P. Hume Brown

“ But the profoundest source of his unrest was neither the distastefulness of Frankfort society nor his remorse for his conduct to Friederike. It was his concern with his own life and what he was to make of it. It is this concern that gives interest to his letters of the period which otherwise possess little intrinsic value, either in substance or form. What we find in them, and what is hardly to be found elsewhere, is a mirror of one of the world's greatest spirits in the process of attaining self-knowledge and self-mastery in the direction of powers which are not yet fully revealed to him. ”

“ So he spoke in the retrospect under the influence of an immediate emotion, but his own contemporary testimony proves that his love for Lili was at least not unmingled bliss. Make what reserves we may for the artificial working up of sentiment which was the fashion of the time, that testimony presents us with the picture of a lover who has not only to contend with obstacles which circumstances put in his way, but with the haunting conviction that his passion was leading him astray and that its gratification involved the surrender of his deepest self. ”

“ The prevailing tone of Leipzig society was, in point of fact, deliberately imitated from the pattern set to Europe by the Court of France. In contrast to the old-fashioned formality of Frankfort, the Leipziger aimed at a graceful insouciance in social intercourse and light, cynical banter in the interchange of his ideas on every subject, trifling or serious. In such a society all free, spontaneous expression of emotions or opinions was a mark of rusticity, as Goethe was not long in discovering. ”

“ While Goethe was pouring forth his confessions to Kestner and Lotte, his circumstances at home were not such as to conduce to calm of mind. Frankfort remained as distasteful to him as ever. "The Frankforters," he wrote to Kestner, "are an accursed folk; they are so pig-headed that nothing can be made of them." With his father his relations had not become more cordial after his return from Wetzlar. "Lieber Gott," he wrote on receiving a letter from his father, "shall I then also become like this when I am old? Shall my soul no longer attach itself to what is good and amiable? ”

“ His relations to Lili had become such that a decisive step was necessary in the interests of both. During the last fortnight of March his mood was certainly not that of a happy lover. To break with Lili was a step which circumstances as well as his own attachment to her made a dire alternative. On the other hand, from the bond of marriage, as we know, he shrank with every instinct of his nature. Only a few weeks before, doubtless with his own possible fate in front of him, he had put these words in the mouth of Fernando in his Stella: "I would be a fool to allow myself to be shackled. ”

“ The more I think of it, the more intensely I realise the impossibility of conveying to one who has not seen or heard Goethe any intelligible notion of this extraordinary creation of God. As Heinse [187] expressed it, 'Goethe is a genius from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,' one possessed, I may add, for whom it is impossible to act from mere caprice. One has only to be with him for an hour to feel the utter absurdity of desiring him to think and act otherwise than he thinks and acts. ”

“ These pleasant people were a pastor Brion and his family living at Sesenheim, an Alsace village some twenty miles from Strassburg. These few days spent with the Brion family were to be the beginning of a history which, as Goethe relates it in his Autobiography, has the character of an idyll, but, when stripped of the poetic haze which he has thrown around it, is not far from tragedy. He himself is our sole authority for its incidents, and he chose so to tell them that the exact truth of the whole history can never be known. ”

“ As in the case of all Goethe's longer productions, critical opinion has been divided from the beginning regarding the intrinsic merits of Götz. In the opinion of critics like Edmond Scherer it is a crude imitation of Shakespeare with little promise of its author's future achievement, while other critics, like Lewes, regard it as a "work of daring power, of vigour, of originality." On one point Goethe himself and all his critics are agreed: the play as a whole is only a succession of scenes, loosely strung together, with no inner development leading up to a determinate end. ”

“ Strassburg he found a society whose ways of living and thinking were equally different from those of Frankfort and of Leipzig. Strassburg had not the bounded intellectual horizon which made him feel himself an alien in his native town, nor, on the other hand, did it offer the opportunities for frivolous distraction which he found in the "little Paris." Strassburg had been a French town for a hundred years, but there was no town in Germany more intensely German in its sympathies and aspirations. ”

“ Kestner was at every point the antithesis of his intruding rival. He was calm, deliberate, unimaginative, yet conspicuously a man of insight and character, with a fund of good sense and good temper, on which the situation made a large draft. "Kestner must be a very good man," was the frequent remark of Merck's wife in view of the relations of the three parties to each other, and Kestner's own words prove it. It is in his Letters and Diary that we have the closest glimpse of all three, and all that he says of himself, of Lotte, and of Goethe, shows a tact and good feeling that inspire esteem. ”

“ Goethe has himself said, "the most important period in the life of an individual is that of his development—the period which, in my case, breaks off with the detailed narrative of Dichtung und Wahrheit." In reality, as we know, there is no complete breach at any point in the lives of either nations or individuals. But if in the life of Goethe we are to fix upon a dividing point, it is his departure from Frankfort and his permanent settlement in Weimar in his twenty-seventh year. ”

“ Knebel was keenly interested in literature, was a poet himself, and an ardent admirer of Goethe. There followed congenial talk which was to be the beginning of a friendship that, unlike most of Goethe's youthful friendships, was to endure into the old age of both. But Knebel had come on a special errand; the young princes had expressed the desire to become acquainted with the man who had made merry with their instructor Wieland, and whose name was in all men's mouths as the author of the recently published Werther. ”

