Volume Xiii Part 13 (1/2)
Two seemingly opposite factors--limiting and qualifying the one the other--determined the course and topics of his life. One was the aim which he proposed to himself as the governing principle and purpose of his being,--to perfect himself, to make the most of the nature which G.o.d had given him; the other was a const.i.tutional tendency to come out of himself, to lose himself in objects, especially in natural objects, so that in the study of nature--to which he devoted a large part of his life--he seems not so much a scientific observer as a chosen confidant, to whom the discerning Mother revealed her secrets.
In no greatest genius are all its talents self-derived. Countless influences mould our intellect and mould our heart. One of these, and often one of the most potent, is heredity. Consciously or unconsciously, for good or for evil, physically and mentally, the father and mother are in the child, as indeed all his ancestors are in every man.
Of Goethe's father we know only what the son himself has told us in his memoirs. A man of austere presence, from whom Goethe, as he tells us, inherited his bodily stature and his serious treatment of life,--
”Vom Vater hab ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes fuhren.”
By profession a lawyer, but without practice, living in grim seclusion amid his books and collections; a man of solid acquirements and large culture, who had travelled in Italy and first awakened in Wolfgang the longing for that land; a man of ample means, inhabiting a stately mansion. For the rest, a stiff, narrow-minded, fussy pedant, with small toleration for any methods or aims but his own; who, while he appreciated the superior gifts of his son, was obstinately bent on guiding them in strict professional grooves, and teased him with the friction of opposing wills.
The opposite, in most respects, of this stately and pedantic worthy was the Frau Rathin, his youthful wife, young enough to have been his daughter,--a jocund, exuberant nature, a woman to be loved; one who blessed society with her presence, and possessed uncommon gifts of discourse. She was but eighteen when Wolfgang was born,--a companion to him and his sister Cornelia; one in whom they were sure to find sympathy and ready indulgence. Goethe was indebted to her, as he tells us, for his joyous spirit and his narrative talent,--
”Von Mutterchen die Frohnatur Und l.u.s.t zu fabuliren.”
Outside of the poet's household, the most important figure in the circle of his childish acquaintance was his mother's father, from whom he had his name, Johann Wolfgang Textor, the _Schultheiss_, or chief magistrate, of the city. From him Goethe seems to have inherited the superst.i.tion of which some curious examples are recorded in his life. He shared with Napoleon and other remarkable men, says Von Muller, the conceit that little mischances are prophetic of greater evils. On a journey to Baden-Baden with a friend, his carriage was upset and his companion slightly injured. He thought it a bad omen, and instead of proceeding to Baden-Baden chose another watering-place for his summer resort. If in his almanac there happened to be a blot on any date, he feared to undertake anything important on the day so marked. He had noted certain fatal days; one of these was the 22d of March. On that day he had lost a valued friend; on that day the theatre to which he had devoted so much time and labor was burned; and on that day, curiously enough, he died. He believed in oracles; and as Rousseau threw stones at a tree to learn whether or no he was to be saved (the hitting or not hitting the tree was to be the sign), so Goethe tossed a valuable pocket-knife into the river Lahn to ascertain whether he would succeed as a painter. If behind the bushes which bordered the stream, he saw the knife plunge, it should signify success; if not, he would take it as an omen of failure. Rousseau was careful, he tells us, to choose a stout tree, and to stand very near. Goethe, more honest with himself, adopted no such precaution; the plunge of the knife was not seen, and the painter's career was abandoned.
Wordsworth's saying, ”the child is the father of the man,”--a saying which owes its vitality more to its form than its substance,--is not always verified, or its truth is not always apparent in the lives of distinguished men. I find not much in Goethe the child prophetic of Goethe the man. But the singer and the seeker, the two main tendencies of his being, are already apparent in early life. Of moral traits, the most conspicuous in the child is a power of self-control,--a moral heroism, which secured to him in after life a natural leaders.h.i.+p unattainable by mere intellectual supremacy. An instance of this self-control is recorded among the anecdotes of his boyhood. At one of the lessons which he shared with other boys, the teacher failed to appear. The young people awaited his coming for a while, but toward the close of the hour most of them departed, leaving behind three who were especially hostile to Goethe. ”These,” he says, ”thought to torment, to mortify, and to drive me away. They left me a moment, and returned with rods taken from a broom which they had cut to pieces. I perceived their intention, and, supposing the expiration of the hour to be near, I immediately determined to make no resistance until the clock should strike. Unmercifully, thereupon, they began to scourge in the cruellest manner my legs and calves. I did not stir, but soon felt that I had miscalculated the time, and that such pain greatly lengthens the minutes.” When the hour expired, his superior activity enabled him to master all three, and to pin them to the ground.
