GIFT OF 
 
 6 
 
GOETHE'S 
 LIFE-POEM 
 
 As set forth in his Life and Works 
 
 BY 
 DENTON J. SNIDER 
 
 ST. LOUIS, MO. 
 
 SIGMA PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 210 PINE ST. 
 
 1915 
 
 ' 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Part First. GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN .... 5 
 
 Chap. I. Infancy to Majority 20 
 
 I. In the Parental Home 25 
 
 II. Goethe's Father 35 
 
 III. Goethe as Phileros 46 
 
 IV. University of Leipzig 56 
 
 V. Home Again 82 
 
 VI. University of Strassburg 92 
 
 Chap. II. The Frankfort Quadrennium 123 
 
 I. Gotz Von Berlichingen 137 
 
 II. Sorrows of Werther 145 
 
 III. Titanic Fragments 157 
 
 IV. Faust 167 
 
 V. Lili 173 
 
 Chap. III. The Weimar Decennium. . . 183 
 
 I. Little Weimar 192 
 
 II. Little Weimar's Ruler 201 
 
 III. Frau Von Stein 205 
 
 IV. Literary Production 219 
 
 V. Longing for Italy 230 
 
 (3) 
 
 403180 
 
4 CONTENTS. 
 
 Part Second. GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. . 234 
 Chap. IV. The Solitary Goethe 281 
 
 I. Goethe's Dramatic Trilogy 287 
 
 Egmont, Iphigenia, Tasso . . . 289 
 
 II. Goethe's Living Drama 357 
 
 III. Goethe's Classic Measures 373 
 
 IV. Eeynard the Fox 380 
 
 Chap. V. Goethe and Schiller 390 
 
 I. Works in Partnership 415 
 
 II. Meister's Apprenticeship 427 
 
 III. Goethe's Epical Mood.. 444 
 
 IV. Reversion to the Drama 459 
 
 (1) Natural Daughter 462 
 
 (2) First Part of Faust 468 
 
 Chap. VI. Goethe Alone Again 477 
 
 I. Goethe's Marriage 481 
 
 II. Pandora 488 
 
 III. Love 's New Epiphany 494 
 
 Part Third. GOETHE THE OLD MAN 502 
 
 Chap. VII. Minna Herzlieb 521 
 
 I. Elective Affinities 524 
 
 II. The Aphoristic Goethe 529 
 
 Chap. VIII. Marianne Willemer 535 
 
 I. West-Eastern Divan 538 
 
 II. The New House of Tantalus... 544 
 
 Chap. IX. Ulrike Von Levetzow 553 
 
 I. Trilogy of Passion 562 
 
 II. Meister's Journeymanship 570 
 
 III. Passing of Goethe's Son 579 
 
 IV. Second Part of Faust 590 
 
Goethe's Life -Poem 
 
 fart Jirst 
 
 tne Woun\ 
 
 a 
 v 
 
 (1749-1786). 
 
 Goethe at Rome, quite in the middle of his 
 long career, takes a look backward upon what 
 he has already passed through in his earthly 
 discipline, and breaks forth into an exalted 
 utterance concerning what he deems the su- 
 preme turning-point of his life: "I am cel- 
 ebrating as a second birth-day, as a true pal- 
 ingenesis, the day on which I entered Rome." 
 (October 29, 1786.) So he writes in a letter 
 to a literary friend who had been watching 
 
 (5) 
 
6 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 his course for many years and who could 
 probably appreciate him better than any 
 other man. Thus the poet speaks of his new 
 birth as he views himself rounding the chief 
 turn or node of his total evolution. Many 
 other declarations made in his later days 
 could be gathered, showing the sovereign im- 
 portance with which he regarded his Italian 
 Journey. 
 
 The significance of these statements of his 
 for us is that he emphatically periodized his 
 own life in order to measure it aright and 
 thus to comprehend it fully. The Pre-Italiari 
 time was to his mind one great Period which 
 he had gone through and brought to a defi- 
 nite close by his sudden flight to Italy. What 
 he did for himself with such persistance, we 
 still propose to do for him in this account of 
 his career. In fact the biographer of Goethe 
 can easily obtain full instructions from Goe- 
 the himself for meting and bounding the 
 great arcs of his life's cycle which we call 
 Periods. His own stages and their landing- 
 places he well recognized, for he was verily 
 the careful self-scrutinizer in reviewing his 
 own life-work. Eeally, he was the most self- 
 examining of poets in spite of many a fling 
 at thinking about thought, which he some- 
 times deemed his disease. Thus our narra- 
 tive is in a certain degree pre-ordered by the 
 
GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN. 1 
 
 poet himself, and the organic points of his 
 life-poem we shall seek through his own 
 words to throw into a stronger light. 
 
 Goethe had, then, if we take his own lan- 
 guage, a first arid second birth, the one of 
 nature and the other of spirit, between which 
 two births he placed the primal grand sweep 
 of his whole career. This early sweep of his 
 years we are now to put together into one 
 thought and one name, designating it as his 
 First Period in accordance with his own sur- 
 vey and outline of himself. It lasted some 
 thirty-seven years (1749-1786), embracing 
 the total range of young-manhood quite to 
 the margin of middle-age. 
 
 We are next to ask concerning his experi- 
 ence and achievement during this time. In 
 general it is to be regarded as his great new 
 movement and advance into another world of 
 culture different from his own, which he has 
 in essence appropriated. He is getting fully 
 ready to be steeped in the classical past of 
 Greece and Rome, for that is what he finds in 
 Italy. Thereby he moves from one civiliza- 
 tion to another, from modern to ancient, from 
 Teutonic to Mediterranean spirit. Perhaps 
 the deepest shock which the mind of man can 
 undergo springs from such a transition of 
 world-historical cultures. But Goethe had to 
 perform this pivotal act of the ages that he 
 
8 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 become the universal man, fulfilling an im- 
 pulse of his genius which kept throbbing 
 within him till the deed be done. Still such 
 a soul-overmaking transition must be pre- 
 pared for not only by study, but by a certain 
 ripeness of the time and the man. Hence, 
 this First Period we may regard as a kind of 
 cultural apprenticeship to his race's develop- 
 ment, which he is in due time to appropriate 
 in its own home. 
 
 Accordingly, we are to put stress upon the 
 fact that the German poet during this First 
 Period never once quits German soil, not 
 even at Strassburg, though it belonged to the 
 French. He limits himself to the one folk 
 and its consciousness whose most musical and 
 soulful voice he becomes. He remains ethnic 
 simply, patriotic, even nativistic, though he 
 chafes at times against his nation's institu- 
 tional walls. He will not yet go South into 
 Italy though he beholds it longingly from the 
 top of Alpine St. Gotthard ; he will not enter 
 the real France, though he stood near it many 
 months, looking over its border as it were to- 
 ward its center Paris. This was, therefore, 
 emphatically his Teutonic Period, now more 
 than ever afterward, when he had tran- 
 scended his ethnic narrowness. But inside 
 the German boundary he wandered about a 
 good deal during these years, and came to 
 
GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN. 
 
 know many of its chief localities, for exam- 
 ple, Frankfort, Leipzig, Strasburg, Weimar, 
 the mountains of Switzerland and Thuringia. 
 
 Germany was dominated at this time by 
 French culture, which especially took hold of 
 its ruling classes. Even the Duke of Weimar, 
 Goethe's own friend and patron, is said to 
 have preferred till the end of his days the 
 literature of France to that of his own Saxon 
 city of the Muses. Voltaire, more than any 
 other writer, was the intellectual ruler of 
 Germany, and her greatest king called him to 
 Berlin to wield his authority of mind along- 
 side the royal dominion of the sword. It was 
 this French supremacy of spirit which Goe- 
 the assailed, as Lessing had done before him, 
 and centered in himself and his group of fel- 
 low-workers the new uprising of German Lit- 
 erature. 
 
 It was a contradictory situation. Fred- 
 erick the Great, by his victories over the 
 French, especially that of Rossbach, awak- 
 ened the national spirit of Germany from its 
 death-like somnolence and made it live again. 
 He became a new hero to the Teutonic folk, 
 and his deeds began to sing in its soul. Where 
 is the poetic voice to utter such a song? It 
 had already started to hum on the air. But 
 Frederick, the hottest foe of French polit- 
 ical domination, was the warmest friend of 
 
10 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 French literary domination. He could not 
 endure the German hymn of his own victory. 
 That the young Literature was but the word- 
 ed outburst of the spirit of the nation which 
 he had roused to fresh aspiration and ex- 
 pression, he had not the gift of seeing. But 
 that is just what Goethe saw, and he had the 
 genius to tap this deepest fountain of all true 
 poetic utterance in the folk-soul, and to set 
 it to flowing. Thus Goethe may be deemed 
 the counterpart and co-worker of Frederick 
 the Great. They both were participants, 
 each in his own field, of the incoming Teu- 
 tonic renascence, the one re-creating the 
 State, the other the Literature. 
 
 Goethe was well aware of this deepest in- 
 ner bond between himself and Frederick, in 
 spite of the latter 's protest. In his Autobi- 
 ography (Book Seventh) he has thrown his 
 searchlight upon his political compeer, and 
 very significant of his own poetic method is 
 it to note the emphasis with which he affirms 
 the worth of the national deed and the na- 
 tional hero to Literature. Hence conies his 
 appreciation of Frederick, the people's hero, 
 as the real source of the new German renas- 
 cence. Says he, in a deep-probing passage: 
 1 i The first true and really more elevated con- 
 tents of life came into German poetry through 
 Frederick the Great, and the deeds of the 
 
GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN. 11 
 
 Seven Years' War. Every national poem 
 must be shallow, or become shallow, that does 
 not rest upon the ultimate human basis, upon 
 the events of peoples and their leaders, when 
 both stand for one man. Kings are to be rep- 
 resented in war and danger where they ap- 
 pear as the first, because they determine and 
 share the destiny of what is ultimate, and 
 thereby become more interesting than the 
 Gods themselves, w r ho if they determine des- 
 tinies do not participate in them. In this 
 sense must every Nation, if it count for any- 
 thing, possess an Epopee, to which the form 
 of an epic poem is not exactly necessary. ' ' 
 
 And now by way of counterblast we shall 
 translate from Frederick's French for he 
 would not write German if he could help it 
 a royal thunderbolt against Goethe's youth- 
 ful drama, Got is von Berlichingen: "a detest- 
 able imitation of those wretched English 
 pieces, full of disgusting platitudes," which 
 opinion is itself an imitation of Voltaire's 
 venomous drive at Shakespeare. Goethe is 
 said to have written an answer to this rather- 
 petty tongue-thrust of the high monarch, but 
 to have suppressed it at Weimar, whose Duke 
 was related to the Prussian king. Anyhow, 
 the darkness was hardly worth the poet's 
 candle. So much for the national background 
 of this First Period, which runs nearly par- 
 
12 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 allel with the reign of Frederick the Great, 
 who died in 1786, the year of Goethe's de- 
 parture for Italy. 
 
 Thus we mark that the poet sees himself 
 centrally located in the great historical move- 
 ment of his country and indeed of his time, 
 of which he is the most universal utterance. 
 But in deep symmetry with the world with- 
 out, he also voices even more intensely the 
 world within, or the subjective side of human 
 nature. In this sphere his peculiar manifes- 
 tation takes the form of love, the elemental 
 bond between man and woman. Far more 
 profoundly than ancient Ovid or medieval 
 Petrarch he is the darling singer of Eros, the 
 Love-God, whom he in turn loves as the very 
 soul of himself and of the All-Self. So pro- 
 nounced and life-unifying is this strain of the 
 poet's personality and achievement that we 
 intend to give him a special name in such a 
 character, designating him as Phileros, not 
 only the lover, but the lover of Love, which 
 is the very heart-beat of his genius and drives 
 its pulsations through all his days even to 
 old-age. It would flame up again and again 
 after quiescent lapses, would renew his cre- 
 ative energy and throb forth a fresh overflow 
 of poetry, keeping him forever young in spite 
 of time's mortal pallor in his cheek, and the 
 flesh's ever-crisping corrugations. On the 
 
GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN. 13 
 
 whole, Goethe is the greatest lover the world 
 has yet seen, running the entire gamut of love 
 from its lowest sensuous note to its highest 
 spiritual transfiguration in the mystical song 
 of the choir of angels chanting of the Eternal- 
 Womanly (Das Ewig-Weibliche in the last 
 lines of Faust). 
 
 So it comes that through this life-poem of 
 the whole Goethe we must unfold from its be- 
 ginning to end the character whom we call 
 Phileros, really the one character of all the 
 poet's characters, their unity and fountain- 
 head. In his case love would stream down 
 upon him as the elemental power of Nature 
 originating all individuality, and revealing 
 that deep harmony of sex which the creator 
 himself of man seems to impart from super- 
 nal sources for the right genesis of hu- 
 manity. 
 
 But behold! there rises up in opposition 
 the foe of love, and hence of Goethe's dis- 
 tinctive genius, calling it the arch tempter of 
 man and woman, and even their destroyer, 
 labeling it and its poet with many ugly epi- 
 thets in the name of morality and religion. 
 Now we intend to listen to this negative voice 
 also, which has its emphatic meaning and 
 place in the race's spiritual evolution, for it 
 represents the vast field of asceticism, monas- 
 ticism, even sacerdotalism in part; its wide 
 
14 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 range extends from the raptured saint to the 
 mocking cynic, aye indeed from the unmar- 
 ried Christ to the marriageless Mephistophe- 
 les. What a long list of antagonists, unlov- 
 ing and loveless, can be lined up through 
 space and down time against our Phileros, 
 the unique lover of love and its supreme 
 singer and protagonist in word and deed ! 
 For our part we shall often take their stand- 
 point and duly report the same with candor 
 and at times with sympathy. 
 
 Thus looms up the portentous figure hos- 
 tile to our Phileros and his work, a denying 
 character whose many shapes we may sum- 
 marize as anti-Phileros, who, however, be- 
 longs to this life-poem of Goethe if we are to 
 reveal him in his full integrity and universal- 
 ity. For the universal man takes up not only 
 himself but his opposite, as God does, and 
 realizes both in his total achievement. So we 
 can see that Mephistopheles, if he be truly the 
 spirit that always denies, as he says he is, 
 must deny his own creator who is now Goethe 
 himself, and of whom he is a phase or stage 
 projected into an active and independent per- 
 sonality. 
 
 Now it so happens that anti-Phileros, or 
 his vicegerent if you wish, has written a very 
 complete and in our opinion a very able Life 
 of Goethe, truly a representative book, voic- 
 
GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN. 15 
 
 ing the vast population of Goethe deniers. 
 who cannot be left out of the all-embracing 
 life-poem. The author is a monk, a Catholic 
 priest, hence a vowed celibate deeply hostile 
 to Phileros the Jesuit Pater Alexander 
 Baumgartner, whose trenchant style can 
 wield in full force the Mephistophelean scoff, 
 along with the fiend's subtle scorching irony. 
 To be sure the Jesuit is not like Faust, a de- 
 nier of Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Medi- 
 cine, and especially not of Theology, unless 
 it be the Protestant or other heretical doc- 
 trine. Still his tongue is aflame with the 
 Hell-fire of Mephistopheles for damning and 
 burning up Mephistopheles, or what he opines 
 to belong to that arch-demon. So we shall 
 confess that the foregoing anti-Goethean bi- 
 ography of Goethe is more significant and 
 unique, and to us more interesting and dia- 
 bolically poetic than any other written life 
 of the poet within our knowledge, which is 
 somewhat extensive, but by no means uni- 
 versal, on this topic. We cannot do better, 
 therefore, than to let this denying voice speak 
 on due occasions for itself in a kind of anti- 
 phony to the poet's own song and deed, since 
 both the counterparts belong at last together 
 and should be builded into the one completed 
 life-poem which we are trying to construct. 
 Such, then, is the general content of Goe 
 
16 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 the's First Period, which embraces his Pre- 
 Italian years, and their discipline. The seeds 
 of his greatest works are at present sown, 
 but none of them ripen; Faust is not the only 
 product of his genius which starts to budding 
 in this spring-time of the poet, and matures 
 gradually to the close of his last Period, 
 which rounds out his fulfilment. 
 
 Here the inquisitive reader will ask about 
 this seemingly formal periodizing of Goe- 
 the's life: Why keep thrusting it under our 
 eyes which long to look ahead and not around 
 and aback? Through the true order of his 
 Periods we penetrate to the true order of the 
 poet's completed accomplishment, and com- 
 mune with his soul not only in its working 
 but also in its work, both of which we find to 
 be at bottom psychical. We thus can share 
 in the inner process of his genius as well as 
 in its vast realization. The Period images 
 the movement of the poet's creative Self. 
 But it reaches far higher in its suggestion, 
 and adumbrates the process of the All-Self 
 reflected in an individual life. If every man 
 be made after the divine pattern, his career 
 should message in some sort a revelation of 
 his Creator. A right biography, especially of 
 a great and complete career, ought, in its ulti- 
 mate purport, to be a written Theophany, a 
 manifestation of the soul of the Universe 
 
GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN. 17 
 
 itself in the universal man. This is also what 
 elevates the single biography into participa- 
 tion with its creative norm, or prototype, 
 which we may call universal biography. Thus 
 the Period, seemingly so external, must be in- 
 ternalized by the true-hearted student till he 
 sees it as the inmost process of the poet's 
 achievement, which process likewise bears the 
 supreme impress of the Creation as well as 
 of the Creator. 
 
 Goethe's life is overwhelmed with partic- 
 ulars, many of them trivial, in fact unneces- 
 sary, and even dangerous to the poet, for his 
 soul had to run the risk of getting drowned 
 in the day's details. But he possessed the 
 marvelous gift of gathering himself up from 
 his scattered chores, and of poetizing his life 
 afresh, in lofty moments which alone are 
 worth the record. For they show the cre- 
 ative descents of the spirit from above into 
 his genius which then inscribes the message. 
 Now it is these written inspirations of his 
 supernal Muse, which we are going to organ- 
 ize into the stages or Periods of one fulfilled 
 career, which thus becomes the poet's total 
 poem. 
 
 The First Period, accordingly, we seek to 
 grasp outwardly as a definite portion of Goe- 
 the's life-time, namely, Goethe the young 
 man, till nearly his fourth decade of years. 
 
18 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 Now this Period, though but a part of a 
 greater cycle, is within itself periodic and has 
 its own inner process, which indeed it must 
 have in order to be such a part. So it comes 
 that the Period will have its own divisions, 
 or rather sub-divisions which show that it 
 also goes through stages of its evolution, 
 which are to be designated and ordered ac- 
 cording to their character. Now such di- 
 vision of a Period should have its special 
 name if we would avoid confusion; accord- 
 ingly we shall call it the Epoch throughout 
 this book of ours, even if it sounds somewhat 
 technical. But it is our purpose to survey 
 and to define all the compartments, greater 
 and lesser, of the poet's vast and multifarious 
 activity. 
 
 In advance let it be noted, then, that the 
 First Period contains three distinctive Ep- 
 ochs, forming together a process which at its 
 deepest source is psychical. During this 
 First Period Goethe is wrestling with the 
 primal problem of the transmitted, estab- 
 lished, institutional order into which he was 
 born, and in which he must somehow con- 
 tinue to live. He has to work over into his 
 inner life the great outer world of prescrip- 
 tion, convention, tradition. Accordingly we 
 shall see him pass through the following 
 Epochs, each of which has its chapter. 
 
GOETHE THE YOUNG MAN. 19 
 
 .# 
 
 I. The time of the externally prescribed 
 education at home and at the university 
 the prescriptive Epoch. From Infancy to 
 Majority First Chapter. 
 
 II. The time of revolt against the trans- 
 mitted order generally his Titanism the 
 anti-prescriptive Epoch the Frankfort 
 Quadrennium Second Chapter. 
 
 III. The time of inner renovation and rec- 
 onciliation with his environing social and in- 
 stitutional world the re-prescriptive Epoch 
 The Weimar Decennium Third Chapter. 
 
 Such is a brief forecast of the poet's round 
 of epochal experiences during his Pre-Ital- 
 ian career. Of course the justification of 
 these divisions cannot be given before hand 
 their significance will only appear when 
 the concrete facts have told their story. 
 
20 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 CHAPTER FIRST. 
 
 FROM INFANCY TO MAJORITY. 
 
 Having thus in outline surveyed our first 
 great field which we call the First Period of 
 Goethe's total career, we next look inside 
 this enclosure, and find that it has some 
 strongly significant lines seaming through it 
 which sub-divides it into lesser though clearly 
 bounded departments. For instance, right in 
 the center of it rises up to a mountainous 
 height and prominence the mighty literary 
 volcano known as Storm and Stress (Sturm 
 und Drang), which has given its name to a pe- 
 culiar form of written activity not merely in 
 German but in Universal Literature. This 
 activity or movement in Goethe's case did not 
 last so very long, only some four years, but 
 it made an Epoch, as it is commonly called, 
 and so we shall call it. 
 
 But this sudden eye-catching outburst had 
 a previous time of training and preparation, 
 before it was able to evoke itself into being. 
 We can hear its early rumbles while Goethe 
 was passing from his twenty-first birth-day 
 to his twenty-second at Strassburg, but the 
 upheaval did not take place till he reached 
 home in Frankfort not long afterwards, 
 
FROM INFANCY TO MAJORITY. 21 
 
 Then the Storm and Stress broke forth in 
 full fiery fury. Still the volcano had to 
 gather its materials and fuse them, and other- 
 wise get ready to explode. 
 
 Now this time of preparatory discipline 
 and multiform youthful experience, extend- 
 ing from the poet's birth till his majority, is 
 what we shall throw into a smaller distinct 
 province or rounded enclosure by itself for 
 the purpose both of adequate scrutiny and 
 right organization. This earliest tract of 
 years and their education we shall call the 
 First Epoch of Goethe 's entire career, or the 
 First Canto of his life-song, for the poet's 
 life, we repeat, is for us a poem, even in its 
 outer mechanism and mathematical ordering, 
 which it is our purpose carefully to set forth. 
 
 We shall try to lay down in advance some 
 guiding lines which may conduct the reader 
 helpfully to the ultimate significance of this 
 prelude to the total Goethean symphony of 
 existence. Of course it is the age of the 
 youth's education, the time in which he is to 
 acquire the transmitted schooling, from his 
 his mother's knee to the learned lecture- 
 room* from the alphabet to the University, 
 aye to his two Universities, with the last one 
 of which (Strassburg) this Epoch closes. 
 Hence it is a time of prescription, even if he 
 makes boyish mouths at it almost from baby- 
 
22 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 hood; he has to win the transmitted instru- 
 mentalities of all culture and to learn how to 
 use them on his own account. He acquires 
 the ancient and modern tongues which con- 
 tain the spirit's treasures of the past- 
 Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, English, Ital- 
 ian and he also develops a voracious appe- 
 tite for literature in his father 's library. To 
 be sure, he resents all restraint, and secretly 
 defies /pedagogy; still he appropriates the 
 traditional education, but flings off its strait- 
 coat of laborious erudition. 
 
 At the same time he has to live and to be 
 reared in and through a social and institu- 
 tional order whose rule he begins to feel 
 cramp him in his swaddling clothes, and the 
 boy grows up in a mood of resistance to its 
 behests. With his other learning he learns 
 to dislike and even to defy parental and com- 
 munal authority, as something alien to his 
 nature. It is evident that the rebel Titan is 
 waxing in him with many a little outbreak 
 which, however, is at present soon sup- 
 pressed by the overwhelming might of estab- 
 lished custom and law. Still there is brood- 
 ing in him during this Epoch the potential 
 revolt against all institutions. 
 
 The climax of the tyranny of prescription 
 was when his father forced upon him a hate- 
 ful profession, that of the law. He yielded, 
 
FROM INFANCY TO MAJORITY. 23 
 
 else he could not have bread ancTbutter ; but 
 he felt that he was wronged by a paternal 
 right in the very essence of his individuality. 
 He was not peftnitted to choose his life's vo- 
 cation .harmonious with his hope, aspiration 
 and aptitude. Goethe will never forget this 
 misfit of man's calling and its bad effect up- 
 on human happiness and excellence. Indeed 
 when he gets free himself, he will try to rec- 
 tify it in others. Again and again we shall 
 see him readjusting people of his environ- 
 ment who are displaced in their life-work, 
 and hence both unhappy and inefficient. From 
 this early experience he was led, we may sup- 
 pose, to enact the part of a benevolent Prov- 
 idence for those whom he saw suffering as he 
 once suffered. 
 
 Still in spite of all conventional restric- 
 tion and repression, our poet continued to de- 
 velop during this Epoch along the deepest 
 and innermost bent of his Nature. The rec- 
 ord of his love unfolding through these early 
 years reveals the very soul of his being, the 
 most intimate evolution of his poetic genius. 
 The part of Phileros, the lover of Love, and 
 also the central character of his life-poem, 
 now has its prelude, and starts its connect- 
 ing movement which interlinks all the creat- 
 ive nodes of his career. Three loves, yea 
 four, elemental we name them, which seem to 
 
24 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 come unbidden from supernal sources with a 
 sudden overmastering downrusli, he experi- 
 ences during this adolescent Epoch, besides 
 a number of amatory fancies not coercive in 
 their urgency. Now this elemental love, 
 deeply necessitated in himself and also in 
 Nature, as he believes, is the inner driving- 
 wheel of his Autobiography which records in 
 his sixties with such fullness and glow the 
 days of his youth, especially the present Ep- 
 och. But it also throbs the pulse-beat from 
 the heart of his whole life whose ultimate 
 movement it directs and organizes. Such is 
 the part of Phileros which we wish to dis- 
 tinguish and emphasize as the golden strand 
 stringing all his creative years together and 
 their manifold works and occurrences. 
 
 Here may be cited a passage from one of 
 his letters in which he sets forth love as the 
 genetic source of all our knowledge, as the 
 original power which enables the mind to cre- 
 ate anew what it truly knows : ' ' We cannot 
 learn to know anything except what we love ; 
 and the deeper and more complete our knowl- 
 edge is to become, the stronger and more vital 
 must be our love, yea our passion.'' (From 
 a letter to F. H. Jacobi.) So it results, my 
 reader, that we must love Goethe ere we can 
 know him, even his faults. 
 
 But to recur to the general character of 
 
IN THE PARENTAL HOME. 25 
 
 this First Epoch, we are to see that it is a 
 time of prescription, of tradition, of the ac- 
 quisition of the past for the young man; he 
 accepts the established order of his environ- 
 ing world of convention, even if the distant 
 roll of Titanic thunder can be heard mutter- 
 ing an ominous protest. But our immediate 
 duty now is to unfold the salient events of 
 this Epoch reaching from the poet's infancy 
 to his majority. 
 
 In the Parental Home. 
 
 "On the twenty-eighth day of August, 
 1749, while the noon bell was striking twelve, 
 I came into the world at Frankfort-on- 
 the Main." With such an abrupt initiative, 
 Johann Wolfgang Goethe opens his Auto- 
 biography, adding that the sun and stars 
 were auspicious to his first appearance, 
 though the moon shone in decided opposi- 
 tion. To this celestial stress he intimates, 
 might be ascribed the fact that "I was born 
 as if dead, and only by many exertions was 
 I brought to open my eyes." Foreshadowy 
 life started with him in a desperate struggle 
 which held out to the end. 
 
26 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 Thus Goethe, looking back at himself from 
 the threshold of declining years, speaks of 
 the earliest moments of existence, hardly 
 from his own memory, but chiefly from that 
 of his mother, who, according to Bettina, 
 failed not to tell of her labor in bringing such 
 a prodigy into the world. The grandmother 
 was also present, as was proper, a thin, white, 
 neatly dressed old lady, hovering around the 
 bedside "like a ghost," who exclaimed at 
 the critical point, when the infant first 
 turned up its trembling eye-lids: "Daugh- 
 ter, he lives." Such is the record of Bettina, 
 evidently drawn from the fountain-head with 
 its right dramatic stroke. Nor is it human 
 to omit the same reporter's account of 
 Goethe's mother, who said of that moment 
 afterwards: "Then awoke within me my 
 mother-heart, and has lived ever since in a 
 continuous flutter of enthusiasm to this 
 hour, ".when she was seventy-five years old, 
 continues Bettina. More than any other man 
 of genius known to history was Goethe his 
 mother's son, and so in this little prelude to- 
 his life she may well be assigned the princi- 
 pal part. She lived to see that son the great- 
 est man that Germany has produced since 
 Luther, dying September 13, 1808 (born Feb- 
 ruary 19, 1731, married August 20, 1748). 
 
 Here we shall place in first rank a charac- 
 
IN THE PARENTAL HOME. 27 
 
 teristic of hers which she hersllf has de- 
 scribed in a letter of 1776: "I possess a treas- 
 ure of stories, anecdotes, etc., which I pledge 
 myself to prattle off eight days long without 
 repetition. " She had made herself instinct- 
 ively a vast depository of folk-lore, which 
 she could string out indefinitely in naive pop- 
 ular narration, yet with many a fantastic 
 turn. So we have to think that it was at her 
 knees that her boy first became acquainted 
 with mythical treasures of the people, source 
 of all true living poetry. The fountain of 
 original Teutonic folk-song and folk-tale was 
 tapped for him by his mother, and not by 
 Herder, who undoubtedly contributed to this 
 tendency, as we shall see later. Goethe in a 
 little distich has celebrated this spiritual 
 heritage of his mother: from her came "my 
 joyous nature and love of fabling. " Out of 
 such maternal endowment, then the young 
 poet took his bent to the Mythus of Peoples 
 which will run through his whole life and 
 form the deepest strain of his poetical crea- 
 tion. We shall find it active in him at the 
 start as well as at the very last round-up of 
 his career (in the Second Part of Faust). 
 
 The mother of Goethe had also the power 
 of literary expression, the gift of the written 
 word. It is true that she preferred, or said 
 she preferred, to talk, to prattle, to spin her 
 
28 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 stories out of her mouth minted fresh from 
 her heart and imagination the pen-point 
 bothered her, confining the immediate gush 
 of her soul to such a narrow outlet. Still she 
 became quite a copious letter-writer through 
 her long life, and developed an original epis- 
 tolary style, probably the most original of 
 its kind in German literature. Full of fan- 
 tastic flights and humorous flashes, all per- 
 fectly easy and artless, she has not to pump 
 for her jokes or her radiant metaphors, they 
 spray out over you like an artesian fount up- 
 springing from nature 's own buoyancy. She 
 has her special orthography which seems in- 
 born in her words, mirroring doubtless the 
 popular accent, like the best of Mark 
 Twain's or Uncle Remus 's; let not her mis- 
 spellings be corrected, as the editorial mind 
 is inclined to do for sake of the printed page ; 
 they are as native as her speech, indeed are 
 an integral part of it. And indeed all her 
 speech springs from the very Teutonic well- 
 head, the pure unsophisticated utterance of 
 the German woman-soul. So the foreign 
 reader will feel through even if quite unable 
 to catch many a little nuance of the native 
 Frankfort dialect. As to her letter writing, 
 she transmitted that gift also to her boy, who 
 kept up the habit during life and has handed 
 down to the future army of readers thou- 
 
7^ THE PARENTAL HOME. 29 
 
 < 
 
 sands upon thousands of samples. Goethe 's 
 early letters have a good deal of resemblance 
 to those of his mother, who retained her 
 buoyant, metaphorical, fantastic style to the 
 last. From this point of view her old-age's 
 letters are often better than those of Goethe 
 himself at the same time of life, for in his 
 correspondence and otherwise he stiffened 
 with the years. Her sprightly oddities seem 
 to have found an echo in Bettina's writings. 
 ' 'She was a nature, " said her son sugges- 
 tively but vaguely, leaving the rest to be 
 filled out, and this has been quite adequately 
 done by her published letters, which have 
 been recently proclaimed to have their ac- 
 cepted niche in the somewhat thronged tem- 
 ple of recent German Literature. In fact, 
 it is worth the while for the student of uni- 
 versal writ to compare her with two other 
 eminent epistolary women of Europe, the 
 French Madam Sevigny, and the English 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montague; all three are 
 distinctly national, yet strictly feminine too; 
 taken together they form a very attractive 
 cheery alcove in the woman's section of Eu- 
 ropean Literature. 
 
 The conception of Goethe's mother and of 
 her influence upon her son would have a huge 
 gap in it unless the religious side of her na- 
 ture were emphasized. In one of her pious 
 
30 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 splashes she has thrown out a luminous con- 
 fession of faith which may be here written 
 down: "I take joy in life, because my lamp 
 still glows; I do not hunt out the thorns, but 
 snatch up every little pleasure; if the doors 
 are low, I stoop; if I can get the rock out 
 of my path, I do it; if it be too heavy, I go 
 around it; and so I find every day something 
 which delights me; and then the key-stone 
 faith in God. 7 ' So on her uplifting world- 
 view she buoyantly swims over all the vexa- 
 tions of life; at the same time she has a pas- 
 sion for radiating human love on every per- 
 son who comes within her range : "I hold all 
 people very dear, and that is felt by young 
 and old in my presence I demoralize no- 
 body, but try to spy out the good side, and 
 leave the bad side to Him who created man 
 and who understands the matter best" 
 (from a letter to a boy who probably had rea- 
 son to appreciate it). A working theory of 
 life she has thought out in her woman 's way, 
 and sprays it out in iridescent jets on the at- 
 mosphere about her: "I do everything 
 forthright at a gush taking the most dis- 
 agreeable thing first always, and I gulp down 
 the Devil (with his black thoughts) without 
 staring at him long." So the light-hearted 
 woman has also her battle with the fiend, 
 whom she gets rid of then and there, when- 
 
IN THE PARENTAL HOME. 31 
 
 ever she meets Mm, by a miraculous act of 
 deglutition. In this way she too may be said 
 to have had her Philosophy of Negation, 
 whereby she could negate the negative, deal- 
 ing with it far more simply but more effectu- 
 ally than her son, who probably never did 
 quite succeed in swallowing his Mephisto- 
 pheles, "the Spirit that denies." Well, who 
 does? For it is a characteristic of old Splay- 
 foot that he will turn up again after repeated 
 human engulf ments may he be accursed! 
 
 Aged Goethe remembered his mother well 
 in her religiosity (wherein he did not always 
 follow her good example) and thus speaks of 
 her as late as 1824 in a letter to Zelter, who 
 wanted one of her epistolary specimens : 
 "Herewith a sample of my mother 's letters 
 which you desired; in it, as in every line of 
 hers, the character of a woman utters itself 
 who lived in the fear of God after the way 
 of the Old Testament, leading a hearty life 
 full of trust in the unchangeable God of the 
 Folk and Family." She could always cite a 
 comforting verse of the Bible for her needs 
 her choice was the ancient Hebrew writ, 
 greatest of all religious folk-books; she was 
 what the Germans call bibelfest, ready at all 
 times to apply a line of Scripture for easing 
 the ups and downs of life, and ready to fling 
 a bucket of water on anybody's Hell-lit 
 
32 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 tongue. Completely inoculated with the 
 Lutherian phraseology, she imparted this 
 linguistic trait to her son, whose biblical 
 turns of expression have been often pointed 
 out. 
 
 But that which she glorified as the chief 
 crown of her existence was her motherhood: 
 ' ' Call me mother for all the rest of my days, 
 as many as my old age may yet count, " she 
 writes to lively little Bettina, "that is the one 
 name which embraces all my happiness. ' ' So 
 she mothered that bright fantastic elf as her 
 own who has so much spiritual kinship with 
 herself; but her chief maternal pride rayed 
 out upon her great son. Weimar not Frank- 
 fort was the home of her heart ; no wonder she 
 exclaims : ' ' That place is the one which con- 
 tains my all, everything which upon this 
 round earth is dear, lofty and of value." 
 Thus she re-lived her own in his genius, with 
 many little meteoric scintillations from her 
 Frankfort home in writ, word and deed, 
 transfiguring the small things of the moment 
 into honey-drops for all times as it has turned 
 out greatly to her surprise would this be, if 
 she were living now. So we regard her with 
 deep delight as a genuine artist of life, espe- 
 cially for her sex, building her happy exist- 
 ence every moment out of microscopic joy- 
 cells. 
 
IN THE PARENTAL HOME. 33 
 
 With these traits before us we can well un- 
 derstand the part which the mother had in 
 the training of Goethe as a poet. She was 
 only eighteen when he was born, they grew 
 up as children together, as playmates in the 
 sunshine of life, she leading the way in 
 games, stories, and happy-making caresses. 
 And this thought will rise to the surface: 
 through her the son became more deeply at- 
 tached to women than to his own sex; they 
 touched him more deeply at the creative foun- 
 tain of his genius, and their influence upon 
 his life is more innate. That strand of the 
 love of woman runs through his career from 
 start to end, and on it are strung all his 
 greatest works and his pivotal Epochs. It 
 has often been remarked that his female char- 
 acters are of a higher order than his male, 
 he seems to possess in his own soul a better 
 elemental stuff out of which he moulds them 
 in his best moments. Through that mother 
 flowed the influences, both pre-natal and post- 
 natal, which brought him his genius, arid 
 twinned it inseparably with the woman-soul 
 to which he was so responsive in act and ut- 
 terance, and whose last message is his last 
 words in the Second Part of Faust. 
 
 To this domestic group of children mother 
 and boy must be added a daughter, Cor- 
 nelia, by name, only fifteen months and a few 
 
34 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 days younger than Goethe. She had a monop- 
 oly of the homely element of the family, 
 while her brother from childhood was noted 
 for his unique physical beauty. She scowled 
 in irregular broken lineaments, and it would 
 seem that her mind was featured somewhat 
 upon her unattractive face. Long afterward 
 the poet speaks very gently of her temper, 
 but hints her lack of beauty and its spiritual 
 influence. Cornelia evidently bore so deep a 
 spite against dame Nature for this injustice 
 that the sense of a born wrong passed into 
 her disposition and there took fixed lodg- 
 ment. One of her exclamations in her diary 
 is still preserved : "I would give everything, 
 if I were only handsome." Still she found 
 an admirer, one a good deal uglier than her- 
 self, according to report and his picture 
 and she married him. Still she belonged to 
 and grew up with that children's group of 
 three in the Goethe household, and was deeply 
 attached to her brother whose gift she appre- 
 ciated and whose early productions she en- 
 couraged. 
 
 There was another strong bond between 
 them: their common, though secret revolt 
 against their father, to which the mother 
 rather leaned, though always seeking to be 
 the mediator, and having to perform the con- 
 trary parts of a doting mama and a dutiful 
 
GOETHE'S FATHER. 35 
 
 .* 
 
 wife. This father furnished also his contri- 
 bution to Goethe's nature and discipline and 
 must be looked at, for chiefly through his un- 
 happy pedagogy his boy was trained to be 
 the contradictory imp who foreshadowed in 
 himself the evolving Mephistopheles. 
 
 II. 
 
 Goethe's Father. 
 
 Having sought to win some idea of how 
 the poet was mothered, we must also take a 
 peep at how he was fathered a much more 
 superficial matter and hence easier. The 
 son has sent down to us a brief glance in a 
 versicle : ' ' From my father I get my stature, 
 and the earnest conduct of life." His phys- 
 ical body and his methodical habit are, then, 
 his paternal heritage worth something in- 
 deed, but quite external in comparison with 
 heirdom of his mother. 
 
 Johan Caspar Goethe was twenty-one years 
 older than his wife, more than double her 
 age, when he married her . If we add twenty 
 or even ten years to both, the difference be- 
 tween them would not be by any means so 
 great. But she was a mere frolicking girl of 
 seventeen at her marriage, and he was a 
 middle-aged man of thirty-eight, crystallized 
 
36 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 in habit and thought, very crystallized in- 
 deed, yet a worthy character and not without 
 affection. He was wealthy for the time, had 
 considerable scholarship with a bent toward 
 literature; moreover he had studied law and 
 was decidedly imbued with formal legality. 
 There is no doubt that he was strongly im- 
 pressed with his right of authority in his 
 family. This he found abundant opportunity 
 to exercise, as he had no economic occupa- 
 tion but lived from his money. The result 
 was a secret opposition, indeed a sort of con- 
 spiracy on the part of his children against 
 his domination. Such a situation is found 
 often enough in the household ; but that which 
 rendered the present case worse was Caspar 
 Goethe's undue love of pedagogy. He be- 
 came the teacher of his children, and played 
 the stern schoolmaster to them during the 
 day. The result was that the parent was 
 sunk in the pedagogue, and the home was 
 turned into a drilling seminary, as far as he 
 was concerned. Moreover he wished his boy 
 to follow his profession and to be a jurist; 
 but the son felt in his heart a decided aversion 
 to be like his father. Even more rebellious 
 was the daughter Cornelia who now had two 
 grievances on her hands: against Nature 
 and against parent. 
 
 It should be noted as a part of Goethe's 
 
GOETHE'S FATHER. 37 
 
 , 
 
 early education, though an unintended part 
 that he was already trained in the family to 
 a strong protest against 'transmitted author- 
 ity. His father was unconsciously develop- 
 ing in the son a secret resistance to the ex- 
 istent order which will in time break out in 
 action somewhat, but far more in mighty ex- 
 pression. The young mother was also put 
 to school under her husband and compelled 
 to learn Italian, music, and other things in 
 which she had little interest. He was a great 
 stickler for principles, and clung to the reg- 
 ular routine, while his three pupils built a 
 little world of their own from which he was 
 excluded. 
 