“ Minerva, who declares that she honours her father Zeus and loves Prometheus, repeats the offer of Zeus to animate the clay images if Prometheus will acknowledge his sovereignty; but when Prometheus passionately refuses to accept the offer, she bursts forth: "And they shall live! to fate and not to the gods it pertains to bestow life and to take it. Come, I conduct thee to the source of all life, which Jupiter may not close against us. They shall live, and through thee!" ”

“ Frankfort, with its 30,000 inhabitants, with its past memories and its bustling present, was at least on a sufficient scale to suggest the conception of a great society developing its life under modern conditions. For Goethe, who was to pass most of his days in a town of some 7,000 inhabitants, and to whom no form of human activity was indifferent, it was a fortunate destiny that he did not, like Herder, pass his most receptive years in a petty village remote from the movements of the great world. ”

“ There was a sufficient reason for Goethe's praying Lili to take the piece "in good part." In the cruel coquette Elmire Lili could not but see a portrait of herself, and there are expressions in the play which she could not but regard as home-thrusts. "To be entertained, to be amused," says Erwin to Bernardo, "that is all they (the maidens) desire. They value a man who spends an odious evening with them at cards as highly as the man who gives his body and soul for them." ”

“ A visit to the cathedral of Cologne recalled Goethe's enthusiasm for the cathedral of Strassburg, but its unfinished condition depressed him with the sense of a great idea unrealised, for in his own words "an unfinished work is like one destroyed." The emotions evoked by another spectacle in Düsseldorf, according to Goethe's own testimony, had the instantaneous effect of his gaining for life the confidence of both Jacobis. ”

“ In his later life Goethe characterised Shakespeare's plays as "highly interesting tales, only told by more persons than one." Whatever truth there may be in this judgment in the case of Shakespeare, it exactly describes Götz. It is as a tale, a narrative, and not as a drama, that it is to be read if it is to be enjoyed without the sense of artistic failure. The anachronisms with which the piece abounds, and which Hegel caustically noted, have been a further stumbling-block to the critics. ”

“ It was in a world where such opinions were entertained by men of the highest character and intelligence that Goethe made his irresponsible addresses to the successive objects of his passion.
The distractions of Strassburg, no more than the distractions of Leipzig, diverted Goethe from what were his ruling instincts from the beginning—to know life and to be master of himself. As in Leipzig, his professional studies in Strassburg held little place in his thoughts ”

“ When we regard his life as a whole, the actual facts hardly justify such a conclusion. Nature had given him two safeguards which, without any effort of will on his own part, assured him deliverance where the risk of wreckage was greatest—a consuming desire to know which grew with every year of his life, and a versatility of temperament which necessitated ever-renewed sensations equally of the mind and heart. Of the working of these two elements in him we have already had illustration; they will receive further illustration as we proceed. ”

“ Friederike Oeser he thus expounds the artistic ideals at which he had then arrived: "A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher, and he who has laboriously thumbed the pages of many books regards with contempt the simple, easy book of nature; and yet nothing is true except what is simple—certainly a sorry recommendation for true wisdom. Let him who goes the way of simplicity go it in quiet. Modesty and circumspection are the essential characteristics of him who would tread this path, and every step will bring its reward. ”

“ In the supreme moments of his career—on the occasion of the surrender of his castle and in his last hour—Gottfried is made to utter the word freedom as the watchword of his aspirations, but in so doing he is expressing Goethe's own passionate protest against the conventions of his age in religion, in philosophy, and art, and not a sentiment in keeping with the class of which he is a type. ”

“ The remark may be exaggerated, but, if a work is to be named which marks the advent of what is covered by the vague name of romanticism, Götz may fairly claim the honour. It had precursors of more or less importance in other countries, but, by the nature of its subject, by its audacious disregard of reigning models, and by its resounding notoriety, it gave the signal for a fresh reconstruction of art and life. ”

“ Apart from the opening Scenes, which have no dramatic connection with it, the Gretchen tragedy constitutes an artistic whole which by its perfection of detail and overwhelming tragic effect must ever remain one of the marvels of creative genius. Not less astonishing as a manifestation of Goethe's youthful power is the creation in all their essential lineaments of the three figures, Faust, Mephistopheles, and Margaret—figures stamped ineffaceably on the imagination of educated humanity. ”

“ In Goethe the instinct for self-mastery was as remarkable as his instinct for knowledge. As the result of his illness in Frankfort, his organs of sense were in a state of morbid susceptibility which "put him out of harmony with himself, with objects around him, and even with the elements." It throws a curious light on the nature of the man that amid all the preoccupations of his mind and heart in Strassburg he could deliberately turn his thoughts to the cure of his jarred nerves. ”

“ Neither, in the ecstasy of these moments, dreamt that at a later day Spinoza, who was now their strongest bond of union, was to be the main cause of their estrangement. For Jacobi Spinoza became the "atheist," to be reprobated as one of the world's false prophets; while for Goethe he remained to the end the man to whom God had been nearest and to whom He had been most fully revealed. ”

“ The two golden rules in composition as in ethics are: know thyself and reverence thyself. Such were the "conjectures on original composition," expounded to him by Herder which led Goethe to regard poetry in "another sense" from that in which he had hitherto understood it. And in confirmation of his views Herder directed him to the exemplars where he would find their illustration—to the Bible, to Homer and Pindar, to Shakespeare and Ossian, and, above all, to the primitive poetry of all peoples. ”