In later years the same zeal of self-discipline which prompted the child to exercise himself in bearing pain, impelled the man to resist and overcome const.i.tutional weaknesses by force of will. A student of architecture, he conquered a tendency to giddiness by standing on pinnacles and walking on narrow rafters over perilous abysses. In like manner he overcame the ghostly terrors instilled in the nursery, by midnight visits to churchyards and uncanny places.
To real peril, to fear of death, he seems to have had that native insensibility so notable always in men of genius, in whom the conviction of a higher destiny begets the feeling of a charmed life,--such as Plutarch records of the first Caesar in peril of s.h.i.+pwreck on the river Anio. In the French campaign (1793), in which Goethe accompanied the Duke of Weimar against the armies of the Republic, a sudden impulse of scientific curiosity prompted him, in spite of warnings and remonstrances, to experiment on what is called the ”cannon-fever.” For this purpose he rode to a place in which he was exposed to a cross-fire of the two armies, and coolly watched the sensations experienced in that place of peril.
Command of himself, acquired by long and systematic discipline, gave him that command over others which he exercised in several memorable instances. Coming from a ball one night,--a young man fresh from the University,--he saw that a fire had broken out in the Judenga.s.se, and that people were standing about helpless and confused without a leader; he immediately jumped from his carriage, and, full dressed as he was, in silk stockings and pumps, organized on the spot a fire-brigade, which averted a dangerous conflagration. On another occasion, voyaging in the Mediterranean, he quelled a mutiny on board an Italian s.h.i.+p, when captain and mates were powerless, and the vessel drifting on the rocks, by commanding sailors and pa.s.sengers to fall on their knees and pray to the Virgin,--adopting the idiom of their religion as well as their speech, of which he was a master.
As a student, first at Leipsic, then at Strasburg, including the years from 1766 to 1771, he seems not to have been a very diligent attendant on the lectures in either university, and to have profited little by professional instruction. In compliance with the wishes of his father, who intended him for a jurist, he gave some time to the study of the law; but on the whole the princ.i.p.al gain of those years was derived from intercourse with distinguished intellectual men and women, whose acquaintance he cultivated, and the large opportunities of social life.
In Strasburg occurred the famous love-pa.s.sage with Friederike Brion, which terminated so unhappily at the time, and so fortunately in the end, for both.
Goethe has been blamed for not marrying Friederike. His real blame consists in the heedlessness with which, in the beginning of their acquaintance, he surrendered himself to the charm of her presence, thereby engaging her affection without a thought of the consequences to either. Besides the disillusion, which showed him, when he came fairly to face the question, that he did not love her sufficiently to justify marriage, there were circ.u.mstances--material, economical--which made it practically impossible. Her suffering in the separation, great as it was,--so great indeed as to cause a dangerous attack of bodily disease,--could not outweigh the pangs which he endured in his penitent contemplation of the consequences of his folly.
The next five years were spent partly in Frankfort and partly in Wetzlar, partly in the forced exercise of his profession, but chiefly in literary labors and the use of the pencil, which for a time disputed with the pen the devotion of the poet-artist. They may be regarded as perhaps the most fruitful, certainly the most growing, years of his life. They gave birth to ”Gotz von Berlichingen” and the ”Sorrows of Werther,” to the first inception of ”Faust,” and to many of his sweetest lyrics. It was during this period that he made the acquaintance of Charlotte Buff, the heroine of the ”Sorrows of Werther,” from whom he finally tore himself away, leaving Wetzlar when he discovered that their growing interest in each other was endangering her relation with Kestner, her betrothed. In those years, also, he formed a matrimonial engagement with Elizabeth Schonemann (Lili), the rupture of which, I must think, was a real misfortune for the poet. It came about by no fault of his. Her family had from the first opposed themselves to the match on the ground of social disparity. For even in mercantile Frankfort rank was strongly marked; and the Goethes, though respectable people, were beneath the Schonemanns in the social scale. Goethe's genius went for nothing with Madame Schonemann; she wanted for her daughter an aristocratic husband, not a literary one,--one who had wealth in possession, and not merely, as Goethe had, in prospect. How far Lili was influenced by her mother's and brother's representations it is impossible to say; however, she showed herself capricious, was sometimes cold, or seemed so to him, while favoring the advances of others. Goethe was convinced that she did not entertain for him that devoted love without which he felt that their union could not be a happy one. They separated; but on her death-bed she confessed to a friend that all she was, intellectually and morally, she owed to him.