 Still there was a positive side to this in- 
 struction which must be duly noted. Young 
 Goethe learned to read and w r rite Latin with 
 ease and retained the acquisition through 
 life. He took French lessons, to which Ital- 
 ian and English were added, and besides he 
 tackled Hebrew. He had a tilt at Greek, 
 probably without much result, for in later 
 life he renewed again and again his onsets. 
 Goethe took pleasure in learning languages 
 and had a gift in this line ; here doubtless lay 
 the most congenial field of his father's in- 
 struction. Still the limit was drawn upon 
 this domain too : he could do nothing with the 
 formal grammar of a tongue, it was detest- 
 
38 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 able like all formalism perchance because 
 it was quite too like his teacher though he 
 loved to read, prattle, and even write in 
 strange idioms, especially during his youth. 
 Worse still he hated mathematics. But the 
 best school for the aspiring lad was his fa- 
 ther 's well-stored private library in which he 
 found many volumes of poetry and general 
 knowledge. The German folk-books he de- 
 voured, "the whole set even to the Wander- 
 ing Jew" as he declares, though this act 
 seemingly had to be done outside the house. 
 Of his own accord he seems to have picked up 
 a knowledge of Jew-German from the ghetto 
 of Frankfort, and he has left us a written 
 specimen. Nor is to be omitted from the pic- 
 ture the stiff pedagogical parent playing the 
 dancing-master to his children, and even if 
 a little old and rigid, giving them lessons in 
 the art of Terpsichore to the tune of a fiddle. 
 But the home-drill continued : Goethe, with 
 one brief exception, never attended a public 
 school with its equalizing tendency. Such an 
 education made for evoking his innate aris- 
 tocratic disposition, which clung to him 
 through great political upheavals which 
 jolted his century. 
 
 Characteristic from this point of view are 
 some expressions in his earliest known letter 
 written before he was fifteen. The vouth feels 
 
GOETHE'S FATHER. 39 
 
 himself called upon to confess his defects of 
 character: "I am somewhat irascible . . . 
 am very impatient, and do not like to remain 
 long in uncertainty. Further I am accus- 
 tomed to giving command, yet when I have 
 nothing to say, I can be silent." Young 
 Wolfgang ruled his mother and sister, and 
 doubtless often circumvented his father. 
 Later in life Goethe failed not to manifest 
 this same trait of domination which in his 
 father caused his youthful revolt. Even the 
 autocratic Duke of Weimar called him a 
 tyrant, and sometimes played the tyrant to 
 the tyrant. Suggestive is the fact that when 
 he comes to have a son, he will largely repeat 
 his father's deed to him, and will largely get 
 back from that son what he himself did to his 
 father. In his Autobiography he confesses 
 that he had inherited the parental peda- 
 gogical propensity a good thing for us by 
 the way, as his desire to teach was the source 
 of many of his happiest reported conversa- 
 tions. One of his youthful companions long 
 afterwards said of him: "We were always 
 the lackeys. ' ' With this superiority was pre- 
 cociously developed his critical faculty : ' ' We 
 have many blockheads in our city" he de- 
 clares scornfully with expanded illustration 
 in a letter written at the age of fourteen. 
 This trait will not fail to unfold with the 
 
40 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 years to its haughtiest potence in the Mephis- 
 tophelean scoff. 
 
 Goethe began poetizing early, and we are 
 surprised to learn that the juridical father 
 encouraged him in his youthful verses, as 
 well as his poetical mother. Only one of 
 these boyish attempts has survived and beck- 
 ons to us in his works under the daring title : 
 Christ's Descent to Hell. The Bible furnished 
 him chiefly with subjects ; we hear of an epos 
 called Joseph and His Brethren, and a drama 
 on Belsliazzar, with some other scriptural 
 themes. Thus his youth's practice was to 
 transform the supreme religious folk-book 
 into various styles of poetry, having his own 
 kin mainly as audience. Two supreme things 
 he caught up from this exercise : how his Teu- 
 tonic people looked upon the divine govern- 
 ment of the world, and how they uttered the 
 same in their most exalted speech. Through 
 the Bible Goethe may not have become very 
 well acquainted with his God, but he did come 
 to know his folk in its profoundest conscious- 
 ness and in its most universal expression. 
 Later with a change of mood, he flung into 
 the flames these considerable works of his 
 boyhood, which " could not otherwise atone 
 for their youthful sins than through fire," as 
 he says of them in a burst of Satanic damna- 
 tion. 
 
GOETHE'S FATHER. 41 
 
 In the Autobiography Goethe has narrated 
 quite fully a number of occurrences in his 
 youth which he, looking back from advanced 
 life, deemed formative for his career. He 
 puts stress upon a puppet-theater, a present 
 of the grandmother to the children, which he 
 holds, " exercised the faculties of invention 
 and representation, as well as the power of 
 imagination and a certain technical skill. ' ' In 
 his Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister he 
 has dwelt iipon the same circumstance with 
 a rather tiresome fullness. The earthquake 
 at Lisbon (November 1, 1755), with its awful 
 and sudden destruction of life and property, 
 is mentioned as having "shaken the boy's 
 repose of mind, to the bottom for the first 
 time." This mental shattering was re- 
 ligious : ' ' God, the Creator and upholder of 
 Heaven and Earth, merciful and wise accord- 
 ing to the first Article of Faith, had over- 
 whelmed the just and unjust with like de- 
 struction, and thus had shown himself by no 
 means so paternal." This is perhaps the old 
 Mephistophelean Goethe of sixty years rather 
 than the boy of six. But he goes on: "In 
 vain the young soul tried to recover itself 
 from these impressions" which, however, 
 even the learned clergy could not do. There 
 is no doubt that this terrible calamity pro- 
 duced at the time a great religious question- 
 
42 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 ing throughout Europe ; there was a theolog- 
 ical upheaval as well as physical ; a vast out- 
 pour of penitential sermons and exhortations 
 to conversion deluged the literature of the 
 time, not sparing Frankfort, and in this ex- 
 citement the child Goethe might have shared. 
 Voltaire seized on the unearthly horror to 
 ridicule the Leibnizian optimism, and Eous- 
 seau entered the lists against him these two 
 writers of French being then the most widely 
 read authors in Europe. 
 
 Another great historic event which became 
 inwoven with Goethe's youth was the Seven 
 Years' War (1756-63). Frederick the Great 
 and Prussia had arisen in the North, and rep- 
 resented on the whole the Teutonic against 
 the Latin world, with their respective cul- 
 tures and religions. Frankfort lay some- 
 what on the border, and in its sympathies 
 was deeply divided. Members of the same 
 family took different sides, and the feud 
 seemed to become all the more bitter because 
 of the kinship. The same phenomenon was 
 often witnessed during our own Civil War in 
 the Border States. Now the main point of 
 the new experience is that young Goethe saw 
 and felt this political rent enter and cleave 
 his own domestic environment his father 
 was a strong Prussian sympathizer, while his 
 mother's family (the Textors) stood emphat- 
 
GOETHE'S FATHER. 43 
 
 .4- 
 
 ically on the other side and possessed polit- 
 ical power the maternal grandfather being 
 the city's highest official. Here, then, the boy 
 first felt the shrill dissonance of politics, 
 which ever afterward jarred in his soul. 
 Still he at present sided with Prussia, with 
 his father and with the national feeling which 
 was mightily evoked by Frederick's vic- 
 tories. 
 
 The overwhelming defeat of the French 
 and Imperialists at Rossbach (November, 
 1757) showed that a new power had dawned 
 upon Europe. A month later came the sec- 
 ond dazzling triumph of Prussia at Leuthen, 
 followed by the capitulation of Breslau. A 
 new power had dawned upon Europe, a new 
 German hero had arisen, who was saluted by 
 the fervid patriots as the fresh epiphany of 
 ancient Arminius again battling for Teutonia 
 against Roma. Goethe was perhaps not too 
 immature to feel during these years the re- 
 juvenation of Fatherland, though he was af- 
 terward not very enthusiastic over it for va- 
 rious reasons. One of these may have been 
 the memory of that violent quarrel between 
 his father Goethe and his grandfather Textor 
 at a family festival w r hen son-in-law and fa- 
 ther-in-law drew sharp weapons on each 
 other, with enormous loss of temper but no 
 loss of blood very properly not reported by 
 
44 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 Goethe himself in the Autobiography, but 
 dug out of the diary of a cotemporary phy- 
 sician by the name of Senckendorf who 
 writes: "Textor threw a knife at Goethe 
 who drew a sword. Pastor Starck (another 
 son-in-law present) fell sick from fright at 
 the scene, " and hence probably the doctor 
 had to be called who probed for the cause of 
 the strange illness. (See the account with 
 the citation in Loeper's edition of Dichtung 
 und Wahrheit, notes to Second Book, p. 
 272.) 
 
 Another incident of this time was the en- 
 trance of French soldiers into Frankfort ; one 
 of the officers, the king's lieutenant, was 
 quartered in the Goethe house for many 
 months. Much discomfort and anxiety re- 
 sulted, especially the father was disturbed by 
 the continual presence of his foes, and could 
 not attend to his pedagogical work with the 
 same strictness. Young Goethe was given 
 greater freedom, or took it, and picked up 
 many a forbidden experience which he has 
 duly recorded. When the war with its ex- 
 citements had ended, another stirring event 
 for the old city took place : the coronation of 
 the Emperor in 1764. This w r e may let pass 
 as an empty pageant, though set forth by 
 Goethe with some detail in his Autobiogra- 
 phy. The Holy Roman Empire was at the 
 
GOETHE'S FATHER. 45 
 
 time in decay and some years afterward 
 gave up the ghost. 
 
 But the pivotal fact at this point is that 
 the lover Goethe weaves through the cere- 
 monies the romance of his first love, at least 
 his first recorded love, and thus starts the 
 deepest and most abiding strand of his whole 
 career, both in life and literature. (See Fifth 
 Book of his Dichtung und Wakrheit.) It is 
 evident by the warmth of his style and the 
 dramatic fullness of his account that the old 
 poet deemed the affair the start of an era in 
 his development. For Goethe is supremely 
 the poet of Love, with its conflicts bringing 
 defeat and triumph, as well as the keenest 
 joys and the intensest sorrows. In this role 
 we have already designated him by a special 
 name, which will keep rising to the surface 
 throughout his life, especially at its epochal 
 turns. Phileros is now to step forth on the 
 stage, a name taken from one of his own char- 
 acters, not well known or rightly appreciated 
 hitherto, but who is now to be promoted to 
 his true place as the central hero, not of a 
 single drama or epos, but of the poet's total 
 life-poem. 
 
46 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 III. 
 
 Goethe Preludes as PhUeros. 
 
 Sitting at the table of an inn, among his 
 youthful companions, who were having a lit- 
 tle festival, Goethe, then fourteen years old 
 or thereabouts, was exercising his talent in 
 making verses for the occasion. This theme 
 was assigned to him: "Compose us a love- 
 letter in poetry which a bashful maiden might 
 write to a young fellow, declaring her pas- 
 sion. " Said the juvenile bard: "Nothing 
 is easier than that," as if already an old 
 hand in such business, and on the spot set 
 about the task. "At once I called vividly be- 
 fore my mind the situation, should a pretty 
 girl be actually inclined to me, and begin to 
 reveal it in prose or verse." Great was the 
 the triumph of Wolfgang in the opinion of 
 his young friends ; one of them ordered right 
 off a bottle of wine, but, instead of the reg- 
 ular waiters, behold a divine appearance in 
 the eyes of the thrilled, adolescent Goethe, 
 whom he thus wreathes in a halo of glory: 
 "A maiden steps in of uncommon, yea, con- 
 sidering her surroundings, of incredible 
 beauty. A little cap sat so neatly upon her 
 little head which a slender throat joined very 
 
GOETHE PRELUDES AS PHILEROS. 47 
 
 .* 
 
 gracefully to neck and shoulders. Everything 
 on her seemed carefully chosen, and we could 
 regard the whole form the more at leisure, 
 since the attention was no longer drawn and 
 fixed on her lovely mouth alone and on her 
 quiet, true eyes," as she turned her back to 
 bring the wine. So the Goddess has come 
 down, and appears for the first time to the 
 youthful poetizer with what result! 
 
 ' ' The form of this maiden pursued me over 
 every path from that moment on ; it was the 
 first permanent impression which any woman 
 had ever made upon me." Such, then, we may 
 consider the starting-point of Goethe the 
 lover, as he himself evidently looks at it in 
 that light. Still further: "As I could find 
 no pretext to see her at home, I went to 
 church and spied out where she sat; so 1 
 feasted my eyes on her during the long Pro- 
 testant service. Still I dared not address 
 her," till the suitable occasion came. Thus 
 the poet portrays himself falling into the 
 toils just when he had wrought himself up to 
 a high pitch of imagination in composing the 
 fictitious love-letter ; in his fervor he pitches 
 from image to reality at one plunge, and 
 sinks suddenly overhead. To be sure the 
 Goddess appears at the right moment in all 
 the magic of her beauty to the impressionable 
 youth still reeling from his poetic paroxysm. 
 
48 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 Now it was so brought about by the same set 
 of mischievous boys that the ardent young 
 poet was called on for another poetic epistle 
 in a kind of comedy which they were playing 
 to make game of one of their crowd. Thus 
 Goethe was now to write a love-letter when 
 deeply in love, instead of the reverse as be- 
 fore; this gave just the opportunity to pour 
 out his present feelings into verse. Neces- 
 sarily the composition came under the eye of 
 the maiden, whose name was Gretchen (Mag- 
 gie), and who was secretly its object. She 
 read it half aloud and very tenderly, when she 
 said : * ' That is very fine, but pity that it is 
 not put to a better, to a true use." Then at 
 the passionate urgency of the lover she signed 
 her name to the letter, as if it were her own. 
 The outcome was a mutual confession and 
 then a quick separation to avoid inquisitive 
 eyes. 
 
 Whereupon the old poet, in his Autobiog- 
 raphy, looking back, through more than forty 
 years, makes the following reflection: "The 
 first inclinations of love in an incorrupted 
 youth take decidedly a spiritual turn. Na- 
 ture seems to wish that one sex shall perceive 
 by the senses the Good and the Beautiful in 
 the other. And so through the sight of this 
 girl through my attachment to her arose 
 a new world of the Beautiful and the Excel- 
 
GOETHE PRELUDES AS PHILEROS. 49 
 
 lent. ' ' In such way again he emphasizes this 
 epoch-making occurrence in his life, and en- 
 forces his training through love of which the 
 present is the earliest instance according to 
 his record. 
 
 The question comes up, how is it that Goe- 
 the is led to recall and portray this affair of 
 heart in so much detail, with such deep in- 
 terest, and with so great artistic delight? The 
 fact is, when he wrote these earlier books of 
 his Autobiography he was again in love with 
 a young maiden Minna Herzlieb. She in- 
 spired in him all the strength of his youthful 
 passion for Gretchen, though he was hover- 
 ing around sixty. It was a hopeless attach- 
 ment, but tormented him for years. In ac- 
 cord with his method of self -relief he threw 
 off his love-pain into literature. No less than 
 three of his larger works sprang from his 
 passion for Minna Herzlieb Pandora, Elec- 
 tive Affinities, and the Autobiography be- 
 sides smaller effusions. But the wound con- 
 tinues bleeding for years ; as he himself inti- 
 mates, it shuns all healing, the heart fears to 
 get well. So it medicines itself by literary 
 utterance, as his wont was in all his amatory 
 catastrophes. 
 
 But the novel of Gretchen is not yet ended, 
 on the contrary many little incidents of lov- 
 ing talk and action are dwelt upon with a pe- 
 
50 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 culiar relish. This Gretchen is also shown 
 at the spinning-wheel, like the Gretchen in 
 Faust. Promenades, poems, boat-rides are 
 all narrated in a radiant afterglow by the old 
 man rehabilitating his prophetic youth. The 
 girl had aspiration, she wished to learn, she 
 would go to the university, "if she were a 
 boy." The lover was not slow to catch the 
 hint and explained many things about the 
 coronation ceremonies then taking place 
 which she did not understand. Upon this 
 point a citation may be made which thrills a 
 chord of Goethe's entire life: "A young 
 couple whom nature has in any degree formed 
 harmoniously can find nothing which tends 
 to a more beautiful union than when the 
 maiden is eager to learn and the youth is 
 eager to teach. Such a relation becomes as 
 deep-reaching as agreeable. She sees in him 
 the creator of her spiritual existence, and he 
 sees in her a creature who ascribes her com- 
 pletion not to nature or chance or a one-sided 
 effort but to a common will, and this recip- 
 rocal activity is so sweet that we do not won- 
 der at the stories of the old and new Abelard" 
 with his sweet teachable Eloisa. 
 
 Then occurs the stroke of destiny which 
 separates the lovers forever. Some of their 
 remote companions had been guilty of a crim- 
 inal act nothing less than forgery. Investi- 
 
GOETHE PRELUDES AS PHILEROS. 51 
 
 y 
 
 gation by the authorities takes place ; Goethe, 
 though innocent, gets involved through his 
 association with bad company; all the hid- 
 den doings of his love episode are brought to 
 light ; Gretchen is questioned and found guilt- 
 less, but quits the city at once. On being ex- 
 amined about her relation to her devoted 
 swain she answers : "I always regarded him 
 as a child, my inclination for him was truly 
 that of a sister. " This response, being re- 
 ported to the youth who was lying ill through 
 the transaction, went far toward curing him 
 of his agony. "I found it unendurable that 
 a girl, at most a few years older than myself, 
 wT>uld take me for a child. " For was he not 
 a full fledged adolescent? Still he could not 
 for a long time get rid of that image which 
 had given him so much delight and so much 
 woe. The counterstroke of love is now first 
 felt by him in all its affliction, often to be re- 
 peated hereafter. He would not allow her 
 name to pass his lips, " still I could not ban- 
 ish the bad habit of thinking about her, of 
 recalling her form, her ways, her looks," and 
 the rest. Very unwillingly the old remem- 
 berer dismisses her, for she is present to him 
 in a new shape which also refuses to quit its 
 dancing before him. 
 
 A careful German investigator has searched 
 the criminal archives of Frankfort for that 
 
52 ^GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 time and found no trace of what is here re- 
 corded by Goethe. Hence the truth of the oc- 
 currence with this early Gretchen has been 
 questioned. It is certainly a little novel and 
 is put together with much art. Founded on 
 fact it doubtless was, and here we may recall 
 Goethe's own dictum: All the occurrences 
 there told took place, but not in the way or 
 order in which they are told. Actual life fur- 
 nished the crude material which he wrought 
 over into art. As he describes it, the poetic 
 function is to idealize the reality. The whole 
 narrative is, accordingly, a little romantic 
 episode bubbling up on the stream of life. 
 And this will indicate the character of his en- 
 tire book of Autobiography : the prosaic back- 
 ground of a human career is given with its 
 epochal effervescences into poetry. Such are 
 the two strands of man's existence in its 
 ceaseless onward flow, fact and fiction, and 
 Goethe will put both into his work making a 
 new specimen of literature. 
 
 It may here be premised that there will be 
 quite a number of such novelettes of love 
 strung through his record, with their setting 
 of merely historic or biographic occurrences. 
 The stories of Frederika and Lili and others 
 will be introduced in the same way. Of a sud- 
 den from unseen depths life wells up. into a 
 rainbow fountain of romance. And with 
 
GOETHE PRELUDES AS PHILEROS. 53 
 
 Goethe love had something elemental in it; 
 unexpectedly it would heave forth from the 
 very sources of his being, and make him vi- 
 brate to its throbs like an earthquake, till it 
 found vent in some mighty volcanic eruption. 
 Then for a while he could be quiescent again, 
 and sink down to the steady commonplace of 
 daily routine. When we come to understand 
 him, we have to regard love's upheaval in 
 him as akin to a phenomenon of nature, often 
 terrible, even shocking to the moral sense, as 
 many good people were shocked morally as 
 well as physically by the Lisbon earthquake. 
 Yet that too has ultimately to be taken as a 
 part of God, if He be the creative All, per- 
 chance a part unexplained of the moral order 
 of the Universe. 
 
 Goethe's loves, then, are the fundamental 
 question of his life and of his poetry. They 
 furnish the point on which he is most gener- 
 ally assailed, and which surely is the most 
 difficult to understand. To \ienounce him or 
 to defend him seems equally inadequate. I 
 wonder if we cannot let him be as he is and 
 try to comprehend him as a unique human 
 phenomenon both in life and literature. The 
 world is still grappling with the problem of 
 him, often in bitter hate, often in hot defense, 
 then again in an uncertain curiosity. At any 
 rate the man himself recounting his own ca- 
 
54 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 reer, has struck its deepest and most per- 
 sistent strain in this story of the somewhat 
 shadowy Gretchen. It is his keynote, sounded 
 now at the start and winding through and in 
 its way controlling his life's long and varied 
 symphony. So we pick it up and dwell on it 
 just here, -as it will recur again and again in 
 many different forms till the end. 
 
 Accordingly we shall give to Goethe, play- 
 ing this deepest and most determining part 
 of his varied life's drama all his days, a spe- 
 cial name Phileros, the lover of love, taken 
 from one of his own dramatic characters (in 
 his Pandora). For Goethe not only loves, 
 but loves love, turning it back on itself and 
 making it an object of itself, making it self- 
 end and not merely an end unto something 
 else. This was done not simply on purpose, 
 by an act of conscious volition, but was the 
 spontaneous upburst of his profoundest un- 
 der-self, truly a manifestation of the secret 
 springs of Nature gathered possibly for un- 
 told ages far down in her fathomless bosom. 
 Goethe, then, is a lover indeed, but likewise 
 a lover of Love; of such new personality he 
 has to deliver the message, *quite different 
 from any thing which had gone before. 
 
 So we shall often have occasion to spy out 
 subtly Phileros, the most central and dis- 
 tinctive of all Goethe's characters. Let not 
 
GOETHE PRELUDES AS PHILEROS. 55 
 
 the watchful reader slight him the most 
 spontaneous and formative energy, indeed the 
 very soul, of Goethe's genius. Undoubtedly 
 we have to construe this one essential char- 
 acter out of numerous manifestations of it 
 scattered along the poet's days, and make it 
 move forth through his life-poem. Love 
 would dart down upon him quite unawares, 
 like a God from Olympus, at first perchance 
 tickling him, then scourging him, yea crush- 
 ing him to death's point almost, yet thereby 
 renewing him and rehearing him for a fresh 
 productive spell. In fact Goethe gets old a 
 dozen times, whatever be his years, but on 
 the last edge downward into hopeless senility, 
 his guardian spirit plucks him out and then 
 plunges him into the fountain of love in 
 which his genius is veritably re-born, and 
 starts again singing the song of its youth 
 with all its original power. 
 
 And now we may listen to a little blast 
 from the other side. Anti-Phileros has not 
 failed to insinuate that this so-called first love 
 already indicates some previous experience 
 in the same line on the part of the guileless 
 adolescent of fourteen years, gifted certainly 
 with a strong amatory pre-disposition. In 
 that love-song how could he hit the nail so 
 pat on the head if his were a state of paradi- 
 saical ignorance? Next our celibate Mephis- 
 
56 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM --PART FIRST. 
 
 topheles, the hater of love and the lover of 
 hate, squirts a dirty jet of inuendos upon the 
 fair maiden Gretchen, whose ideal vesture, 
 given her so lovingly by the poet, gets badly 
 besmirched, as she vanishes from our view. 
 Well, her company was not the best, it was a 
 bad lot of boys, even criminals among them, 
 and Goethe conceals not the fact. Still her 
 fascinating figure stays and is going to stay 
 as preluding the very soul of Phileros and 
 starting the long line of fair women whose 
 presence had the power of tapping the deep- 
 est sources of his Muse and of re-creating his 
 genius. 
 
 IV. 
 
 'At the University of Leipzig. 
 
 We have seen that Goethe already in his 
 boyish days had made himself a general vers- 
 ifier for occasions in his family and among 
 Ms youthful companions; at Frankfort he 
 had become young Johannes the rhymer. 
 This trait he will carry with him to Leipzig 
 as student of the University and will continue 
 it through life. The reality about him and 
 his own experiences he had the innate bent 
 to turn into verse on the spot ; so he calls his 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 57 
 
 .4- 
 
 poetic productions generally poems for oc- 
 casions. On the side of expression, then, his 
 central life-strand is made up of a long chain 
 of poems, beginning quite with his infantile 
 lispings and ending only with the cessation 
 of speech itself. The autobiographer thus 
 speaks of his earliest aspiration: "I had in 
 mind (as a boy) to produce something extra- 
 ordinary ; but what it was to be about, would 
 not quite clear up. . . . Still I do not deny 
 that if I thought of any desirable piece of 
 good-luck, it appeared most attractive in the 
 form of the crown of laurel which is woven to 
 decorate the poet." (Autob. end of Book 
 Fourth.) 
 
 In the early days of October, 1765, young 
 Wolfgang Goethe arrived at Leipzig to attend 
 the University in general and specially to pre- 
 pare for the vocation which his father had 
 chosen for him against his will, that of juris- 
 prudence. As cities, Leipzig and Frankfort 
 were nearly of the same size, both hovering 1 
 about 30,000 inhabitants ; one of them seems 
 to have had 3,000 souls more than the other, 
 but which one of two it was, our best German 
 authorities disagree. Let them fight it out; 
 to a land of big cities, it seems but another 
 controversy over tweedle-dum and tweedle- 
 dee. The young fellow arrived at the time of 
 the famous Leipzig Fair in which he took a 
 
58 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 special delight. "I wandered through the 
 market and the booths; my attention was 
 drawn principally to the strange costumes of 
 the people of Eastern countries, Poles, Rus- 
 sians, and above all others the Greeks, who 
 charmed by their distinguished forms and 
 their dignified dress. " Doubtless too he now 
 experiences by actual sensation that the old 
 classic people yet exists with its language, 
 fundamentally still alive, and with somewhat 
 of its ancient Spirit. 
 
 Our fresh student naturally began the 
 course of studies prescribed for him in the 
 parental household. But we have already 
 found in his home the strongest inner revul- 
 sion and rebellion against his father's plan 
 of making him a jurist. It did not take him 
 long, however, to find out that he was now his 
 own man, and that he could largely mold his 
 own future. Not only with home and father, 
 but with his native city he had fallen out a 
 very recalcitrant youth. Hear him : "I rode 
 away from Frankfort with pleasure, and Tin- 
 regretfully left behind me the worthy city 
 where I was born and reared, as if I were go- 
 ing never again to set foot inside of it. ' ' So 
 he regards this step as a sort of new birth, 
 or as a new severance of tender but enslav 
 ing ties which nature outgrows, and breaks. 
 He muses on review: "Thus at certain 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 59 
 
 epochs children release themselves from par- 
 ents, servants from masters, favorites from 
 their patrons : it is an attempt to put one 's 
 self upon his own feet, to attain personal in- 
 dependence, to live his own life. Be it suc- 
 cessful or not, it is according to the will of 
 Nature. " Or as we may say, it is man's en- 
 deavor to win a higher freedom, especially 
 according to the prescription of Rousseau. 
 
 "Well, how did our released youth employ 
 his freedom? There is no doubt that he in- 
 dulged a good deal in an irregular life; the 
 penned-up adolescent, full of the first fury 
 and keenness of early appetite, broke loose 
 into the garden of sweet but forbidden fruit ; 
 we read of high living and deep drinking, of 
 association with girls, "who were better than 
 their name, ' ' and with others who could make 
 no .such claim, "through whom our name 
 would not be bettered." To be sure, he usu- 
 ally wheeled about at the sharp corner, for 
 that life-long peculiar compromise of his be- 
 tween self-indulgence and self-restraint he 
 began to show in youth as his saving anchor. 
 
 Significant is the fact that in his revolu- 
 tionary spirit he turned against the regular 
 work of the University. He has left on rec- 
 ord his verdant contempt for the whole Pro- 
 fessorate, and his revolt against their in- 
 struction. This record, we are not to forget, 
 
60 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 was penned by Goethe when he himself was 
 practically at the head of a University, that 
 of Jena, to whose instructors he may well 
 have been giving an indirect lesson, after his 
 subtle pedagogy. Especially to that accursed 
 Jurisprudence he played truant, possibly out 
 of memory for his jurist father. To be sure 
 he claims that owing to paternal instruction 
 at home "I already knew just as much as our 
 teachers gave us." The infernal stuff he 
 could not hear twice. He took courses in 
 Logic and Metaphysics, which he scoffed at 
 and skimped, applying to them probably al- 
 ready the Mephistophelean mockery in Faust. 
 But the Professors of those subjects in which 
 he felt an interest and to which he was to de- 
 vote his life, hardly fared better in his mood 
 of gall. His inclination was to be poet, yet the 
 poet Gellert 's lectures on poetry he found ut- 
 terly flat and flaccid, wholly devoted to the 
 old poetic grind and never once mentioning 
 the new celestial luminaries, Klopstock and 
 Lessing. To Gottsched, formerly the literary 
 pope of Germany, but now quite dethroned, 
 he pays a visit but makes the tall, big, bald- 
 pated old man, who slaps the ears of a ser- 
 vant in presence of visitors, the center of a, 
 scene in an actual comedy, and otherwise 
 laughs him off the stage. So the University, 
 with its formal pedagogy, becomes quite as 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 61 
 
 distasteful to him as his pedagogical father, 
 indeed quite similar, and receives similar 
 treatment. 
 
 His revolt from the customs of tne time 
 and the place seems to have extended to his 
 clothes. He dressed in an outlandish fashion 
 of his own, so that the girls made fun of him, 
 saying that "he looked as if he had snowed 
 down from another world." The letter of a 
 fellow-student has preserved this account of 
 his make-up: "All his habits and his pres- 
 ent behavior are absolutely different from 
 his former conduct. In his pride he has be- 
 come a dandy, and his garments, as fine as 
 they are, show such senseless taste, that they 
 mark him out in the whole academy. ' ' Deeper 
 still cuts the Leipzig criticism on his lan- 
 guage with its biblical coloring, its aphoristic 
 snappiness, and especially its overflow of the 
 Frankfort dialectal peculiarities in contrast 
 with the pure classic German spoken by the 
 highly cultured Leipzigers. So penetrating 
 were these critical thrusts that Goethe long 
 afterward complained: "I felt myself par- 
 alyzed in my innermost self and hardly knew 
 any longer how I had to express myself about 
 the commonest things. " 
 
 Still it must not be thought that the young 
 aspirer was idle ; on the contrary he was very 
 busy in hewing out his own way; he was mak- 
 
62 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 ing Ms own curriculum of studies and pursu- 
 ing it with a vengeance. In his father's li- 
 brary he had learned to devour print with 
 leonine voracity; the appetite stayed with 
 him, and the " forty book-shops of Leipzig " 
 furnished abounding material of every sort, 
 as this city was then the center of the Ger- 
 man book-trade. The first appearances of 
 the new German Literature were just seeing 
 the light in his time; he hailed Lessing's 
 Laocoon when it came out, illumining the lit- 
 erary world, "like a sudden stroke of light- 
 ning." He read Winckelmann's great work 
 on the History of Art, and he tells how the 
 author was expected at Leipzig when the 
 news of his horrible murder fell into the 
 midst of his friends there "like a thunder- 
 bolt from a clear sky." Wieland also laid 
 strong hold of him, "the best of all those old 
 poets. ' ' Probably his first real acquaintance 
 with Shakespeare, or with one side of the 
 many-sided British thunderer took place at 
 Leipzig through a book of extracts known as 
 "Dodd's Beauties of Shakespeare," a collec- 
 tion of the mightily worded passages which 
 appeal so strongly to responsive boys of 
 Goethe 's age. Later he will be inducted more 
 deeply into the soul of the English drama- 
 tist by Herder. 
 
 The theater became at Leipzig not merely 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 63 
 
 a passionate amusement of Goethe, But also a 
 part of his deepest and most permanent edu- 
 cation, a genuine study in his self -chosen cur- 
 riculum. He saw good acting, especially two 
 attractive actresses, one of whom afterward 
 went to Weimar, Corona Schroeter. He even 
 practiced the art, taking roles in amateur the- 
 atricals ; thus he was being trained for an im- 
 portant strand of his life-work which lay in 
 the coming development of the German the- 
 atre. Still further, he was preparing for his 
 chief task in literature, for Goethe 's literary 
 expression is mainly dramatic, in form at 
 least, even if his lyric genius is the more im- 
 mediate and unforced, and the more endur- 
 ing. His two earliest remaining dramas are 
 survivals of Leipzig, samples of his Univer- 
 sity studies outside of the University, theses 
 for which he received no degree, but which 
 welled up from the native fountains of his 
 spirit. 
 
 Another thread woven through his Leipzig 
 life-course was that of art. He became ac- 
 quainted with a painter by the name of Oeser, 
 who possessed also the additional attraction 
 of an agreeable daughter, very friendly to 
 the young patrician of Frankfort, and easily 
 stirring a responsive pit-a-pat in the heart 
 of Phileros. The latter corresponds with the 
 daughter at a later time and he praises her 
 
64 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 father who " taught me that the ideal of 
 beauty is noble simplicity and repose. " The 
 same thought is found in Winckelmann, who 
 also drew it from Oeser, once his teacher. 
 Oeser indeed was rather a great personal in- 
 fluence than an original artist. He was an 
 enemy of the rococo style with its convulsions 
 and grotesquery, and he had a chief hand in 
 driving it out of his part of Germany. He 
 may be set down as noteworthy in Goethe 's 
 evolution, since he gave to the latter a turn 
 toward the classic ideal, which will culminate 
 in the poet's Italian Journey, and inspire a 
 long line of poetic works during his classic 
 period. So deep-seated became Oeser 's in- 
 fluence that he laid in Goethe's soul a doubt 
 in regard to his vocation : shall I be an artist 
 or poet? That wrenching dubitation har- 
 assed the poet for more than forty years ; he 
 wanted to be what he could not a formative 
 artist in color and marble, instead of or per- 
 chance along with the word and so he spent 
 much valuable time in running counter to his 
 own true genius. In this connection should 
 be added the name of the engraver Stock, un- 
 der whom Goethe practised etching and en- 
 graving, besides having a jolly good time 
 with him in the wine-shop, after the convivial 
 fashion of artists. Thus we observe our stu- 
 dent taking quite an universal art-course out- 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 65 
 
 .< 
 
 side the University. The intended lawyer 
 seems to intend everything else but the law, 
 disliking it, indeed defying it by his action, 
 and flinging it overboard in his new freedom. 
 
 Goethe himself was well aware of his neg- 
 ative condition and thus comments on it in 
 his Autobiography: "And so the time kept 
 approaching when all authority was to van- 
 ish, and I was to feel doubt or rather despair 
 even as regards the greatest and best indi- 
 viduals I had ever known or conceived. " 
 He is verily becoming his own young Mephis- 
 topheles, scoffing at all human greatness and 
 worth, and denying all but his own denial. 
 One of his ideals which he brought from 
 Frankfort was Frederick the Great. But to 
 this supreme German hero of the century, 
 German Leipzig was hostile, belittling him 
 in every way and criticising his mistakes, 
 military and political, and thus overthrowing 
 his triumphs. 
 
 The city had indeed felt his heavy hand in 
 war, could not love him and would not appre- 
 ciate him. We have already seen that Fred- 
 erick caused a split in the poet's own family 
 at Frankfort; still the father remained a 
 stanch admirer of the Prussian king, and 
 this admiration the son brought with him to 
 Leipzig, whose vitriolic atmosphere gradu- 
 ally destroyed it. No hero any more noth- 
 
66 GOETHE' 8 LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 ing heroic poor youth, unpoetic poet, hap- 
 less adolescent coddling his petty world- 
 pain! 
 
 Of course our young denier, having so 
 much of the Mephistopheles in him, soon 
 found the latter embodied outside of him. 
 This new companion was called Behrisch, 
 and was engaged as tutor to a young noble- 
 man. He was an oddity in dress and man- 
 ner, but his special gift was in killing time 
 and all that time contains. He took chief 
 pleasure in treating earnestly the follies of 
 life, and in running down some silly notion 
 into endless detail of mockery. Culture and 
 knowledge he possessed, was well versed in 
 modern languages and their literatures; but 
 the result of all his studies was to make him 
 the better scoffer. Of course such a charac- 
 ter was not troubled with moral scruples, and 
 it seems that the tutor led both his friend and 
 his ward into the Witches' Kitchen of Leip- 
 zig. The result was scandal and trouble of 
 which Goethe lets us take quite a glimpse in 
 his book. But Mephistopheles lost his job of 
 tutoring and had to leave town, whereat some 
 versified lamentations of young Wolfgang 
 bubbled forth and have been preserved. Such 
 was one of the Leipzig educators of the com- 
 ing poet of Faust, who let him see what life 
 was outside of books. 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 67 
 
 
 
 It is no wonder, then, that Goethe obtained 
 the reputation among the staid University 
 authorities of being "a dangerous student. " 
 For the Professor, dull and dignified, he had 
 no respect; at the lectures he would draw 
 caricatures instead of taking notes, and pass 
 them around to raise a laugh and to distract 
 the attention of the class. Of his father, even, 
 he made game in his letters, writing him 
 thus : ' ' You cannot believe what a fine thing 
 it is to be a Professor. I was altogether en- 
 raptured when I saw some of these people in 
 all their glory. Nothing more magnificent, 
 weighty and honorable. ' ' Then he adds in a 
 Latin sentence for his pedagogical papa: "I 
 thirst for no other honors except those of a 
 Professorship." It is to be hoped that the 
 old man never saw through the irony. 
 
 And now we come to the deepest, most in- 
 tense, most real part of Goethe's Leipzig 
 curriculum it was his love for Anna Kath- 
 arina Schonkopf (his dear Katy), whose fa- 
 ther kept a wine-shop and boarding-house 
 where Goethe ate and drank. She could not 
 be called beautiful, though of an open, tender, 
 attractive look; not very large, but active; 
 not highly educated but endowed with prosy 
 good-sense. Moreover, she was three years 
 older than her admirer, without his vast 
 overflow of fancy and emotion, a well-bal- 
 
68 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 anced head, rather unromantic and deeply 
 addicted to the humdrum of life. 
 
 So our Phileros is to play his drama again 
 now at Leipzig, with many a new turn and 
 with prolonged throes of intensity. But 
 three prominent obstacles rise up in the way 
 of their union: the difference between the 
 lovers in rank, wealth and age. What will 
 our young poet do as he dashes up against 
 these barriers? Leap over them, of course, 
 as they are more or less conventional any- 
 how ; besides we have already seen his bound- 
 breaking mood, his defiance of the established 
 precedent. One of his letters of this time has 
 been preserved (to his friend Moors, October 
 1,1766), in which he exclaims: " What is 
 station ? A vain color which men have found 
 for the purpose of daubing it on people who 
 do not deserve it. And money is likewise a 
 miserable claim of superiority in the eyes of 
 a man who thinks. I love a maiden without 
 position and without property, and now I 
 feel for the first time the happiness which a 
 true love produces/' So he proclaims his 
 fealty to Love, the all-leveler at least in the 
 wine-shop. 
 
 Another point to be considered is the 
 length of time which the passion lasted with 
 all its torturing tortuosities; he takes his 
 meals at the Schonkopf hostelry, sees the 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 69 
 
 .4- 
 
 girl daily at her work and play for two years 
 and a half, during which he says he was part 
 and parcel of the household. Yet the obsta- 
 cles were ever present to his mind and hers , 
 both doubtless believed that she could never 
 become his wife. 
 
 But all the more madly dashed the foam- 
 capped tempest of love against its limits. As 
 Katharina was of marriageable age and time 
 was passing, she naturally entertained some 
 other suitors. All this became the source of 
 the stormiest Olympian jealousy in young 
 Phileros, he raved and foamed and set it all 
 down in writing. Quite recently his letters 
 penned during these paroxysms have been 
 discovered and published. Let us try some 
 extracts: "Ha, friend, now comes one of my 
 moments ! God, God let me first get back 
 to myself accursed be love if you could 
 see me, the wretched one, how I rave and do 
 not know against whom I should rave, you 
 would pity me. Now it is 8 o'clock, my blood 
 runs calmer, I shall talk to you more quietty 
 but not more rationally. ' ' So he recounts 
 in a series of letters his jealous perturba- 
 tions, racked to agony by love yet bound fast 
 to the Promethean rock. "I have tried the 
 whole evening in vain to shed tears, but my 
 teeth gnash together, and in that state I can- 
 not weep. -What if she continues to act 
 
70 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 coldly toward me! I shall punish her, the 
 most fearful jealousy shall torture her no, 
 no, that I cannot do." For his Katy in the 
 wineshop can certainly trump his card. 
 
 Such, then, was the emotional life of the 
 young poet during nearly three years of his 
 Leipzig period, producing yet another and 
 the most radical interference with study. 
 Here were obstacles in the path of the world- 
 storming youth, human conventions which he 
 could not surmount in contempt even if man 
 made them. Be it said to the honor of the 
 woman that she was disposed to maintain 
 them against her fiery lover; heart-crushing 
 was the torment he caused her through his 
 fits of jealousy, which sometimes rose to 
 downright threats of vengeance, as we may 
 see in some of his letters. An actual Othello 
 he was in his demoniac rages ; it is recorded 
 that the pair went through "awful scenes" 
 together. She was a waitress on her father's 
 customers in the matter of food and drink, 
 and had to be friendly to all ; but young Wolf- 
 gang seems to have been jealous of a smile 
 given to anybody else along with a bumper of 
 beer or dish of noodles. The result was a 
 gradual estrangement on part of the woman. 
 A letter tells of the breach : She and I * ' have 
 separated, and now we are happy. We are 
 now only friends no more intimacy. We 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 71 
 
 .$ 
 
 began with love and conclude with friendship. 
 she is an angel ! ' ' Ominous words these for 
 mere friendship. The fact is that Katharina 
 Schonkopf has decisively dismissed Wolf- 
 gang Goethe while his passion is still as flam- 
 ing as ever. She, the level-headed, practical, 
 unimaginative bar-maid, for this she is, has 
 had ample cause to discover that such a 
 genius is an ever-burning Inferno, and she 
 does not propose to enter Hell-fire for life. 
 Moreover another suitor has put-in appear- 
 ance at the Schonkopf dining table and pot- 
 house, introduced by Goethe, too, as if fate 
 would make him the instrument of his own 
 undoing. This new boarder was a Doctor 
 Kanne, two years older than the woman and 
 already established as a lawyer; a steady, 
 prosaic man, far more desirable as a match, 
 and more like herself, Katharina must think. 
 An attachment springs up and grows to the 
 howling jealousy of Wolfgang, who actually 
 gets sick, or makes himself sick, and has to 
 go home for recovery. 
 
