to pur- 
 sue and execute which were well worth going 
 over life again." Up to his last days life and 
 power shone through his features and his 
 speech. His eye was tmdimmed, his coun- 
 tenance unweakened, his mind clear and 
 sprightly. Among the latest things he wrote 
 were these lines : 
 
 " Every day and every night 
 (Thus I gauge of man the fate) 
 Does he ever aim at right, 
 He is ever fair and great." 
 
 What the mental characteristics of Goethe 
 are, of what quality is his genius, the reader 
 will have formed some notion from expositions 
 and translations, in the foregoing pages. Merk 
 early seized a fundamental feature in Goethe's 
 organization when he said to him : " Thy en- 
 deavor, thy bent, from which nothing can turn 
 thee, is to give a poetic form to reality ; others 
 seek to realize the so called poetical, the imag-
 
 266 GOETHE. 
 
 inative, and that yields nothing but nonsense." 
 The latter half of the sentence, is it not itself 
 nonsense ? When a poet aims to give a poetic 
 form to reality, as Goethe does, is hk not then 
 seeking to realize the poetical ? That he be 
 able to give a poetic form to reality, must he 
 not have an ideal, a model, in his mind ? And 
 whence does this model draw the essentials of 
 a poem, truth and beauty ? From what, if not 
 from this, that the endowments of intellect and 
 sensibility in the poet be so fine and full, and 
 so enlightened by a sense of the perfect, that 
 thereby the product of his working after this 
 interior model remains true to Nature while 
 brightened beyond her general brightness ? 
 Moreover, when the poet has had great famil- 
 iarity with the actual, as Goethe soon got to 
 have through his immense power of observa- 
 tion and assimilation, he can then do what the 
 competent sculptor or painter does, he can keep 
 his hand true to Nature without her visible 
 presence ; and this he can do, not solely be- 
 cause of his long familiarity with her, but 
 because his own being is so truly gauged, so 
 choicely furnished. For Lear and Lear's fool, 
 for Imogen and Polonius, Shakespeare did not 
 need immediate models. And where did he 
 get Puck and Ariel ? The main need, the
 
 CONCLUSION. 267 
 
 primary requirement to produce genuine poetry 
 is, that the producer carry, inborn within him, 
 true ideals ; and this implies rich internal re- 
 sources, and among them a pure sense of the 
 beautiful. As Goethe, in the remark quoted 
 in a previous chapter, said to Eckerman about 
 Faust : " Had I not had the world in my soul 
 from the beginning, I must ever have remained 
 blind with my seeing eyes, and all experience 
 and observation would have been dead and un- 
 productive." 
 
 To be true, the ideals must be faithful to the 
 broad designs and sane proportions of Nature, 
 as faithful as are Don Quixote and my Uncle 
 Toby. The reading world is deluged with false 
 ideals, in novels and in much popular verse. 
 What Merk ascribed to Goethe, sagaciously and 
 rightly ascribed to him, that his bent was to 
 give a poetic form to reality, is what other poets 
 try to do ; and what most of them partially fail 
 to do, because they have not within their own 
 brains a high and true model. Some of the 
 most popular of modern poetry has just this 
 defect. Its authors are not deep enough natu- 
 ralists. They take up a real story or incident 
 or a legend, and versify it cleverly, so as to 
 captivate for a while a multitude of readers ; 
 but not having within them a true and pithy
 
 268 GOETHE. 
 
 ideal (which is a rare possession) their work 
 lacks a soul, and thence a genuine body too. 
 They are not in close and subtle rapport with 
 the heart of Nature ; they cannot " think the 
 thoughts of God," as Goethe did. They have 
 not the fullness and richness of sensibility and 
 of perception which give richness of experience, 
 and which in poetry supply body and substan- 
 tiality. Their thoughts and imaginings lack 
 substance. Were they to meet one of Nature's 
 ideals, in shape of man or woman, they could 
 not verify, and therefore not keenly appreciate, 
 him or her. 
 
 That Goethe took delight in the concrete 
 and not in the abstract, to this we owe the 
 roundness and flexibility and naturalness of his 
 characterization. To illustrate him again by 
 contrast : a meditative poet, like Wordsworth 
 for instance, does not require the concretion of 
 his conceptions and imaginings in organized 
 bodies. A simple form, like that of the ode or 
 sonnet, gives body enough for his subjective 
 sentiment. Nearly all of Wordsworth's four 
 hundred sonnets and the most of his lyrics are 
 in a region of abstraction. When he puts his 
 thought into a story or tale, he limps : he has 
 little epic gift, and still less dramatic. Yet 
 there is no truer poetry than Wordsworth's,
 
 CONCLUSION. 269 
 
 true in feeling and true in thought. When the 
 poet's head rests on a sound heart, he need not 
 be afraid to write out of his head. 
 