In 1775 our poet was invited by the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August,--whose acquaintance he had made at Frankfort and at Mentz, his junior by two or three years,--to establish himself in civil service at the Grand-Ducal Court. The father, who had other views for his son, and was not much inclined to trust in princes, objected; many wondered, some blamed. Goethe himself appears to have wavered with painful indecision, and at last to have followed a mysterious impulse rather than a clear conviction or deliberate choice. His Heidelberg friend and hostess sought still to detain him, when the last express from Weimar drove up to the door. To her he replied in the words of his own Egmont:--
”Say no more! Goaded by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time run away with the light chariot of our destiny; there is nothing for it but to keep our courage, hold tight the reins, and guide the wheels now right, now left, avoiding a stone here, a fall there. Whither away? Who knows? Scarcely one remembers whence he came.”
It does not appear that he ever repented this most decisive step of his life-journey, nor does there appear to have been any reason why he should. A position, an office of some kind, he needs must have. Even now, the life of a writer by profession, with no function but that of literary composition, is seldom a prosperous one; in Goethe's day, when literature was far less remunerative than it is in ours, it was seldom practicable. Unless he had chosen to be maintained by his father, some employment besides that of book-making was an imperative necessity. The alternative of that which was offered--the one his father would have chosen--was that of a plodding jurist in a country where forensic pleading was unknown, and where the lawyer's profession offered no scope for any of the higher talents with which Goethe was endowed. On the whole, it was a happy chance that called him to the little capital of the little Grand-Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. If the State was one of petty dimensions (a kind of pocket-kingdom, like so many of the princ.i.p.alities of Germany), it nevertheless included some of the fairest localities, and one at least of the most memorable in Europe,--the Wartburg, where Luther translated the Bible, where Saint Elizabeth dispensed the blessings of her life, where the Minnesingers are said to have held their poetic tournament,--
”Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Wolfram von Eschenbach.”
It included also the University of Jena, which at that time numbered some of the foremost men of Germany among its professors. It was a miniature State and a miniature town; one wonders that Goethe, who would have shone the foremost star in Berlin or Vienna, could content himself with so narrow a field. But Vienna and Berlin did not call him until it was too late,--until patronage was needless; and Weimar did. A miniature State,--but so much the greater his power and freedom and the opportunity of beneficent action.
No prince was ever more concerned to promote in every way the welfare of his subjects than Karl August; and in all his works undertaken for this purpose, Goethe was his foremost counsellor and aid. The most important were either suggested by him or executed under his direction. Had he never written a poem, or given to the world a single literary composition, he would still have led, as a Weimar official, a useful and beneficent life. But the knowledge of the world and of business, the social and other experience gained in this way, was precisely the training which he needed,--and which every poet needs,--for the broadening and deepening and perfection of his art. Friedrich von Muller, in his valuable treatise of ”Goethe as a Man of Affairs,” tells us how he traversed every portion of the country to learn what advantage might be taken of topographical peculiarities, what provision made for local necessities. ”Everywhere--on hilltops crowned with primeval forests, in the depths of gorges and shafts--Nature met her favorite with friendly advances, and revealed to him many a desired secret.”
Whatever was privately gained in this way was applied to public uses. He endeavored to infuse new life into the mining business, and to make himself familiar with all its technical requirements. For that end he revived his chemical experiments. New roads were built, hydraulic operations were conducted on more scientific principles, fertile meadows were won from the river Saale by systematic drainage, and in many a struggle with Nature an intelligently persistent will obtained the victory.
Nor was it with material obstacles only that the poet-minister had to contend. In the exercise of the powers intrusted to him he often encountered the fierce opposition of party interest and stubborn prejudice, and was sometimes driven to heroic and despotic measures in order to accomplish a desired result,--as when he foiled the machinations of the Jena professors in his determination to save the University library, and when, in spite of the opposition of the leading burghers, he demolished the city wall.
In 1786 Goethe was enabled to realize his cherished dream of a journey to Italy. There he spent a year and a half in the diligent study and admiring enjoyment of the treasures of art which made that country then, even more than now, the mark and desire of the civilized world. He came back an altered man. Intellectually and morally he had made in that brief s.p.a.ce, under new influences, a prodigious stride. His sudden advance while they had remained stationary separated him from his contemporaries. The old a.s.sociations of the Weimar world, which still revolved its little round, the much-enlightened traveller had outgrown.
People thought him cold and reserved. It was only that the gay, impulsive youth had ripened into an earnest, sedate man. He found Germany jubilant over Schiller's ”Robbers” and other writings representative of the ”storm-and-stress” school, which his maturity had left far behind, his own contributions to which he had come to hate.
Schiller, who first made his acquaintance at this time, writes to Korner:--
”I doubt that we shall ever become intimate. Much that to me is still of great interest he has already outlived. He is so far beyond me, not so much in years as in experience and culture, that we can never come together in one course.”