 Meanwhile this stay of the poet at Leipzig 
 has left its mark not only on his life but also 
 on literature for all time. It has come down 
 to us in no less than four literary forms, each 
 of which is employed by the poetical sufferer 
 as a means of self-expression. They all re- 
 veal the same uncontrolled upheaval and pite- 
 
72 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 ous self-lacerations of love-lashed Phileros, 
 but from different points of view. 
 
 First is his most direct and stormy utter- 
 ance, contained in the letters specially ad- 
 dressed to his friend Behrisch which have 
 quite recently come to light. Disjointed, el- 
 liptical, apostrophic, they are a frenzy of 
 speech, a delirium of molten lava-like pas- 
 sion splashing over the reader, who often 
 dodges. They are the prelude of Werther, 
 only hotter; they also show the epistolary 
 form as the first elemental expression of his 
 genius a form which he will use to the end 
 of his days. 
 
 Second is his lyrical output, of which two 
 different volumes have come down to us. The 
 Leipzig Book of Songs was actually published 
 in 1769 with music by Goethe's friend, Breit- 
 kopf, of Leipzig. A second collection has 
 been recently brought to light, with its ded- 
 ication to Annette (Goethe's name for Kath- 
 arina), most of them little effusions of pas- 
 sion for his adorable goddess, in Anacreontic 
 tira-lira of love. They have their worth as 
 showing a psychologic stage in the early de- 
 velopment of the poet, but they are not equal 
 to Goethe's later lyrics at his best. 
 
 Third is his little pastoral drama, The 
 Whimsical Lover, in which he sets forth his 
 own amatory caprices toward Katharina, 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 73 
 
 .so- 
 under the names of Eridon and Amina. With 
 this pair of lovers is contrasted a second pair, 
 Lamon and Egle, whose course of love runs 
 smooth in its happy channel. "It is care- 
 fully copied from nature, ' ' said Goethe at the 
 time (1767) in a letter to his sister, but it is 
 quite devoid of the fiery intensity of his con- 
 temporaneous epistles already cited. Still 
 he claims to have written it as a kind of 
 atonement for his whimsical behavior toward 
 his sweetheart. It was incorporated by Goe- 
 the himself in his works as his earliest 
 drama, and as the beginning of that series of 
 confessions, which run through all his chief 
 writings, his heart's deepest confidences pub- 
 lished by him to the public. 
 
 Fourth is the account of his Leipzig years, 
 composed long afterward and given in his 
 Autobiography. This is emphatically the 
 cool reminiscence of the ageing author, and 
 is well worthy of being compared with the 
 other three utterances which belong to up- 
 roarous youth and are contemporaneous with 
 the matters experienced. The most striking 
 fact is the meagerness of his narrative about 
 the very real Katharina in contrast with his 
 elaborate fullness concerning the half-myth- 
 ical Gretchen, his antecedent heroine, whom 
 he saw only a few scattered times and for a 
 little period. And his next story of love, that 
 
74 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 of Frederika is wrought out in still greater 
 detail and interest; yet he could never have 
 had half as much to do with Frederika as 
 with Katharina, nor could his passion for 
 the latter have been less intense than it was 
 for the former, in view of -the exact evidence. 
 Let us declare at once our opinion : Katha- 
 rina Schonkopf jilted our young Phileros and 
 left him on his back totally upset and pros- 
 trate. This happened in neither of the other 
 cases ; the memory of his defeat was not a 
 pleasant topic, even to old Phileros, and so he 
 forgot to explain the joyless, unheroic novel- 
 ette. He has himself put the three together, 
 showing that they were present to his mind 
 in a kind of gradation : ' ' Gretchen was taken 
 away from me, Katharina abandoned me, so 
 that in both instances I incurred no blame, 
 which, however, fell upon me in the case of 
 Frederika. " Note here the order of these 
 darlings, about which Goethe himself is not 
 always consistent, sometimes placing Annett? 
 (his Katy) as the first one, wherein many 
 German writers have followed him. But 
 Gretchen is to be put first, as he does in the 
 paragraph dealing with his second love : i i My 
 former inclination to Gretchen I had now 
 transferred to Annette/' so he marks em- 
 phatically the transition. He goes on: "Of 
 the latter I have only to say that she was 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 75 
 
 .* 
 
 young, pretty, lively and lovely, and so agree- 
 able that she deserved to be set up for a while 
 in the shrine of the heart as a little Saint in 
 order to pay her the adoration which often 
 aroused more pleasure in giving than in re- 
 ceiving. ' ' How does this sound ? Gallant ex- 
 ternally is the tone, but internally without 
 heart a subject which he seems inclined to 
 dismiss, adding a few complimentary com- 
 mon-places, with a slightly satirical tang. 
 
 Then how does it comport with those awful 
 spasms of jealousy which burst forth when 
 she did not give back to him and to him alone 
 her adoration. (See his letters to Behrisch.) 
 Such is the senescent Goethe reporting tho 
 adolescent Goethe, with the repertorial wry 
 face made at a sour memory in spite of gray 
 hairs. 
 
 Still he braces himself up to tell the main 
 facts in a few short sentences: "I saw her 
 daily without hindrances. She helped pre- 
 prepare the food which I consumed, she 
 brought me, at least in the evening, the wine 
 which I drank. There was many an oppor- 
 tunity and wish for entertainment. . . . Fin 
 ally I was seized by that ugly distemper 
 which seduces us to get amusement out of 
 the torment of the loved one, and to domi- 
 nate the devotion of a girl with tryannical 
 caprices. " Of this behavior he gives as 
 
76 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 cause "the bad mood, produced by the fail- 
 ure of my poetical attempts," but his contem- 
 porary letters show a different, more com- 
 pelling reason. Still the truth will leak 
 out: "Through unbounded and senseless 
 fits of jealousy, I spoilt for me and her the 
 fairest days, though she dearly loved me and 
 did what she could for my pleasure. She en- 
 dured my torment for a while with incred- 
 ible patience which I was cruel enough to 
 drive to the extreme." Now for the real 
 pivot: "At last I had to observe, to my shame 
 and despair, that her heart had turned away 
 from me. . . . But my passion only in- 
 creased and took all forms; for I could not 
 renounce the hope of winning her back. 
 There were frightful scenes between us which 
 did no good. ... I had really lost her." 
 Moreover the other man had appeared, Herr 
 Kanne, Doctor of Law, who afterwards be- 
 came her husband, though Goethe will not 
 mention his rival in this connection. The fact 
 is he was distanced by the new suitor, being 
 very decisively sent adrift by the girl bravo 
 for her ! Still one drawback we shall have to 
 note with regret: We shall now have no 
 pretty novelette of love interwoven with the 
 story of the author's life in the case of An- 
 nette, as we had of Gretclien, and shall have 
 of Frederika and others; old-aged Goethe is 
 
AT THE UNIVHIfK/TY OF LEIPZIG. 11 
 
 .$ 
 
 not going to celebrate his long and fervent 
 suit criss-crossed by a bar-maid. That were 
 just a littlo too unheroic for Phileros, love's 
 triumphant hero. So he refuses to idealize 
 his coriqueress, the humble Annette, though 
 she be a true heroine in saving herself and 
 serving up to her haughty tormentor a bitter 
 dose of his own deed. 
 
 Now what happens? "In my frenzy I 
 avenged my folly on myself. I stormed 
 ?rj-ainst my physical nature in manifold 
 senseless ways, in order to do injury to the 
 moral ; this contributed very much to the bod- 
 ily ills, under which I lost some of the best 
 years of my life." The meaning of these 
 veiled allusions are plain enough: he gave 
 himself up to prolonged dissipation and sen- 
 sual indulgence to drown his agony at the 
 loss of Annette the passion for whom was of 
 the most desperate and deepest-searching of 
 his life, at the same time the most crushing 
 in its humiliation. He adds now a glimpse of 
 his great remedial gift : "I would have prob 
 ably gone to complete destruction through 
 this loss, had not my poetic talent with its 
 healing powers come to my help." Still he 
 fell sick and took to his bed, till he was nursed 
 up sufficiently to go home to Frankfort for 
 recovery. So Phileros has received the coun- 
 ter-stroke of love, its furious vengeance for 
 
78 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 its wrong, for its wanton violation, and long 
 will he remember it, and he will also record 
 it, but not under his own name ; the recollec- 
 tion of it will not flow triumphantly through 
 his goose-quill. 
 
 Thus our poet has passed through the dis- 
 cipline of love's transgressor and paid the 
 penalty adjudged to his deed by the Upper 
 Powers. Yet he punished himself at the same 
 time ; his vengeful act inflicted upon an inno- 
 cent heart was his own boomerang returning 
 to the source whence it came. The rattle- 
 snake bit itself in its frenzy and writhed mor- 
 tally in its own poison. So he confesses to 
 his deed, and on the whole quite adequately, 
 which confession is not in vain, for it is in its 
 nature remedial and soul-liberating. 
 
 In this connection Goethe sets down one of 
 his weightiest utterances regarding his lit- 
 erary procedure: "And this started that 
 tendency from which I have never been able 
 to swerve during my whole life, namely to 
 transmute that which rejoiced or tormented 
 me, or otherwise occupied me, into a pic- 
 ture, a poem. In that way I got rid 
 of it, correcting my impressions of ex- 
 ternal things as well as calming my internal 
 upheavals. The gift could be to nobody more 
 necessary than to me, whom nature drove al- 
 ways from one extreme to the other. Every- 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 79 
 
 thing, therefore, which has been published by 
 me constitutes only the fragments of one 
 great confession which this little book (his 
 Autobiography) daringly attempts to render 
 complete/' 
 
 Such we may deem the prof oundest course 
 of training which the poet took at Leipzig- 
 University, even if not set down in its regu- 
 lar calendar. We can see that he has gone 
 through the purgatorial process of penitence 
 for the sinful deed: contrition, confession, 
 atonement. To be sure his way is not that of 
 the church, though it be essentially the same ; 
 its form is not religious but literary. He too 
 must travel the journey of repentance and 
 make undone his wrongful conduct through 
 expiation; but he cannot call in priestly ab- 
 solution, it must be won by himself in his 
 own characters through self-expression by 
 means of literature. Thus the pen becomes 
 to him not merely an instrument of pleasure 
 or profit, but of his soul's salvation. Sue!?, 
 we may regard the deepest fact of his mes- 
 sage which he will continue to herald to the 
 end of his days. And this too is the pivotal 
 point which makes his name and work the 
 greatest in recent Letters. He represents a 
 new and deeper expiation of errant mortality. 
 
 There is a second drama printed in Goe- 
 the's works which belongs to his Leipzig pe- 
 
80 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 riod, called the Fellow Culprits. Four char- 
 acters take part in the play, all villains at 
 heart two thieves and two adulterers yet 
 only one of them succeeds in getting the bad 
 deed done, and in stealing some money. But 
 the intrigue is so carried out that they all 
 discover one another, and forgive themselves 
 mutually. Goethe in his Autobiography tries 
 to make out that the drama illustrates the 
 words of Christ: "Let him that is without 
 sin among you cast the first stone." Still 
 the poet had to acknowledge its failure : "The 
 harshly outspoken illegal actions violate the 
 aesthetic and moral feeling, and therefore 
 found no entrance on the German stage." 
 But it remained a favorite of his to the last, 
 and he caused it often to be played in the 
 Weimar theater. On the whole the only ex- 
 planation of his negative work is that it rep- 
 resents his strong reaction against law and 
 the transmitted order, which was his main 
 mood at Leipzig, though he says he felt it al- 
 ready at Frankfort. "In my affair with 
 Gretchen I had seen how society is under- 
 mined. Religion, morals, law, station, rela- 
 tions, custom, all of them influence only the 
 surface of city-life." So he turns his pes- 
 simistic view into a drama, which always 
 kept its hold on him, especially in his Me- 
 phistophelean humor, which on provocation 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG. 81 
 
 .* 
 
 would burst forth in furious overflow from 
 Ms tongue till its last fire-tip of sulphurous 
 execration. 
 
 Still we are to note that his mood was but 
 a transitory phase, the negative or diabolic 
 part of the universal man who indeed repre- 
 sents the universe, not omitting old Satan. 
 
 Such, then, was the basic discipline which 
 young Wolfgang Goethe received at the Uni- 
 versity of Leipzig. His chief instructor was 
 indubitably the bar-maid, Katharina Schon- 
 kopf, who gave him life's profoundest, least 
 forgettable lesson. All his other Professors 
 and their erudite lectures were very superfi- 
 cial driftwood floating on the river of his 
 love. Phileros had gotten an ultimate ex- 
 perience of his own innermost nature ; he had 
 attained a stage of self-knowledge far more 
 significant than any other sort of learning, 
 and had transformed Leipzig University into 
 Life's University. But the shock reached 
 down to the very roots of existence, and his 
 life trembled in the balance. As already in- 
 dicated, his health has given away, and so he 
 turns down the road homewards for Frank- 
 fort, while his head doubtless keeps running 
 over with sober reflections upon his past do- 
 ings. 
 
82 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 V. 
 
 Home Again. 
 
 It is recorded that on or about September 
 2, 1768, Goethe, the undone student physic- 
 ally and mentally, returns to the family cir- 
 cle at Frankfort, consisting of father, 
 mother, sister; he was still an invalid and 
 destined to have many fluctuations of illness 
 for the coming eighteen months. Exactly the 
 sort of Goethe's bodily malady has never 
 been determined. He was plagued with a 
 sore on his neck which would not heal; then 
 it was supposed he had a pulmonary trouble, 
 with an outlook upon consumption perchance ; 
 but soon we hear: "Nothing is the matter 
 with my lungs, it is my stomach which is out 
 of order. " On his sister's birthday, some 
 three months after his arrival, he was at- 
 tacked by awful pains; the good mother 
 opened her Bible for a prophetic, possibly 
 prophylactic verse, and behold this text of 
 Jeremiah fell first into her eye : ' ' Thou shalt 
 yet plant vines upon the mountains of Sama- 
 ria;" whereat she was much consoled and 
 took new hope. Moreover, a kind of doctor- 
 ing is introduced through a woman friend of 
 the family, Fraulein Von Klettenburg, who 
 
HOME AGAIN. 83 
 
 .* 
 
 combines medicine and religion; but she also 
 introduces a regular physician who unites in 
 the practice of his art both constituents of 
 the sick man, the physical and the psychical, 
 to be sure, compounded with some peculiar 
 alchemistic preparations. But we must rec- 
 ollect that chemistry as a science was then 
 just beginning to throw off its swaddling 
 clothes, and to step forth in its modern glory. 
 Wolfgang's crisis was averted by adminis- 
 tering a mysterious salt of the doctor's own 
 composition, given />nly by him at the last 
 turning point between life and death. Other 
 influences were invoked by the mother and 
 her female friend, influences which in these 
 days would be called psychic or spiritistic, 
 about the bedside of the seemingly dying pa- 
 tient. But betterment after two days set in 
 though during three weeks he could not leave 
 his room, or even sit in an upright posture 
 for half an hour. 
 
 When Wolfgang was well enough, ho 
 turned back to ponder his miraculous cure, 
 and sought to find out its method, which had 
 so strangely vindicated the doctrines of Frau- 
 lein Von Klettenburg and her physician. So 
 he began the study of books on alchemy, and 
 experimented with retorts, furnaces and test- 
 tubes, transforming his attic into a labora- 
 tory. He must have continued for some time 
 
84 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 the pursuit of this alchemistic ideal, seeking 
 the unitary substance of nature, the mother 
 element of all elements, so dimly yet attrac- 
 tively floating before Paracelsus, Van Hel- 
 mont, Welling, and other writers of the kind. 
 Now the interest of these studies is that they 
 are reflected in the early scenes of Faust, 
 where the tireless but unsuccessful searcher 
 for truth drops back into magic and tries to 
 grasp the grand boon in that way, evoking 
 an exalted vision of the Nature-Spirit, when 
 it suddenly vanishes, and leaves him in his 
 old skepticism. That doctor with his mar- 
 velous salt was a sort of believing Faust, but 
 Goethe, after trying the experiments to a 
 sufficiency, became the disbelieving Faust 
 truth was not to be won in that way. So this 
 experience of the poet has written itself 
 down on a page of the World's Liter- 
 ature. 
 
 The prodigal had returned home, but old 
 ties were not restored. The father, stern, 
 formal, and rather narrow, did not conceal 
 his disappointment in his son who had come 
 back without a degree, sick, petulant, ship- 
 wrecked seemingly in soul and body. The 
 two had many a disagreeable tilt, the sick- 
 ling being inclined to criticise right and 
 left the appointments of the house with the 
 freedom of Leipzig, the old man resenting 
 
HOME AGAIN. 85 
 
 such unfilial impertinence. The mother 's gift 
 of reconciliation was often severely tested. 
 Wolfgang pitied deeply his sister Cornelia, 
 who in his absence had to take the concen- 
 trated cannonade of pedagogy from the 
 schoolmastering parent. It had nearly killed 
 her, destroying all pleasure of life*; then, too, 
 she was morbid over her ugly features, 
 which seemed to repel all suitors from one 
 who was most in need of love. That house- 
 hold was accordingly quite out of tune with 
 itself, the two children only waited an oppor- 
 tunity to fly away for good from what was to 
 them a domestic Inferno. 
 
 Meantime Wolfgang in convalescent peri- 
 ods would bury himself in the books of the 
 well-stocked library of his father; his read- 
 ing was considerable, but miscellaneous. Also 
 he would break out into rhymes now and 
 then in his stronger moods ; some of these 
 verses have been preserved. He studied a 
 little philosophy, chiefly of the Neo-Platonic 
 pantheistic cast, as he states in his Autobiog- 
 raphy; "the mystical, hermetical, cabalistic 
 writings contributed their part." Among 
 other things he made his own religion at his 
 leisure, being predisposed to such contempla- 
 tion by illness, and also incited by Fraulein 
 Von Klettenburg. A pantheistic world-view 
 was indeed native to him; it stayed with him 
 
86 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 through life and later found utterance in his 
 devotion to Spinoza. He had a tendency to 
 turn back upon himself to review his past ; he 
 re-read his Leipzig letters which had been 
 carefully saved by the folks at home. The 
 survey did not always give him satisfaction ; 
 he criticised himself and carried his damna- 
 tory judgment to the pitch of burning a pile 
 of his poems his second expiation by fire of 
 his literary sins. 
 
 His malady kept lingering, with fresh re- 
 currences followed by partial allayments. 
 What could be the matter? It is clear that 
 his trouble was psychical as well as physical ; 
 his own people saw the fact, even his father. 
 We have to . think that especially Fraulein 
 Von Klettenburg glimpsed to the bottom the 
 source of his illness. We see by his letters 
 of this time that he could not free himself of 
 recurrent paroxyms of love for Katharina 
 Schonkopf. To her he continues to send a 
 letter once a month when able. He dreams 
 of her, dreams that she is married, and at 
 once writes to her asking if it be so. In a 
 letter written more than fifteen months after 
 his arrival at Frankfort he confesses to her : 
 "My body is restored but my soul is not yet 
 healed ; ' ' so he will have in consequence phys- 
 ical regurgitations of his malady. He cries 
 out to her in vain regret: "If I were now 
 
HOME AGAIN. 87 
 
 ,< 
 
 with you, how delighted would I pass my life ! 
 
 if I could recall the two and a half years 
 of Leipzig !" He seems to intimate some 
 dark threat or stroke of fate: "I have al- 
 ways said that my destiny depends on yours. 
 You will perhaps soon see how true is what 
 
 1 have spoken, perhaps you will soon hear 
 news which you do not expect. ' ' He remem- 
 bers still with a touch of jealousy "all the 
 admirers big and little, crooked and straight, 
 whom you have salted down with your friend- 
 ship. " He answered Katharina's reproof: 
 "You are right, I am now punished for the 
 sins I committed at Leipzig." Finally after 
 an absence of more than a year and a quar- 
 ter he summons courage to make tLe grand 
 renunciation; he will not write to her more, 
 and he begs her not to write to him : "I wish 
 never again to see your hand nor hear your 
 voice ; I suffer enough that my dreams are so 
 busy." Of course he refuses to write a poem 
 celebrating her coming nuptials with another 
 man, which poem it seems she, with unique 
 daring, had requested: "I would be sure to 
 say too much or too little." Still the next 
 month he sends her a good long letter which 
 he preludes with an apology for breaking his 
 resolution "never to take up pen again to 
 write to you." He intends to go to Stras- 
 burg for a course in the University and we 
 
88 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 hear the request : " Will you not write to me 
 at Strasburg? " He winds up the epistle with 
 an outlook: "In two years I shall be back; 
 I have a house, I have money. Heart, what is 
 thy desire 1 A wife. > ' 
 
 Such is the new disclipine of love which 
 Phileros, heart-sick and brain-sick, has re- 
 ceived from the Leipzig girl a long weary 
 illness threatening mind and body. He has 
 experienced the pangs of the hopelessly re- 
 jected lover the penalty of his own con- 
 duct; he has seen a rival step into his shoes, 
 in spite of repeated attempts to storm anew 
 the fortress. Still he has largely recovered, 
 as he says, his health and composure. How 
 was this brought about? Hereby hangs a 
 fresh deep experience of the man long to be 
 remembered and in time to be duly recorded 
 in a literary confession. 
 
 Already the presence of Fraulein Von Klet- 
 tenburg has been noted at the bedside of 
 young Wolfgang, with her peculiar ministra- 
 tion of help. Her fundamental trait lay in 
 her religious character: she held or claimed 
 she held, immediate communion with the In- 
 visible One and from that source derived 
 special aid and power. Through her the suf- 
 ferer becomes religious, and gets to know her 
 spiritual associates : the Herrnhuters. There 
 is no doubt that her remedial power lay in her 
 
HOME AGAIN. 89 
 
 . 
 
 psychical influence over the rent soul of the 
 hapless lover. Hers was a healing presence 
 and her talk medicined not the body but self- 
 lacerating spirit. Goethe has left an eternal 
 picture of her pure womanliness and also of 
 her inner evolution in the "Confessions of a 
 Fair Soul," which form a part of his novel, 
 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. She was 
 probably his most direct experience of the 
 Woman-Soul, or the Eternal-Womanly in its 
 religious mystical exaltation. 
 
 Now Fraulein Von Klettenburg had also 
 gone through her sore trials of love disap- 
 pointed in her younger days. Her training 
 accordingly, prepares her to be the medi- 
 atrix of the youthful Goethe in his present 
 desperate tribulation. She had risen through 
 a fruitless particular love to a fruitful uni- 
 versal love which brought her into immedi- 
 ate participation with God. Through her 
 the wild estranged soul of our Phileros 
 sought to know that Upper World which the 
 blessed ministrant lived in. According to 
 his account of her life, she passes through 
 three loves, all with disappointment, but rises 
 above them into heavenly love, and becomes 
 mediatiorial for those who have had the same 
 affliction. 
 
 So our Phileros, though he has occasional 
 outbursts of misogyny in his letters, realizes 
 
90 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 the woman as mediator, as savior in this long 
 desperate struggle, physical and psychical, of 
 eighteen months, with the dark powers of 
 death. Never will he forget the lesson; it is 
 stamped upon all his art at its highest mo- 
 ments. Again and again will he portray the 
 woman as divinely gifted with reconciliation 
 for the guilty despairing man, moulding her 
 character out of far better and purer mate- 
 rial than his men, necessarily more or less 
 copied after himself. 
 
 Thus the old Goethe (of the Autobiogra- 
 phy) looks back at the young Goethe in his 
 first soul-transforming discipline of love. It 
 is an ordeal which opens death's door where 
 he peeps in, yea is on the point of passing in, 
 when a saintly hand reaches forth and slowly 
 draws him back, mediating him anew with 
 life. Phileros, the lover of love, has in this 
 deepest remedial experience become ac- 
 quainted with a new kind of love, we may 
 call it Love universal, which is the supreme 
 fruitage of fate transcended through suffer- 
 ing, the crucifixion re-enacted through the 
 loving heart of a woman, whose mediatorial 
 power Goethe now feels and beholds in his 
 own restoration and redemption. Such a fe- 
 male character starts from this present 
 Frankfort experience with Fraulein Von 
 Klettenburg and moves through all his best 
 
HOMfi AGAIN. 91 
 
 .4- 
 
 works, appearing at the top of their highest 
 fulfilment. 
 
 Such a process is profoundly religious in 
 the universal sense; but the special religion 
 of routine and dogma will turn denier of it, 
 as not being its way, and possibly damn it as 
 heretical if not blasphemous. Phileros, it 
 would seem, cannot be saved by the beaten 
 track of salvation, and great is the outcry. 
 Still the main point is to save him, sinner 
 that he is, and to heal him, that he may pro- 
 claim the new evangel of his redemption, 
 which is the literary, not the theological, 
 though the latter too has its place in the Di- 
 vine Order. The spiritual deliverance must 
 be won, be the form religious or sacrilegious, 
 orthodox or heretical, Christian or heathen. 
 Hence we cannot seriously listen to the cler- 
 ical Mephistopheles at this point with his 
 scoffing denials and damnations, for can we 
 not see our bad boy Phileros emerging from 
 the valley and shadow of his own Satanic 
 deeds, through a strange remedial process 
 healing and hallowing him at least, and 
 doubtless others? 
 
 So young Goethe is well again, and ready 
 to take a fresh stride in life's journey. His 
 outer traditional education is by no means 
 complete, his father still insists upon mak- 
 ing him a lawyer, but to Leipzig he cannot 
 
92 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 return for a number of reasons, open and 
 secret. To the University of Strassburg he 
 will turn, where a new stage of experience 
 awaits him. 
 
 VI. 
 
 At the University of Strassburg. 
 
 One more step we have now to consider in 
 Goethe's prescriptive Epoch, as we have 
 hitherto called it, when his father sends the 
 youth to the University for another tilt at 
 Jurisprudence. He will again obey parental 
 authority, but the study of the law will be the 
 least of his cares. He will follow his bent 
 and harvest a fresh crop of life 's own teach- 
 ings not laid down in the curriculum. Toward 
 Art and Literature push all his thought and 
 striving ; his education goes to school to itself, 
 makes its own course and graduates him with 
 a unique outfit for his real vocation which is 
 not the legal one. 
 
 And let it not be forgotten ! in this flower- 
 ing of his adolescence, he will not fail to re- 
 enact the part of Phileros in a new and far- 
 famed drama of love. He has told it under 
 several forms ; it drove him to poetic produc- 
 tion whose echoes throbbed still in his old- 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 93 
 
 age. The story of Frederika of Sessenheim 
 belongs to those years of the poet and has 
 gained through his magic touch a tender im- 
 mortality which calls forth pilgrimages to 
 this shrine of love. Hence in the present life- 
 poem of Goethe the Strassburg episode rays 
 forth far-illumining flashes over his whole 
 activity. The environment of the place and 
 the time acted creatively upon him and he 
 reacted in turn, winning a new utterance of 
 himself. 
 
 Says Goethe in a significant passage : ' ' The 
 chief function of Biography seems to be this : 
 to set forth the man in his relations to his 
 time, and to show how far the great Whole 
 of which he is a part has resisted him or has 
 favored him, then how he has elaborated out 
 of such a situation his view of the world and 
 of man, still further how he has mirrored 
 that view of his outwardly, as artist, poet, or 
 author/' This is taken from the Introduc- 
 tion to his own Life as written by himself 
 and touches upon these elements : the individ- 
 ual, his environing age, his world-view, and 
 his production. 
 
 I. At Strassburg Goethe enters an en- 
 tirely new set of circumstances, we might 
 title it a new world. In general this may be 
 called Teutonic, he becomes decidedly Teu- 
 tonized in that city of the borderland, he be- 
 
94 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 gins to take possession of his nation 's spir- 
 itual heritage. Now the strange fact is that 
 French or Latin culture dominated at Leip- 
 zig which rather rejoiced in being designated 
 as "a little Paris. " The professors there on 
 the whole ignored the new movement in Ger- 
 man Literature, even if one of them, Thomas- 
 ius, had formerly changed his University lec- 
 tures from Latin to the vernacular. At 
 Frankfort the people were politically divided 
 into the German and French parties, as we 
 have seen in Goethe 's own family ; but other- 
 wise that city seems to have been largely a 
 center of indifference. Yet at Strassburg the 
 change to Teutonia was marked, and in Goe- 
 the's case was intensified by unforeseen oc- 
 currences, such for instance as the fortuitous 
 advent of Herder. 
 
 So it came about on the second day of 
 April, 1770, that young Wolfgang Goethe, 
 not yet twenty-one years old by some months, 
 crossed the Ehine at Kehl bridge, entered 
 Strassburg and took lodgings as a student 
 where he was destined to stay nearly a year 
 and a half (till August, 1771). It was indeed 
 a pivotal turn of his life, in a number of ways 
 premonitory of his coming career ; he repeat- 
 edly gives to his narrative of it a vein of 
 forecast. That river Khine flows through 
 German legend, song, history, and it is not 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 95 
 
 .4- 
 
 done flowing yet. It was the old boundary 
 line between Teuton and Celt in the twilight 
 of time; then between Teuton and Roman, 
 when it begins to stream into human record. 
 Strangely Goethe crossed the Ehine into Al- 
 sace to become conscious of his own Teutonic 
 spirit there; a century later the German ar- 
 mies passed that same Rhine to take posses- 
 sion of what they deemed their own. It is 
 curious to observe how many German writers 
 of today regard Goethe's act as typical of 
 their supreme national deed in the Franco- 
 German war. The greatest German man 
 passed the battle-line as the protagonist of 
 his folk and the forerunner of the united 
 German nation, to whose spirit he is to give 
 its latest and highest utterance in its highest 
 domain. 
 
 The people of Alsace had been under 
 French rule for nearly a century, but they 
 had remained German to the core, preserv- 
 ing their German tongue, customs and even 
 costumes, especially in the rural portion of 
 the land. To be sure over the higher classes 
 was varnished a thin layer of French cul- 
 ture, supported by officialdom and the sol- 
 diery. A certain defiance was developed just 
 in this borderland against the ruling stranger, 
 who might govern externally but could not 
 sway the heart and the intellect. Into this 
 
96 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST, 
 
 peculiar social environment with its ever- 
 active secret protest against the outsider and 
 its dream of deliverance, Goethe came, and 
 he felt the throb. At the dinner-table the 
 students conversed only in German; food, 
 cookery and everything else took the Teu- 
 tonic flavor. From German Leipzig in the 
 heart of the Fatherland, Goethe wrote often 
 French letters; but from French Strassburg 
 over the frontier his letters are German. So 
 too are his thoughts, so too is his poetry, the 
 latter undergoing quite a transformation in 
 form and content. Such was the social at- 
 mosphere which Goethe now breathed and 
 began to relish. It should be added, however, 
 that during the century after Goethe, the Al- 
 sations changed a good deal, and went decid- 
 edly Frenchward; in that attitude the Ger- 
 man troops found them at the last invasion, 
 and so it is said they remain today, after more 
 than forty years of German rule. 
 
 II. And now can we catch the object which 
 first centered Goethe's attention and held it 
 to the end, during his entire stay at Strass- 
 burg? That was the famous Cathedral which 
 he first sees towering in the distance as he 
 approaches the city and to which he hurries 
 eagerly as soon as he has alighted at the inn. 
 Hear him: "I hastened off to satisfy my 
 dearest wish and to get to the Cathedral 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 97 
 
 .* 
 
 which had long been pointed out by my fel- 
 low travelers, and had remained in my eye 
 for quite a distance. As I first perceived 
 this colossus through the narrow alley, and 
 then stood before it upon the small square, 
 it made upon me a very peculiar impression, 
 which I was unable to develop on the spot, but 
 w r hich I bore about with me unconsciously/' 
 Then he ascended the structure, and took a 
 view of- the beautiful country around him as 
 it lay in the sunshine with all its varied 
 scenery, through which threaded the Rhine 
 along its green shores and islands and cas- 
 tles. Finally he descended and stood before 
 the venerable pile gazing at its f agade ; what 
 it all meant he could not then understand, 
 but he treasured up his impression, and con- 
 tinued to let "the astonishing monument 
 work upon me quietly through its presence/' 
 Such we may call a kind of key-note to his 
 whole Strassburg period struck here at the 
 very beginning and kept up to the last. The 
 sight of the edifice seems to start some germ- 
 inal emotions lying far down in the uncon- 
 scious depths of his soul-life. He will study 
 its plan, observe its unfinished parts and will 
 complete them in idea ; he will go back to its 
 medieval origin, and grope after its builder 
 or builders ; it becomes a sort of daily repast 
 to his creative genius, as he looks upon it at 
 
98 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM.- PART FIRST. 
 
 all hours, going and coming, under every va- 
 riety of illumination by sun and moon, in the 
 distance and close at hand, as one great to- 
 tality, yet with infinite details. Its echoes 
 kept thrilling in him long after he had left 
 Strassburg, as we see in the essay written up- 
 on it later at Frankfort. In fact the effect of 
 it flowed over into his poetry in a secret 
 stream of inspiration, as he himself remarked 
 in speaking of those strongly tinged Teutonic 
 works of his, Gotz and Faust : "The Strass- 
 burg Cathedral left in me a very potent im- 
 pression which can very well stand as the 
 background of such poems. ' ' So he declares 
 calmly looking fack from the gray hairs of 
 his Autobiography; but we also have the ad- 
 vantage, in the aforementioned essay, of lis- 
 tening to some of his youthful dithyrambic 
 ecstasies of utterance: "With what unex- 
 pected emotion did the view take hold of me 
 as I stood before the structure! How did I 
 return to it from all sides to behold its dig- 
 nity and glory! How fresh fell its morning 
 gleam upon me! With what joy I stretched 
 out my arms toward it, observing its huge, 
 harmonious masses alive down to its count- 
 less small parts, as in the works of eternal 
 nature ! How easily did the colossal edifice lift 
 itself up heavenward, infinitely divided and 
 yet everlastingly one! Thereupon revealed 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 99 
 
 itself to me in gentle anticipations the genius 
 of the master-builder." This was Ervinus 
 a Steinbach whom Goethe thanks for his 
 great lesson, "that a drop of the spirit's ec~ 
 stacy sinks down into my soul" and makes it 
 creative along with thine! Evidently the 
 poet thought that the vision of that great 
 original act of creation was what kindled him 
 to creation, and so he continued to commune 
 with it as a sort of divine revelation in the 
 form of art, and as a source of productive 
 power. 
 
 Moreover it should be noted that Goethe 
 was prepared to feel the religious inspira- 
 tion of the mighty temple of God. He came 
 to Strassburg still throbbing with the sacred 
 words of his Frankfort priestess, Fraulein 
 Von Klettenberg. His early letters from 
 Strassburg have a tinge of religious fervor, 
 indeed of pietism which we shall hunt for in 
 vain through the rest of his life. A few days 
 after his arrival he writes : "As I was, I am 
 still, except that I stand somewhat better 
 with our Lord God, and with his dear Son 
 Jesus Christ." That does not sound much 
 like Goethe's strain, though we hold that he 
 always had religiosity if not much religion. 
 Then in another letter : "I am altered, much 
 altered, for which I thank my Savior" 
 which seems to imply his own belief in his 
 
100 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 conversion. After almost five months' stay 
 in Strassburg he writes a letter to Fraulein 
 Von Klettenberg : "I have been today to the 
 Holy Communion to keep in mind the passion 
 and death of our Lord," and goes on to ex- 
 press his devotion still to "my Count" Zin- 
 zendorf, the Herrnhuter. It has also been 
 handed down by Goethe's mother that on his 
 arrival at Strassburg, he, the first day read 
 this passage of Isaiah, to his great comfort: 
 "Enlarge the place of thy tent and let them 
 stretch forth the curtains of thy habitations ; 
 spare not, lengthen thy cords and strengthen 
 thy stakes, for thou shalt break forth on the 
 right and on the left" which Goethe cen- 
 tainly did at Strassburg in accord with the 
 prophet's exhortation, if not altogether in 
 consequence of it. 
 
 And now this outbreak "on the right and 
 on the left" is what we are next to trace in 
 its outlines. It is true that he had come to 
 the University again to finish his course of 
 Jurisprudence in compliance with the wish of 
 his father. But he soon found that with the 
 help of a private tutor or drill-master he need 
 not be troubled much about that study, which 
 with all his efforts he could not like. So he 
 was left free to range in obedience to his in- 
 ner bent ' ' on the right and on the left. ' ' 
 
 III. The first matter to be noticed in this 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 101 
 
 .<* 
 
 connection is Goethe's strong reaction 
 against everything French art, science, 
 philosophy, language, especially against the 
 all-dominating French Literature with its 
 European prestige. Goethe himself has dwelt 
 upon this fact at some length in his Autobi- 
 ography (Eleventh Book). In Alsace he 
 found everywhere an attachment to the old 
 imperial constitution, to German speech, folk- 
 lore, traditions. The political abuses of 
 French administration already caused proph- 
 esies of a coming upheaval. French Litera- 
 ture, represented in the aged Voltaire had 
 become senile, with an implied contrast which 
 at least suggests the new youthful German 
 Literature. 
 
 To be sure Goethe will later react consid- 
 erably against this reaction. French culture 
 had been implanted too deep within him and 
 had too many points in harmony with his uni- 
 versal spirit to be banned from his life for- 
 ever. He will return to France, to the Latin 
 world, and especially to the great classical 
 heritage of the race's spiritual treasures. 
 That will form a long chapter in his future 
 development. 
 
 But now his call is to Teutonize himself in 
 preparation for his task. That Cathedral 
 uttering the Teutonic folk-soul from its ele- 
 mental sources we have noted as the object 
 
102 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 which struck the deepest national chord in 
 Goethe. It is doubtless true that the Gothic 
 style did not originate among a German- 
 speaking people. In northern Europe it is 
 first found in Normandy where Norsemen, a 
 Teutonic stock had settled, but had adopted 
 the French language and culture. But the 
 Pointed Arch, the determining feature of 
 Gothicism in architecture, has been traced to 
 Sicily, to Mahomedan structures, even to old 
 Egypt and Assyria. Still it was the Teutonic 
 spirit in France, England and Germany, 
 which seized upon the Pointed Arch as its 
 own supreme expression in art, as the outer 
 manifestation of its own deepest feeling of 
 selfhood. The Pointed Arch, like some other 
 architectural forms, had to wander thousands 
 of years before it found its own people. So 
 Goethe, if not accurate historically, was right 
 in the deepest sense when he took the vast 
 Gothic minster at Strassburg as a mighty ut- 
 terance of the Teutonic folk-soul, and still 
 further of himself. 
 
 The colossality of the edifice must be re- 
 garded as an important part of the impress 
 left upon the poet's mind. It stands there as 
 an enormous Titan seemingly breaking forth 
 into thousands of shapes each of which im- 
 ages the whole. The grand outbreak "on the 
 right and on the left" foreshadowed by the 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 103 
 
 prophet he could behold in visible reality be- 
 fore him, and that reality also became pro- 
 phetic in his soul. The magnitude of the 
 Cathedral's appearance begat a correspond- 
 ing magnitude of expression in his genius. 
 Those furious power-words of his which are 
 soon to burst forth into German literature, 
 have a deep inner kinship with the huge 
 Gothic pile talking itself out into its multi- 
 tudinous shapes. That is, Goethe is not only 
 to be Teutonized but also Titanized at Strass 
 burg, where the Titanic minster contributes 
 its influence. 
 
 To the German mind he is on the whole re- 
 garded as the third great or greatest hero of 
 Teutonia against Roma. First comes Ar- 
 minius (Herrmann), more mythical than his- 
 torical, a nebulous but gigantic figure rising 
 up in the cloudy North and overwhelming the 
 ancient Roman legions in defence of the 
 Fatherland. Second is Luther with his es- 
 sentially Teutonic revolt against the second 
 or papal Rome in behalf of religious free- 
 dom. Third is Goethe, the modern hero of 
 Teutonia, not a political nor a religious here, 
 but a cultural hero we may call him, starting 
 to break the more recent Latin fetters of the 
 spirit, chiefly in literature. Now there comes 
 to his aid unexpectedly, as if sent by Pallas 
 Athena, who loves the youth, a man that is 
 
104 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 to train him for his pivotal vocation as well 
 as to furnish him with his chief weapons of 
 warfare. 
 
 IV. This was Johann Gottfried Herder, 
 who had by seeming chance dropped down 
 into Strassburg to be treated for a disease of 
 the eyes. He was born of humble parents in 
 Mohrungen, a town of East Prussia, in 1744, 
 so that he was 26 years old when he first saw 
 Goethe. He was already fully matured and 
 had written two of his chief works, critical 
 but full also of inspiration. The philosopher 
 Kant at Koenigsberg had taken part in his 
 early training, but a peculiar, mystical, yet 
 deep-seeing German writer by the name of 
 Hamann who had especially inducted him in- 
 to the appreciation of Shakespeare, had ex- 
 erted the main influence over him. Coming 
 by way of Paris, he had seen and conversed 
 w r ith the distinguished literary lights of the 
 French capital; the result, however, was an 
 intense disgust, which on the whole fitted in- 
 to the Alsatian mood as well as into that of 
 Goethe. The latter, having already heard of 
 the arrival of the distinguished stranger, 
 hunted him up and established a bond of 
 friendship with him which lasted with consid- 
 erable fluctuations during his life-time. In 
 the Autobiography Goethe gives quite a full 
 and appreciative account of Herder, starting 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 105 
 
 with this prelude of recognition : ' ' The most 
 important event, the one which was to have 
 the weightiest consequences for me was my 
 acquaintance with Herder, and the close con- 
 nection with him springing from the same." 
 Goethe had been in Strassburg some six 
 months before the arrival of Herder, brows- 
 ing about a good deal in a general way, study- 
 ing a little jurisprudence, reading much in a 
 desultory fashion, conversing at the table 
 with companions, some older and some per- 
 chance younger, but all of them his inferiors. 
 The outcome was a certain spirit of intellec- 
 tual domination and of .youthful self-conceit 
 in the young fellow which for his own good 
 had to be taken out of him. Now Herder 
 was just the man for such an operation in 
 pedagogical surgery. Goethe narrates : "By 
 various questions he sought to make himself 
 acquainted with my situation, and his power 
 of attraction worked upon me with increasing 
 energy. I was in general of a very confiding 
 nature, and before him, I withheld no se- 
 crets. ' ' So young ambition with its egotism 
 lets out all its great plans, when comes the 
 backstroke. "It was not long before the re- 
 pellent pulse of his nature began to show 
 itself, and precipitated me into a state of no 
 small disagreeableness. I spoke of my occu- 
 pations with some self-satisfaction, but he 
 
106 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 was of a different opinion, he not only con- 
 demned my interest in such things, but made 
 it ridiculous even to myself almost to the 
 point of disgust/' A new sort of discipline 
 is that, very different from the admiration 
 and even flattery which he received and ex- 
 pected from his young associates at the din- 
 ner table, who echoed him and themselves 
 with much hearty applause. But be it said 
 to the credit of the youth that he recognizes 
 the teacher whom the Gods seem to have 
 sent him with a divine purpose ; the castiga- 
 tion of that awful tongue he is going to en- 
 dure for the sake of the treasures which it 
 pours out with its gall. Gentle is his com- 
 plaint : "I had much to suffer from his spirit 
 of contradiction, " still the aspiring youth 
 will hold on in spite of lacerations till the 
 blood trickles. Whf does he not quit? He 
 cannot; well does he know that he has dis- 
 covered just the man to supply his soul's 
 deepest needs. 
 