 All great poets deal in meditation. Goethe 
 does, and Shakespeare immensely ; but Words- 
 worth is almost exclusively a meditative poet. 
 I doubt whether Goethe, had he known Words- 
 worth's poetry, would have fully valued it. 
 Goethe is full of profound things, but did not 
 give into nights : he is more broad than high. 
 He preferred significant poetry to inventive or 
 spiritual. I think he has somewhere a fling at 
 Milton. He would probably not have taken to 
 Shelley. Keats he would have greatly enjoyed. 
 In the Greeks he delighted, especially in the 
 sensuous, objective Homer ; and he overrated 
 Byron. At the same time he avers that Byron 
 was a child in reasoning, an opinion which 
 should curb excessive admiration. 
 
 Goethe himself was of large mould in reason- 
 ing capacity. He had that high range of thought 
 reached through the commanding intellectual 
 faculties, whereby are seized the relations of 
 analogy and causation, the supreme intellectual 
 faculties, which knit the subtlest as well as 
 strongest bonds among thoughts themselves, 
 and between thought and feeling ; of whose
 
 2/O GOETHE. 
 
 vast agency the most abundant and the most 
 brilliant examples are to be found in the great- 
 est pages of Shakespeare. 
 
 Above these great intellectual powers in 
 Goethe, and far above his clear, rapid, sensuous 
 perceptions, were those noble generic sensibili- 
 ties, which give depth and breadth to human 
 sympathies, and universality to poetic concep- 
 tions, and which in Goethe streamed often 
 upward to link themselves to, and identify 
 themselves with, divine sentiment. Illustra- 
 tions of this mounting tendency the reader has 
 seen in the conclusions of both Parts of Faust, 
 and in the ballad The Faithless Boy. A still 
 stronger illustration is another of his ballads, 
 The God and the Bayadere. I give a transla- 
 tion of this great poem, because it is a sample 
 of Goethe's best. He has here a material 
 which, as being warm, palpitating, picturesque, 
 fully meets his demand for the sensuous. Then 
 the legend carries in its core a deep ethic prin- 
 ciple, a principle human and divine, which is 
 the soul that weaves around itself this beaming, 
 undulatory, richly colored body. Then the 
 poem is significant as few poems are, and 
 through that significance binds us in beautiful, 
 mysterious union to the spiritual world.
 
 CONCLUSION. 271 
 
 THE GOD AND THE BAYADERE. 
 
 A LEGEND OF INDIA. 
 
 M AHADOH, Earth's sceptre bearing, 
 Comes the sixth time here below, 
 That with us a like life sharing, 
 He may feel both joy and woe. 
 Here he lives our daily living, 
 In himself lets all things be ; 
 Would he punish, be forgiving, 
 Men he must as mortal see. 
 And has he the city as traveller inspected, 
 His looks to the great and the little directed, 
 He quits it at nightfall still onward to flee. 
 
 Thus with much made well acquainted, 
 
 As he leaves the city's whirl 
 
 He beholds, with cheeks bepainted, 
 
 An abandoned, lovely girl. 
 " Hail thee, maiden ! " " Wait thou there, 
 
 Quickly to thee I will come." 
 " And who art thou ? " " Bayadere ; 
 
 And this is of Love the home." 
 
 And now she bestirs her, the cymbals smooth sounding, 
 She dances, in languishing circles soft bounding, 
 And bending she hands him sweet flowers in bloom. 
 
 Him caressing she then sprightly 
 Draws across the threshold dim. 
 " Beauteous stranger, 'twill here brightly 
 Shine when quick my lamp I trim. 
 Art thou weary, I'll revive thee, 
 Soothe thy wayworn members' smart, 
 What thou wilt that I will give thee, 
 Quiet, pleasure, frolic's art."
 
 2/2 GOETHE. 
 
 And busily now assumed ills she assuages : 
 The god inly smiles, as with joy he presages 
 Through vilest corruption a true human heart. 
 
 And exacts he slavish duties ; 
 
 Gladder grows the maiden youth, 
 
 And what first were artful beauties, 
 
 Changed are to nature's truth. 
 
 And thus shooting from the blossom 
 
 By degrees the fruit doth grow ; 
 
 Is obedience in the bosom, 
 
 Love will not have far to go. 
 
 But sharply, more sharply still further to prove her, 
 Resolves the deep searcher of hearts now to move her 
 By ecstacy, terror, and frightfullest woe. 
 
 Kisses he her cheek distained, 
 And she feels love's thrilling fears, 
 And the maiden is enchained, 
 And she weeps her first warm tears. 
 At his feet she sinketh pining, 
 Not for lust or profit low, 
 And those agile limbs reclining, 
 They refuse all service now. 
 
 And so o'er the couch's sweet mysteries spinning, 
 A suitable veil, with their darkness quick winning, 
 The favoring night-hours all silently throw. 
 