 It may be said that Goethe has now found 
 his true University not Leipzig, not Strass- 
 burg; but the University of Herder, upon 
 whose course he enters with unremitting in- 
 dustry. "During the whole time of this ill- 
 ness I visited Herder mornings and evenings ; 
 indeed I stayed entire days with him and ac- 
 customed myself the more willingly to his 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 107 
 
 .# 
 
 scolding and fault-finding, as I learned daily 
 to put a higher value upon his fine and great 
 qualities, his very extensive knowledge and 
 his deep insights. ' ' So Goethe kept going to 
 the bedside of the sick giant, and performing 
 all sorts of little services for him, since that 
 gave the unique opportunity. But the deed 
 of kindness had to be done without the thanks 
 of the recipient who could even launch a sar- 
 casm at his benefactor in the act of helping 
 him. Goethe declares that "nobody could 
 ever expect a word of approval from Herder, 
 let one try as one might. " That was cer- 
 tainly not pleasant, but the pupil holds on 
 with grip unshaken; for listen to those con- 
 versations ' * which were always full of mean- 
 ing, whether the teacher was answering a 
 question or asking it, or otherwise imparting 
 himself; thus he kept advancing me to new 
 views daily, yea hourly." How narrow 
 seems now 'Leipzig and Frankfort, and even 
 Strassburg, as it was hitherto! "Of a sud- 
 den I was made acquainted through Herder 
 with the whole new movement of the time and 
 with all the special directions which it seemed 
 to take." Still mid these unspeakable bless- 
 ings the counterblast of fiery damnation 
 would fall upon the eager youth, "causing ir. 
 me a diremption which I had never experi- 
 enced before in my life. ' ' So the spoilt child 
 
108 GOETHE'8 LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 of genius has to take big doses of bitter med- 
 icine f^om that sick couch till he may well 
 query, Which is the patient, I or he? Both 
 are indeed undergoing treatment, but for 
 very different troubles. Thus Goethe pays 
 his school fees to the university Herder, but 
 receives untold reward. 
 . What did our poet receive from this inter- 
 course! A new appreciation of the world's 
 greatest Literature; Herder revealed espe- 
 cially Shakespeare to Goethe, who will soon 
 make the English dramatist his poetic start- 
 ing-point. Other authors were read and com- 
 mented on : Homer, Ossian, Goldsmith, whose 
 Vicar of Wakefield has a notable place in this 
 Strassburg experience of Goethe, since he 
 will make it reflect his love-idyl of Sessen- 
 heim. But Shakespeare is the elemental 
 Genius who seems to draw from the same 
 sources as the builder of the Strasburg ca- 
 thedral. 
 
 Moreover Herder taught his pupil to go 
 back to the folk-soul as the original fountain 
 of poetry. In this spirit he explained much 
 of the Hebrew Bible, as he was a theologian 
 by profession. He deeply appreciated 
 Percy's Reliques and ballads of the people; 
 under his inspiration Goethe began collect- 
 ing the folk-songs of Alsace, and wrote some 
 of his own. Herder had largely wrought out 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 109 
 
 and applied one of the sentences of his 
 teacher Hamann: "Poetry is the mother- 
 tongue of the human race. ' ' Moreover he in- 
 sisted upon the poet's employment of one 
 language which is also to be carried back to 
 its well-head in the folk-soul ; German speech 
 became a leading tenet of his poetic and pa- 
 triotic creed. 
 
 Still Herder had his decided spiritual limi- 
 tations leaving out the matter of temper. 
 His insights were sudden jets bursting up at 
 random from the unseen depths with marvel- 
 ous power and brilliancy but with little inner 
 coherence. Herder to the end of his days 
 could not form, having no native ability to 
 organize his separate thoughts into one great 
 totality. To the entire body of his works 
 might be given the title of his first book which 
 he called "Fragments," the key-word of his 
 talent and his character. Herder himself is 
 a Fragment, but a great and glorious one, 
 whose essence lay in its enormous power of 
 stimulating others to make it whole. So he 
 stirred Goethe to a higher completeness, al- 
 together transcending his own fragmentary 
 nature. Moreover, Herder bloomed rapidly 
 and early to what he became; at Strassburg 
 he was doubtless in his very flower, which 
 Goethe plucked and went on, making the won- 
 derful fragment integral in himself and in 
 his work. 
 
110 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 But alongside of this Herderian fountain 
 another source was tapped by the youth, even 
 deeper and more compelling, that of love, 
 and it began to overflow and quicken into the 
 fairest romance of life. The part of Phileros 
 cannot be left out at Strassburg, still less can 
 the part of Frederika. 
 
 V. It is now accepted as a wee dot of bio- 
 graphic fact that Goethe first visited the 
 parsonage of Sessenheim, a village distant 
 several hours' ride from Strassburg, on the 
 13th of October, 1770. There he met Fred- 
 erika Brion, the third daughter of Pastor 
 Brion, then in her nineteenth year, and at 
 once the fairest romance of Goethe's life be- 
 gan spinning itself in the deed. The result- 
 ing love-affair became a very important phase 
 of the poet's human discipline; it started to 
 flowing the deepest springs of his emotional 
 existence, while Herder had stirred quite at 
 the same time the intellectual side of his na- 
 ture. Furthermore, according to his own 
 confession repeated again and again it flung 
 him into guilt, and turned the Furies loose 
 upon him for retribution, like a second Ores- 
 tes. In consequence he is brought face to face 
 with atonement for the guilty act, which 
 atonement he works out in his own peculiar 
 way, which is literary. The remorseful ex- 
 perience brings him to a consciousness of 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. Ill 
 
 what he is to do with that pen of his imthe 
 new dawn of the written word just then 
 glimmering around the European horizon 
 and specially the German. Thus the tragic 
 Goethe now appears in the actual deed done 
 in the flesh, upon whose throes is deeply 
 carved his heart's anguish. To be sure Goe- 
 the's own personal tragedy never quite 
 reached death's point; he always succeeded 
 in mediating it at last, as he says, through 
 his poetry, which thus becomes for him and 
 for his best readers mediatorial a kind of 
 vicarious offering which expiates Transgres- 
 sion. Moreover Goethe through his love for 
 Frederika became the supreme lyric poet of 
 modern, if not all time ; many were the effu- 
 sions spraying from his soul's depths into 
 the sunshine of that girl's countenance; two 
 of them may be said to have reached a height 
 which he never afterward overtopped. And 
 we are not to forget that this heroine lived 
 among and belonged to the people; a rustic 
 maiden, or we may call her a folk-girl, un- 
 doubtedly of finest type, whom the poet is to 
 idealize or indeed transfigure into an eternal 
 shape of beauty. On the other hand Frede- 
 rika also must have possessed the spirit's 
 remedial gift, as she, unmarried, survived 
 her trial some forty-two years, dying in 1813 
 at the age of 61. Upon her tombstone a stray 
 
112 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 gleam of the Muse lias dropped down and 
 carved itself there in lasting beauty: "A 
 poet's sun rayed forth its full sheen upon her 
 youth and made it immortal." 
 
 Significant is the fact that the unexpected 
 descent of Herder into Goethe's career quite 
 coincides in time with the epiphany of the 
 Alsatian maiden. Ever memorable was that 
 month of October, 1770, when two such di- 
 vine appearances speeding down from Olym- 
 pus of a sudden darted into his life's jour- 
 ney. Do these two striking phenomena be- 
 long together in some deeper purpose or 
 stream of consciousness? We believe that 
 they do, as diverse as they certainly are on 
 the surface ; they both lead the young genius 
 to that poetic fountain of which he is now 
 to take the deepest draughts the fountain 
 of the Teutonic folk-soul. To be sure the two 
 conduits or channels tapping and conveying 
 that ultimate fountain are in the most 
 marked contrast, but they reach down to the 
 same underlying source and terminate in the 
 same individual participant. 
 
 Goethe in his Autobiography has wrought 
 out with great fullness the story of his rela- 
 tion to Frederika. It is one of those novel- 
 ettes which we have watched him weaving in- 
 to the historic events of his life. But it is 
 emphatically the greatest of them all, the 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 113' 
 
 most complete in its details * and the 
 most finished in its artistic procedure. He 
 prepares us by suggestion for what is com- 
 ing; at least three times beforehand he hints 
 of his Frederika, even to the fateful outcome 
 of the story. That demonic kiss of the 
 French dancing-master 's daughter is a kind 
 of prelude to the event coming fatefully on. 
 The rejected maiden, as she madly presses 
 her lips to his, utters the piercing outcry of 
 a Fury: "Woe upon woe, for ever and ever, 
 be to that girl who kisses these lips the first 
 time after me! I know that Heaven hears 
 my curse this moment. And you, Sir, take 
 yourself hence as rapidly as you can." Goe- 
 the adds that he flew down the stairs with the 
 purpose of never entering that house again, 
 as if forefeeling the effect of the woe-freight- 
 ed imprecation. In his intimacy with Frede- 
 rika, his fear of his curse-laden kiss will dart 
 again and again into his mind. Still he gives 
 it in the hot fervor of passion and the curse 
 falls, like that of Lear, or of Oedepus, of 
 whom we are reminded by this unique dra- 
 matic overture. 
 
 Upon Frederika 's first appearance before 
 him the poet lavishes all the wealth of his de- 
 scriptive glories. He had already entered 
 the Sessenheim parsonage, Frederika 's ab- 
 sence was the burden of the talk even with a 
 
GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 touch of anxiety, when in she bounced and "a 
 most charming star arose in this rural 
 Heaven ' ' : such are the words of Goethe flash- 
 ing out of his old-young eyes. She still "wore 
 German/' that is, she dressed in the national 
 costume of the German country-girl. "Slen- 
 der and light she tripped along as if she had 
 nothing to carry, " yet "with great blonde 
 hair-braids hanging down her back" from 
 her neat hatless head. "Out of her cheery 
 blue eyes she looked with clear glances and 
 her pretty stub-nose pried into the air as un- 
 concernedly as if there could be no care in 
 the world. " He says that she stood between 
 the city and the country, but all his descrip- 
 tion puts upon her the rural stamp. Later 
 she with mother and sister paid a visit to 
 Strassburg, but the lover confesses that she 
 did not belong there, she was displaced from 
 her true environment in the country among 
 the people. 
 
 So Goethe falls in love with a Teutonic 
 rural folk-maiden of the genuine type in com- 
 plete accord with his present temper and 
 spiritual tendency. The inclination soon gets 
 to be a love of the first magnitude, being the 
 third one in his career already; in fact the 
 artistic introduction and treatment of Fred- 
 erika in his narration show quite a resem- 
 blance to his account of Gretchen, his first co- 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBURG. 115 
 
 .4- 
 
 ercive passion. Here it may be stated that 
 Goethe in his Autobiography makes uncon- 
 sciously a distinction 'between his many loves 
 which shoot out all over the firmament of his 
 life like Heaven's stars of the first, second 
 and third magnitudes, and perchance still 
 lesser ones which turn to a kind of star-dust 
 or galaxy. For instance that affair with the 
 dancing-master's daughter was to our Phi- 
 leros but a love of the third magnitude if even 
 so large, whatever it may have been to the 
 passionate girl with her demonic kiss of a 
 curse. Now his attachment to Frederika 
 blazes up to a love of the first magnitude, a 
 veritable Sirius of the stellar retinue, and re- 
 ceives proportionate attention. To him she 
 represents the Teutonic folk with which she 
 is ingrown, and of which she springs up be- 
 fore him the very inflorescence of love. We 
 must repeat that through Herder and through 
 the Cathedral he is already in a Teutonic 
 mood, and in accord with his deepest nature 
 must love the ideal Teutonic maid when she 
 appears. 
 
 But now falls the counterstroke after 
 months of dalliance that torturing sense of 
 guilt which he has so often expressed directly 
 through open confession, and indirectly 
 through literature. His letters indicate a 
 gnawing self-reproach; anxiety hounds him 
 
116 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 on account of his " passionate relation to 
 Frederika;" from allusions somewhat veiled 
 it is evident that he has felt "the invisible 
 scourge of the Eumenides" which "may lash 
 him out of his country. ' ' Looking back from 
 his far colder autobiographic years of the 
 sixties he can say: "My heart was torn by 
 the answer of Frederika to my letter of sep- 
 aration. . . -. Now I was guilty for the 
 first time. " He recounts his former loves: 
 "Gretchen was taken away from me; Kath- 
 arina abandoned me ; now I was guilty. ' ' So 
 a penitential time sets in with works of atone- 
 ment. One queries with much dubitation: 
 What could the man have done to call up such 
 throes of remorse how far did his passion 
 carry him? That is not known with exact- 
 ness; German writers have differed much 
 tabout the degree of violation which evoked 
 such paroxysms of conscience. At any rate 
 there can be no doubt concerning his deep 
 and intense conviction of wrong; also no 
 doubt concerning his bitter repentance: "I 
 had wounded the most beautiful heart in its 
 deepest part, and so there followed the epoch 
 of a dismal remorse." 
 
 And now for Goethe's peculiar method of 
 self -recovery, of winning a certain relief and 
 forgiveness from his conscience. He is to 
 appeal to that deepest mediatorial principle 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBUJiG. 117 
 
 of his nature: poetry. Says he: "At the 
 time when the pain at Frederika's situation 
 tortured me, I sought help in my old way, 
 through poetic composition. I continued 
 again to practise my accustomed poetic con- 
 fession in order to become worthy of an in- 
 ner absolution through this self-tormenting 
 penitence. The two Marias in Gotz and Cla- 
 vigo can properly be regarded as results of 
 such penitential contemplations, also the two 
 miserable fellows who play the parts of lov- 
 ers in those dramas. " Thus Goethe pun- 
 ished himself through his pen, and sought to 
 reward his female victims in the same way 
 which atonement they probably did not care 
 for or even know about. However we catch 
 here the spur which harassed him into pro- 
 duction the necessity of self-redemption 
 from guilt. Still the purgatorial process was 
 not easy or short ; it kept recurring with new 
 resurgences of remorse and goading him to 
 still further poetic utterance. Margaret in 
 Faust is largely a confession of scenes with 
 Frederika. In his Stella is a direct outburst : 
 "Retributive Fate, thou dost lie heavy upon 
 me, and art just 0, pardon me it is long 
 I have gone through an infinite suffering. ' ' 
 And still the inner absolution would not come 
 in spite of these paroxysmal offerings of 
 sighs and even tears. Some eight years later 
 
118 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 in his journey to Switzerland he felt com- 
 pelled to make a diversion to Sessenheim and 
 there in the family itself to seek some kind of 
 forgiveness. He describes the fact in a let- 
 ter of the time : he saw Frederika * ' who once 
 loved me more beautifully than I deserved. 
 I had to leave her at a moment when it cost 
 her almost her life. I stayed over night and 
 set out the next morning at sunrise sur- 
 rounded by the friendly faces of the family, 
 so that I can again think on this little corner 
 of the world with peace of mind and can live 
 placated in myself with these reconciled 
 spirits. " So he, self -accused, makes a pilgrim- 
 age to the scene of his wrong for atonement, 
 and comes away with some feeling of forgiv- 
 eness. That seems to be the last flicker of 
 Goethe's novel lived by himself and Fred- 
 erika. 
 
 Here, then, we win a glimpse of Goethe's 
 deepest impulse to the written word: his re- 
 demption from guilt. He goes through the 
 round of humanity in himself : transgression, 
 reproach, penance, and forgiveness. It is 
 what the church essentially prescribed for the 
 sinful soul: heart's sorrow (contritio cordis), 
 oral confession (confessio oris), reparation 
 through the deed (satisfactio operis). But 
 the mediation of church and priest has now 
 become internal ; man, still prone to sin, is to 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF 8TRASSBURG. 119 
 
 complete the process of atonement within his 
 own conscience. Moreover this man is now 
 the poet, the creator of the word supreme 
 which he will utter to his fellow men as his 
 message. Thus it becomes a kind of new 
 evangel to erring humanity, who by help of 
 this fresh utterance are to win their self-re- 
 demption. Such is the deepest significance 
 of Goethe in his writ and in his life, for his 
 life is a mightier poem than any or all of his 
 written things put together. It is the total 
 man in his complete rou*nd of error, sin, dam- 
 nation, hell, repentance and restoration- 
 life's purgatorial journey which the poet 
 travels and then narrates for the rest of us 
 sinners. Thus he suffers for, all and sings 
 his suffering in his way a vicarious sacri- 
 fice. 
 
 And now comes up the question which was 
 asked the moment Goethe's Autobiography 
 appeared, has been asked ever since, and will 
 continue to be asked by a multitude of read- 
 ers as long as the book is read : Why did not 
 Wolfgang Goethe marry Frederika Brion? 
 He was well aware of the question and of his 
 condemnation, for he lived many years after 
 the publication of this novelette. Several 
 times he seems in conversation to throw out 
 excuses, probably without believing much in 
 them himself. At any rate he was caught in 
 
120 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 double grip of Fate and whichever way he 
 went, guilt certainly and possibly tragedy 
 stared him in the the face. Especially he was 
 disillusioned when he saw the country girl 
 outside of her poetic rural environment on 
 her visit to Strassburg. He came to the con- 
 viction that under the circumstances mar- 
 riage meant only a longer and a worse trag- 
 edy for both. But in the mad intoxication of 
 love he had plunged forward to a point from 
 which he could not retreat without inflicting 
 pain and wrong. So* he was caught in the 
 awful criss-cross of guilt whatever he might 
 do. Not only outer censure will be his, but 
 also the inner laceration of conscience by go- 
 ing either way. So he portrays that mill of 
 destiny into which his emotions have hurried 
 him, as it literally grinds him for years in the 
 torture. He has set forth this stage of guilt 
 in Meister, where the old Harper sings of the 
 Heavenly Powers : 
 
 Ihr fiihrt ins Leben uns hinein, 
 Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden, 
 Dann iiberlasst ihr ihn der Pein 
 Denn alle Schuld racht sich auf Erden. 
 
 This experience made him the poet. The 
 mighty collision of human life went inside 
 him and tore him to pieces. He was both 
 sides of the tragic conflict, and whichever 
 
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF STRASSBU^RG. 121 
 
 side received the blow lie was the sufferer. 
 Still he had to act and take guilt with its re- 
 morse and penalty. 
 
 VI. At the end here we must take a brief 
 look at the University, though it and its Pro- 
 fessors meant quite nothing to the student 
 Goethe. But to satisfy his father he did 
 learn enough law, not to get the full degree 
 of doctor, but to become a licentiate. Curi- 
 ous is the subject he took for his dissertation : 
 The State is to establish Religion by law, but 
 is not to interfere with private opinion. So 
 he set up a kind of tyrant; the law is made 
 and interpreted by the Prince or Ruler, the 
 people having nothing to do with it. The 
 people as self -legislative lay beyond his hori- 
 zon; but he reached down to them in speech, 
 song, mythus. The tyranny of the Three 
 Unities in the drama he assailed, but not tyr- 
 anny in politics. Goethe was a tyrant polit- 
 ically at Weimar ; the Duke called him by that 
 name, and had occasion more than once to 
 assert his own autocracy against the auto- 
 crat. 
 
 Thus he brings to a close his studies at 
 Strassburg, which belonged chiefly to the 
 great University outside of the University. 
 Much had he gotten very needful for his life 's 
 curriculum; but his prophetic instinct was 
 bent to find and to appropriate what was to 
 
122 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 enter into his future. The transmitted train- 
 ing had to be transcended by the genius, and 
 Goethe 's prescriptive education was simply 
 set aside at Strassburg except in the one 
 small point of the law. The Cathedral, Her- 
 der, and Frederika had been his real Univer- 
 sity. On the whole his career at Strassburg 
 meant a breach with the traditional order, and 
 this character he will soon embody in his 
 Gotz, when his pen begins to flow into new- 
 born shapes at Frankfort. 
 
 When Goethe entered his native city in 
 August, 1771, he felt himself a new man with 
 a new vocation of his own choice, which he at 
 once set about to realize. Hence it comes 
 that a fresh Epoch begins with him, in its 
 salient features the most sharply marked and 
 distinctive of his whole career. This is what 
 we are next to consider. 
 
THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNI^M. 123 
 
 CHAPTER SECOND. 
 
 THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNIUM. 
 
 So we shall name the next four years of 
 Goethe's productive life, affixing this title as 
 a sort of temporal tag, to which we shall 
 often hereafter have occasion to refer. For 
 now Goethe the author breaks out with a 
 kind of cosmic fury, world-making, and starts 
 the mighty creations which it will take him a 
 life-time to finish, and some he never gets 
 done. 
 
 Volcanic is the term most frequently ap- 
 plied to the present grand upheaval of the 
 poet which seems so sudden and overwhelm- 
 ing, as if giving vent to all the pent-up forces 
 of Nature. Then follows an equally sudden 
 and surprising quiescence, so that the human 
 volcano appears almost extinct for some 
 years after its prolific quadrennial overflow 
 at Frankfort. Thus it comes that the pres- 
 ent time is very distinctly bounded in Goe- 
 the's career; in fact it bounds itself as de- 
 cisively as does the mountain which uplifts 
 itself abruptly skyward out of the plain be- 
 low. It is the young volcanic Goethe now 
 passing through his primordial state of erup- 
 
124 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 tion, as if he had to live over in his own soul 
 the elemental stages of Nature's evolution. 
 So we may be allowed to think of some deep 
 ultimate sympathy which bonded the poet's 
 life with that of his planet or perchance of 
 the cosmos. The thread of Natural Science 
 which spins through his activity till the close 
 of his days may go back and connect with his 
 volcanic time. 
 
 In such fashion we shall let Goethe's sec- 
 ond Epoch at the start define itself, for it 
 still is a part or stage of his Pre-Italian Pe- 
 riod, and thus may be deemed in the total 
 view a preparatory discipline for his larger 
 life-work. He has to go through the present 
 unclassic schooling before he can appreciate 
 aright classic Italy. He has to realize first 
 his own Northern Teutonic spirit ere he can 
 unite it with the antique culture in a creative 
 way. So we can glimpse at the start this 
 Frankfort Quadrennium as a single epochal 
 turn in Goethe's total evolution. 
 
 It is also designated often as Titanic, be- 
 ing supremely defiant of the existent order, 
 and hostile to the old established Gods. One 
 of these ancient Titans he will seek to limn 
 early in his career, his Prometheus, whom, 
 however, he could never quite conquer in 
 writ. 
 
 Another designation of the present Epoch 
 
THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNIUM. 125 
 
 * 
 
 emphasizes its contrast with the preceding 
 Epoch by terming it anti-prescriptive, run- 
 ning counter to the realm of prescription, 
 which has hitherto dominated the. poet's life 
 even if often under protest. It is thus a 
 mighty revolt of the individual against his 
 environing institutional order, whose valid- 
 ity he has to learn by colliding with it, and 
 then portraying his collision, which thereby 
 takes its place as a phase of Universal Lit- 
 erature. 
 
 His creative energy at this time, or his 
 writing demon, as we may call it, is unique 
 in his own life for its enormous output both 
 as to quantity and character, and would be 
 hard to parallel in any other great writer. 
 He rises up a kind of Super-man in a new lit- 
 erary movement, and his Genius seems to be 
 endowed with an elemental energy in its ut- 
 terance, often turbid and uproarous, yet al- 
 ways strong and daring even in its defects. 
 
 Equaly energetic and overflowing is the 
 part of Phileros during this Epoch. Goethe 
 as champion lover of the time if not of all 
 time, shows his greatest activity of love at 
 present ; it too is volcanic both as to intensity 
 and power, and appears in a perpetual state 
 of eruption. Here too we note that strange 
 connection between his productive and his 
 amatory energy; the two are counterparts 
 
126 GOETHE'S LTFE-POEM.PART FIRST. 
 
 and rise together from the deepest thrill of 
 his being. 
 
 So much in general terms as a forecast of 
 the present Epoch. 
 
 I. Quitting his Strassburg time of disci- 
 pline, young Goethe returns to the paternal 
 roof in Frankfort, charged to the muzzle with 
 all the spiritual explosives of the age as the 
 material for his Genius. Four years the vol- 
 canic outpour will last (1771-1775), with a 
 creative potence which would not be easy to 
 find in Literature. Taking the Greek sym- 
 bol for such a character we have called him 
 the Titan, who warred in the twilight of time 
 with the deities of the Upper World, defying 
 the established Olympian order. Such colos- 
 sal characters, corresponding with his pres- 
 ent mood, Goethe will pick out of the myth- 
 ical and historical past, and seek to mould 
 them anew in human speech during this the 
 mightiest, most exuberant overflow of cre- 
 ativity of all his life's Epochs. Never again 
 will he have such an unremitting spell of lit- 
 erary genesis, which indeed begets the chief 
 works of his later years, and starts their evo- 
 lution which, in the case of Faust, runs 
 through all his days and joins them together 
 in its unity. Moreover he will make himself 
 the center of a band of like-minded writers 
 and readers, who constitute the movement 
 
THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNIVM. 127 
 
 .$ 
 
 known in German literary history as Sturm 
 und Drang (Storm and Stress), which ex- 
 pression images its activity. 
 
 It was a struggle welling up from tho 
 deepest human sources, an uplift which we 
 may name elemental. We can observe it as 
 a stage in the development of all the great 
 poets. It is an original force, like a force of 
 Nature which takes possession of the man, 
 turning him for a while into an element of 
 Nature which acts beyond his will. He be- 
 comes as the volcano, the storm, the mighty 
 onflow of the river. Shakespeare, when in 
 full demonic obsession, shows this elemental 
 energy at its height in the thunder of his 
 words, for instance in his youthful Richard 
 III and in the King Lear of his middle age. 
 The Titan expresses the concentrated might 
 of all individuality, as restrained by the lim- 
 ited, the established, the institutional. The 
 world becomes too small for the aspiring 
 spirit who will shatter it to fragments. 
 
 Language likewise must reflect this break- 
 ing over transmitted limits. Goethe's early 
 speech often defies the grammatical organ- 
 ism, it too is explosive in word, sentence, 
 paragraph, as well as in theme. What a 
 maelstrom of apostrophes, exclamations, 
 breaks in structure, sudden saltations of 
 meaning out of ken! Note this chaotic and 
 
128 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 often coruscating prose till it smoothes down 
 into the classic flow of Meister, deep but 
 transparent. Here again we feel that Goethe 
 is tapping the far-down elemental sources of 
 human utterance as it first springs from the 
 Teutonic folk-soul. Herder had stimulated 
 him to this strain at Strassburg, and he had 
 taken his first lesson by collecting the Alsa- 
 tian ballads of the people. Language also 
 had become crystallized in that time of the 
 spirit's crystallization, and must be shiv- 
 ered into its original atoms, for a great lin- 
 guistic re-birth. Thus the Titanic revolu- 
 tion reached down to the prime vehicle of all 
 literary expression, which like everything ex- 
 ternally transmitted and imposed from the 
 outside must be knocked to pieces, and if pos- 
 sible, reconstructed. 
 
 Thus then streams through this entire 
 epoch an unearthly striving to get beyond 
 and beyond out of this little earthly exist- 
 ence; limit-breaking the man pushes for the 
 unlimited, for that which he deems his free 
 dom. In his thought and imagery there is 
 often a cosmical outreach ; in this sentence 
 of Gotz we may hear the note of the new liter- 
 ary Superman: "To me it was as if I held 
 the sun in my hand and could play ball with 
 it!" Not only supra-terrestrial but supra- 
 solar rises the daring conception, whose play- 
 
THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNIUM. 129 
 
 ,4- 
 
 ground is the cosmos a far larger field than 
 those old giants had who could only pile Ossa 
 on Pelion. 
 
 Many productions written in this spirit 
 rose roaring and surging along the surface 
 of the time's turbid current, but they have 
 vanished into the ocean of inanity except 
 those of Goethe. And some of his survive 
 not of their own worth, but buoyed up by the 
 fame of his Muse, they float along in the up- 
 bearing current of his greatest works. 
 
 II. There were many signs throughout 
 Europe of the mighty protest against the old 
 outgrown social order. The French Revolu- 
 tion was brewing at the time, and the ferment 
 was not confined to France. Voltaire's bit- 
 ter negations had traversed and leavened 
 the whole field of European culture. Then 
 came Rousseau whose cry "Back to Nature" 
 became the text of the time and of Goethe. 
 The entire institutional world was regarded 
 as unnatural, artificial, fit only for the gen- 
 eral bonfire soon to be kindled. French lit- 
 erature, then the mouthpiece of the spirit of 
 the age, was peppered through and through 
 with the eternal No, denying especially the 
 transmitted system in society, state, relig- 
 ion, education. The Last Judgment on the 
 old forms of man's associated life was al- 
 ready being trumpeted from every part of 
 
130 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 Europe's sky, and it was forefelt everywhere 
 that the universal doom would soon go into 
 execution. Already during these very years 
 on another continent the great new Kevoln- 
 tion was starting. The American War of In- 
 dependence has its parallel with Goethe's 
 War of Independence which he fought out in 
 writ during his present Titanic Quadren- 
 nium. Very remote were the two -movements 
 and quite unaware of each other, still they 
 were both elemental expressions, or if you 
 please, explosions of the same central spir- 
 itual energy of the time rounding the whole 
 earth. 
 
 So this brief bit of Goethe's life has a far- 
 reaching significance. It is not too much to 
 say that here the poet becomes the main lit- 
 erary spokesman of the turn of an epoch ; he 
 is the voice of a node of the World 's History. 
 Today there does not exist probably a more 
 characteristic and smiting utterance of that 
 age than Goethe 's manifold, but fragmentary 
 outbursts during these four years. His words 
 seem now the fore-words of the grand com- 
 ing deed, the French Eevolution. Never 
 again, even if he wrote afterwards more per- 
 fect works artistically, was he so adequately 
 the herald of his time, delivering its message 
 from the supernal Powers- in a speech well 
 accordant with its character. Onlv in his 
 
THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNIQM. 131 
 
 Faust, which has its conception and earliest 
 form in this Quadrennium, did he so deeply 
 touch the creative fountains of our modern 
 spirit. 
 
 Let it be said, however, that Goethe's pro- 
 ductions of this stage are stamped so pe- 
 culiarly with the monstrous mood of the 
 epoch and with his own anarchic condition, 
 that they seem unbalanced to many people 
 and hard to read. They certainly do lack 
 the calm clear universality to which he as 
 author evolved in many of his later writings. 
 He is not in the present output a model in 
 any wise, be it of style, .thought, or man. Still 
 just in this lies a chief interest of .his biog- 
 raphy; he had the power of unfolding out of 
 this primal chaotic earthquake of his age and 
 of himself into an Olympian serenity of soul, 
 speech and writ. And right here it should be 
 emphasized that Goethe passed through more 
 stages, and more pivotal stages, of human 
 consciousness than any other known man, 
 and at the same time preserved the genius to 
 fling them out of himself into vivid and sym- 
 pathetic utterance. In this connection again 
 we may repeat that the main object of the 
 present book is to find and set forth the har- 
 monious psychical order of these multifari- 
 ous stages of the poet tumbling through one 
 another backward and forward on the sur- 
 
132 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 face, but manifesting an inner movement and 
 law of their own. 
 
 III. On Goethe 's return from Strassburg 
 to Frankfort, the first thing to be noticed in 
 reference to the youthful protester is that he 
 finds himself in fierce rebellion with his whole 
 environment. In the paternal home he was 
 again subject to the narrow pedantry of his 
 father, just the opposite of himself who was 
 seeking to break loose from the fetters of the 
 past. The strict old gentleman gave to the 
 wayward son very sparingly of his cash, re- 
 ducing the youth's free life to painful limits; 
 for we may suppose that the young stormer 
 was as prodigal of money as of genius. Thus 
 his native town of Frankfort he grew to 
 loathe for its petty social life, and its devo- 
 tion to mere money-getting. He would flee 
 to his attic for a free outlook with the Muses, 
 or would rush through the city-gates for a 
 carousal with boundless Nature. Above all 
 he detested his vocation, that of attorney, and 
 his first law-suit seems to have given him a 
 disgusting dose of shysterdom. No wonder 
 that he afterwards so often dwells on the 
 wretched lot of the man whose strongest na- 
 tural bent runs counter to his calling, to the 
 work he has to do every day. 
 
 It seems too that he met at this time a 
 literary personage, who was full of the de- 
 
THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNIUM. 133 
 
 .* 
 
 nying spirit of the age, and who, he says, 
 ' l had the greatest influence on my life. ' ' This 
 companion "had embittered himself against 
 the whole world, and had allowed this mor- 
 bid whim to sway him to such a degree that 
 he felt an irresistible inclination to be wil- 
 fully a roguish clown (8 chalk) or even a 
 downright scamp (Schelm)" (See Autobiog- 
 raphy Book 12). The name of this character 
 was Merck, who evidently contributed a num- 
 ber of features and probably of sayings to 
 the portraiture of Mephistopheles ; indeed 
 Goethe names him Mephistopheles Merck. 
 But the deeper matter is that the poet beheld 
 in this real demonic figure a very significant 
 phase of himself at the present epoch, a liv- 
 ing counterpart and spokesman of his own 
 negative condition. Hence a strong affinity 
 sprang up at once between the two universal 
 soreheads, till Goethe sucked the egg dry, 
 which was addle indeed, though sweet to his 
 devilish taste just now. The later outcome 
 of Merck must be noted : he committed sui- 
 cide, the negation negated itself with due 
 logic, and a sorrowful time of it the poor fel- 
 low had in the real tragedy which he got out 
 of life. A strange immortality he has won 
 by revealing the Devil of Culture in person 
 to the creator of Mephistopheles. It is true 
 that some modern commentators have warmlv 
 
134 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 defended the character of Merck against 
 Goethe who is charged with injustice and 
 even ingratitude against the man who had 
 befriended him. We are inclined to think that 
 some truth lurks in this defence. Still hero 
 we are to see what Merck meant to Goethe, 
 at a very important turn in the latter 's spir- 
 itual evolution. 
 
 It becomes evident that Goethe during this 
 Frankfort Quadrennium had unfolded into a 
 full-fledged institutional rebel, as we may 
 generalize him for the nonce. He was out 
 with his family, especially with the head 
 thereof, his father ; he hated his stifling com- 
 munity ; he had little respect for the supreme 
 State above him, the Holy Koman Empire 
 with its justice; of Eeligion as established 
 he was defiant, though he might indulge in a 
 subjective play of it with Fraulein Von Klet- 
 tenberg who passed away toward the end 
 of this Frankfort epoch (in 1774). A mighty 
 inner defiance to the whole transmitted world 
 of institutions was his attitude, to which has 
 been given the name Titanic, and which was 
 soon to burst forth through him into its colos- 
 sal literary expression. Though his reaction 
 was born of a petty locality, and his spirit's 
 protest sprang from his shriveled communal 
 environment, his genius made it universal, 
 flung it by his poetic might through Space 
 
THE FRANKFORT QUADRENNIUM. 135 
 
 and down Time so that we read it ,today on 
 the other side of the world as typical of a 
 similar condition in ourselves and in our 
 land and age. In fact it were not hard to 
 point out contemporary writers who repre- 
 sent this stage. 
 
 IV. And now we must take note of the 
 other thread, passionate, deeply internal, 
 which winds through Goethe's life, and is es- 
 pecially to be designated in the present Quad- 
 rennium. His love we are not to leave out, 
 or rather his loves, for with him this emotion 
 had the tendency to break over the singular 
 into the plural number. Titanic, barrier- 
 bursting, soul-dizzying was his experience in 
 this field. Two if not three stars of the first 
 magnitude rose in his Frankfort heaven ; then 
 other stars of the second magnitude flash out 
 fitfully, and even of stars of the third we 
 catch some dim uncertain twinkles. Again 
 we behold Goethe the lover as the profound- 
 est and most abiding strain of his total per- 
 sonality ; lover he is, unconfined, volcanic here 
 too, indeed the lover of Love, Phileros, we 
 have named Mm in this part of his life's 
 drama, which part streams, hot through all 
 his utterances both in word and deed unto 
 the very last. 
 
 Yet to this sweet dalliance" with tender 
 hearts Goethe will not fail to show in keen 
 
136 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 requital the counter thrust: guilt, self-re- 
 proach, penitential sorrow. Again he will 
 employ his literary method of confession: 
 not by the secret word whispered in the 
 ear of the priest, but by the open writ pro- 
 claiming in the face of the whole world the 
 transgression and its punishment. Litera- 
 ture he turns into his confessional, whereby 
 he unloads his sense of guilt, at least for a 
 time. He writes during this Quadrennium 
 three dramas in which he lays upon three 
 faithless lovers the decree of death, making 
 them tragic ; he slays himself thrice upon the 
 stage for his own deed done to Frederika. 
 Thus he in his way puts himself into his self- 
 made Inferno, branded with his sin, as an ex- 
 piation due to his own conscience. After a 
 not dissimilar manner Dante sent himself 
 down to his special circle of Hell, and recog- 
 nized himself in the victim of his damnation, 
 though under a different name. 
 
 As already remarked these four years were 
 the most original in production, the most 
 germinal of his whole literary career, as well 
 as the fullest. The time was a delirium of 
 creation whose mighty push was to "widen 
 out this narrow existence to eternity. " It 
 was a debauch of his spirit's freedom : "More 
 than ever I was turned to the open world, to- 
 wards boundless nature," away from the in- 
 
GOTZ VON BERLICHINGEN. 137 
 
 stituted world of man. And the paroxysm 
 went on without cease, as he states in his Au- 
 tobiography: "My productive talent never 
 quit me a moment for some years, " even 
 active during the night, and turning the day's 
 experiences into dreams; "let there be only 
 an occasion with some character in it, and I 
 was ready " with my poem or novel, not omit- 
 ting farces and satires, and lyrical outbursts. 
 Such was his overflowing Vesuvius. 
 
 Of the chief productions of this epoch we 
 may give a brief account, noting their great 
 variety yet their common character, 
 
 I 
 
 Gotz Von Berlichingen. 
 
 Such is the name of Goethe's first charac- 
 teristic production, dramatic in form, but de- 
 fying dramatic form with a furious explos- 
 iveness. It has perchance a center from 
 which it shoots forth in diverse directions, 
 but hardly has a dramatic unity, against 
 which it vehemently asserts its freedom. 
 The transmitted law of the drama the Titan 
 must deny and break to fragments just in 
 writing his drama, else he were no literary 
 Titan. Hence the chief interest of the pres- 
 
138 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 ent piece is to see how its very form becomes 
 formless, and how it illustrates both the 
 character of the time and of the author. It 
 is the sudden explosive detonating prelude 
 which announces the advent of the poet Goe- 
 the. Scarcely had he touched the soil of 
 Frankfort when the subject began to simmer, 
 and such was his frenzy of composition that 
 in about six weeks the whole work was writ- 
 ten or rather erupted from his volcanic Self. 
 
 Significant is the fact that Goethe was 
 never quite satisfied with the chaotic audaci- 
 ties of his first famous masterpiece. Again 
 and again he tried to mend it and to put in 
 theatrical bounds, making it suitable for the 
 Weimar stage; in the main without success. 
 If he had succeeded, he would have destroyed 
 his work, for its essence is to be a shred of 
 chaos, not of cosmos. No; it would not let 
 itself be tampered with, even by its own 
 maker. So it must stand with all its rugged 
 fervor as a mountain uprisen in a night to 
 mark the distinctive starting-point of Goe- 
 the's total life-poem. 
 
 The literary overture, then, to this Frank- 
 fort Quadrennium or Epoch, and in fact to 
 Goethe's career in its entire sweep, is Gotz 
 Von Berlicliingen, a drama with an historical 
 setting which goes back to the Germany of 
 the 16th century, but is intended to cast an 
 
.* 
 
 GOTZ VON BERLICHINGEN. 139 
 
 image of Germany of the 18th century, of the 
 poet's own time. Scarcely had he settled 
 down at Frankfort in 1771, when he dashed 
 off with amazing rapidity his first form of 
 Gotz; the next year (1772) he recast the 
 whole, so that in 1773 it was published in its 
 present shape. Noteworthy is the incident 
 already mentioned that Goethe often after- 
 ward tried to finish the unfinishable, and kept 
 tinkering at it almost to the end of his days. 
 Strains of this preluding work of his we 
 shall often catch hereafter. 
 
 Gotz is the heroic noble who, having fallen 
 out with the stagnant environing Teutonic 
 world, starts to defy it and to assail it in its 
 leading manifestations. Thus he collides 
 with supreme authority, that of the Kaiser, 
 Maximilian I, and was laid under the imperial 
 ban, besieged in his castle, but was rescued 
 by an associate, and pardoned. But again 
 he repeats his violation of the existent order, 
 arid perishes. In one way or other through 
 the course of the drama Gotz is brought into 
 conflict with the established institutions of 
 the age nobility, city, church, state. This 
 was the daring Titanic element in him which 
 appealed at that time so strongly to Goethe. 
 Still the poet realizes that such a character 
 in the end is tragic. 
 
 Suggestive is the fact that Goethe does not 
 
140 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 introduce into this drama of protest the 
 mightiest protest of the age, that of Protest- 
 antism itself. In general Gotz was coteni- 
 porary with Luther. But the epoch-turning 
 Teutonic attack upon the Latin Church is 
 shunned by the Teutonic poet in his most 
 Teutonic mood and production. It is true 
 that ecclesiastics are introduced a bishop 
 with his court, an abbot with attendants; 
 there then is the humble monk Martin whose 
 name recalls Luther, and who in a single 
 scene of the First Act speaks words of deep 
 sympathy with Gotz, and then drops out of 
 the drama completely. One thinks that Goe- 
 the may have intended to make further use 
 of this rather mysterious monk, but found 
 that he could not without danger to his 
 drama. So the conflict of Gotz is limited to 
 the secular institutions of the period, which 
 are also in the condition of dry rot, and sorely 
 need the reformer. 
 
 Now the poet interweaves the second chief 
 strand of the play, taking a theme which was 
 much nearer liis heart than State or Church, 
 namely love. Phileros Goethe here appears 
 in all his strength, and writes the sovereign 
 part of his work, imparting the most intimate 
 confessions of his soul-life to the reader who 
 can look through the outer covering which 
 the artist throws over them in the secretive 
 
GOTZ VON BERLICHINGEN.*' 141 
 
 skill of his art. Two women step forth in 
 striking contrast, the demonic and the an- 
 gelic. The latter bears the name of Maria, 
 is a sister of Gotz's wife, and loves the faith- 
 less villain Weislingen, who deserts her 
 though she still remains faithful to him and 
 attends with love and prayer his last mo- 
 ments. She speaks to him on his death-bed : 
 "Forget all, may God forgive thee as I do." 
 This scene (Act V, Sc. 10) is regarded as a 
 spiritual transcript of the last interview be- 
 tween Goethe and Frederika. Such was the 
 form which the consciousness of his wrong 
 assumed in his soul: his first written per- 
 formance after the deed of guilt must show 
 the atonement. The poet sent a copy of his 
 Gotz to Frederika through his friend Salz- 
 mann at Strassburg, with the remark : "Poor 
 Frederika will feel herself consoled to some 
 extent when the faithless man is poisoned. " 
 That might be no great consolation to her; 
 but to him it may have brought a brief 
 balm. 
 
 But the demonic female of the play is really 
 its strongest character, and to her we next 
 turn. Adelheid is the name of this second 
 woman of the play, one of the permanent per- 
 sonalities drawn by the poet. She is the 
 subtle diabolic enchantress who controls men 
 through their passion, rousing it to such a 
 
142 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 degree that they are unable to control it or 
 themselves. She cannot truly love, rather 
 she loves her power of love, using it as a 
 means. She. is verily a product of the cor- 
 rupt order, its striking symbol, whose mean- 
 ing is glimpsed when she checkmates the 
 bishop. In her way she may be deemed the 
 Titaness, with her serpentine skill she plans 
 to reach up and enmesh the young Emperor, 
 head of the State. Also she is the foe of Gotz, 
 with his family life and his devotion to his 
 wife, and she finds that he is proof against 
 her grand implement, insidious passion. But 
 supreme is her fascination over Weislingen 
 who is the associate of Gotz and the accepted 
 of his sister Maria. Thus Weislingen be- 
 comes the slight connecting link between the 
 two very distinct parts of the drama. 
 
 So we may designate Adelheid to be a fe- 
 male Mephistopheles, the woman as negative 
 to the social and institutional order of her 
 age, the sexual anarch w r ho turns Love it- 
 self into the destroyer instead of the cre~ 
 ator of man and his world. With her Satanic 
 charm she transforms her lover, Weislingen, 
 into her own destructive nature and destroys 
 him with poison. Still she meets with the 
 doom of her deeds, through a dark hidden 
 Tribunal which dispenses the judgment of 
 the Gods upon the criminal too strong or too 
 
GOTZ VON BERLICHINGEN.* 143 
 
 subtle for the State. Tims she too gets the 
 penalty. 
 
 Taken as a product of art, the play lacks 
 unity, being a series of vivid panoramic 
 scenes which burst up rather capriciously 
 with little connection. Composed of huge 
 boulders tumbled over an uneven surface, 
 the work illustrates the seismic upheaval of 
 the author and of his time. Its scattered ap- 
 pearance on the printed page is typical. 
 There is no doubt that Shakespeare was Goe- 
 the's chief model, and there are more indi- 
 cations of a study of Julius Caesar than of 
 any other play. Herder's vigorous reproach 
 was: "Shakespeare has spoiled you." Still 
 in its deepest note the drama is not imitated 
 but original, not Shakespearean but Goe- 
 thean, and belongs to a new genius and a new 
 age. 
 
 But the deepest break in Gotz is that a fis- 
 sure runs through it which divides it into 
 two dramas, which have been called from 
 their central male characters, the Gotz 
 drama and the Weislingen drama. The first 
 had a political content chiefly; but that could 
 not satisfy the young Goethe, he could not 
 help adding the love-drama, in which the fe- 
 male characters especiallly rise to promi- 
 nence. Here we note again our Phileros giv- 
 ing himself an utterance which constitutes 
 
144 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 the most intimate and vivid portion of the 
 play. The political part sprang from his ex- 
 ternal experience as advocate before the im- 
 perial tribunal at Wetzlar; but the amatory 
 part was his own deepest self flaming up in- 
 to expression. He would not have been Goe- 
 the the poet unless he had introduced the 
 woman-soul, which is here given in its two 
 opposite poles. 
 
 Accordingly we may say that in Gotz tho 
 genius of Goethe has suddenly and violently 
 erupted, scattering its scintillant particles 
 pretty much at random. It has burst up 
 from central fires hitherto suppressed under 
 the hardened and even crystallized layers of 
 the social system of the time. We are made 
 to feel the gigantic striving to get free of 
 the institutional fetters crushing the new- 
 born spirit. Gotz on the one side as reformer 
 or rather as revolutionist, and on the other 
 side the environing long-established law and 
 custom, are the two colliding forces the 
 Titanic individual against the instituted 
 world. Thus it is an eternal theme and re- 
 curs perpetually in one form or other, 
 though at certain crises the fury gathers to 
 a head and the grand final overturn seems to 
 be at hand. 
 
 Still it must not be forgotten that Goethe 
 makes his hero tragic and really self-undo- 
 
.* 
 
 THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. 145 
 
 ing. In spite of all the poet 's sympathy Gotz 
 is a failure and his way is the way how not 
 to do the thing. One cannot help remarking 
 that this was the deeper though unconscious 
 spirit of the author welling up to the sur- 
 face at last and determining the result al- 
 most in spite of himself. Thus the institu- 
 tional world triumphs and is the real hero of 
 the conflict rather than Gotz, though the lat- 
 ter started a beneficial hurricane in which he 
 himself perished. 
 
 Hereafter Goethe will come to recognize 
 this unconscious element in himself and in 
 the world. The Titanic poet is next to learn 
 consciously his own lesson that Titanism is 
 tragic; he escapes his own fate by making 
 his hero fated; he slays Gotz and therein 
 saves Goethe. 
 
 II. 
 
 The Sorrows of Young Werther. 
 
 So runs the title of a work by Goethe 
 which probably stands next to his Faust in 
 fame, in its typical character of the author 
 and his time, as well as in its power stimu- 
 lating reproduction in other writers. We 
 
146 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 place it just after Gotz, coupling the two 
 productions as the greatest completed works 
 of the poet's Frankfort Epoch. 
 
 The pivotal fact which gave to Goethe his 
 theme as well as its outcome in the lover's 
 suicide, was the following. There was a young 
 official located at Wetzlar, where Goethe was 
 staying, by the name of Carl Wilhelm Jeru- 
 salem, who had fallen desperately in love 
 with the beautiful wife of a prominent diplo- 
 mat of that place. Ardent, unhappy Jerusa- 
 lem strange name for a German had al- 
 lowed his passion to carry him beyond the 
 bounds of propriety, and he had to be for- 
 bidden the house by the husband. He took 
 the repulse so seriously that on the 30th of 
 October, 1772, he ended his life with the bul- 
 let of a pistol the tragic victim of an im- 
 possible love. 
 
 Now it so happened that Goethe at the mo- 
 ment when he heard of this suicide and its 
 cause, was in the same forlorn condition. He 
 had become deeply enamored during his stay 
 at Wetzlar of a young lady who was betrothed 
 to another and hence out of his reach. Thus 
 he also was writhing tumultuously in the 
 pangs of a hopeless love, when he heard, as 
 it were the crack of Jerusalem's pistol as the 
 only solution of his woe-begone conflict. The 
 event stirred him from the last depths of his 
 
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. 147 
 
 being, and drove him to find some mitigation 
 of his awful restlessness and world-weari- 
 ness. But his antidote was not the pistol but 
 the pen, which had the power of saving the 
 author even if it slew the hero. 
 
 The name of the young lady was Charlotte 
 Buff, famed undyingly as Goethe's Lotte. 
 She married faithfully her betrothed, Herr 
 Kestner, who curiously had loaned the fatal 
 pistol to Jerusalem, of course for a different 
 purpose, and who first told the story of the 
 suicide to Goethe, in whose soul at once the 
 sufferings of young Werther began to seethe 
 and roll in violent paroxysms deathward. In 
 some such condition the poet remained for 
 more than a year, brooding over his cosmic 
 egg, till on February 1, 1774, it began to 
 hatch out. For the record runs that on said 
 day he started to compose his work finally, 
 and he pushed on steadily till it was com- 
 pleted in some two months, evidently from 
 material already prepared for the most part. 
 
 In the present work the part of Phileros is 
 supreme and all-embracing, it alone is the 
 whole and nothing else is. We see Goethe as 
 the lover indeed, but especially as the lover 
 of love; he coddles his emotion, dwells in its 
 joys and even more in its pains ; he caresses 
 his amatory sorrows, and shows himself in 
 in love with love's keenest sufferings. Phile- 
 
148 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 ros has a great new experience ; lie is not now 
 the victor but the vanquished, he makes the 
 heart 's full sacrifice, but without the requital. 
 Hitherto he has been conqueror, as in the case 
 of Gretchen, Katharina, and Frederika; but 
 now he has to feel the unrequited, the hope- 
 less, the impossible in the deepest strain of 
 his nature. The shock reaches down to the 
 primal fount of his very selfhood and com- 
 pels to relief through literary utterance. 
 
 So we bring before us the second world- 
 shaking eruption of Goethe's Frankfort vol- 
 cano: this book known as The Sorrows of 
 Young Werther, which kept fermenting in 
 him nearly the whole Epoch, starting in 1772 
 and ending with the publication of the novel 
 in Autumn, 1774. The two works Gotz and 
 Werther are altogether the greatest of the 
 poet's early creations ; very different in many 
 ways, they nevertheless show that they be- 
 long to the same spiritual upheaval. Goethe 
 fifty years later speaking to Eckermann (Jan. 
 2, 1824) indicates this purport: "In the 
 much-bespoken Wertherism, we observe that 
 it belongs in the life-experience of every in- 
 dividual who with an inborn free instinct has 
 to learn to accommodate himself to the nar- 
 rowing forms of an antiquated world." So 
 it comes that both works manifest a conflict 
 with an old instituted order, against which 
 
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. 149 
 
 they revolt, with tragic result, be it noted in 
 each case. 
 
 The first striking difference which grips 
 the mind of the reader is that Wertherb&s 
 far more concentration in form, in matter 
 and in spirit than Gotz whose scattered char- 
 acter was above observed. There is now the 
 one central ever-recurrent theme, and the one 
 central character with whom two others are 
 conjoined, the woman and her betrothed, both 
 of whom stand firm as the rock of ages, while 
 an ocean of sentiment dashes madly about 
 them. To be sure .we shall later point out 
 that a deep line of scission enters the work 
 before it is completed. The interest, however, 
 is that of one soul which gives itself up to 
 emotion as its Fate which swirls it around in 
 an incessant tempest. From this side it is 
 another portrayal of Goethe 's own person- 
 ality at the present stage, and a confession 
 as well as a redemption. The poet here tackles 
 that stormy Titanic emotion of his, often 
 threatening self-destruction till he works it 
 over and wrings it out of himself by writ, get - 
 ting thus at least a partial release by slaying 
 not himself, but the semblance of himself at 
 this epoch of his evolution conjured up by his 
 art. 
 
 Goethe himself has depicted (Autobiogra- 
 phy, 13th Book) with startling vividness how 
 
150 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 near lie came in his own person to tins final 
 elimination of the earthquakes of his emotion. 
 We shall cite the famous passage about the 
 actual implement of suicide : ' ' Among a con- 
 siderable collection of weapons, I possessed 
 a handsome well-sharpened dagger. Every 
 night I laid it beside by bed, and before I put 
 out the candle I would try whether it were 
 possible to thrust the sharp point a couple of 
 inches down into my bosom. But I never 
 could quite succeed and at last I laughed my- 
 self- out of the notion, flinging away my hypo- 
 chrondriacal specters, and concluding to 
 live." Still this was not enough, he had not 
 yet saved himself in the only way he could 
 be saved. His salvation must come through 
 his genius which redeems him by the written 
 confession. So the account runs on: "But 
 to be able to accomplish this with the joy of 
 success, I had to bring a poetic problem to 
 fulfilment, in which all that I had felt, thought 
 and dreamed upon this weighty point, should 
 be put into language. " Such is his only 
 course of redemption ; ink must flow through 
 his pen, else blood will gush out of his heart. 
 So we may fancy him sharpening his goose- 
 quill with that keen-edged dagger of his in- 
 stead of plunging it into his bosom. 
 
 Let us return, however, to consider some 
 contrasts between Gotz and Werther. The 
 
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERT&ER. 151 
 
 one celebrates Will, the other Feeling", thus 
 they hinge on two very different elements of 
 the human Self. The full name of the dra- 
 matic hero, Gotz "with the iron hand, suggests 
 rude might, blood and iron, militarism if you 
 please. But the record of the sentimental 
 hero, Werther, proclaims his sufferings upon 
 the title-page, intimating his internal lacera- 
 tions. To us both characters seem typically 
 Teutonic, prophetic of the Germany of to- 
 day, combining crass strength with tender 
 sentimentality. Many a parallel might be 
 drawn between Gotz and Bismarck, in their 
 common assault upon the abuses of the old 
 empire, yet dropping back to it finally, and 
 seeking to restore it in the last instance. The 
 ancient medieval system would seem to have 
 been the political ultimate lying back of 
 these two greatest German men of our mod- 
 ern era: the poet and the statesman. Even 
 Faust with all his denials, does not deny the 
 old Imperial Order, but fights for it and in- 
 deed wins its victory in the Fourth Act of the 
 Second Part of the drama. 
 
 Still further we may draw the lines of dis- 
 tinction : the one is essentially masculine, the 
 other feminine. As works of art, Gotz is a 
 man, Werther is a woman ; the two books are 
 to our mind spiritually sexed. Perhaps some- 
 thing of the kind lies in all human produc- 
 
152 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 tions: they are dominantly male or female, 
 sharing in the profoundest creative fact of 
 Nature herself, the sexual diremption. On 
 the whole we may say that the drama is male, 
 the novel female. At some future time all 
 original works are going to be classed in that 
 way, with the addition that not a few perhaps 
 will have to be labeled as neuter. So we may 
 say that Goethe the man utters himself in 
 Gotz, but Goethe the woman in Werther. And 
 all through his career moves not merely the 
 man Goethe but the woman Goethe, the latter 
 being really the best portion of his genius 
 and inherited from his mother, as he himself 
 often recognized. But now comes the curi- 
 ous contrast and rather the deepest stroke of 
 art in the whole book : the woman is the man 
 as an offset to the man being woman ; Lottie 
 is really the bearer of the masculine part of 
 the entire transaction while Werther is more 
 the feminine, if not effeminate. She is never 
 upset by her emotion, but holds steady course 
 mid the vast spume of sentiment surging 
 around her and even over her head ; the solid 
 practical German maiden as precise house- 
 keeper, cutting bread and butter for her little 
 sisters and brothers, God bless her! She is 
 prose, but good hearty buxom prose, over 
 against the incalculable poetic effervescence 
 to which she, along with her betrothed in far 
 
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERT&ER. 153 
 
 less prominence, stands as the bulwark im- 
 movable. And that is a vast new experience 
 for our victorious Goethe, now conquered by 
 a simple girl of the folk. But this it is which 
 rouses the Titan in him all the more ; the ob- 
 stacle he lashes against with all the fury of 
 his feelings, but he has to give up and retire. 
 
 Werther is a work of wider appeal than 
 Gotz, which is national, while the former is 
 supra-national, and rises into the realm of 
 universal literature. The modern man with 
 his brooding contorsions comes emphatically 
 upon the stage and begets a new expression 
 in a new art form : the psychic novel in which 
 the incidents are internal. Undoubtedly 
 Rousseau had opened this mine in his Nou- 
 velle Hetoise, whose flight back to Nature we 
 find re-echoed in Goethe's book. Herein lies 
 another pivotal distinction of Werther from 
 Gotz: the latter is objective in its trend, 
 based upon history, dealing with the actual 
 world of institutions, while the former is sub- 
 jective largely, showing the deep upheavals 
 of the underself, giving the soul's adven- 
 tures, a psychic Odyssey whose Ulysses is 
 also in search of * ' sunny Ithaca and prudent 
 Penelope. " The setting of Gotz is medieval, 
 but that of Werther is still most modern in 
 its modernity. 
 
 Moreover the people of Werther with their 
 
154 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 surroundings are all of the simple middle 
 class, having no nobleman nor plebian, while 
 Gotz takes up every social class, from em- 
 peror down to the rabble, all of which adds 
 to the dispersion of its action. This homo- 
 geneity of Werther gives point to its inten- 
 sity and unity. Its epistolary form enables 
 it to hit home, sending bullet after bullet to 
 the one spot. This form was not new, Smol- 
 lett in England and Rousseau in France had 
 famously employed it. But Goethe as letter 
 writer was the greatest that ever lived, his 
 correspondence runs through his whole life 
 and is no small part of his literary output, 
 both as to quantity and quality. 
 
 Still there are two parts to Werther and 
 both are different. The characters change, 
 though the names are retained in the second 
 part; Lottie is really dethroned by a new 
 lady-love; and Albert the betrothed is 
 strangely transformed. This transition is 
 known to have corresponded with events in 
 Goethe's life at this time. The fact is that 
 Werther from first to last spans the entire 
 Frankfort Quadrennium, starting with poet 's 
 love for Charlotte Buff; the suicide of the 
 love-lorn youth Jerusalem occurred some- 
 what later and showed him the tragedy of 
 love as an actual fact. His second sweet- 
 heart in the course of the novel was Maxie 
 
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER. 155 
 
 Laroclie, who was soon married to another 
 man, a grocer by the name of Brentano, and 
 madly jealous of the poet. When Goethe 
 started to writing he says he finished it in a 
 few weeks, but really its composition runs 
 through this whole Epoch. Also he changes 
 his literary bibles from Homer in the first 
 part to Ossian in the second. Still the furi- 
 ous reaction of emotion against the limits of 
 existence is the same in both parts, and the 
 world-pain keeps up flamboyant. There is no 
 mythus or fable, but real life is photographed 
 directly. And he feels a swaying between 
 life and death, which Goethe claims strongly 
 was his own condition at the time, making all 
 existence seem unanchored. 
 
 It is noteworthy that to these two early 
 works of Goethe, we can trace two tendencies 
 of the novel. Gotz was translated by Sir 
 Walter Scott in his young manhood, and 
 must have opened up to the coming novelist 
 the medieval content which is found in so 
 many of his works illustrating more the outer 
 life of man. On the contrary Werther can 
 well be deemed the ancestor of the novels of 
 today, which dwell with so much detail on 
 the inner life of the emotional soul. Thus 
 both productions have shown a marvelous 
 creative power. It has been estimated that 
 in the first twenty-five years after Werther 
 
156 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 more than 6,000 appeared in Germany, indi- 
 cating what an ocean the author had tapped. 
 
 Upon Goethe's later production Werther 
 had far more influence than Gotz, and helped 
 bring forth a line of novels reaching to the 
 poet's last years. We can find its traces in 
 M sister's Apprenticeship, and still more de- 
 cisively in Elective Affinities; and it has its 
 kinship with certain parts of Meister's Trav- 
 els, Goethe's last novel. In fact a strain of 
 Werther has been noted in a number of Goe- 
 the 's poems, notably in his Tasso. Thus the 
 present work is an ever-active fountain which 
 flows through the whole life-poem of the au- 
 thor. So it may be said that the sorrows of 
 young Werther were peculiarly Goethe's 
 own, and remained his own through the lapse 
 of all his years, continuing an incessant 
 source of his literary productivity. 
 
 This fact was known and felt deeply by 
 Goethe himself. His last elemental love, that 
 for Ulrika, which also starts the final cre- 
 ative Epoch of his career, was coupled by 
 him with that of Werther, which thus may be 
 said to interlink the first and last nodes of 
 his long life-poem through the common bond 
 of the poet's love. The earliest and the lat- 
 est Phileros. thus join hands through Wer- 
 ther 's woes of passion and round out the 
 cycle of the poet's total activity. (See the 
 
TITANIC FRAGMENTS. 157 
 
 poem called Trilogy of Passion, with its 
 opening address to Werther, experienced and 
 written in 1823.) 
 
 III. 
 
 Titanic Fragments. 
 
 Doubtless the most striking manifestation 
 of the explosive character of this Epoch is 
 seen in the mountainous fragments strewn 
 through its four years. In a letter to Herder 
 he figures his Muse as the driver of a team of 
 four wild untamed steeds, rearing, kicking, 
 wrestling with the reins and with one an- 
 other; still the master if he can, is to bring 
 about that all their i i sixteen feet move to one 
 beat toward the goal." The time was an 
 ecstacy of creative power in which he was 
 possessed by what he often calls Nature. 
 "How I long, Nature, after thee, to feel 
 thy truth and love ; thou becomest to me a joy- 
 ous fountain gushing forth out of a thousand 
 pipes." And this might of Nature is su- 
 premely the limit-breaker of the whole finite 
 world: "Thou art what expands this nar- 
 row existence of mine to infinity. ' ' This ele- 
 mental view of himself and of his power oc- 
 curs often in his verse and prose. 
 
 Such an illimitable tendency could seldom 
 
158 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 produce complete tilings which after all must 
 be limited. In this mood the poet cannot 
 rightly form, and hence brings forth frag- 
 ments which will only indicate his "striving 
 for the infinite. " Indeed he becomes a frag- 
 ment too ; thus we may conceive Goethe dur- 
 ing this Epoch as a Titanic fragment in him- 
 self, producing Titanic fragments. 
 
 So now we come to look at the colossal 
 torsos of literary plans during this Frank- 
 fort Quadrennium, which lie scattered along 
 Goethe 's printed page as huge boulders of his 
 volcanic overflow. There is no more amaz- 
 ing exhibition of his enormous natural en- 
 ergy than these irregular broken blocks of 
 great poems which he conceived and threw 
 out in his Titanic spasms. Many of them are 
 unfinished, are indeed unfinishable; but they 
 remain the more impressive witnesses of his 
 original native power. They still show the 
 suddenness of their origin, the prodigious 
 throes of creation, as born directly of Nature 
 herself. Thus they stand in contrast with 
 the two finished products of this Quadren- 
 nium, especially Gotz and Werther, which 
 show at least some intentional construction 
 in their organism, made up as they are of 
 vivid jets of this same central energy. The 
 volcano Goethe has left these monstrous lava 
 figures, partial gigantic outlines lying pros- 
 
TTTANIC FRAGMENTS. 159 
 
 trate on the ground as if Heaven-defying 
 prodigies pierced by the bolt of Jove. For 
 after all to the poet himself this frenzy of 
 production was tragic, and died away like 
 the. very Titan; the mood had its beginning 
 and close in the present Epoch of his career. 
 Hereafter we shall see him passing from this 
 time of all overturning seismic disturbance 
 to a classic sunny repose which will be an- 
 other stage of his comprehensive life. But 
 now we are to stroll through the field of these 
 significant fragments, and put them together 
 as a phase of our poet's evolution. Let it be 
 said that this phase is to be found in every 
 great writer some of them never get over 
 it indeed it has its counterpart more or less 
 distinctly in every individual. 
 
 Of these fragmentary remains, we may 
 first note that some are taken from History, 
 some from Fable, and some from Human Na- 
 ture directly (like Werther). To be sure 
 they all go back to the author's personal ex- 
 perience, which took shape in works; they 
 likewise belong to his present utterance of 
 Titanism. 
 
 Beginning with the historic figures we note 
 three if not four. We behold Goethe's poetic 
 insight seizing the mighty individualities 
 which stand at the grand nodes of the re- 
 corded Past and are the pivotal souls of its 
 
160 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 supreme events. Here we place the poet's 
 early attempt to set forth Socrates, the Greek 
 epochal thinker who more than any other 
 man forms the transition from a religious to 
 a philosophic world-view, and thus estab- 
 lishes forever the new European discipline 
 of the spirit, namely philosophy, even if there 
 were philosophers before him. Goethe, how- 
 ever, after coddling this favorite theme for 
 some years found that he was not the man to 
 portray in poetry the great philosophic rev- 
 olution, if indeed it could be deemed a right 
 poetic theme. Another of his plans derived 
 from History was to write a drama of Julius 
 Caesar, probably incited by Shakespeare's 
 masterpiece. Thus he would grapple with 
 the character who more than any other is the 
 political turning-point of antiquity, whose 
 colossal form still hovers mistily over Eu- 
 rope and her States-system. But this sub- 
 ject also was not rightly Goethe's, whose bent 
 was not political or world-historical, and so 
 he resigned it, leaving only a few stray rags 
 as he says. But longer and more deeply he 
 worked over his Mahomet, central figure pri- 
 marily of a great religious revolution which 
 also had its far-reaching political side, tear- 
 ing Asia from Europe, halving Christendom 
 through a new faith and a new government, 
 and starting a fresh period of the World's 
 
TITANIC FRAGMENTS. 161 
 
 History. In his Autobiography (Book 14, 
 toward the end) the poet has indicated what 
 most deeply drew him to the character of 
 Mahomet, who at first "sought to impart the 
 divine idea in himself to his environment. 
 But he collided thereby with the rude world, 
 and in order to win it had to come down and 
 be equal to it, wherein he renounced his lofty 
 excellence. ' ' This thought was also wakened 
 in the poet, as usual by living examples be- 
 fore him, which he recounts. Of this Ma- 
 homet drama, three fragments remain, most 
 famous of which is the song of the victorious 
 prophet, setting forth the rapid rise of the 
 new doctrine like a small mountain rivulet 
 which takes up all other streams in its course, 
 at first peacefully and then by violence and 
 war's triumph. Years afterward (in 1799) 
 Goethe was still drawn to the same theme and 
 translated Voltaire's drama of Mahomet, 
 though in a very different mood from the 
 present one. The two views of the same great 
 character are worth comparing, as they show 
 two ways of conceiving such men as well as 
 two different stages of Goethe's own life-evo- 
 lution. 
 
 Such are the three dramas, a philosophic, 
 a political, and a religious, conceived during 
 this time (to them perhaps Egmont ought to 
 be added, though completed in a different pe- 
 
162 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 riod). Vast are the broken disjointed out- 
 lines, revealing the poet's desperate stress to 
 utter what surged within him. No little^ na- 
 tional themes are these, but the outstretch 
 grasps for grandest world-historical events 
 and personages; still the human limit is up- 
 on him, the youthful Titan, and he can pro 
 duce only, Herculean torsos. Properly the 
 historic spirit lay not in the field of his high- 
 est Genius, and he has specially denied the 
 value of the World's History. 
 
 So we may turn to his work in the realm of 
 the Mythus, in which he brought forth the 
 fragment indeed, but also the fulfilment. For 
 Goethe was in the very essence of him myth- 
 ical, we may call him mythopoeic, a trait 
 which runs through his whole life to its very 
 end, as we may note in the Second Part of 
 Faust. He has in a humorous way marked 
 this supreme bent of his Nature as his inborn 
 desire of fabling (die Lust zu fabuliren) 
 which he claims to derive from his mother. 
 The mythical substance of the ages was verily 
 his favorite poetic material, as affording him 
 a freer treatment than history, and also as be- 
 ing more cognate with his genius. In general 
 the grand figures of Mythology are more 
 plastic to the touch of the shaping artist than 
 those already shaped by historic events. 
 Accordingly we shall behold him seizing up- 
 
TITANIC FRAGMENTS. 163' 
 
 on the legendary heroes of peoples, all show- 
 ing in one way or other his attitude of revolt 
 against the existent order of their world. In 
 fact Goethe developed the Mythus and in the 
 My thus as the native element of his poetical 
 creation during his whole life, especially the 
 Greek and Teutonic Mythologies he works 
 over from youth to old-age, reflecting in them 
 all the various stages of his evolution. 
 
 In this sphere we shall first place his Ti- 
 tanic Prometheus, a dramatic fragment writ- 
 ten in 1773, which was followed about a year 
 later by a rhythmic monologue put into the 
 mouth of the same defiant Titan who ex- 
 presses his contempt for the Gods, and lays 
 stress upon his work of forming men like 
 himself, "to suffer, to weep, and to rejoice, 
 and to care not for thee, Zeus, as I do not." 
 Such was the Titan Prometheus, the original 
 man-shaper against the Gods, voicing the Ti- 
 tan Goethe who also has been shaping men 
 in his writ during this Epoch, hostile to the 
 existent order. Already the poet has com- 
 pared Shakespeare to Prometheus as maker 
 of men, "breathing into them the breath of 
 his Genius." But years before Goethe the 
 English Shaftsbury had said: "The poet is 
 a second creator, a Prometheus under a Ju- 
 piter." So the Promethean idea lay already 
 in the time, and at the Goethean home in 
 
164 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 Frankfort there was the revolt of the son as 
 creative Prometheus against the father as 
 wielder of transmitted authority. This Pro- 
 methean man is indeed made mortal, but his 
 death is to be enacted as his final transfigur- 
 ation. In an exalted passage of the dramatic 
 fragment, Prometheus describes man's ris- 
 ing through ecstacy till he embraces a world, 
 becoming one with the All: "then the man 
 dies." So the poet casts an image of him- 
 self as Titan at this time in the old legend, 
 which by the way kept haunting him long 
 afterwards, and will insist upon a new utter- 
 ance in his much later drama called Pandora. 
 Next we are to observe Goethe passing 
 from an Hellenic to a Semitic mythical 
 theme, to the Wandering Jew. Of this com- 
 position, a narrative poem in doggerel verse, 
 there remain a number of disjointed tatters 
 large and small. In his Autobiography (15th 
 Book) the poet tells quite fully his plan, 
 which does not agree very well with this 
 poem written many years before. Ahasverus, 
 the Jewish shoemaker, meets with the cross- 
 bearing Christ and through a kind of curse 
 is made to start on his wanderings. The Ti- 
 tanic element of the poet is seen in the scoff- 
 ing attacks upon the established religion of 
 Christianity, especially upon the clergy who 
 are represented in striking contrast with 
 
TITANIC FRAGMENTS. 165 
 
 Christ himself. The mocking burlesque tone 
 jars with the earnestness of the theme. There 
 is no wonder that Goethe never completed it, 
 and suppressed it from print for many years, 
 and first published it as a sample of his fof- 
 mer self long since transcended. Really 
 Christ is more the leading figure of the poem 
 than Ahasverus, and he is made to voice the 
 main satirical outbursts against the religion 
 bearing his own name and life-stamp. 
 
 Not much is said of the wanderings of 
 Ahasverus, which would seem to be the main 
 content of the Mythus. Incidentlly Goethe 
 drops the remark that he intended to bring 
 the two Jews, mythical and historical, to- 
 gether for a mutual interview, Ahasverus 
 and Spinoza. This suggestive legend re- 
 mained long in Goethe's soul; during his 
 Italian Journey, he speaks of it again as one 
 of the subjects of his creative brooding. But 
 he never finished the fragment, for which he 
 gives a rather unreasonable reason. 
 
 The American reader of today ponders why 
 the "great poet could not work out to a com- 
 pleted product these two supreme mythical 
 figures adumbrating peoples and ages Pro- 
 metheus and the Wandering Jew. .The fact 
 would seem to reach to the deepest move- 
 ment of the World 's History. The European 
 consciousness has never been able to unchain 
 
166 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 the fettered Prometheus, despite the hun- 
 dreds of attempts by its writers, and has 
 never been able to bring home the homeless 
 Jew, to stop him from his wanderings, though 
 many a poet and novelist have tried their pen- 
 driving hands. In our opinion it requires a 
 new social and political order, which always 
 lies back of and determines every epoch-turn- 
 ing literary masterpiece. Very suggestive is 
 it, therefore, that Europe 's greatest poet and 
 myth-transformer has left these two mighti- 
 est mythical deposists of the old world in 
 fragmentary ruins. 
 
 So these enormous Titanic plans have 
 come down to us unfilfilled, hardly more than 
 signs of the poet's super-human aspiration. 
 We may well ask for the deeper reason why 
 he could not bring to fruition such vast de- 
 signs. After all, they appealed only to one 
 side of his nature; they did not engage the 
 whole man, still less the whole poet. They 
 were a vent for his Titanic protest against 
 the social order of the time, but not for his 
 love, the deepest current of his being. Phile- 
 ros has no part in the five mentioned torsos, 
 magnificent as may be their conception. The 
 Titan as such seemed not to share in the soul 
 of love. So Goethe dropped him, had to drop 
 him as inadequate to his profoundest self-ex- 
 pression. 
 
FAUST. 167 
 
 Now the curious fact rises to the surface 
 that there was one of these Titanic frag- 
 ments of the present Epoch which Goethe did 
 complete, though he took his whole life for 
 the work. This was his Faust, which also 
 burst forth during the Frankfort Quadren- 
 riium. But it had also the element of love 
 represented in Margaret as well as the ele- 
 ment of Titanism represented in the hero 
 Faust. Phileros, therefore, finds his deepest 
 utterance in this work; indeed his part is its 
 chief attraction today. Hence the loveless 
 Titanic fragments stayed as they were first 
 erupted by the poet in his volcanic convul- 
 sions. To him in later life they simply ap- 
 peared like the rude outbursts of a former 
 geologic era. But his Faust became his dar- 
 ling for life, and so we may look at it sep- 
 arately in its early shape. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Faust. 
 
 There is no intention here of giving an ac- 
 count of the completed Faust; merely we 
 would mark its first appearance during the 
 present creative tension of the poet. It will 
 rise repeatedly to the surface in the course of 
 
168 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 this narrative. Indeed of all Goethe's single 
 poems, Faust has the best claim for repre- 
 senting his life-poem; still it is not his life- 
 poem by any means, which must include in its 
 sweep all his works, and whose theme is his 
 total achievement. 
 
 So there is one Mythus, that of Faust, 
 which Goethe, wrestling over during this 
 genetic Quadrennium, was destined to com- 
 plete, but only after he had poured into it his 
 whole life. We may suppose that this Teu- 
 tonic Mythus was closer to him than Hellenic 
 Prometheus, or Semitic Ahasverus. Some 
 years ago the early Faust, known as the Ur- 
 faust was discovered, though we cannot tell 
 how much of it was written at Frankfort and 
 how much of it later at Weimar. Indeed some 
 bits seem to have been composed when the 
 poet was only twenty years old, according to 
 his own statement, which would throw its 
 start back to 1769. And the legend of Faust 
 was known to Goethe's childhood through 
 puppet-play and folk-book, and possibly 
 through his mother 's gift of story-telling. At 
 any rate the theme of Faust saturated his 
 ,whole life, quite from infancy to his last pen- 
 stroke. 
 
 There is evidence, however, that during his 
 Frankfort upburst of creativity, he was 
 deeply occupied with a Faust drama, which 
 
.* 
 
 FAUST. 169 
 
 expressed one phase of his Titanism, his re- 
 volt against the limit of man's knowledge. 
 But there was now made an addition which 
 belongs peculiarly to this epoch : the story of 
 Margaret which he never could have written 
 except for his experience with Frederika. 
 Thus he conjoins to Faust the simple country- 
 maiden, and puts into his drama again the 
 confession of his own guilty deed, portraying 
 it with an intensity and pathos which he 
 never attained afterwards. As already indi- 
 cated, literature was his way of passing 
 through the process of atonement. The poig- 
 nancy of his own conscience he threw out in- 
 to that of his characters. You may hear 
 Goethe's own anguish in Margaret's soul- 
 riven outcries at the Cathedral or before the 
 Mater Dolor osa. It would kill him unless he 
 could get it out of himself through a propor- 
 tionately intense utterance. His art was his 
 final relief, giving him shrift and absolution. 
 Thus his expiation is not merely individual 
 but becomes universal, not alone for himself 
 but for all and for all time, through the word 
 of the genius who, however, has to suffer what 
 he writes and before he writes. 
 
 In the Frankfort Epoch, then, he clapped 
 together the Faust my thus and the Margaret 
 story. Still there was a great chasm between 
 these two ingredients of the drama, quite 
 
170 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 dividing it in twain. In the Urfaust which 
 doubtless belongs on the whole to this time, 
 we feel the deep separation which destroys, 
 unity. But the poet must have felt far down 
 in his creative instinct that the two elements 
 belong together, that they are at their deep- 
 est point integrating members of one great 
 theme, though he cannot as yet raise their 
 connecting link to light. This is the problem 
 which occupies Goethe for many a year till at 
 last we see its solution in the completed 
 First Part of Faust, after full forty suns had 
 ripened his early conception. He must un- 
 fold Meph'istopheles as the destroyer of Mar- 
 garet's world, evolving him out of Faust's 
 primal negation. 
 
 Two more dramas of atonement he wrote 
 during this epoch for his self -torturing trans- 
 gression against Frederika. He could not 
 get over it, remorse would soon steal back 
 upon him even after he had done penance and 
 said shrift in agonized writing. The result 
 was that in no less than five dramas he por- 
 trays the self-reproach and punishment of 
 the faithless lover; it was just the point in 
 them all on which his genius spent itself with 
 the greatest energy. Says he: "The answer 
 of Frederika to my letter announcing my de- 
 parture rent my heart," and this lacerated 
 organ of his would not heal. "I was guilty, 
 
FAUST. 171 
 
 I had wounded in its last depths a beautiful 
 heart," says he, and his own heart had re- 
 ceived as deep a thrust as hers, and kept 
 bleeding. One temporary alleviation he 
 could find ; let us hear him tell it again in his 
 Autobiography (Book 12th) : "But when the 
 anguish over Frederika kept wrenching me, 
 I once more after my old fashion sought re- 
 lief through poetry. I continued my accus- 
 tomed confession by writing it out in works 
 that I might become worthy of an inner abso- 
 lution through this self-inflicted expiation. 
 The two Marias in Gotz and Clavigo and the 
 two detestable characters who are their lov- 
 ers may well be considered as results of my 
 repentance." Such at least was his way of 
 reparation. Thus from his first drama Gotz 
 (1771) to Clavigo (1774), and also through 
 his Stella (1775), streams an ever-surging 
 current of volcanic contrition for love's vio- 
 lation. The two mentioned dramas, Clavigo 
 and Stella, are slighter performances, very 
 rapidly composed, but still strongly empha- 
 sizing the one innermost theme of this time, 
 heart's sorrow for guilt and the immediate 
 relief through literary utterance. But the 
 self-stabbed wound never was healed, he will 
 carry it in him through life, with recurrent 
 paroxysms. 
 
 Thus two main strands, his outer Titanic 
 
172 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 revolt and his inner Titanic tribulation for 
 sin weave through this Frankfort Quadren- 
 nium, working often together, yet often in 
 separation. But what an astounding produc- 
 tivity! It seems as if the whole age pushed 
 to voice itself through this one puny individ- 
 ual, and would tear him to pieces in its rush 
 for utterance. Besides these five completed 
 works (if we include the Urfaust) and the 
 colossal fragments of great enterprises al- 
 ready recounted, he wrote numerous news- 
 paper notices, chiefly criticism. Also many 
 letters and many lyrics which show the same 
 ebullience of the world-stormei* as elsewhere. 
 Also quite- a list of dramatic skits, farces, 
 spiteful burlesques taking off individuals 
 whom he knew, such as Wieland and Herder. 
 One may well wonder how he survived it all. 
 Especially in these smaller pieces Mephisto- 
 pheles begins to peep out as the scoffing 
 clown of the world-order, or as he appears 
 later, God's court-fool. 
 
 Truly Goethe's genetic Quadrennium it is 
 in which his whole literary career starts to 
 germinating. Here the fact may be men- 
 tioned that the primal conception of Wilhelm 
 Meister^ which unfolds through Goethe's en- 
 tire life, has been found in this Frankfort 
 Epoch. Thus we may see his first drama and 
 his first novel, Got 2 and Werther, made uni- 
 
.* 
 
 LILT. 173 
 
 versal in his two supreme life-works, the 
 drama Faust and the novel Meister, written 
 counterparts of his total selfhood, whereof 
 something is to be said hereafter. We re- 
 gard him in the enormous strength and mul- 
 tiplicity of his present literary utterance, as 
 a greater hero than any of his heroes, espe- 
 cially in his two leading roles, the Titan of 
 revolt and the Titan of expiation. 
 