 Late by sleep mid smiles enfolden, 
 Early roused from briefest rest, 
 Finds she, by her heart upholden, 
 Dead the much beloved guest. 
 On him falls she in loud sorrow, 
 Wakes him not her anguish dire, 
 And his stiff limbs on the morrow 
 Are borne to their grave of fire.
 
 CONCLUSION. 273 
 
 She hearkens the priest and the funeral chantings, 
 She raves, and she rushes with soul-wrested pantings. 
 " Who art thou ? what drives thee to this solemn pyre ? " 
 
 Prostrate on the bier she cast her, 
 
 Her wild shriek transpierced the crowd. 
 " O ! my husband, my dear master ! 
 
 I will seek him in his shroud. 
 
 Shall it be to ashes wasted, 
 
 Of those limbs the godlike grace ? 
 
 Mine he was, so quickly blasted, 
 
 Mine for only one short space." 
 The priests they are singing, " The aged we carry 
 Who long on the earth in dull feebleness tarry, 
 We carry the young ere they start in life's race. 
 
 " To thy priest's words give thou ear ; 
 
 As his wife thou hast no right ; 
 
 Liv'st thou not as Bayadere, 
 
 And so canst thou have no plight. 
 
 Only shadows bodies follow 
 
 To the silent realm of rest ; 
 
 Wife her husband, that we hallow, 
 
 As both fame's and duty's hest. 
 Let trumpets resound, let be kindled the fuel ; 
 O ! take him, ye gods, of young manhood the jewel, 
 O ! take him the youth through hot flames to the blest." 
 
 Thus the choir, unpitying, wringeth 
 Still more deeply her sore heart, 
 And with outstretched arms she springeth 
 In the flames that round him part. 
 But the god-youth quick upriseth 
 From the pyre whereon he lay ; 
 With him she whom he so prizeth, 
 In his arms she floats away. 
 18
 
 274 GOETHE. 
 
 The Deity joys in a sinner repenting, 
 
 The lost one uplift the Immortals relenting, 
 
 With fiery arms up to heavenly day. 
 
 A few final words about the man, as judged 
 by some of his most noted contemporaries. 
 The man is always father to the poet. 
 
 Merk, who was not liable to overpraise, said 
 of Goethe : " Beautiful as are his writings, his 
 life is still more beautiful." 
 
 Herder, almost as little given as Merk to 
 laudation, is cited, in a letter from Schiller to 
 Koerner, as passing the following deliberate 
 judgment on Goethe. The -letter is dated 
 Weimar, August I2th, 1787, several years be- 
 fore Schiller himself knew Goethe, and a year 
 before he had seen him. " Goethe is spoken of 
 here by many with a sort of devotion, and is 
 even more loved and admired as a man than 
 an author. Herder says he has a most clear 
 judgment, great depth of feeling, and the pur- 
 est sentiments. Whatever he does, he does 
 well ; and, like Julius Caesar, he can do many 
 things at the same time. According to Her- 
 der, he is free from all spirit of intrigue ; he 
 has never done harm to any one, and never un- 
 dermined the happiness of a fellow-creature. 
 He hates mystery, and in his political transac- 
 tions acts openly and boldly. Herder says
 
 CONCLUSION. 275 
 
 that as a man of business, he is still more de- 
 serving of admiration than as a poet. He says 
 he has a mind large enough for anything (fin 
 allumf as sender geist ") . 
 
 Napoleon, after an interview with Goethe at 
 Erfurt, in 1 808, exclaimed, Voila un homme ! 
 " There is a man ! " 
 
 Chancellor Mueller bears testimony to the 
 love and esteem entertained for Goethe by the 
 citizens of Weimar, especially to the attach- 
 ment and veneration of all who had lived in his 
 house or had been immediately about his per- 
 son. The same high witness thus writes about 
 him in another passage : " Never did he em- 
 ploy the great influence granted to him by his 
 prince and friend, for selfish ends, or to the in- 
 jury of any one. I can indeed affirm of my 
 own knowledge, that among the numerous let- 
 ters and confidential suggestions which have 
 been preserved among the Duke's papers, there 
 is not one to be found in which he does not 
 plead with the warmth of personal interest on 
 behalf of some instance of honest service, or 
 of promising talent." 
 
 This volume cannot be more fitly closed 
 than with words of Schiller, uttered three 
 years before his own death. The great friend 
 and rival of Goethe thus writes :
 
 2/6 GOETHE. 
 
 " It is not the greatness of his intellect 
 which binds me to him. If he were not as a 
 man more admirable than any I have ever 
 known, I should only marvel at his genius from 
 the distance. But I can truly say that in the 
 six years I have lived with him, I have never 
 for one moment been deceived in his character. 
 He has a high truth and integrity, and is thor- 
 oughly in earnest for the Right and the Good ; 
 hence all hypocrites and phrasemakers are un- 
 comfortable in his presence." 
 
 THE END.