 But there is one more act to be recounted 
 of this quadrennial drama of the poet, and 
 that not the least memorable and provocative 
 of the Muse. 
 
 V. 
 
 Lili. 
 
 Such is the liquid name of the new young 
 lady who gets intertwined in Goethe 's already 
 complex love-life during the last year of his 
 stay at Frankfort. Phileros yields to the 
 tender enthrallment of his emotion, and pro- 
 ceeds one step further than he has ever yet 
 gone: he actually becomes betrothed to the 
 object of his affection, which has not hap- 
 pened before, and thus he is fettered by a 
 new chain in which custom or convention or 
 duty holds him fixed. How will the Titan 
 like that, after his free boundless ranging! 
 
174 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 Soon he begins to feel the restraint and we 
 see him rattling at these fresh gyves with 
 many a sign of impatience if not of wrath. 
 He has never before been held in the bond of 
 a trothplight, with its obligation and even 
 sacredness. Such is the new conflict in which 
 our daring lover has become involved. 
 
 Thus the two sides of the man meet in a 
 renewed desperate fray. Or we may fable 
 the matter thus : Phileros and the Titan, al- 
 ready having tested each other in many a 
 struggle, now come to their deepest collision. 
 The one is gentle and yielding and especially 
 delights in the service of love, but the other 
 is defiant of the tender sentiment and refuses 
 all service as hostile to freedom. Thus Goe- 
 the, at the close of the present Epoch, is to 
 experience just about the hardest inner bat- 
 tle of his life between the two strongest ele- 
 mental powers of his nature. 
 
 It may be here preluded that Goethe is 
 driven out of Frankfort primarily by the 
 scourge of this new passion and its vengeful 
 backstroke. Yes, here he descends again, 
 the insatiable Love-God, the poet's dearest 
 Olympian comrade through life, yet also his 
 severest punisher. Let us hear him describe 
 the divine epiphany which turns a new page 
 of his heart's never-ending history. "A 
 friend invited me to go with him to a little 
 
LILI. 175 
 
 concert to be given at the house of an eminent 
 business man. As I liked to do everything on 
 the spur of the moment, though it was late, I 
 went with him. We entered the spacious sit- 
 ting room with a large company around the 
 piano at which the only daughter of the house 
 took her seat and played with remarkable fa- 
 cility and grace. I stood near enough to ob- 
 serve her form and bearing. After the play- 
 ing was over I observed her watch me closely. 
 Thus we slyly eyed each other, and I do not 
 deny that the tenderest sort of attractive 
 power began to steal into my heart. On tak- 
 ing my leave the mother gave me to under- 
 stand that another visit would be agreeable, 
 to which invitation the daughter responded 
 with friendly alacrity. I did not fail to re- 
 peat my call at proper intervals. " 
 
 Thus Goethe gets to know on New Year's 
 Day, 1775, Lili Schonemann, daughter of a 
 prominent banker, deceased, whose widow 
 kept up the business and the home. Beauti- 
 ful, divine appearance of a maid not yet sev- 
 enteen years old by half a year, yet level- 
 headed, trained to social life of which her 
 home was quite a center, especially for the 
 moneyed aristocracy of Frankfort. Then fol- 
 lows the sweet toying of tender souls, 
 wreathed in the present case with all the 
 flowers of music and poetry. But just think 
 
176 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 of it ! This young girl has completely netted 
 in her chain the bond-breaking Titan, now 
 the most famous man in Frankfort, and the 
 first author in Germany. She must have read 
 his Werther, or if she has not, she certainly 
 does it now, and her mother reads it too, one 
 may conceive the very next day. Both of 
 course identify the hero of that novel easily, 
 nor can they help making the secret reflec- 
 tion that the lover does not now need to kill 
 himself because his sweetheart is betrothed to 
 another. No such obstacle is in sight, still 
 the sailing is not smooth. The two families 
 belong to different and somewhat antagonis- 
 tic sets of the Frankfort community; father 
 Goethe, of the ancient patriciate and of the 
 Lutheran confession, does not like this quite 
 recent moneyed aristocracy with its display 
 and pretence, and with its Galvanism in re- 
 ligion. Still the deft match-maker appears 
 and harmonizes the discords, so that the be- 
 trothal becomes a fact. 
 
 What! the untamed Goethe actually 
 noosed! He who was nicknamed the Bear, 
 and even wild Indian, in his desperate return 
 to Nature! Hear his comment: "It was a 
 strange decree of overruling Providence that 
 in the course of my singular life, I should also 
 have experienced the feelings of one who is 
 betrothed. " Then he moralizes upon the sit- 
 
LILT. Ill 
 
 nation with some satisfaction, but soon be- 
 gins to feel the new restraint. The Prome- 
 theus in him rattles his fresh-forged fetters 
 and starts to lurching on this side and that to 
 the infinite unhappiness of the young lady 
 and of himself. He gets an awful disgust at 
 the social formalities of the Schonemann 
 household, at the utterly common-place peo- 
 ple who visit there, with nothing to say ex- 
 cept business ; mad fits of jealousy overwhelm 
 him at the sight of his Lili lavishing her 
 sweetest smiles and blandishments, which be- 
 longed to him only, on a lot of socially impor- 
 tant nobodies who had some money. In one 
 of these moods he gives vent to his bitterly 
 humorous burlesque called Lili's Menagerie. 
 Artificiality, stiffness, fashion's servility 
 made the caged Bear roar, or rather made 
 the trammeled Titan curse anew the Gods in 
 grim defiance. 
 
 So the battle rages up and down for some 
 months, but the outcome is an easy prophecy. 
 The captive breaks loose and takes to flight, 
 making for the mountains of Switzerland, 
 Nature's mighty upheaval in the heart of 
 Europe, where he may find sympathy in the 
 gigantic Heaven-storming landscape of Al- 
 pine summits. He reaches the top of St. 
 Gotthard, whence he peers down into plains 
 of Italy, in which classic land of art his fa- 
 
178 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 ther wished him to take a journey. But with 
 that one outlook he turns back homewards, 
 the Genius bids him wait as he is not yet 
 ready for the Italian Journey; he has still a 
 German discipline to undergo. Not till a 
 dozen years more have passed over him, and 
 he has had the training of a wholly new Ep- 
 och of life at Weimar, will he feel himself 
 driven to descend the other side of the Alps. 
 Still there is no doubt that the immediate 
 force which whirled him about was his love 
 for Lili. That bond still fettered him, the en- 
 gagement was not yet broken, the problem 
 was unsolved. So he wends his way back to 
 Frankfort. 
 
 Goethe has again set down in a drama the 
 confession of his peculiar inner condition. 
 He was now a man with two loves in his 
 heart, and two devoted women as their rep- 
 resentatives. This is the general situation 
 in the play called Stella, written in the 
 Spring of 1775, when his passion for Lili was 
 urging and scourging him at its topmost. 
 For the affair of Frederika still tossed might- 
 ily his soul, and he had lashed the tempest 
 in his memory to yet more violent paroxysms 
 through the recent composition of Clavigo 
 and of Faust. Both these dramas have 
 stormy echoes of the Sessenheim episode, set 
 forth in the two female characters respec- 
 
LILL 179 
 
 tively, Marie and Margaret, each of deepest 
 fidelity in contrast with the faithless lover. 
 Thus the poet gibbets himself in writ, but 
 saves his own skin in fact. And behold now 
 an additional betrayal of love, seemingly in 
 the midst of his hottest repentance for his 
 guilt toward Frederika. In this frame of 
 mind he composes his Stella, the drama of 
 the double lover, Fernando, who is just about 
 the most contemptible piece of a manikin that 
 ever spouted forth his meanness on the stage. 
 So Goethe thought of himself for we have to 
 take him here as self -portraying. It is note- 
 worthy that in his Swiss trip he visited 
 Strassburg twice, both going and coming, 
 where the all-dominant fact filling his recol- 
 lection must have been the real drama of 
 Frederika. But at the same time Lili would 
 flit across the scene the high-toned, elegant 
 society girl, coupled with the simple country 
 maid in a sort of rivalry round the poet, who 
 in his written play reconciles them both in the 
 common love for himself/ For each of the 
 women, Cecilia and Stella, takes one of his 
 hands and one of his cheeks, the last words 
 of the drama being "we are thine. " It 
 should be noted that Goethe long afterwards 
 in a very different mood changed this early 
 ending and made it tragic, spoiling it as a 
 document of his own psychological evolution. 
 
180 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST, 
 
 From Goethe's telling description of Lili 
 in his Autobiography, we get a high notion of 
 her personal worth and especially of her 
 own courage. When her own family and all 
 her social set were seeking to separate her 
 from her lover, she defied the whole opposi- 
 tion and offered to flee with him to distant 
 America which was then in the throes of its 
 own Revolution. We have to think (though 
 he does not put the matter in this way) that 
 she dared him to the flight, and he backed 
 down and ran off in the other direction. No 
 wonder that he paints himself so often with 
 contempt, with even baseness, from Weis- 
 lingen to Fernando, and in sharp antithesis 
 glorifies his women. Soon, however, Lili 
 herself becomes convinced of the impossibil- 
 ity of a strong union of hearts with such a 
 weak-hearted Titan. The bond drooped, then 
 dropped asunder when the stormy unbridled 
 poet quits Frankfort and sets out for Wei- 
 mar, where he awaits a fresh stage of his ap- 
 prenticeship. 
 
 He had already been approached by the 
 young Duke Karl August, and he undoubt- 
 edly feels that he must take a new step in life. 
 The Frankfort Epoch has definitely closed 
 with a kind of crash. He begins to feel that 
 his Titanism has run its course against the 
 social order, with which in some way he must 
 
* 
 
 LILI. 181 
 
 become better acquainted and if possible rec- 
 onciled. He sees that the Titan is tragic, 
 and he as writer has shown him such in a 
 literary way. The idea of an official position 
 under some prince was at first repugnant to 
 him as it ran counter ' ' to my instinct of per- 
 sonal freedom. " Then his father, the proud 
 patrician of the free city of Frankfort, was 
 averse to such service for his son. But there 
 was no other course to get into the estab- 
 lished life of society. In one of his later let- 
 ters of this present Epoch he indicates that 
 he feels his dawning limit, when "I have 
 learned political subordination. ' ' Where was 
 he to take such a lesson? Gradually he chose 
 the court of Weimar as the school of his com- 
 ing discipline. 
 
 Thus the Epoch of Goethe's life-poem 
 which we call the Frankfort Quadrenniuin 
 winds up in a flight from his native city, 
 which separation is not only local but spirit- 
 ual. The peculiar manifestation which char- 
 acterized these four volcanic years has 
 reached its cessation. That which we have 
 named his Titanism drops into the back- 
 ground of his life and writing. The volcano 
 has spent its fury, has indeed erupted itself. 
 But its results will never be lost, its products 
 will occupy the poet during the rest of his 
 days. It was essentially the elemental ere- 
 
182 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 ative Epoch of his whole career, as so often 
 stated already. 
 
 In our opinion his break with Lili was prac- 
 tically his last Titanic act, which defied the 
 instituted order of love and betrothal culmi- 
 nating in marriage and the established fam- 
 ily. Then he had to flee from his home and 
 his deed. But his chief separation was from 
 his state of revolt against the transmitted in- 
 stitutions of his race, or his flight from his 
 Titanism and its Epoch. He will hereafter 
 have resurgences of this Titanic spirit, but as 
 a stage of his life-poem it is over. 
 
 But Phileros survives and goes with his 
 genius to Weimar where he will have another 
 sort of career. For love, as already said, 
 is the deepest fact of Goethe's existence, and 
 cannot be torn out of him by the harshest 
 wrenches of fate. But along with love, a new 
 discipline at Weimar presents itself whose 
 portrayal we have now reached. 
 
THE WEIMAR DECENNIUM. 183 
 
 CHAPTER THIRD. 
 
 THE WEIMAR DECENNIUM. 
 
 Another Epoch of the poet 's career has ar- 
 rived, distinct from the foregoing one, and in 
 certain essential points quite the opposite. 
 From being a free ranger, as he was practi- 
 cally during the previous four years at Frank- 
 fort, he becomes a government official bound 
 to place and to a certain fixed routine of work. 
 Thus he is tethered, even if he still enjoys 
 many a limited freedom. He has to fit him- 
 self into a pre-established order, and also to 
 help administer the same in his new calling. 
 
 It is evident that the chief training here is 
 institutional subordination, against which he 
 has been hitherto recalcitrant. Thus he is 
 sent to school to learn through experience the 
 meaning and value of institutions of which he 
 in his previous tendency had been not simply 
 ignorant but defiant. The transmitted sys- 
 tem of society to which he has shown no little 
 antipathy, he is at present required to main- 
 tain and to conduct successfully to its goal. 
 This means the making of a great turn in the 
 round of his life. He is to conserve, not to 
 tear down. In this regard the coming Wei- 
 
184 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 mar Epoch is quite the reverse of the preced- 
 ing Frankfort Epoch. 
 
 Still we are to observe that Goethe evolves 
 and improves the various governmental de- 
 partments of which he becomes the chief min- 
 ister. He recognizes the abuses and corrects 
 them; on certain lines he develops the better 
 organization out of the past antiquated forms. 
 But the great fact which interests us and 
 makes the present time a turning-point of his 
 total achievement is that he gets acquainted 
 with the instituted world at first hand, and 
 contributes to establish it, yea to transform it 
 into a higher stage of itself. 
 
 The importance of this new experience 
 upon his future literary activity is manifest. 
 The Titan is converted to the social order 
 which he wished to overthrow ; the revolution- 
 ist turns to the preserver. After his Weimar 
 discipline, Goethe can never again drop back 
 into his Frankfort attitude. He has yet much 
 to write before his eyes close for the last 
 time, but his work will show that he has 
 passed through the present Epoch of institu- 
 tional training. 
 
 As indicated by the title of the chapter, 
 this social schooling of the poet will last some 
 ten years, which seems a long time. Perhaps 
 it might have been made shorter; still he had 
 to drain the cup dry, and feel that it was dry 
 
THE WEIMAR DECENNIUM. 185 
 
 for him; that is, he must find the limits of the 
 present Epoch also, and at last break over 
 them into a still higher stage. Thus Goethe 
 manifests the ever-developing spirit which 
 unfolds from one state of excellence to an- 
 other in the ceaseless sweep toward its high- 
 est fulfilment. He will learn the lesson of this 
 long Decennium through direct practice of its 
 duties. 
 
 Hence he will have little time or oppor- 
 tunity for great literary works; indeed the 
 mood to make such long-continued and stress* 
 ful efforts will be quite wanting, even if he 
 sometimes chafes at the small written output 
 of his brain. In fact, the most striking con- 
 trast with the preceding Frankfort Epoch is 
 the nearly total quiescence of his productive 
 Genius at present in the Weimar Epoch; the 
 change was so overwhelming that it struck 
 him almost dumb for a decade. Still we hold 
 that he was at work, doing what was neces- 
 sary to make the grand totality which we call 
 Goethe. The psychological import of these 
 ten years of his Muse's brooding silence must 
 be integrated with the poet's evolution. 
 
 But the deepest strain of the poet's char- 
 acter, that of love, will not be quiescent dur- 
 ing this quiescent Epoch. ^Phileros also goes 
 to Weimar, and is active* there in his own 
 way, playing a unique part in his life's his- 
 
186 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 tory, of which an account will be given later. 
 Indeed love will stir the poet to be creative 
 in this otherwise uncreative time, and will 
 stimulate him to a work which has its signifi- 
 cant place not only in his life-poem, but also 
 in literature generally (his letters to Frau 
 Von Stein). 
 
 We designated the Frankfort Epoch as 
 anti-prescriptive, hostile to everything in the 
 form of transmitted authority, and reacting 
 against the prescribed forms of education 
 which were imposed upon the poet during his 
 youth. But at Weimar Goethe as official has 
 to accept prescription and indeed to enforce 
 it, vindicating it in practice. Thus we may 
 regard this third Epoch of his Pre-Italian 
 Period as a return to the principle of his first 
 Epoch, and thereby forming a rounded 
 whole, which characterizes the Period. 
 Hence he not only has to receive prescription, 
 from the outside, as he did at first, but he 
 has to re-make it as a part of himself and of 
 his present vocation. Herein we may observe 
 the psychical process, which will also be 
 manifested in Goethe 's entire career, and 
 which will constitute the inner organisation 
 of his life-poem. 
 
 Accordingly we may well emphasize in 
 word and thought the transition from Frank- 
 fort to Weimar as truly epochal in the poet's 
 
. 
 
 THE WEIMAR DECENNIUM. 187 
 
 experience. As already indicated, it lasts 
 some ten years and more if we date it ex- 
 actly as lying between Goethe 's first arrival 
 at Weimar, November 1775, and his depar- 
 ture from Carlsbad for Italy September, 
 1786. But he was unsettled about his stay 
 at Weimar for some months, and in spirit 
 he had set out for Italy a good while before 
 he actually started. Accordingly we shall 
 name it the Weimar Ten Years of official 
 service, or distinctively the Weimar Decen- 
 nium. So Goethe himself has measured it, 
 looking back at it from Rome: "Than my 
 life during the last ten years I would rather 
 wish me death. ' ' Thus we mark the bounda- 
 ries of this Epoch between his two flights: 
 from Frankfort to Weimar, and then from 
 Weimar to Italy. And long afterwards the 
 old poet praised a French critic (Ampere) 
 who had specially designated this Epoch: 
 "How correct is his observation that I in 
 the first ten years of my Weimar life pro- 
 duced as good as nothing, and that despair 
 drove me to Italy. " 
 
 There is no doubt that the deepest strain 
 in him was his creative poetic impulse. But 
 that had delivered its first message, and he 
 was aware of it. It was impossible for him 
 to go on writing Werthers and Gotzes, as 
 some German biographers hold that he ought 
 
188 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 to have done. That work had been wrought 
 out to a finish, and his two last dramas of the 
 Frankfort time are repetitions, quite dispen- 
 sable, very inferior to his other workman- 
 ship, and he knew it. His Titanism had ut- 
 tered itself at its highest flood, and his ex- 
 pression of it remains lasting, indeed typical. 
 But what step was he to take next in spiritual 
 evolution! His genius or his guardian spirit 
 was correct in sending him to Weimar for a 
 new dip in the world-order, for such it was. 
 So it was a necessary part of his life as a 
 whole, as a completed work. 
 
 Undoubtedly the prime physical necessity 
 of existence lay heavy upon him, he had to 
 earn his living. His literary work though 
 popular brought to him no adequate income; 
 his father was growing more querulous and 
 more stingy; his tried law practice was odi- 
 ous to him and not remunerative. Weimar 
 had to train him to a vocation, to become a 
 member of the social Whole by some sort of 
 social service for which society would give 
 him a compensation. Thus he is to be har- 
 nessed to a vocational routine for his own 
 new good the recalcitrant Titan who had 
 rebelled against all order must be put into 
 harness and made to pull in harmony with 
 the Gods. The first fate of man food, rai- 
 ment and shelter he is forced to grapple 
 
THE WEIMAR DECENNIUM. 189 
 
 with at Weimar and to conquer. But 
 the reward, yea the experience is su- 
 premely significant: he wins through him- 
 self his economic freedom, the primal one 
 and basis of all other kinds of free- 
 dom. Let it also be noted that he now 
 acquires first-hand knowledge of the socio- 
 economic institution, which plays a most im- 
 portant role in his later works see Meister, 
 and the Second Part of Faust. In this 
 lies the first subjection of the Titan to an 
 institutional order, which is his special dis- 
 cipline at Weimar. And here we may like- 
 wise touch upon the fact that Goethe at Wei- 
 mar gets into the employment of the State, 
 the political Institution, very different from 
 the economic just considered. He is to help 
 administer that system against which he had 
 protested; indeed he soon rises to be chief 
 officer of the Commonwealth, the most active, 
 the most far-seeing and talented. It is an 
 absolute rule, that of the Duke, which he rep- 
 resents and rigidly upholds; he is now in the 
 service of an imperial power not unlike that 
 against which his Gotz had revolted. Here 
 then lies the essential part of Goethe's new 
 discipline: he must realize both in his prac- 
 tice and in his thought that institutional 
 world which previously he had made his hero 
 assail. Still Gotz in the drama was tragic; 
 
190 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 we see that the poet is now reaching back to 
 that power against which his Gotz dashed 
 himself to pieces. Thus the Titan is getting 
 reformed and transformed, but it will take 
 him a good while, ten years indeed of severe 
 schooling, which has its drawback in the al- 
 most total cessation of his literary creativ- 
 ity. But his one supreme task is to de-Titan- 
 ize himself in preparation for the greater 
 work which is to come. 
 
 Nevertheless there is a strain of discon- 
 tent, a secret feeling of mal-adjustment run- 
 ning through this Epoch, especially in the 
 latter part of it. Goethe felt that he had an- 
 other call than his present one; after all he 
 was not in his right place as minister of State. 
 His true function in life was to be poet, and 
 he could not be permanently happy in pursu- 
 ing a different vocation. His spare moments 
 only could now be given to the deepest neces- 
 sity of his being, which was literary crea- 
 tion ; his Genius could not be satisfied except 
 by the living sacrifice of his whole best self 
 to its goal. Hence his strongest aspiration 
 and his daily routine of work were at odds; 
 thus there was a jar in his life during this 
 Decennium, and especially during the last 
 half of it, which often was hopelessly painful. 
 He was not fulfilling his mission, he was not 
 delivering the high message which he had 
 
THE WEIMAR DECENNIU&. 191 
 
 been sent to proclaim. The son of the God had 
 sold himself to perform all the petty labors 
 of mortality, in which his divinity was 
 quenched. 
 
 This discontent took chiefly the shape of 
 longing for Italy and for the classic world. 
 He tells us that he could not look at a Latin 
 book without twinges of pain. He speaks of 
 "the physico-moral ills" which at last made 
 the Italian Journey a necessity for his soul's 
 health. Thus he reached a state of revolt 
 against Weimar as he did against Frankfort, 
 and had to move forth into a new plane of his 
 development. So at last his institutional 
 training completed itself, which will not be 
 lost, and his aspiring Genius, long smoth- 
 ered in the petty routine of a petty Court, 
 takes flight across the Alps to win fresh life 
 and freedom. 
 
 It should be noted that his Autobiography 
 stops short at the start of the Weimar Decen- 
 nium. Hence we have no direct record of this 
 Epoch from the poet's pen, as we have so 
 fully of the two preceding Epochs. Of course 
 he had nothing much to tell about in the field 
 of literature, since his Genius had fallen into 
 a state of subsidence during the whole decade. 
 Nor does he seem inclined to dwell upon the 
 real discipline which he received from his 
 long immersion in the business of the State. 
 
192 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 I. 
 
 Little Weimar. 
 
 The explosive, limit-breaking Titan has 
 now to creep into a little hole of a city and 
 country, and to adjust himself to such nar- 
 row conditions. At the time of Goethe's ar- 
 rival, the city Weimar had about 6,000 in- 
 habitants and the entire dukedom of Wei- 
 mar-Eisenach contained perhaps 100,000 peo- 
 ple. The land was poor, hilly, rocky, not dis- 
 similar to New England ; moreover the terri- 
 tory was curiously scattered about over a 
 good deal of space, as if strewn in streaks 
 and spots. It was not huddled around one 
 capital, which the people could easily reach 
 and support. So it came that Weimar, the 
 seat of government, was small and poor and 
 helpless; if the Muse were in search of 
 money or even a good living, that would be 
 just the last spot in all Germany where she 
 would alight. To Goethe very shuddering 
 must have been the contrast with his Frank- 
 fort which had wealth, business activity, rich 
 surrounding country, and fine edifices. The 
 best house in Weimar, the ducal palace, lay 
 in ruins, having burnt down recently. Still 
 his Genius bids the young poet to shrink him- 
 self into this petty bottle, and there to ex- 
 
LITTLE WEIMAR. 193 
 
 pand it and himself into the Universe. Did 
 he do it ! If he had not, we would not be read- 
 ing him and talking of him today on the oppo- 
 site side of the globe, in another hemisphere. 
 Already there had been the tendency to 
 gather the children of the Muses in Weimar, 
 especially by the former Duchess, Anna Ama- 
 lia, who secured Wieland, a great literary 
 light of that time, and other smaller ones, not 
 mentionable here. The reigning Duke, her 
 son Karl August, showed the same bent and 
 did the one supreme deed in this line by catch- 
 ing Goethe, and so to speak impounding him, 
 the wild fence-breaker. Then Goethe in his 
 turn develops this same trend marvelously, 
 through his conscious effort, as well as 
 through his unweeting personal magneticism. 
 He had not been in Weimar long and was 
 hardly yet firm in the saddle when he began 
 to stir the Duke to call Herder to be the first 
 clergyman of the land and guardian of the 
 State's religion. For Goethe well remem- 
 bered Herder at Strassburg as the magician 
 who had evoked the power of his sleeping 
 Genius, and had led him into the creations of 
 his Frankfort epoch. Naturally the poet 
 thought that some such deed could be done 
 again at Weimar. But really Herder had 
 then imparted to his spiritual pupil the one 
 really pivotal lesson which he was able to 
 
194 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. P^ART FIR8T. 
 
 give ; already Goethe had outgrown him and 
 was in a new stage of development. The re- 
 sult was that the old relation could not be re- 
 peated; at Strassburg for once it had been 
 and for all. Still Herder was a man of great 
 talent in his line, and he filled an important, 
 though subordinate place on the Weimar 
 Parnassus. Seeing this and fully satisfied of 
 his supremacy, he grew discontented and 
 lived his life in the mood of the sulking hero. 
 Moreover he passed into a state of mental 
 crystallization; he did not evolve, and could 
 not understand Goethe 's stages of evolution, 
 except the first in which he was the chief 
 mediating factor, the new soul's very obstet- 
 rician. Hence he, coddled by wife, became 
 the towering example of the unappreciated 
 genius among the Weimar mountain peaks. 
 Goethe took untold trouble in satisfying his 
 just claims, as well as in soothing his ever- 
 ruffled temper, which would easily quill itself 
 like the fretful porcupine. And that wife of 
 his, Caroline, sharp-witted and sharper- 
 tongued, Goethe seems to have actually feared 
 when she would sheer off into her tantrums, 
 and start up her cannonade of grievances. 
 Still Herder had the remnant of good sense 
 to stick to his place, for he was a greater man 
 under Goethe's wing than he could have been 
 anywhere else. 
 
LITTLE WEIMAR. 195 
 
 So our greatest Genius gathers his group 
 of geniuses, big and little, troublesome, jeal- 
 ous, and of course not one of them fully ap- 
 preciated. Still they remained circling about 
 the central sun, and receiving its light; they 
 constitute a unique system, gazed at today in 
 the literary Heaven. 
 
 But there was one set of these sons of the 
 Muses whom Goethe could no longer endure. 
 They were his old boon comrades of the 
 Storm and Stress, defiant of all conventions 
 and of the world ordered. Seemingly they 
 expected to have another time of poetic de- 
 bauchery under their former leader and su- 
 preme reveler. But great is their disappoint- 
 ment. Goethe has begun to transcend that 
 stage of himself which now is getting to be to 
 him downright repulsive. The Brothers Stol- 
 berg pass through Weimar on their return 
 from Switzerland, apparently for another 
 frolic with the former grandmaster ; but they 
 soon leave. Then unaccountable Lenz ap- 
 pears with his monkey tricks and violates all 
 propriety; whereat Goethe sends him off with 
 a sticking epithet of " jackass. " Still an- 
 other of the same ilk, by the name of Klinger 
 enters, but makes quick exit. Thus we may 
 watch Goethe looking at the picture of his 
 former Self, and dashing it to pieces. For 
 these boisterous youths simply showed him 
 
196 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 what he had been, and that was enough; he 
 was getting conscious of his transition from 
 Frankfort to Weimar and its significance. 
 
 Thus our poet, now turned statesman, is 
 seeking to make his little state a work of art, 
 to render it a perfect thing of its kind ; small 
 though it be, yea the smallest, it can image 
 the all. That is the reason, we conceive, why 
 Goethe's artistic instinct rightly turned him 
 away from a large city or country from Ber- 
 lin, Leipzig, even from his own Frankfort, 
 which he knew he could not transform into 
 the world beautiful, the material was too re- 
 fractory and overwhelming. But little Wei- 
 mar he could handle and mould to shape, in- 
 ner if not outer, by the co-operation of its ab- 
 solute sovereign. So in that wee nest on the 
 wee Ilm, he could lay the cosmic germ which 
 would reflect the Universe. 
 
 Hence today we are looking back at Wei- 
 mar pedestaled in its center with Goethe, as 
 a great original work of art. We think of it 
 along with Athens in the age of Pericles, with 
 Florence in her bloom. No other city of Eu- 
 rope during that time rouses the same in- 
 terest. To be sure Weimar never had any 
 great works of architecture, sculpture, paint- 
 ing, any magnificence. The outer vesture of 
 it was poverty-stricken, almost shabby and 
 tattered, and, though much improved it still 
 
LITTLE WEIMAR. 197 
 
 is not dazzling today. But that magic struc- 
 ture of its inner life, spanned by Goethe's 
 days and their works, is what we are to be- 
 hold and to commune with.- A strange im- 
 mortality it has conferred on a crowd of peo- 
 ple totally insignificant, and doomed of them- 
 selves to nameless perdition; but they lived 
 and moved about in some petty corner of this 
 communal edifice and so partake of its eter- 
 nal transfiguration. What a lot of immortal 
 nobodies we have to meet with and to know in 
 the itinerary of Goethe 's life ! The common- 
 est clay his Promethean touch seems to trans- 
 mute into little Gods and Goddesses ever- 
 living. So we wander through this Goethe 
 gallery of temporary men and women who 
 have been tranced by the poet's spell into a 
 deathless presence. Eeally all Weimar is 
 Goethe's poem, which in some respects is his 
 most unique achievement. Dante did no such 
 thing with his Florence though he has res- 
 cued the name of many a petty sinner from 
 the fire of oblivion through his Hell-fire. 
 
 Accordingly we have to weigh carefully the 
 thought that Goethe when he settled down at 
 Weimar could not help making it over into 
 one of his poetical works, which indeed he 
 wrought at as long as he lived. Thus it has its 
 parallelism with his Faust, also a life-long 
 work, which ended when he ended. In like 
 
198 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 manner his whole career is to be regarded; 
 not any single poem of his is the best, but his 
 total life-poem. Of this life-poem his biog- 
 raphy is essentially an interpretation. A vast 
 multiplicity of human activities he showed, 
 seemingly scattering himself to the four 
 points of the compass; but in them all he 
 was at last doing the one thing: girdling his 
 world in one all-embracing life-poem, whose 
 unity must be seen amid its many diversi- 
 ties. Weimar then was a single long poem 
 of his, the communal one, built not of verses 
 but of actions. 
 
 We should also note that a second small 
 urban community lay only a few miles dis- 
 tant from Weimar, having nearly as many 
 inhabitants but possessed of its own central 
 institution, not political but educational. This 
 was Jena with its University which at this 
 time was attended by some 600 students. In 
 a number of points it was antipodal to Wei- 
 mar, yet each mutually integrated the other. 
 The University was naturally the home of 
 erudition and investigation, while in the 
 Temple of the Muses originality was the di- 
 vine token, especially literary. Goethe cher- 
 ished both, was the zealous supporter of both, 
 and took up both into his life and writ. Still 
 Jena was remarkably fertile in movements 
 which Goethe did not care for personally. 
 
LITTLE WEIMAR. 199 
 
 Philosophy was not to his liking, yet at Jena 
 under his sway the three supreme philoso- 
 phers after Kant of modern Germany, Fichte, 
 Schelling and Hegel were professors. The 
 brothers Schlegel originated there the famous 
 Romantic movement, of which both Novalis 
 and Tieck drank at Jena, but which the clas- 
 sic Goethe always shunned as repugnant to 
 the right view of Art. Still its vogue he rec- 
 ognized, and followed to its depths without 
 its excesses, so that he became the greatest 
 romanticist of them all. 
 
 Such was the real objective work of the 
 poet during the present Decennium, \ve may 
 call it his work of art, which we still ideally 
 contemplate in wonder. Perhaps we can ac- 
 count for his lack of written poetry through 
 his pre-occupation with this one real poem, 
 of which he is not only author but hero. For 
 Weimar transformed becomes his great po- 
 etic work of this Epoch, and so he could write 
 none other. Undoubtedly he was building in 
 himself anew the transmitted order of the 
 little State, but at the same time he rebuilt 
 the social world there, as a kind of ideal 
 which we study in its little details, otherwise 
 insignificant, and seek to fathom and make 
 our own. 
 
 Goethe like every true poet is a symbol- 
 maker essentially, filling every particular 
 
200 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 which he touches with a universal content, 
 with a gleam of the All. Not only in his writ- 
 ings but likewise in his deeds we trace his 
 symbolic power. He could not help acting 
 symbols, so that there is a poetry in his life 
 as well as in his word; in fact the two are 
 necessary counterparts, and belong together. 
 So it can well be said that Goethe transfig- 
 ured Weimar into a symbol, elevating the lit- 
 tle unimportant speck to an universal inter- 
 est and worth seemingly for all time. Thus it 
 comes that he put such stress upon the sym- 
 bol especially in his older days, feeling it to 
 express the very essence of his Genius. More- 
 over we may here add that not only his writ- 
 ten but also his acted works constitute the 
 total poem of his life, which is to be conceived 
 and set forth as one vast symbol whereby he 
 as individual Self becomes the image and as 
 it were the incarnation of the All-Self. In 
 other words his particular biography is to be 
 grasped as a symbol in which is seen the soul 
 of all biography, and thus images Universal 
 Biography, which we have already character- 
 ized in its deepest sense as the Biography of 
 the Universe. For to our mind this Universe 
 is not merely dead matter or blind force, or 
 even unconscious life, though it has all these 
 too, but a conscious Self in its full entirety. 
 
LITTLE WEIMAR'S RULER. 201 
 
 . 
 
 II. 
 
 Little Weimar's Ruler. 
 
 With the small sovereign there is the same 
 problem as with the small realm : can he, di- 
 minutive as he is among the throngs of Ger- 
 man princes, be made the bearer of the true 
 greatness of the ruler! Goethe himself calls 
 him small in an oft-cited epigram : ' ' Among 
 Germany's rulers mine is certainly small," 
 whereupon follows a neatly-turned compli- 
 ment to his Duke. In other words Karl Au- 
 gust, a mere unformed stripling of eighteen 
 when the poet arrived at Weimar was to be 
 moulded by him into the sovereign as a work 
 of art. Goethe trained him and kept him un- 
 der training, yet with subtle tact and unfail- 
 ing affection. The teacher concealed deftly 
 his schooling, he would yield to his pupil in 
 unnecessary matters and go along with him 
 in certain sports which shocked the staid eti- 
 quette of the old Weimarians; but at the 
 critical moment he spared not the lesson, usu- 
 ally with effect. To be sure the pupil some- 
 times gave a squirm, and called his teacher 
 "an old tyrant," but always with gratitude 
 for his tyranny. 
 
 Thus by a unique educative process which 
 we can trace in their mutual dealings and cor- 
 respondence, the poet helped to mould the life 
 
202 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 of the ruler into a work of art which we also 
 contemplate with admiration in this Weimar 
 Gallery. And it may be added that Goethe 
 shared in the new educational tendency of 
 the time; he lived in the age of the greatest 
 modern educators, Pestalozzi and Froebel, 
 and breathed their atmosphere, not to speak 
 of lesser lights like Basedow, of whom he has 
 given a lively whimsical account. Indeed his 
 Wilhelm Meister turns mainly on an educa- 
 tional problem, and in the second part of this 
 novel he has described an ideal school in 
 what he calls the Pedagogic Province. But 
 we come back to the fact that his greatest 
 work in this sphere \vas the transformation 
 of his ruler 's life-rule into a poem, in which 
 the small reflects the all. 
 
 Still Karl August was not merely clay in 
 the hands of the potter ; he had a strong char- 
 acter, a born love of the ever-better, and a 
 princely- magnanimity ; yet his supreme talent 
 as absolute Prince lay in his capacity to take 
 such a training, to appreciate it, and to cling 
 to it as a sort of ideal in life. No sooner had 
 Goethe come to Weimar than the young 
 Duke's transcendent effort was to fix the 
 wanderer to the spot and to set him to work. 
 Accordingly after some wary months of mu- 
 tual testing between the two spirits, the poet 
 and the sovereign, Goethe is appointed Privy 
 
. 
 
 LITTLE WEIMAR'S RULER. 203 
 
 Councilor with seat and vote in Council, 
 whereto is added 1200 thalers yearly salary. 
 This was done by the Duke against the oppo- 
 sition of all the old officialdom of the Duchy, 
 backed by their friends and all the gossips of 
 the town. Only the absolute power of the 
 young ruler carried it through. Karl August 
 must have f oref elt what could be done by such 
 a man in little Weimar. It was indeed a dar- 
 ing, even risky stroke. But let the fact be 
 noted : the artist as statesman here starts up- 
 on his long arduous toil of transforming that 
 little world into the fair shape in which we 
 may now contemplate it enshrined in beauti- 
 ful words and deeds. 
 
 Distinctively the Weimar Decennium now 
 opens, during which Goethe not only trains 
 but gets training himself. He has henceforth 
 to administer the institution against which he 
 once launched his poetic protest ; indeed just 
 this world of order is what he has to poetize 
 along with himself the poet. His new voca- 
 tion with its business he is to turn to art. 
 Even the court frivolities, its masques, its 
 festivals, its dramatic trifles he will seize up- 
 on as a vehicle for manifesting the beautiful. 
 Every detail that he touches he strives to 
 bring to its universal consecration, often with 
 small result. The material was too fragile; 
 out of mere gossamers he could not weave 
 
204 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 lasting solid works, time-defying. Still these 
 flimsy court spectacles have their meaning for 
 him and also for Weimar. 
 
 But the time comes when he feels the in- 
 anity of such evanescent literary work; his 
 Genius begins to cry out to him to produce 
 something worthy of itself. Moreover for 
 ten years and longer he has taken his institu- 
 tional discipline; he is no more the Titan, 
 but he still is the poet. So he gets ready to 
 break out of the Weimar Decennium, and fly 
 to the Southern art-world for restoration. 
 
 Still it must be added that the character of 
 Karl August has its negative strain. He was 
 married to a high-spirited, eminently worthy, 
 though somewhat precise Duchess, while he 
 was inclined to range freely in the realms of 
 indulgence outside of his domestic bond. 
 Hence arose trouble enough between the pair, 
 in which Goethe had to be the intercessor and 
 reconciler, yea the reprover of the Duke who 
 well might answer his moralizer : Are not you 
 doing the same thing! Goethe as Phileros 
 was not the best defender of Ethics in its con- 
 flict with love. Still he performed his part 
 with such tactful diplomacy that he prevented 
 any serious rupture. These were some of the 
 secrets which he did not and could not tell in 
 his Autobiography, but which cannot be 
 wholly passed over in his life-poem. 
 
.4- 
 FRAU VON STEIN. 205 
 
 III. 
 
 Fran Von Stein. 
 
 Thus we shall retain her Teutonic designa- 
 tion which has already crept into numerous 
 languages, borne by the fame of Goethe, who 
 during this whole Weimar Decennium is 
 bound to her by the deepest tie of his Nature, 
 that of Love. Here then rises to surface that 
 strand o.f his inner life which has been so 
 prominent in every epoch of his career hith- 
 erto at Frankfort, at Strassburg, at Leip- 
 zig, and still before this last, in the first turn 
 of adolescence. And so it will continue here- 
 after. Goethe's supereminent part in this 
 earthly existence of ours, we repeat, was that 
 of lover, aye the lover of Love herself em- 
 bodied in many fair forms flitting before him 
 through all his days, which he would unfail- 
 ingly seek to catch and to trance into poetic 
 shape. So we are to take him up in this role 
 of Phileros, as we have sought to personal- 
 ize it. 
 
 Before he had come to Weimar, during 
 his journey to Switzerland, Goethe had seen 
 her picture in silhouette; he picked it out 
 among ten others and wrote beneath it : ' 'It 
 would be a glorious view to see how the world 
 mirrors itself in this soul. She sees the 
 
206 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 world as it is, and yet through the medium of 
 love." Here he gives a strange anticipation 
 of his own future and hers, as well as the 
 coming bond between them. He feels in ad- 
 vance that the soul peering out behind such 
 a face has its view of the universe as created 
 by love and understood by love. He also de- 
 clares that the sight of that face surging 
 through his imagination robbed him of sleep 
 for three nights. Such is the prelude of Phi- 
 leros to his longest and most unique affair of 
 heart, and, as he says, the most formative. 
 Also we may note here the strain of proph- 
 ecy characteristic of Goethe ; he deemed him- 
 self a poetic somnambulist, seeing with a kind 
 of second sight, or super-sense, his predes- 
 tined lot. 
 
 Who was this woman who had such a power 
 of projecting her soul through space into 
 Goethe's very genius and setting it into vio- 
 lent tumult simply from the meagre outline 
 of a silhouetted visage? Charlotte Von 
 Schardt (Lotte's name again) was born at 
 Weimar in 1742, married the Duke's Master 
 of Horse, Friedrich Von Stein, in her twenty- 
 second year; both her father and her hus- 
 band were officials of the Court, and she her- 
 self was a lady in attendance on the Duchess 
 Amalia. Thus her outer social life had 
 passed at Court whose forms, ceremonies, 
 
FRAU VON STEIN. 207 
 
 proprieties* and prejudices she knew thor- 
 oughly, and indeed they were ingrown into 
 her being. This is particularly the side of 
 her character which the unconventional Goe- 
 the shocks at first, and then he starts adopt- 
 ing it. Thus she becomes the trainer of the 
 Titan out of his Titanism, especially out of 
 his Titanic love. She stimulates Phileros to 
 the highest point of intensity, and then puts 
 him under her discipline and formalism. A 
 very needful school for him and which none 
 of his former young maidens could have ac- 
 complished he was too strong and head- 
 strong for their restraints. 
 
 Naturally one asks: What had been the 
 previous discipline of the woman for such a 
 task? We read that her marriage was love- 
 less, quite neutral, though not poisonous ; 
 seemingly a made-up matter of convenience, 
 when the all-conquering Phileros appears on 
 the scene. She had borne already seven 
 children in nine years, of whom four had 
 wilted away in infancy, and three remained, 
 all boys. Certainly in these facts lies the 
 most tremendous discipline which woman- 
 hood can undergo, the discipline of mater- 
 nity in just about the hardest form it can as- 
 sume. She is indeed performing the abso- 
 lute duty of her sex, which is to be mother.of 
 her race, and certainly she has not shrunk 
 
208 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 from its fulfilment. To bear seven children 
 in nine years to the man she loves not, yet to 
 keep fidelity to the husband, coupled with the 
 sense of her highest obligation that is what 
 may be deemed the hardest test of woman, 
 the supreme discipline of maternity. One 
 may well see this awful trial and its mastery 
 in her portrait still, with its depth of sorrow 
 reaching to the soul's bottom, and there ac- 
 cepted if not overcome. No wonder that Goe- 
 the at the view of such a picture sympathet- 
 ically fathomed its deepest purport, and 
 longed to see "how the world mirrored itself 
 in this soul," for beyond all his experience 
 with women and Phileros had known a good 
 deal already here was a new and deeper 
 message from the woman-soul than any he 
 had yet heard or seen, not excepting that of 
 his own dear mother. Thus the poet gets to 
 glimpse the function of womanhood at the 
 very fountain of its being. He is brought in- 
 to the presence of the original Eve of crea- 
 tion. 
 
 But now having given expression and full 
 validity to this eternal element in Frau Von 
 Stein, she has with it curiously commingled 
 something quite opposite, a very finite ele- 
 ment of gossip, petty jealousy, a feminine 
 tendency to nag the man she loves, and be- 
 cause she loves him. How many apologies 
 
FRAU VON STEIN. 209 
 
 has he to make, defences, explanations, em- 
 broidered with tenderest words of devotion! 
 All for some little impropriety or neglect or 
 pleasantry not rightly timed or tuned ac- 
 cording to her sense of what befits such a 
 man. Later we shall see this strain of her 
 character rise to the surface and jet forth 
 stinging vitriolic sarcasm and disparagement 
 against her former lover when he has taken 
 unto himself another woman, she in the mean 
 time having become a widow. 
 
 Here it may be well to note of this impor- 
 tant woman that her long life running par- 
 allel to Goethe's, shows three distinct stages 
 of development, if we pass over her unmar- 
 ried days of which we know nothing worth 
 knowing. First is the mentioned stage of ma- 
 ternal consecration, quite at the close of 
 which she meets Goethe with whose acquaint- 
 ance opens the second stage, starting a new 
 and very distinct change in her disposition. 
 The following passage spoken by a charac- 
 ter in a little drama of Goethe's, is supposed 
 to be taken literally from one of her letters : 
 * i The world again becomes dear to me, though 
 I had flung it off dear through you. My 
 heart indeed reproaches me ; I feel that I am 
 preparing troubles for you and myself. Six 
 months ago I was ready to die, but now I am 
 not." This touches upon another trait of 
 
210 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 Frau Von Stein 's character : the struggle be- 
 tween her conscience and her love, to which 
 is allied her premonition of some penalty for 
 what she acts and feels. And the final stroke 
 came, her lover quit her for one whom she 
 deemed far inferior to herself. Therewith 
 began her third stage, a long spell of sullen- 
 ness and spiteful utterances against the man 
 of her heart, lasting nearly forty years she 
 died in 1827. Her letters during this time 
 have been published, or extracts from them 
 (Diintzer, Charlotte Von Stein), and they 
 make a running commentary on Goethe's 
 works and his actions for nearly the entire 
 stretch of his two great Periods, as we shall 
 hereafter mark them out. She becomes the 
 Weimar Cassandra, uttering doomful words 
 over the country's greatest man venomous 
 prophecies but often true and fulfilled to the 
 letter. Thus we may bring before ourselves 
 the three grand sweeps of her life the last 
 of which she sat in her cottage not far from 
 Goethe's own door, and in look and word 
 threw upon his wife, his children and him- 
 self the venom fabled of the basilisk. 
 
 Goethe's letters to Frau Von Stein have 
 been edited and published more than 1500 
 of them the edition under my eye numbers 
 them at 1775, of which more than two hun- 
 dred belong after his breach. These letters 
 
FRAU VON STEIN. 211 
 
 may be regarded a continuation of his Auto- 
 biography (Dichtung und Wahrheit) not on 
 all its lines, but on the main one, that of 
 Phileros. As she was still living and a near 
 neighbor, it was probably in part the regard 
 for her feelings and memories, which made 
 him stop his account of his life at the Weimar 
 Decennium. Goethe knew of these letters and 
 was willing to let them tell their own story; 
 indeed they are his chief literary work of art 
 during this Epoch. He re-enacts in reality 
 his Werther romance, though this too was 
 based upon fact. He becomes enthralled to 
 a woman belonging to another; not only be- 
 trothed is she, but married and a mother 
 many times ; and so we have an actual Wer- 
 therian situation of hopeless love, and like 
 Werther, written in letters full of emotion. 
 Goethe himself recognized the parallel and 
 poetized it somewhat thus : 
 
 What I then dreamed and suffered, 
 Now I experience awake. 
 
 So we have in these Letters the immediate, 
 often daily gushes of the heart, the primal 
 elements of his love-life during this time, not 
 wrought over by the ageing man into his 
 more artificial Autobiography, nor transfig- 
 ured to alien artistic shapes as in his Tasso, 
 which a French critic pronounced an intensi- 
 
212 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 fied Werther, nor having the youthful ebul- 
 liency of his first novel, which starts the 
 evolving series. Goethe through some ten 
 years is called upon to endure the pangs 
 which caused his first hero to solve his prob- 
 lem by suicide* But now he cannot save him- 
 self by killing off his hero who is none other 
 than just his own person. The tragic act of 
 that Titanic epoch must be met and undone, 
 cries his destiny : you are to solve a more des- 
 perate case of impossible love, and live and 
 pass to a new stage of your career. So the 
 two Lottes, she of Frankfort (or Wetzlar) 
 and of Weimar are coupled not only in name 
 but in a unique immortality given them by the 
 love of a poet. To be sure there is too much 
 repetition of tiny tendernesses, honeyed lit- 
 tle phrases and petty chores a prolonged 
 iteration of candied humdrum, till one lays 
 aside the excess of sweetmeats. 
 
 But it is the eyes of Frau Von Stein which 
 proclaim her chief evangel from within 
 those unusually large, melting, lustrous eyes 
 swimming in a tidal sea of their own and 
 overflowing with an all-motherly tenderness 
 appeared to tap and ray out into sunlight the 
 very sources of creation. So she could start 
 that prophetic anticipative throb in Goethe. 
 Yet she undergoes transformation through 
 him as well ; one observer notices how she be- 
 
.4- 
 FRAU VON STEIN. 213 
 
 gins to get like Goethe, in speech and tone and 
 even physiognomy. The poet confesses that 
 she knew " every trait of my nature/' that 
 she could "read me with a look," that she 
 "trickled into my hot blood drops of re- 
 straint," and was able to stem "my wild 
 erratic course." 
 
 Still there was a slow but rounded evolu- 
 tion in this decennial companionship. At first 
 she would mother him in the way of right 
 courtly manners, teach him good behavior, 
 him the defiant stormer against all conven- 
 tions. This he feels now to be his deeper 
 call: to make himself harmonious with the 
 order about him. So he sings of her as the 
 one "who gives me back more purified the 
 purest of my impulses." She had read his 
 early romance and identifies him, saying "I 
 know not whether he or Werther is talking 
 to me. ' ' But with a few years the inner bond 
 becomes stronger, yea, indissoluble forever, 
 though still impossible to realize. Not only 
 heart but intellect grew together, they stud- 
 ied in common Natural Science, Spinoza's 
 philosophy, as well as literature, but her de- 
 mand for personal fidelity began to be more 
 exacting, yea tyrannical; her jealousies shot 
 bitter reproaches with imperious haughti- 
 ness. Goethe still took a free range with the 
 ladies in accord with his old habits, particu- 
 
214 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 larly was she jealous of Corona Schroter, 
 who had not the legal impediment of mar- 
 riage, nor the handicap of age, children, hus- 
 band. Indeed Goethe was already known to 
 have had too many transcended loves to be 
 without suspicion. Thus the fact became 
 ever present to him and to her: she could 
 not give like for like, though she demanded 
 his freedom for her unfreedom. The coun- 
 tercurrent could not help setting in: he was 
 a hopeless slave without any reward for his 
 slavery; the supreme fruition of love in the 
 Family could not take place, but it became 
 his damnation to stay in that inner grinding 
 hell of blasted hopes, ever being re-born only 
 to be accursed. Hence we begin to trace in 
 the later letters of the Decennium the care- 
 fully hidden yet growing resolution of Goe- 
 the to get rid of his bondage which had de- 
 veloped into an Inferno out of a former Par- 
 adise. 
 
 Still he covers up his changing soul with all 
 the more profuse display of emotional fire- 
 works. Even more wonderful and intricate 
 became his arabesques of imagery no won- 
 der that she began to suspect their full sin- 
 cerity. Moreover she had so encased Goe- 
 the in her proprieties that he had lost touch 
 with men, had become stiff, formal, silent, 
 quite the opposite of the genial Titan he 
 
FRAU VON STEIN. 215 
 
 once was.- Therewith too he had lost his 
 power of creativity; his great poetic plans 
 Faust, Meister, Tasso, Iphigenia, would not 
 unfold and organize themselves in his pres- 
 ent condition of servitude. His Genius 
 seemed bottled up, helpless and hopeless, 
 hardly alive but for some flutterings brief 
 and uncertain. He began to long for death, 
 he might after all enact his Werther to the 
 last deed of suicide such an existence could 
 not continue. Love the impossible was 
 slowly murdering him in the presence of the 
 Stein so he must flee. When at Rome look-- 
 ing backwards, he writes to her still: "Alas! 
 dear Lotte, you do not know what violence I 
 did, and am still doing to myself, and the 
 thought not to possess you is what grinds 
 and consumes me from the foundation, let mo 
 construe it as I may." 
 
 So he must flee for self recovery along all 
 his broken lines love, poetry, life itself. 
 Weimar must be left behind, Phileros has 
 finished another stage of his life's appren- 
 ticeship and can wait no longer without los- 
 ing his goal. But how about Frau Von Stein? 
 She also passes into a new development, as 
 already set forth; from being the poet's very 
 Muse, she changes into the vengeful sybil of 
 his fate, his mirroring oracle of ill to come 
 for ill done by him; re-enacting Cassandra, 
 
216 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 Ilium's frenzied but true prophetess of mis- 
 fortunes sent from the Gods for its misdeeds. 
 She belongs to quite the whole qourse of his 
 life, being to him the voice, often the vindic- 
 tive voice of retribution, once angelic in love, 
 now demoniac in hate, not without cause. 
 Thus she remains a very significant charac- 
 ter in his evolution, a character, however, 
 which he has not portrayed, but which he 
 must have often heard in the depths of his 
 soul responsively. Once the nurse of his good 
 genius, she is transformed into the scourge 
 of his evil genius. So she has her necessary 
 place in his complete life-poem, embracing 
 the total Goethe unwritten as well as written. 
 During these ten years, what about the hus- 
 band, Herr Stallmeister Von Stein? One can- 
 not help having some curiosity concerning 
 his part in the affair. For after all we are 
 human and must need ask, what would I have 
 done were I in his place! It seems that he 
 was not jealous, but accepted the relation 
 with a certain nonchalance if not approval. 
 He attended to his business with horses and 
 cattle, also he operated a factory, letting his 
 own boys alone, and leaving the superintend- 
 ance of their education chiefly to Goethe, who 
 with a paternal affection adopted one of 
 them, little Fritz. Perhaps w r e have the right 
 to hear the accommodating husband say to 
 
FRAU VON STEIN. * 217 
 
 his wife: "You deserve love which I have 
 not given, cannot give because I have it not. 
 I see you are not happy with me, but faith- 
 ful. So find your happiness where you may, 
 but leave to me, phlegmatic as I am, my pipe 
 and beer and stable." 
 
 The chief function of Frau Von Stein, then, 
 is to subordinate the wild poet from Frank- 
 fort to order, law, and outward convention, 
 at present especially useful to him as a court 
 official. But of course such training, only pos- 
 sible to him through love, goes far deeper 
 than mere ceremony ; it brings him to re-con- 
 struct not only externally in form but inter- 
 nally in spirit the whole existent institutional 
 world, now his prime need both as poet and as 
 man. Again the woman bears a creative part 
 in Goethe 's total development, and spurs him 
 to his highest production. 
 
 So Phileros is not going to be left behind 
 at Frankfort for the young girls but passes 
 with the poet to Weimar, as the most essen- 
 tial factor of his personality. There he en- 
 ters upon a new experience of his love-life, his 
 attachment to an .older wonran, who in her 
 tactful way mothered him, and through her 
 maternal power won his abiding devotion. It 
 is not the first nor the last time that the el- 
 derly matron enthralls the more youthful 
 lover. Thus Goethe was tethered for years 
 
218 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 with a love impossible of fruition at the age 
 fittest and most natural for wedlock, and 
 seemingly lost the opportune time for rightly 
 entering the family. 
 
 It is to be expected that anti-Phileros has 
 not been silent about this episode of the 
 greatest poet-lover that ever lived. Voices 
 of protesting women can be heard censuring 
 the formation of such a tie in the first place, 
 then blaming the man for breaking it off so 
 heartlessly. What a hubbub of opinions vi- 
 tuperating and defending both parties to the 
 affair! Very suggestive becomes the attack 
 of the vowed celibate at this point, assailing 
 all love and lovers in their supreme human 
 representative, Goethe. For such a celibate 
 is also a representative voicing a vast mass 
 of peoples, faiths, and institutions. The Jes- 
 uit Pater recognizes fully that love is the 
 central creative force of all Goethe's poetry, 
 as well as of his life. (Baumgartner's Goe- 
 the, I. 279, etc.) Phileros is slashed right and 
 left by the keen satire of his sacerdotal foe, 
 who is both strong-worded and well-informed. 
 In the outcome we hear the damnatory judg- 
 ment of the priest: The poet sought in the 
 love of woman what God alone can give. 
 
.4- 
 LITERARY PRODUCTION. 219 
 
 IV. 
 
 Literary Production. 
 
 There is no doubt that the literary writing 
 of Goethe during the Weimar Decennium 
 shows a sudden and all-round shrinkage. To 
 every reader who gets to the point of seeing* 
 and marking off the various stages of Goe- 
 the, this long paralysis of his deepest Genius 
 becomes a study of pivotal interest and con- 
 templation. It seems as if his sun of life 
 were in lasting eclipse. Still his creative 
 spirit did not die, it continued to throb out at 
 intervals in little spurts, and underneath the 
 strong outer repression the fires kept smoul- 
 dering, if not burning. In 1782, hence in the 
 central part of this Decennium, he thus 
 speaks of his own true vocation, after having 
 enjoyed the rare luxury of composing a lit- 
 tle bit of his Meister: " Properly I am born 
 for a writer. When I have written anything 
 well and fully up to my conception it gives 
 me a purer joy than otherwise. " But the 
 immortal Apollo in him has to serve out his 
 apprenticeship to the mortal Admetus, now 
 the deity's master. 
 
 We have already given what we deem the 
 inner necessity of this stage in the evolution 
 of the poet. He must recover from his re- 
 
220 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 volt against the established order; his defi- 
 ance of the Gods is no longer his poetic evan- 
 gel but submission to the law of overarching 
 Heaven ; he can now say : Let no mortal dare 
 measure himself with the Immortals as did 
 the Titan. Human limitation becomes his 
 theme of verse under many images. He lays 
 down in strong lines the bounds of humanity, 
 and actually celebrates the finitude of little 
 man. So he seems to be squeezing into little 
 Weimar and into the numberless littlenesses 
 of the life there ; the day is indeed filled with 
 microscopic duties which he has to perform 
 or go to the wall. How different was the at- 
 titude of Prometheus, the daring challenger 
 of the Olympians ! But now he glorifies the 
 Divine in his most exquisite verse, and exalts 
 Godhood to the world's supremacy in many 
 a fresh-wrought phrase which shows the new 
 insight at its deepest font. We might say, if 
 the expression be taken aright, that Goeth<3 
 got religion in this Weimar Epoch; that is, 
 he reached a religious world-view, in opposi- 
 tion to his Titanic protest against the Gods. 
 Undoubtedly he was by nature susceptible of 
 such a godful impress, as the influence of 
 Fraulein Von Klettenberg showed at Frank- 
 fort. Yet he was there the Heaven-stormer 
 in word and deed. But Anti-Titanism is now 
 his category practical and theoretical, in po- 
 
. 
 LITERARY PRODUCTION. 221 
 
 etry and prose; he can sing it and dance it 
 and stage it in many a little skit as well as 
 realize it in the time's business, arabesquing 
 it also with life's philosophy. 
 
 Still it must be acknowledged that just this 
 reaction against his Titanic power ham- 
 strings his literary creation in the large sense. 
 He, during these ten hibernating years, will 
 produce no Gotz or Weriher, not even a Cla- 
 vigo or Stella. His time breaks up into little 
 moments for little things ; he finds it impossi- 
 ble to organize and complete any great works. 
 He starts several and fiddles away at them 
 during odd hours; but they remain frag- 
 mentary and formless, unfinished and unfin- 
 ishable. He works at Tasso, Iphigenia, Meis- 
 ter, but they stay merely blocked out and 
 half-hewn, which he will afterward chisel 
 down into artistic shape under very differ- 
 ent conditions. Thus the Weimar Decennium 
 has also its torsos, but how diverse from 
 those of the Frankfort Quadrennium! Yet 
 we must remember that Goethe during this 
 Epoch was spending the whole energy of his 
 Genius upon another and more universal 
 work of art, that of the Institution itself; he 
 was laboring to transform Weimar into an 
 ideal organic whole, into the complete State. 
 Not till he had done that, did he feel that he 
 had won his Archimedean pou sto, from which 
 
222 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART FIRST. 
 
 he could move the world. So he submits for 
 ten long years to the grinding drudgery, to 
 the awful self-estrangement from his own 
 true calling, which often tears his soul to 
 very shreds till he has gained emancipation 
 for himself and his world. The social and po- 
 litical structure which he was building was 
 far greater than his Gotz or Werther, and 
 sapped his total creative energy, still Titanic 
 in its way; no literary organism, poem, dra- 
 ma, novel, could be quite so exacting or suck 
 up from the source of creation so much ge- 
 netic power. 
 
 He wrote, nevertheless, in moments of re- 
 laxation from his supreme task, many small 
 trifles to amuse the court and the town, op- 
 erettas, farces, comical interludes, masques. 
 These we cannot even register here, still less 
 estimate them, in their varying degrees of 
 ephemerality ; we may say, however, that 
 they are frequently tinged with his present 
 reaction and satirize his own former epoch, 
 that of Storm and Stress, and sometimes he 
 ridicules his own performances, Gotz and 
 Werther. For instance in his little drama 
 called the Triumph of Sentimentality he 
 passes judgment upon all Wertherean books, 
 and makes the judge shout out the decree: 
 "Into the fire with them!" So he scoffs at 
 his own shed snake-skin with an ironical self- 
 
LITERARY PRODUCTION. 223 
 
 damnation, which at least hints his present 
 spirit at Weimar. Still into the same holo- 
 caust the reader will be inclined to fling also 
 these petty insects of his ephemeral muse, 
 serving up to them their own negation. 
 
 There is one exception, however, to be 
 made to this trial by fire ; or rather there is 
 one kind of production in this very combus- 
 tible mass of literary frailty that the fires of 
 time have only brightened and tempered to 
 an indestructible duration. This is the lyrical 
 output of the Weimar Decennium. It would 
 seem that the very repression of his business 
 environment caused the purer and more 
 spontaneous upbursts of his imprisoned 
 Genius. We are free to say that these sud- 
 den and rather intermittent gushes of writ- 
 ten song are the finest specimens of this sort 
 that European Literature possesses. And 
 they are altogether the best that Goethe pro- 
 duced during his long life; they express his 
 concentrated Genius better than any form of 
 his art. If the All-Self ever uttered itself in 
 singing words, they are these. For while 
 they appeal to very particular, even personal 
 emotions, they have the unique power of an 
 universal consecration, being common to all 
 humanity. Short heart-bursts of sorrow and 
 joy, of love and longing, as if heaved up 
 from the world-soul. What is the mystery of 
 
224 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 these lyrics? Humanity lias gotten a voice 
 and sings German through Goethe. They 
 have their own music even when set to notes, 
 and the words hymn the soul's very melo- 
 dies/ 
 
 An answer to Frederick the Great's criti- 
 cism of German Literature and specially of 
 GotZy was written by Goethe, at Weimar, 
 doubtless with considerable vigor. It has, 
 however, disappeared, probably having been 
 destroyed by its author. The fact is signifi- 
 cant: the poet himself probably no longer 
 felt like defending his Titanism. We may 
 also suppose that his new respect for author- 
 ity caused him to look with disfavor upon his 
 own defence. Then the Duke of Weimar was 
 a relative of the Prussian King. So his Wei- 
 mar obedience suppresses his Frankfort re- 
 volt in a typical deed. 
 
 His interest in Natural Science begins de- 
 cidedly to be creative in this Decennium. 
 He discovers the intermaxillary bone, he 
 starts to recreate the vegetable kingdom 
 from an original type, and is led to many ob- 
 servations on Geology and Mineralogy by 
 his development of mining and agriculture. 
 A fragment on Nature belonging to these 
 studies shows his new conception of Nature, 
 very different from his sentimental efferves- 
 cences in Werther. Nature is now the all- 
 
THE LONGING FOR ITALY. 225 
 
 mothering, ever-producing principle, self- 
 generating without cease. "She has no 
 speech or discourse, but creates tongues and 
 hearts through which she feels and speaks. " 
 This hints of Goethe's lyrical fountain. Then 
 again he says, "Her crown is Love; only 
 through this can you get near her. ' ' He does 
 not quite say how; but probably Love har- 
 monizes the deepest dualism of Nature, 
 whose ultimate scope or push is thus to- 
 ward Love's unity. So Goethe tries to sum- 
 mon before himself Nature as a whole. 
 
 V. 
 
 The Longing for Italy. 
 
 Especially through the last half of the Wei- 
 mar Decennium we find traces in Goethe of 
 a deep discontent with his present lot. He 
 feels that he has fulfilled largely his mission 
 in bringing Weimar up to his ideal of a 
 State. He had also trained those who could 
 take his place in its administration. He has 
 risen to the point of having made himself un- 
 necessary, at least for a time. His pupil, the 
 Duke, after a ten years' education, he deems 
 to have graduated. This is well indicated by 
 a letter written by him in 1786 to Karl Au- 
 gust: "Your affairs at home are in good or- 
 
226 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART FIRST. 
 
 der; and I know that you will now allow me 
 to think of myself ; in fact you have often re- 
 quested me to do so. In the general business 
 of the State I certainly am not needed at 
 present, and my special duties I have so ar- 
 ranged that they will be fulfilled without me ; 
 indeed matters would run on the same, if I 
 were dead." This is hardly the case; still 
 we can discern in this act of self-obliteration 
 that he did wish to see the validity of his in- 
 stitutional deed tested. Will his Weimar 
 work of art persist in his absence has he in 
 it created something which will outlast his 
 days? Well, there it stands yet and we are 
 looking at now. 
 
 Moreover he had begun to feel the impos- 
 sibility of continuing his relation with Frau 
 Von Stein. It brought him many a jar out- 
 side and inside. Both the Duke and the 
 Duke's brother, Prince Constantine, had their 
 affairs of passion, causing domestic and even 
 political troubles which Goethe had to har- 
 monize. But how could he plead with them 
 not to do what he was doing? Did he not 
 himself set the example? Moreover he must 
 have had his pangs of conscience (as she had) 
 about the matter else he could hardly write 
 
 I am living for her sake ever 
 
 For whose sake to live I ought never. 
 
THE LONGING FOR ITALY. 227 
 
 But especially he had commenced to see 
 that she had come to stand in the way of the 
 full development of his Genius, although she 
 may at one time have evoked it and nour- 
 ished it by her sympathy. He realized that 
 her schooling was over and that he had paid 
 the fees; she was in reality a transcended 
 stage. Evidently those ' ' physico-moral evils 
 which plagued me in Germany and at last 
 made me useless " are largely connected with 
 his impossible love for Frau Von Stein. This 
 obscure allusion contained in a letter of his 
 to the Duke from Italy hints at least a phase 
 of his secret malady, which stirred imagina- 
 tion but brought no fruition. To be sure he 
 lets her down easily in his letters with many 
 tender outlooks on the future which are just 
 too sweet to be true, and which she herself 
 did not believe. But he is resolved to break 
 the fatal chain, and so without bidding her 
 good-bye or even letting her know his pur- 
 pose, he slips off one morning on the road to 
 Italy for which he had come to have a long- 
 ing of such intensity that it too was becoming 
 a disease. He declares that "for several years 
 I have not dared look at a Latin author or 
 regard anything that brought up a picture 
 of Italy without suffering the most terrible 
 pain. Had I not taken the resolution which 
 
228 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 I now am carrying out, I would have simply 
 gone to pieces and have become incapable of 
 anything. ' ' 
 
 Thus he looks upon Italy as the sole sana- 
 torium, which is to heal body and soul of 
 their tortures and to restore him to his true 
 vocation which he has lost. Still he had to 
 pass through and daringly wind up his Wei- 
 mar Decennium ere he could take the Italian 
 dip of regeneration. This he knew: we have 
 already watched him twice on St. Gotthard 
 gazing down into the classic South, then 
 turning away from the sight back to his 
 Northern home. He had not yet won his in- 
 stitutional world, which he could do only in 
 his native land. But the Weimar training is 
 now done, and again he exclaims: "the goal 
 of my most cherished longing, which filled 
 my whole soul with anguish was Italy. " 
 There he is to have a fresh baptism in the 
 spirit of the World's History which was en- 
 acted on that soil and uttered itself in the 
 noblest art and poetry as well as in the lofti- 
 est deed. His journey had and still has na- 
 tional significance; it was another Teutonic 
 migration to the classic world to win the an- 
 tique ideal and to take it up into the North- 
 ern culture. So Goethe's longing for Italy 
 may well be deemed racial, which, starting 
 with the old German barbarians and running 
 
THE LONGING FOR ITALY. 229 
 
 all through the Middle Ages down into the 
 modern world, becomes most strongly indi- 
 vidualized in the greatest Teutonic man, who 
 expresses it not only in the highest literary 
 form of his native tongue, but also in his 
 very Self, in his heart's deepest aspiration. 
 
 No poem has had a wider reading and sing- 
 ing than Mignon's song: "Knowest thou 
 the land?" It is the most intimate utterance 
 of the poet's longing for Italy, which he has 
 elevated into an " universal consecration," 
 since not only Teutonia, but all the rest of the 
 world have appropriated it. To the same 
 time belongs the deeply internal poem called 
 "The Mysteries" w r hich is a kind of repro- 
 duction of medieval Italy with her religion, 
 art and nature. The stanza is derived from 
 Tasso's ottava rima, known already to Goe- 
 the's boyhood. In like manner The Dedica- 
 tion is strongly Italianized in verse and mood 
 a poem which he prefixed to the edition of 
 his Works in 1786, which he got together and 
 gave to a publisher before starting for Italy. 
 Thus he collects all his writings of his First 
 Period, before making a start into the Sec- 
 ond Period, whose character he already fore- 
 feels. It is suggestive to observe that the 
 poet in this one fact of gathering all his 
 pieces up to date indicates the periodizing of 
 his own life. Indeed he already notes his dif- 
 
230 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 ferent stages, or the Epochs of this first great 
 Period as those of Weimar and Frankfort. 
 
 But now this Period has rounded itself out 
 to its conclusion in the poet's experience. Its 
 problem is the primal one of the rational 
 man: What signifies to me this transmitted, 
 established social order which has spiritu- 
 ally enveloped and largely controlled me 
 from birth! In its. Teutonic manifestation 
 Goethe has wrought through the problem; 
 but he is not satisfied, he feels the limit, he is 
 not universal, he has not fully come into his 
 total heritage, he is not all that man has 
 been, and cannot be at Weimar in his 
 bounded German environment/ The pivotal 
 psychological moment having arrived, he 
 clutches it with a sort of desperation and 
 bursts into another world. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Retrospect. 
 
 It is opportune at this point to take a 
 glance backward over the field already trav- 
 eled, noting especially its general outlines. 
 The Weimar Decennium now winds up, con- 
 taining the poet 's deeply formative discipline 
 during his first stay at Weimar. Too much 
 
.* 
 
 RETROSPECT. 231 
 
 slighted lias the present significant Epoch 
 been by the biographers of Goethe; indeed 
 we do not recall one of them who has even 
 understood the meaning of this somewhat 
 silent decade in the complete evolution of the 
 poet. To be sure it is largely an unwritten 
 part of his total life-poem ; that is, he has left 
 meager record of it in prose and verse ; still 
 it is a great canto of his entire song written 
 and acted, and hence must be set forth duly 
 to reveal the achievement of the man in his 
 wholeness. Fortunately the documents, even 
 if fragmentary, are sufficient for this pur- 
 pose. 
 
 Let it be noted again that the present Ep- 
 och bears in it a return to the First Epoch, 
 and thus rounds out into a totality of devel- 
 opment the entire Pre-Italian time. At the 
 start the youth was in general under the ex-' 
 ternal sway of prescription against which he 
 revolted in his Second Epoch at Frankfort, 
 that of his young-manhood. But at Weimar 
 he not only goes back and takes up the world 
 prescribed, but reconstructs it internally and 
 externally. Thus w r e may observe a finished 
 cycle of his evolution, which we have already 
 named a Period in the present case his 
 First Period made up of the three Epochs al- 
 ready designated. These taken together form 
 a process which is in its last analysis psych- 
 
232 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART FIRST. 
 
 ical, showing the three stages of the one basic 
 thought, namely the poet's relation to the 
 transmitted order in which he was born and 
 which he had to portray. Or, to repeat des- 
 ignations already specially employed: in the 
 First Epoch he Teutonized, in the Second he 
 Titanized, in the Third he institutionalized. 
 
 We should also observe that with the con- 
 clusion of the Weimar Decennium concludes 
 a Period, the first of the three into which his 
 entire life-poem falls. This we have labeled, 
 following Goethe's own authority, the Pre- 
 Italian Period, after which he passes into a 
 wholly new stage of his development. Thus 
 he keeps unfolding into one plane of life after 
 another without cessation till he seems to 
 embrace a fuller human experience than any 
 other recorded mortal. Such is the unique 
 'interest of his career, world-inclusive we feel 
 it to be, not only in extent but in depth. 
 
 Some, poets never get out of the stage of 
 protest, revolt, negation; they stay Titanic in 
 their denial, as did Byron and Shelley. Both 
 died young, and perhaps did not have time 
 enough to break through their egg-shell. Oth- 
 ers never actually pass into this negative pe- 
 riod, but remain innocently positive, like 
 Longfellow and many more. Others again 
 take an early dip in the Titanic brimstone but 
 get terrified and flee back to their first inno- 
 
RETROSPECT. 233 
 
 cent Paradise, as we may see in Wordsworth 
 and doubtless in Coleridge. Now it is the pe- 
 culiarity of Goethe that he takes up all stages 
 positive and negative, in his experience, 
 drains their contents, and then passes on to 
 the next Epoch in his evolution, " without 
 haste, yet without rest." 
 
 Thus we may deem his the completest and 
 concretest human life ; he goes through all its 
 grades without getting lodged in any one of 
 them, being at the same time laden with every 
 sort of employment. Diversified rays out his 
 work in multitudinous directions, yet unified 
 in one grand process all-comprehending, 
 which it is the fundamental object of his bi- 
 ography to unfold and to keep in view amid 
 the ever-scattering inrush of details. So 
 from this point of contemplation, which re- 
 gards life's varied content, his biography 
 suggests his universal character, though the 
 latter is more deeply imaged in the basic 
 process of his whole career, of which process 
 we have now concluded the First Period and 
 are ready to pass to the next. 
 
(1786-1809.) 
 
 By this caption we seek to emphasize the 
 fact that Goethe now passes into the Second 
 Period of the three which embrace his com- 
 plete life. It lasts some twenty-three years, 
 starting from his push for Italy till he begins 
 to turn back autobiographically upon his 
 early career, when he was hovering about his 
 sixtieth year, though this last transition can- 
 not be pinned down exactly to an annual 
 date, as it was not a sudden spurt but of slow 
 
 (234) 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 235 
 
 growth. The present Period, accordingly, 
 spans the activity of the fully ripened middle- 
 aged poet, from his thirty-seventh year to the 
 verge of old-age, and brings to fruitage what 
 are usually deemed to be his two greatest 
 books, his Meister's Apprenticeship, and his 
 First Part of Faust, the novel and the poem 
 of the highest reach of his Genius. These 
 are the towering summits above numerous 
 other lesser successes and also failures. Then 
 it should be added that this Period nearly at 
 its middle overarches the turn of the centur- 
 ies from the old one passing off to the new 
 one coming in with a mighty political up- 
 heaval, the French Revolution, which lies 
 back of this portion of Goethe 's life. France 
 was already in the first throes of her coming 
 eruption when the poet turned his back on 
 the North and pushed forward to Italy. 
 
 Thus we are brought face to face with the 
 most distinctive, most deeply trenched land- 
 mark of Goethe's entire career. Also it is, 
 let the fact be noted again, the dividing line 
 which he most often drew upon his work, and 
 of which he was himself profoundly con- 
 - vinced. The Journey to Italy may, therefore, 
 be said to have been the grand transit of his 
 Genius from one world to another. 
 
 Moreover it was the fulfilment- of a life- 
 time's longing. Already as a boy at home 
 
236 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 he heard much of Italy from his fa ther's lips, 
 and saw it in many pictured illustrations; 
 also at an early age he began to delve some- 
 what in its literature. But toward the last 
 of his Weimar years this longing became 
 pathological, and grew to be a painful mal- 
 ady, from which relief and cure could only 
 be obtained by letting it take its course. At 
 last he heard the hour strike when he must 
 make the pivotal turn, or give up hope of his 
 future career, possibly even of his existence, 
 if we may construe literally some of his 
 words. 
 
 I. It was a great act of separation, he often 
 calls it a birth, like a child taken from its 
 mother. He turned away from home, folk, 
 native land and tongue to another country, to 
 a strange people, speech, consciousness. He 
 crossed physically and spiritually the divid- 
 ing line between the new and the old civili- 
 zation, as he passed over the Alpine water- 
 shed down into Italy, moving from North to 
 South. Moreover it was a transition to a 
 different religious environment, from a Prot- 
 estant to a Catholic conception of man's des- 
 tiny, each of them in its way spirit-moulding 
 and world-building, even if Goethe in his per- 
 sonal view hardly acknowledged either. For 
 he then was seeking to reach back of Chris- 
 tendom in this Mediterranean itinerary, and 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 237 
 
 somehow commune with and make his own 
 antique Heathendom, which started Euro- 
 pean culture and once brought it to its fair- 
 est artistic flowering. This the poet would 
 appropriate in order to be the complete man 
 by being all that his race had been. 
 
 So Goethe is now to enter a strange world, 
 and therein to become estranged from his 
 own and from himself. His life-long relation 
 to his immediate environment of home, na- 
 tion, and consciousness he is to break through 
 and become a stranger in another order. 
 Such we may call his pivotal act of self- 
 estrangement (using an educational term), 
 by which he is to transcend his purely indi- 
 vidual selfhood and rise toward universality. 
 He quits his own and makes himself the par- 
 ticipant in another civilization, which also 
 belongs to the movement of total humanity. 
 For he has come to feel himself but a half- 
 man, and the problem is how can he rise to 
 be a whole man, and take up the full flower of 
 all human development into himself. As a 
 mere Teuton at Weimar he knows himself 
 only a fragment, and Weimar, yea Germany 
 itself, is but a fragment. So he has to take 
 flight to what he deems his other half that he 
 may integrate his own soul from its destroy- 
 ing scission. Therein he performs his cul- 
 minant deed of self-estrangement heroic if 
 
238 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 carried out to the full which he certainly 
 looked on as the masterstroke for his spirit's 
 salvation, as his way of reconcilement with 
 God, since otherwise he were surely damned. 
 And such is still his evangel. 
 
 Whom did he imitate? He saw that all 
 History, Civilization, Humanity had taken 
 that dip into the classic Greco-Roman time, 
 Why should not he? The World-Spirit once 
 took this Italian Journey in its terrestrial 
 round some centuries since, and why should 
 not its present supreme representative as 
 mouthpiece and reporter, namely the poet 
 Goethe, do likewise? At any rate he hears 
 the call from supernal sources, and resolves 
 to do the deed and then deliver the message. 
 To be sure he must not stick fast there, per- 
 manently caught in one only stage of evolu- 
 tion; he must also get out of it, and return 
 to his own, to his Weimar, but as a new man, 
 with another world born into his soul a 
 world created long ago yet which he must 
 recreate for himself, for his people, and for 
 his age. 
 
 II. In many an iteration repeated during 
 his later years, Goethe characterizes his Jour- 
 ney to Italy as a wholly new era of his life, 
 a veritable second birth. In this way he lays 
 the strongest emphasis upon the deep separa- 
 tion between his career before that event and 
 
. 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 239 
 
 afterwards. He looks back and names his 
 flight from Weimar as his Hegira truly pro- 
 phetic as that of Mahomet. He writes from 
 Italy to Herder, "I celebrate as a second 
 birth-day, as a true palingenesis the day on 
 which I entered Rome." A fresh activity 
 throbs up, old poetic plans revive, works 
 which he deemed dead and buried, begin to 
 rise from their graves and to insist upon a 
 regeneration. Thus the moribund poet with 
 his deceased children of the brain undergoes 
 resurrection in Italy. Says he of that last 
 act of his before setting out for the South: 
 "When I resolved to print my fragments, I 
 looked upon myself as dead." One great 
 Period of his life was dead, but not his life 
 itself; he was simply shedding one stage of 
 his evolution, and advancing to another. In 
 August, 1787, he writes from Rome : "I have 
 passed through one leading epoch (Haupt- 
 epoche), completely ended it, and have become 
 almost another man from what I was a year 
 ago." 
 
 Thus Goethe has marked in many deep- 
 toned passages the separation, we might call 
 it the chasm between what we here have des- 
 ignated as his First and his Second Periods. 
 When he set out for Italy he was thirty-seven 
 years old ; 'he had just brought to a close the 
 the Weimar Decennium and with it the entire 
 
240 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 cycle of his early career which we periodize 
 as the First. But the Second Period now 
 opens, which embraces what we may deem 
 his middle age, lasting more than a score 
 of years longer, when a new Period will dawn 
 and unfold. Let the reader then note with 
 due attention, that these divisions of Goethe 's 
 life, both the greater and the less, are his 
 own, being repeatedly enforced by himself 
 as supremely necessary, if we wish to under- 
 stand the man's personality. We may well 
 question if any great writer is as deeply and 
 suggestively retrospective as Goethe; he 
 sought to know himself in his past as the 
 chief fact of his present personal existence, 
 and to attain a full self-consciousness of his 
 own career. Hence we shall often catch him 
 measuring, evaluating, and delimiting the 
 ground over which he has gone and the work 
 which he has done, making himself his own 
 life's careful surveyor. 
 
 III. The question, therefore, comes up all 
 the more pressingly, What did Goethe actu- 
 ally get from his Journey to Italy? First of 
 all, we may take his own statement of his 
 case, evidently thrown off at random in a 
 letter to the Duke from Rome: "The main 
 purpose of my Journey was to cure me of the 
 physico-moral evils which tormented me in 
 Germany, and then to quench my hot thirst 
 
. 
 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 241 
 
 for true art." The first of these reasons as 
 a private confession the Duke probably un- 
 derstood, if we do not ; as to the second rea- 
 son, his desire to come to an inner clearness 
 about art, his book on Italy is a continuous 
 commentary upon it. Goethe had reached 
 such a point in his cultural development that 
 he had to appropriate unto himself the pecu- 
 liar expression of man civilized which is 
 known as the artistic. Moreover he had to 
 go to the land where this unique evolution 
 took place, or which became its center, and 
 which continues to possess its historic re- 
 mains. Italy was a museum of antiquity 
 where still the ancient forms of beauty could 
 be seen, and where the old civilization could 
 be inhaled directly from the atmosphere in 
 which it was born. The chief instinct which 
 drove Goethe to Italy, in our opinion, was 
 that he must now take up into himself all 
 that his race had been in the way of culture. 
 He is to become the whole man, the individual 
 epitome of total humanity, and not merely a 
 German. Later we shall find that even Eu- 
 rope cramps him too much, and he cannot 
 stay European, but he will betake himself, 
 not in person but in imagination, to the 
 Orient, to Persia, to India, even to China. So 
 this desperate break for Italy, for the great 
 past of Rome and also of Greece, is a mighty 
 
242 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 sweep of his Genius toward the universal 
 man, properly the ideal goal of us all. To 
 be sure he will not and cannot lose his Teu- 
 tonic substrate of character and language in 
 this transfiguration into universality. 
 
 At Rome he attempts in a letter to desig- 
 nate the grand change in himself by a special 
 category, which he calls solidity: " Really 
 nothing petty can be found here. When I 
 turn back into myself, as people do so readily 
 at every opportunity, I discover a feeling 
 which gives me infinite joy so that I dare even 
 express it. Whoever earnestly looks around 
 here and has eyes to see, must become solid 
 he must get a conception of solidity which 
 never before had for him any such vitality. 
 The spirit is stamped with a fresh efficiency, 
 and reaches earnestness without being dessi- 
 cated, attaining a steadied nature yet ever 
 joyous." This curious passage of self -in- 
 spection (which we have freely translated 
 according to our view of its purport) hints 
 the inner transformation of the man commun- 
 ing with the mighty presence of a greatness 
 which is indeed past, but whose spirit still 
 hovers over the spot where it was once the 
 supreme living reality. Such a spirit the trav- 
 eler Goethe will take up and make over into 
 his own, and thus become a solid character, 
 no longer foggy, flighty, ephemeral, suddenly 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 243 
 
 explosive. No longer the volcanic Titan can he 
 be, whom he now sees to have constituted only 
 a fragment of the great Whole, and a negative 
 fragment at that. The Heaven-stormer of 
 the Frankfort Quadrennium is himself as- 
 cending into glorified Olympus, and becoming 
 as one of its serene Gods in the happy classic 
 land. And the paralyzed poet of the Wei- 
 mar Decennium is fledging afresh his wings 
 of song, is getting creative once more in a 
 second juvenescence, being dipped in the orig- 
 inal fountain of the world's poetry and art. 
 He felt himself already an old man at the 
 end of his First Period, but now he rebounds 
 with the elasticity of youth again in its primal 
 upspring toward creation. So he exclaims: 
 "My renascence, which keeps working me 
 over from within outward, goes on ferment- 
 ing. " A changed world-view he spies in 
 himself, "which this life- here in a wider 
 world has instilled into me. " Then he makes 
 the pivotal confession: "Verily it is my 
 ethical sense along with my artistic sense 
 which is undergoing the great renewal." 
 Here we dare interpret that the insight is now 
 dawning upon the poet that the world of in- 
 situtions, the true ethical world, is the basis 
 of all right life as well as of all right poetry. 
 Hardly can his words mean the narrow moral 
 view of the universe, to which way of think- 
 
244 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ing he was always averse, probably too 
 much so. 
 
 At any rate, we may affirm that Goethe is 
 again attending a University, not that of 
 Leipzig or Strassburg, as he once did; we 
 may deem it the University of the World and 
 the World's History, which in his time was 
 located at Rome, and still is to be sought 
 there in many of its unique branches. In this 
 sense he is going back to his youth, and 
 starts a curriculum of studies, whereof we 
 read not a few details in his book on Italy. 
 But the main fact is that this University was 
 a true University, true to its name and right 
 purpose which is to universalize the man, not 
 simply to specialize him into thousandfold 
 knowledges, but into the one supreme, all- 
 embracing, all-organizing knowledge. "No 
 such thing possible, " cries out our time's 
 skepticism and pessimism, portentous prod- 
 ducts largely of our modern University train- 
 ing. Goethe's Italian book becomes thus a 
 work of great significance to-day, being the 
 record of the struggles of a student at the 
 World's University, located at the heart of 
 the World's History, whose essence he is 
 striving amid all his wanderings and caprices 
 to appropriate. 
 
 Hence it comes that his stay will be some- 
 what prolonged. At first he intended to dash 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 245 
 
 through two thousand years of the Time- 
 stream at its highest tide in a few months 
 many a modern tourist winds up the whole 
 matter in one or two weeks, which may be 
 better than mere zero, but usually is not 
 much more. Very different in this regard 
 was Goethe, who could not relax his desper- 
 ate grapple with the University of Civiliza- 
 tion till he had won possibly its heart's 
 secret, or at least some of its profoundest 
 lore which he could take home with him and 
 realize at his leisure. So he puts off again 
 and again his fixed day of departure, till al- 
 most two years have sped away. Finally, 
 on the 23rd day of April, 1788, he quits Rome, 
 passing out by the Porta del Populo, which 
 he had entered October 29th, 1786, and winds 
 down the Flaminian Way gradually out of 
 sight of the Eternal City, which had given 
 him such a lesson of its eternity. His imme- 
 diate associates have handed down the state- 
 ment that every day for two weeks before 
 his departure he wept like a child. He com- 
 pared himself to ancient Ovid, who was ban- 
 ished from Rome by Augustus, and poured 
 forth his lament in an 'Elegy (Tristia) as he 
 quit the city on a moonlighted evening. Long 
 afterwards the old Goethe, pensively retro- 
 spective, could say to Eckermann: "Com- 
 pared to my state of mind in Rome, I have 
 
246 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 never been really glad since/' Such then 
 was his exalted mood, the mood of a human 
 being who is daily sweeping toward the goal 
 of his full humanity, and feels the ever ex- 
 panding joy of rising to the universal man. 
 So we may understand another old-age 
 declaration of his: "I can say that only 
 in Rome have I experienced what it is to be 
 properly a Man (Mensch)." 
 
 IV. And now we have to ask, What part 
 of the total Eoman heritage did Goethe take 
 unto himself with the deepest and most inti- 
 mate love? For he by no means cared for all 
 of it equally ; not a little of it he passed with 
 an empty and silent stare; and some of it 
 he rejected downright, even with a Mephisto- 
 phelean scoff. There is no question that 
 Rome the antique was his darling, with what 
 had been left of her art, even if chiefly bor- 
 rowed or imitated from that of Hellas. To- 
 day the traveler finds on the same spot of 
 ground three great Romes layered chrono- 
 logically, the ancient, the medieval and the 
 modern ; the last as the capital of new united 
 Italy had not yet been born when Goethe 
 threaded the narrow Roman streets. But 
 medieval Rome was there present in full dom- 
 ination, spiritual and temporal; but to it he 
 paid hardly enough attention to show his 
 aversion. Undoubtedly he went the round 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIO&. 247 
 
 of the multitudinous churches, old and new, 
 but with no devotion in his soul, yea with no 
 hearty appreciation of their art. The fact 
 is, Goethe was fundamentally in an anti- 
 Christian, heathen mood at Rome, and his 
 divine associates were the old Gods. He had 
 not yet evolved into the Middle Ages whose 
 expression in all its forms, in religion, art, 
 and institutions, were repugnant to his pres- 
 ent bent and deepest instinct. So it comes 
 that of the three great historic Presences on 
 the soil of Rome he loved only the ancient one, 
 and sought to build its shrine in his heart. 
 
 That is, Sculpture, the art of the ancient 
 world was really the profoundest object of 
 his aspiration, we might say, of his venera- 
 tion. It was that which he would penetrate 
 both with his feeling and his intellect, nay, 
 he would like to become its creative, or rather 
 re-creative artist. Undoubtedly he dallied 
 much with drawing and painting, and brooded 
 over their artistic meaning for his culture 
 and even for his vocation in life. He had 
 many dealings with artists, especially Ger- 
 man artists, who often gave a temporary 
 splash of their color to his soul. Still he 
 would sink back upon the Antique as his artis- 
 tic bed-rock, and seek to transmute himself 
 into the consciousness which could create 
 such a world of beautiful forms. 
 
248 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 And to his own guild of poets, what was 
 his attitude? We turn the leaves of his book 
 and are astonished to find how little the great 
 medieval sunburst of Italian poetry shone 
 into his vision. Nothing of Petrarch or Bocac- 
 cio, both of whom would naturally be thought 
 as very attractive to our Phileros, the lover 
 of Love. Nothing of that shining melodious 
 band of romantic poets headed by Boiardo 
 and Ariosto, with their endless frisking of 
 fancies ; only Tasso, known to him from boy- 
 hood, seems to have occupied him seriously, 
 since Tasso, the poet at the little court of 
 Ferrara, had gradually grown into a type of 
 himself Goethe at the little court of Wei- 
 mar, soon to be set forth in one of his deep- 
 est-keyed dramas. But what about the great- 
 est, most universal poet of them all, Dante, 
 writer of one of the Literary Bibles of the 
 race ? Some Italian admirer appears to have 
 asked him in company, whereupon follows the 
 explosion: "I have never been able to un- 
 derstand how anybody could occupy himself 
 with such poetry : the Inferno is simply hor- 
 rible, the Purgatorio ambiguous, the Para- 
 diso tedious. " So the one world-poet judges 
 the other; but Goethe in his present heathen 
 mood could only be repelled by the intensely 
 Christian poet. But let it be noted that 
 Goethe in later life will make some headway 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 249 
 
 probably never much toward the appre- 
 ciation of Dante, especially through the 
 medium of the new German translation of 
 the Divine Comedy by Streckfuss. In a 
 famous soliloquy near the beginning of the 
 Second Part of Faust he adopts the Dantean 
 terza rima with its peculiar metrical music, 
 and at the close of the same poem some of 
 the horribly infernal imagery of Dante is 
 summoned before us not without a satirical 
 streak. But the most significant reproduc- 
 tion of the Dantean measure and conception 
 is in Goethe's short poem, entitled "Reflec- 
 tions on Schiller's Skull," which skull hav- 
 ing been dug up from its resting-place in the 
 grave, was brought to Goethe for inspection 
 and identification. Nothing in Dante is more 
 ghoulish and skin- shiver ing than this grue- 
 some incident, in which classic Goethe, now 
 also taking a short dip into the realms of the 
 dead like Dante, gives utterance to his philos- 
 ophy of bones which he had much handled in 
 his osteological studies. In grim Teutonic 
 humor and grisly grotesquery the whole situ- 
 ation outstrips Dante, who never quite 
 reaches the lofty apex of Goethe here fond- 
 ling the death's head of his dearest friend and 
 exclaiming: "How am I worthy of holding 
 thee in my hand!" And rising out of this 
 bone-house the Teutonic poet visions a grand 
 
250 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 revelation of God (God-Nature is the Spino- 
 zan name here) wherein again he is like 
 Dante in all his unlikeness. So much for the 
 peculiar relation between these two supreme 
 masters in the poetic realm ; but we must add 
 that Goethe's appreciation of the two other 
 world-poets, Homer and Shakespeare, was of 
 the highest ; in their case he felt the deep un- 
 derlying kinship which begat him and 
 twinned him with the supreme Parnassian 
 brotherhood of the ages. But Italy did not 
 reveal to him the poet of all its poets, ancient 
 or modern. 
 
 Was Goethe, then drawn to no poetry on 
 the Italian soil? Undoubtedly, but it seems 
 to have been chiefly ancient Roman verse and 
 small verse at that; little Propertius took 
 strong hold of him, and to the audacious ob- 
 scenities of spicy Martial he confesses, along 
 with the amatory daring of Ovid. This in- 
 fluence he will carry back home with him and 
 there reproduce. Big rugged Eome anciently 
 was a contrast with her petty pretty poetry- 
 somewhat like America at present. And 
 even this old Roman literature was the 
 moon's reflection of the Hellenic sun; Greece 
 was the original fountain of all Roman art 
 and literature to which Goethe appears so 
 devoted. 
 
 In like manner the sculpture which the 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 251 
 
 Northern pupil so diligently studied was not 
 original, but copied or imitated from the 
 Greek masterpieces. He was still in the 
 swaddling-clothes of Winkelmann, a great 
 man indeed, but a greater beginner who has 
 trained his pupils, though lesser men, to 
 modify, and even to reverse many of his judg- 
 ments. On the whole, then, Goethe at Rome 
 never saw real Greek art, but only its later 
 Roman reflection. Still his enthusiasm would 
 effervesce beyond all bounds. Thus he speaks 
 of the Juno Ludovici, a copy, or it may be, 
 a copy of copy: "This was my first love in 
 Rome. No words can give an idea of it. It 
 sings like a song of Homer." In a similar 
 manner he praised the Zeus Otricoli, which 
 modern criticism has so belittled. But recent 
 archaeology has gone to the other extreme, 
 and has underestimated the worth of these 
 Roman copies and reproductions. The study 
 of the Elgin marbles, taken from the Par- 
 thenon, has developed a new standard for 
 sculpture unknown to Goethe. 
 
 Still he knew that this whole world of 
 Roman art and literature was derivative from 
 ancient Hellas. But he seems almost to have 
 preferred such a copy to the original. These 
 Greek forms were really exiles in Rome and 
 showed the fact in many a little turn and 
 transformation. Their silent sigh for their 
 
252 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PARr SECOND. 
 
 native land can still be heard by the sympa- 
 thetic visitor who will stop and listen. But 
 somehow Goethe did not hear it ; or if he did, 
 he held aloof from following it to its source. 
 So he turned away from a tour to Greece 
 when he had the opportunity. Count Von Wai- 
 deck gave him an invitation to cap his Italian 
 with an Hellenic Journey. But he declined, 
 and thus he never saw the landscape of 
 Greece and her peculiar environment of 
 Nature; he never got a view of the noblest 
 Greek statuary, genuine works of Phidias, 
 the greatest sculptor of all time, which were 
 then still to be seen in the pediment of the 
 Parthenon. And from the supreme examples 
 of Greek architecture at Athens he averted 
 his eyes, satisfying himself with a brief trip 
 to Sicily, once colonized from Greece. Yet 
 the chief purport of his Italian Journey was 
 that he might be baptized in and be regener- 
 ated by Greek art. To our mind the decision 
 seems so strange, so contradictory of his 
 deepest bent that we have tried to probe to 
 the bottom of it. 
 
 Dismissing his fear of sea-sickness, of 
 which he had a dreadful attack during his 
 voyage to Sicily, and shoving aside various 
 other determents and inconveniences which 
 can be imagined, we believe that Goethe in 
 Italy preferred Hellas Romanized to the act- 
 
GOETHE 1 8 MIDDLE PERIOD. 253 
 
 ual genuine Hellas itself. In the first place, 
 the latter was farther off from him both in 
 space and in spirit. Then he may have felt 
 the need of a mediator like Rome who had 
 already done what he was trying to do had 
 appropriated Greek art and culture. Little 
 Athens was too like little Weimar which he 
 had just left, and had in a way transcended. 
 He would follow Borne, which had universal- 
 izednot only Greece but the world. Already 
 we have noticed that the deepest trend of 
 Goethe in this Italian Journey was toward 
 universality; he would rise to be the race- 
 embracing man. Therein he felt his ultimate 
 kinship with Borne, which in its sphere had 
 risen to be the great World-State of antiquity 
 out of a little City-State on the banks of the 
 Tiber. No Greek Commonwealth had dpne 
 the like; they all showed themselves unable 
 to rise beyond their limits institutionally. So 
 Goethe longingly sought Hellas, but he sought 
 it through Kome, not through itself. Only 
 Borne the universal could universalize him, 
 not the individualistic Hellas. Nor in his 
 present mood could he feel much inner incli- 
 nation toward the history of the typical 
 Greek City-State with its democratic bent. 
 Politically he never did like Athens, creative 
 center of Greek art and poetry and history. 
 Thus Goethe amid all his Hellenism and 
 
254 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 classic Heathenism never poetized Greece 
 from actual observation and experience; he 
 preferred to take it through its Eoman trans- 
 mutation, as more congenial to his present 
 stage of development. Still through this 
 medium he tapped the Hellenic fountain-head 
 and made it flow into Teutonic speech, so that 
 in his classic modern reproductions he ap- 
 pears a greater and more original poet than 
 any of his Roman prototypes, not even ex- 
 cepting Virgil. 
 
 V. Curiously significant is the fact that 
 Goethe often speaks of this journey to Italy 
 as if it were a return to his own ; ' i once more 
 at home in this world/' he cries, "and no 
 longer an exile. ' ' He had never been during 
 life in that land of the sun, but the farther 
 South he went, the more he felt that he had 
 been there before, and that he was simply 
 coming back. Thus a new experience kept 
 fleeting through his soul dimly, that of a for- 
 mer state, in which he was an inhabitant of 
 the Mediterranean world, whither he has now 
 returned for a while to take a fresh dip in 
 its primeval fountain of human evolution. 
 He has compared himself to a somnambulist, 
 when composing in an exalted mood ; he some- 
 how went off into another state unconscious, 
 yet resembling the activity of sleep. And 
 during this Italian Journey he seemed in this 
 
.4- 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 255 
 
 somnambulistic condition; he often felt him- 
 self half adream, another former life floated 
 around him, a sense of pre-existence kept 
 weaving through his sense of existence. Thus 
 his poetic imagination would literally fling 
 him back into the antique past as an actual 
 denizen, a re-incarnation of his very self- 
 hood he weened to be taking place, so often 
 does he allude to his new birth, celebrating 
 even what he calls his second birth-day at 
 Eome, now more deeply significant to him 
 than his first birth-day at Frankfort. Thus 
 by his intense aspiration he was wrought up 
 to the height of realizing the old classic world 
 as an actual presence here and now, so that 
 he brought back the pre-existent to re-exist 
 in himself by a poetic metempsychosis. And 
 is not some such thing the chief fruit of a 
 visit to the classic land to-day? Can you 
 transmigrate yourself backward and become 
 an old Greek or an old Roman, and thus re- 
 incarnate the soul of the World's History, 
 of which they were once the lofty builders'? 
 And so it comes that Goethe reveals himself 
 a typical man performing a typical journey 
 to the original fountains of human culture 
 and civilization. 
 
 Impressive is the attempt of Goethe to take 
 up the entire classic art-world into his arms, 
 or into his brain and carry it off. He worked 
 
256 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 at old coins and their meaning, he studied 
 gems and vases, he drew and modeled; he 
 would become a new creator of the antique 
 expression, he sought to be sculptor, painter, 
 architect. The mighty presence of Roman 
 antiquity so overpowered him that he became 
 confused for a while about his true vocation 
 in life, over which he had always had some 
 waverings. Was he to be -an artist? Too old 
 for one "thing, but chiefly his true genius lies 
 in another field. So at last we hear the re- 
 gretful confession: " Every day it becomes 
 clearer to me that I am properly born to be 
 a poet, ' ' that being his native art ; ' ' from my 
 longer stay in Rome I must henceforth seek 
 this advantage that I renounce the practice 
 of the plastic arts." Still he did not even 
 after he returned to Weimar; so easily he 
 could not renounce so fond a hope, and for 
 many years he kept up a desultory dabbling 
 with the thought and thing. 
 
 It must not be imagined that the journey 
 to Italy did not have its drawbacks. It 
 blunted, yea stunted his perception for any 
 other kind of art except the classic. Espe- 
 cially the Gothic, which he once so admired 
 in the Strassburg minster, he flung under 
 his feet with contempt. Hence he showers 
 derision upon the Doge's Palace at Venice, 
 and sneers at his own former unformed self 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD* 257 
 
 and its likings. Most striking is his total neg- 
 lect of the unique Gothic Church of St. Fran- 
 cis at Assisi with its epochal frescos, while 
 he pours out his enthusiasm for what was 
 once a Roman temple, small and not excellent 
 of its kind. So petty becomes his judgment 
 at times that we think it must be in great 
 Goethe a little affectation. But the narrower 
 his outlook, the intenser it surges into and 
 through the classical channel. Christian Italy 
 with its art he spurns on the whole ; it is not 
 for him, at least not now. And the mighty 
 expression of the Greco-Roman world in His- 
 tory he hardly touches upon. He seems to 
 know nothing of its great historians. Indeed 
 during his entire life it must be acknowl- 
 edged that Goethe was defective in the his- 
 toric sense. It is true that in one of his let- 
 ters he says that since arriving at Rome he 
 has recovered his enjoyment of History. But 
 of such enjoyment we hear little afterwards, 
 except somewhat of the History of Art. He 
 also declares that Rome is the right spot for 
 studying Universal History, with which 
 statement the study in his case seems to have 
 come to an end. 
 
 Noticeable also is his cessation of lyrical 
 productivity in Italy, compared with that of 
 Weimar and Frankfort. Why did such a 
 deeply spontaneous strain of his soul-life dry 
 
258 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 up so suddenly? This too lay in his changed 
 mood and education. The lyrical gush is sud- 
 den, small, particular and of the moment; 
 but Goethe's Italian bent was toward the 
 Universe and the Universal, as already indi- 
 cated. Little limited Weimar and his con- 
 finement there would spurt forth into brief 
 snatches of songs of surpassing intensity and 
 beauty. But the Eoman world released his 
 inward pressure, which is the condition of 
 the throbbing lyrical jet of utterance, and 
 gave him its ocean to flow into and be lost. 
 Still the Italian time is not wholly without 
 pretty singing shreds though few and not of 
 first import. 
 
 It is well enough to reflect that the spirit- 
 ual transformation in Italy was not so sud- 
 den as it seems on the surface, it merely came 
 to a head there after many antecedent throes, 
 and long preparation. It is true that he 
 never was much of a classical scholar, espe- 
 cially his Greek had a crick in its back which 
 had often to be doctored before it would 
 march to a tune. But all the better he caught 
 the spirit of the classic age by not being 
 swamped in its Teutonic erudition. Full- 
 fledged Hellenists like Voss complained of his 
 violation of the niceties of Greek scholarship. 
 Goethe's aim indeed was not literal transla- 
 tion or imitation, but a spiritual transfusing 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 259 
 
 of the Greek world into the modern. Wherein 
 he has surpassed any other European poet. 
 Already at Frankfort he was Hellenizing, and 
 he employed Pindaric rhythms with a living 
 power. The free swing of rhymeless irregu- 
 lar measures is found in some of the finest 
 lyrics of the Weimar Epoch. He was Whit- 
 manizing nearly a century before Whitman. 
 In his own view, however, he was Pindariz- 
 ing, going back to ancient Hellas. Nor must 
 we forget that in the parental home the old 
 Counsellor Goethe was forever recurring in 
 his talk to his days in Italy, over which his 
 dry, pedantic precision would show signs of 
 liquefying. Pictures of Italy and its mas- 
 ters abounded in the household, and books 
 about the subject stood on the library shelves. 
 And it was the one thing which his father was 
 always urging him to do : take a trip to Italy 
 before you are too old. Even Goethe himself, 
 when at last he reached Italy, could sigh forth 
 the lament: "Why not earlier?" This was 
 in a letter to his mother as if in recognition 
 and memory of his father, who never saw his 
 son taking the oft-advised Italian Journey, 
 having died in 1782. And during the Weimar 
 Epoch he started practicing himself in hexa- 
 meters and in the elegiac stanza, which after 
 his return from the South he employed for 
 so many subjects. Thus in many a little 
 
260 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 throb he preluded his classical time before 
 he started for Italy. 
 
 VI. In spite of his manifold occupations, 
 and his self-scattering over multitudinous 
 studies he tried always to do too much he 
 still clung to the deepest strand of his being, 
 the poetic, and unfolded it in some of his most 
 permanent literary works Egmont, Iphig- 
 enia, and Tasso, and even Faust, though this 
 last Teutonic poem resented in its every fibre 
 his present bent, and refused to be trans- 
 formed after the classic model. So at Borne 
 he could write the wildest scene in the whole 
 sweep of Faust, namely, The Witches' 
 Kitchen, in a kind of Gothic reaction against 
 Classicism.Than this no circumstance is more 
 significant of the double-natured poet: the 
 dark spectral witch-world of the North lay- 
 ered deepest in the soul of the Teutonic 
 Genius bursts up and insists on utterance 
 right in the midst of the clear sunlit sculptur- 
 esque forms of the Olympians. How could 
 he help it? It is in him, in his folk, and in 
 their art and poetry. That witch-scene, how- 
 ever, was but one passing spurt. He cannot 
 finish his Faust, even its First Part, in Italy ; 
 he must wait till his flood-tide of classicism 
 has fallen a good deal in the lapse of years. 
 
 Hardly has he touched the soil of Italy 
 when he feels its creative effect. His old 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 261 
 
 fragments of great works, reaching back to 
 the Frankfort Epoch revive in him, and 
 march in thought toward completion. As he 
 rolled through the mountains in his stage- 
 coach, the scheme of The Wandering Jew 
 came up to him vividly, and he dreamed it 
 out to its conclusion, which, however, he 
 failed to set down in black and white. What 
 peculiar experience could have brought up 
 that theme? He does not say, but one may 
 think of him in his present anti-Christian 
 mood, as represented in the Jewish scoffer 
 at the crucifixion. A negative subject for 
 him at best ; no wonder he finally dropped it. 
 Far deeper-searching is the fact that his 
 Iphigenia began to dance before his imagina- 
 tion and to insist upon a new birth here along 
 with his own. At Weimar he had shaped her 
 drama in prose, and it had been acted; but 
 that form of her will never do now ; the whole 
 must be flung into this Italian melting-pot 
 and poured over, giving her a new classic 
 vesture in verse. But one asks why does the 
 story of the fate of Iphigenia rise up just now 
 with such a co-ercive power of expression! 
 Essentially the Greek ideal woman has been 
 banished to a barbarous land where she is 
 serving as priestess to a non-Greek world, 
 say the Teutonic. So a fair image of all 
 Greek culture hovers before him who may be 
 
262 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 said to be seeking Iphigenia just now in his 
 Journey. But another subtle psychical 
 fact begins to surge through him: an Iph- 
 igenia at Delphi seems for the nonce to sup- 
 plant the Iphigenia at Tauris. So he ex- 
 claims: "But what happened! The spirit 
 led before my imagination the argument for 
 the Iphigenia at Delphi, and I had to work 
 it out." Why? again we interrogate. Such 
 a theme accords with Goethe's deepest mood, 
 hinting from afar that he hag- been in separa- 
 tion from his own world, born in exile as it 
 were, and now he is returning to his true 
 home in classic lands. So his ideal in the 
 shape of Iphigenia cannot stay longer at 
 Tauris in the non-classic North, but must re- 
 turn to Greece, yea to the very center of spir- 
 itual Greece, to Delphi. There was also an 
 ancient legend to this effect. Thus Iphige- 
 nia 's return had its parallel to Goethe's 
 return, both having been separated from their 
 own right world. So the poet, journeying 
 Southward, feels his new kinship, and starts 
 to mythologizing the same in Greek forms. 
 He writes in a letter of this time : "It is in- 
 credible to what extent I have been led to 
 basic conceptions of life and art during the 
 last eight weeks. " He then tells of a plan 
 for a drama upon the wanderer Ulysses, who 
 also is returning home "to sunny Ithaca and 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 263 
 
 prudent Penelope/ 7 Such a theme likewise 
 springs up in tune with, his present mood of 
 being the wanderer restored to his spiritual 
 home. Many were his struggles for expres- 
 sion, but out of them all rose three works of 
 permanence, Egmont, Iphigenia at Tauris, 
 Tasso. In fact, all his classic mythical knowl- 
 edge seems to be undergoing a peculiar meta- 
 morphosis into himself, and starts to being 
 transmuted into his own life-experience, espe- 
 cially this present one of Italy. 
 
 With this entrance to the classic land and 
 its ancient art, there takes place a perma- 
 nent personal assimilation, both in character 
 and in external manner, to his ideal. He be- 
 comes distinctly what is known as the Olym- 
 pian Goethe, his personality changes as well 
 as his style of writing in accord with his 
 world-view; his very look turns Zeus-like. 
 No wonder he kept the head of Zeus Otricoli 
 before him in his bed-chamber for early and 
 late contemplation. His friends at Weimar 
 after his return complained that he was not 
 the same man. Well, in one sense he was 
 not; he had sloughed off his old integument, 
 and showed the fact externally and intern- 
 ally. 'The truth is he was no longer a German 
 of Germany, but a German of the whole world, 
 and now he begins to write not simply Ger- 
 man, but universal literature. Whence arose 
 
264 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 great complaint of his lack of patriotism, and 
 of his unwillingness to stay cooped up in the 
 Teutonic pale. Still to-day we hear the same 
 objections from his recent German biogra- 
 phers, some of whom would absolutely cut 
 out of his career this classic tendency repre- 
 sented by the Journey to Italy as un-German 
 and unfaithful to the Fatherland Germany 
 being now over all, indeed just the All. 
 
 With this change was coupled a change in 
 his style of writing. He could no longer com- 
 pose in the manner of Gotz and Werther, the 
 immediate upburst was toned down to classic 
 self-control even in the wildest passion. The 
 result was at first a great disappointment in 
 his German public; the national in him has 
 risen to be universal through Italy, and the 
 neo-Teutonic has evolved into the antique- 
 Hellenic, of course through the Eoman chan- 
 nel. Still this was the mightiest necessity of 
 him and of his time, yea of his people too 
 witness its deepest and most representative 
 movement, that of philosophy, from Kant to 
 Hegel, really from a German to a universal 
 philosopher, who was still a German. Goethe 
 had, 'therefore, to train his public, and it is 
 not yet trained; he wrote not only for his 
 own people, but for all, since all culture has 
 to make this transition from a local and nat- 
 ional to the universal spirit. Many German 
 
. . 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 265 
 
 writers blame him because he quit his purely 
 German soil and its native literary forms, but 
 the world studies him now because he made 
 the grand passage which is primarily for him- 
 self and his people, but also for mankind. 
 Thus he becomes his race's mediator at the 
 most significant node of man's cultural disci- 
 pline. We must re-enact the highest spir- 
 itual achievements of our racial kinship if we 
 wish to be its worthy successors. 
 
 Still it should not be forgotten that Goethe 
 after his Italian experience returned to Wei- 
 mar, where he stayed for the rest of his days. 
 He was not to remain in Italy nor to get 
 stranded forever in the antique, but to evolve 
 into it, through it and out of it, as a stage of 
 his development toward his true goal, as one 
 strain of many in his long life-poem. His 
 function was to acquire ancient culture for 
 his own spiritual health and wholeness ; then 
 he was to re-create it in his native speech and 
 impart it to his people, who needed it as well 
 as he; finally his deed as typical and his 
 work as poetical were to reach beyond his 
 own country and time to distant and future 
 peoples and ages. In those days, now more 
 than a century and a quarter ago, it was 
 something of an enterprise to go even from 
 Germany to Eome by stage-coach, though 
 this certainly had its advantages over a rail- 
 
266 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 road car. But at present Chicago is nearer 
 to Italy than Weimar then was, if we measure 
 by time, convenience and expense. Hence 
 the world can now with no great difficulty 
 take Goethe's Italian Journey, and extern- 
 ally run through all its localities. But really 
 his itinerary was a spiritual one, and that 
 takes quite as much time as ever. 
 
 Some years after this first trip Goethe went 
 to Italy a second time. But his stay was 
 brief, and he had strangely lost his interest 
 in that country, turning it even to a theme 
 of disparagement and satire. Italy had 
 seemingly given him her whole boon in his 
 first Journey, and there remained for him 
 nothing but her filth, beggary and supersti- 
 tion in the second visit. Doubtless a deeper 
 current was starting just in such a negative 
 attitude. 
 
 VII. It must not be left out that Phileros 
 went along to Italy; indeed he is bound to 
 go where Goethe goes, in spite of certain re- 
 solves to keep him back or hold him down. 
 Goethe as lover is not at all to be smothered 
 in the hoary antiquity of Kome. Indeed 
 Phileros will adjust himself to the new situ- 
 ation, and even take possession of the antique 
 for his own means of self-utterance. To be 
 sure he will find examples enough for imita- 
 tion in that ancient time. 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 267 
 
 But listen again! Out at Castel Gandolfo, 
 a social resort not far from Eome, Goethe 
 comes upon a Milanese lady, young, beauti- 
 ful, and very amiable, who in comparison 
 with the Roman ladies there present shone to 
 great advantage "by her naturalness, her 
 common-sense, and her good manners. ' ' Such 
 is the first gentle stroke of the Love-God, as 
 recorded by himself in his Italian book. Then 
 follow games, little talks and loving tender- 
 nesses till the poet declares : "I found in the 
 strangest manner that my inclination for the 
 fair Milanese had taken a decided turn, shoot- 
 ing swift as lightning and quite irresistible, 
 as commonly happens to an unoccupied 
 heart. ' ' Goethe at her request gives her les- 
 sons in English a very dangerous business 
 under the circumstances. So Phileros is 
 again caught in spite of some little resist- 
 ances, partly real, but also partly simulated. 
 Then after the sweet dalliance comes the 
 backstroke very suddenly and without warn- 
 ing: she is engaged to another. Goethe dis- 
 covered this fact as if by accident, through 
 asking an innocent question. He adds: "It 
 is not necessary to describe what horror 
 seized me as I learned the circumstance." 
 He runs off as soon as he can and gives him- 
 self up to his agitated reflections. Another 
 case of WertHer burning in the flame of an 
 
268 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 impossible love. Still our Phileros much- 
 tried recounts of himself: "I had years and 
 experience sufficient to be able to rally myself 
 at once, though the effort was painful. ' ' Then 
 he exclaims in heartfelt reminiscence of his 
 former condition: "It would be strange in- 
 deed, should a fate like that of Werther pur- 
 sue me to Rome." Thus the image of the 
 suicide rose up before him in his sudden 
 agony. Still there is no danger, the crisis is 
 very brief even if poignant. Nor will an- 
 other book burst out of his emotion, as once 
 in his youth at Weimar. That Epoch is past, 
 though its scars remain and can even start 
 to burn again with a little friction. So we 
 have only a short account of the affair in 
 Goethe's Second Residence at Rome. And 
 there is no guilt and hence no atonement to 
 drive the author to one of his long and intense 
 literary confessions. Goethe does not men- 
 tion her by name, which a recent Italian in- 
 vestigator has dug up, and two pictures of 
 her also, one of them by Goethe, have been 
 exhumed. So Maddelena Riggi, very evan- 
 escent young lady, flitted before the poet, and 
 caught his glance of love, which made her im- 
 mortal. 
 
 But the poet indulged at Eome in a differ- 
 ent sort of love from that of Maddelena, a 
 sort of which he has given no*record, at least 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 269 
 
 not directly, though indirectly he has told 
 enough. In the Roman Elegies occurs the 
 name of a shadowy female who evidently be- 
 longed to the night-side of Koman life, and 
 whose relation to the author is suspiciously 
 hinted in many a tickling turn of poetic ex- 
 pression. That was his Eoman Faustina, 
 whose praises he sang, and who plainly gave 
 him his training for his later relation to his 
 Teutonic Christiane, both in poetry and con- 
 duct. Here starts the germ of the greatest 
 fatality of Goethe's entire life. If he had 
 quit the habit when he quit Eome, and had 
 left his classic debauch behind when he re- 
 turned to his regular home, the matter would 
 have been fameless. But instead of shedding 
 his snake-skin and flinging it away, he takes 
 the serpent itself along with him back to his 
 own hearth. In other words, he re-enacts at 
 Weimar openly what was more or less a 
 clandestine indulgence at Borne, defiant of all 
 public morality. Thus Phileros falls into his 
 truly tragic deed of guilt, giving way to the 
 sensuous side of his nature, and daring to 
 violate the very soul of the domestic institu- 
 tion, then persisting in his violation through 
 many succeding years. 
 
 At Rome, accordingly, the tragedy of Phi- 
 leros may be said to start in its primal act 
 of violation, unrepented, unatoned, and long- 
 
270 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 continued. We shall later find that the poet 
 came to feel what he had done, and even 
 called his offspring the children of Tantalus, 
 of one who had sinned against the Gods. This 
 tragedy will spin an ever-darkening, fateful 
 thread through his life-poem during the 
 whole length thereof; even if he has not told 
 it openly, its influence can often be traced in 
 his writings. Here we may note only the 
 most smiting conclusion of the long trag- 
 edy: after some forty years Goethe's son, 
 August, will perish of excess at Eome, as it 
 were on the spot where the original tragic 
 germ, which he bore in him, was laid. 
 
 VIII. Goethe has left us a book entitled, 
 The Italian Journey, which has a pivotal 
 place in his life and works. It was put to- 
 gether from letters and memoranda more 
 than twenty-five years after his tour, the first 
 volume being published in 1816. It is a much- 
 scattered product, and has a great deal of slag 
 for the modern reader, such as the observa- 
 tions on various kinds of rocks and geology 
 generally. Then there is too much about the 
 artistic and non-artistic nobodies who crossed 
 his path. 
 
 The book has the atmosphere of a man let 
 loose after long confinement, and allowed to 
 roam in the joys of a new freedom. Espe- 
 cially his sensuous nature breaks* forth on all 
 
GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIO&. 271 
 
 sides; every external appearance in the sky 
 and landscape delights him; his pleasure in 
 what he eats is noted; he refuses to have a 
 servant with him. " Every beggar points me 
 the way, and I talk with the people I chance 
 to meet as if we were old acquaintances. " 
 He is democratized in Italy, and becomes 
 one of its rabble ; each little event is a kind of 
 miracle and each petty object a thing of 
 beauty. He does not wish to hear German 
 at Roveredo, but only "the beloved tongue, " 
 Italian. He puts on Italy's costume, and 
 learns her peculiar gesticulations and grim- 
 aces as a part of his new vocabulary. Thus 
 he moves southward from the Alps in a state 
 of continual exaltation and unconventional 
 liberty. 
 
 That which especially attracts him is the 
 new appearance of Nature, who seems to be 
 on a revel of freedom like himself. She 
 bursts forth into her bright multitudinous 
 Southern forms, she too leaps up released of 
 her German fetters of ice, cloud and fog. 
 Any thought of "the melancholy Northland " 
 produces a shiver in his pen ; he calls his peo- 
 ple up there "Cimmerians dwelling in eter- 
 nal mist and gloom who hardly know what 
 the day is like," 'since there "it is all the 
 same whether it be day or night." Thus 
 Goethe reads sympathetically his own deliv- 
 
272 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 erance everywhere into his physical environ- 
 ment. Eeally he becomes the confirmed nat- 
 uralist in Italy; especially he gets on track 
 of the typical plant, and wins his insight into 
 vegetal metamorphosis. As he continues to 
 go Southward till Sicily, the lavish outburst 
 of semi-tropical vegetation appeals mightily 
 to the mood of his soul's liberation, all Nature 
 appearing here ungyved like himself and 
 erupting into a world of happy forms. 
 
 The human body is, however, the culmina- 
 tion of his rapture. In a letter from Borne 
 (August 23, 1787) he ecstasies: "Now at 
 last the Alpha and Omega of all things 
 known, namely, the human form, has seized 
 hold of me and I of it till I say: 'Lord, I 
 shall not let go of thee unless thou bless me, 
 though I should wrestle myself lame.' To 
 draw is not enough, and accordingly I have 
 resolved to turn to modeling. " Here is indi- 
 cated his deeper transition from graphic to 
 plastic Art, the latter being the solid shape 
 and hence more completely sensuous or nat- 
 ural, as he says. The ideal organism of all 
 humanity he first sought to conceive and then 
 to realize; it became his supreme goal. He 
 says in one of his later letters: "I am now 
 wholly employed in the study of the human 
 form, the non-plus-ultra of all man's know- 
 ing and doing. ' ' He thought that he had dis- 
 
. 
 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 273 
 
 covered the principle of the ancient sculptors, 
 who in their Gods did not mould mere indi- 
 viduals or make portraits, but produced in 
 their works of art "the highest of Nature's 
 works, made by men in accordance with true 
 and natural laws. All that is arbitrary, or 
 merely fantastic perishes; here is necessity, 
 here is God." Thus Goethe glimpses, as he 
 thinks, the creative idea of the antique, and 
 he even seeks to model it in a little plaster 
 cast, at which he reports people looked in 
 amazement, disbelieving it to be his. So he 
 puts not the living organism as uppermost in 
 Nature, but the work of the old artist as God- 
 maker. 
 
 Goethe would accordingly seem to place his 
 insight into ancient art as the highest fruit 
 of his Italian Journey. No wonder he longed 
 to become a sculptor. But that was not his 
 destiny, it would have been a relapse back- 
 ward twenty centuries if he could have suc- 
 ceeded. Still this delight in the antique may 
 be deemed the summit of his sensuous out- 
 burst in Italy. For Sculpture is the most im- 
 mediate sense-art, having length, breadth 
 and thickness of form like solid matter, and 
 not merely the surface thereof, as is the case 
 with Painting. So Goethe never rested in 
 the unfolding of his sense-life in Italy, till he 
 landed in Sculpture, and therein beheld the 
 
274 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 creative ideal of the whole sense-world the 
 God himself taking on visible material shape 
 through this Art. 
 
 It is not too much to say that the supreme 
 attainment of Goethe in Italy .was to behold 
 the descent of the Divine into full solid form, 
 which thus became the statue of the God. 
 That was the religious view of the old Greek, 
 the deities came down and revealed them- 
 selves visibly in actual shape to Homer for 
 his poetry as well as to Phidias for his statue. 
 Hence springs Goethe's love of the ancient 
 Hellenic world, which he never tires of prais- 
 ing. He reaches the point of sharing its con- 
 sciousness, and thus of becoming a heathen, 
 as he was often called. Still he did not stay 
 forever in this classic stage. But he did at- 
 tain to a vision of the old Greek Theophany, 
 or the God's sensible manifestation in art, 
 especially that of Sculpture. So we gather 
 from many a passage, particularly in the lat- 
 ter part of this Italian Journey. His use of 
 the term solidity (already noted) as charac- 
 teristic of the antique world would seem to 
 come from the fact that the statue is solid, 
 real, with matter's three dimensions, not an 
 illusion of reality, such as is a picture. Goethe 
 himself became solid in Italy, transformed 
 into his own ideal of art; he turned to 
 a kind of statue, very real indeed, yet 
 
. 
 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 275 
 
 with the Divine in him and through him mani- 
 fested. 
 
 The drawback did not fail to show itself 
 when he came home. He was separated from 
 his time and people, isolated, solitary. Such 
 was his deep estrangement ; it took him some 
 years to get back to his own and to himself, 
 and he had to go through a peculiar discipline 
 which is to be narrated later. Still he did 
 not lose his classic impress, but he stamped 
 it harmoniously upon his Northern heritage, 
 especially in poetry. 
 
 IX. Goethe gets back to Weimar April 
 23rd, 1788, after an absence of nearly two 
 years, measured by the calendar, but told on 
 the horologe of the spirit he had been far 
 away from home for centuries. He found his 
 place filled, the world was moving on without 
 him, even in matters of business he was quite 
 dispensable. Such a feeling comes over every 
 man who has been abroad for a couple of 
 years, his social niche is taken, perchance his 
 economic position must be entirely re-made. 
 To a certain extent he has to begin life over, 
 downcast in gloomy humiliation at his lack 
 of importance in his own little community. 
 In Goethe's case such a feeling must have 
 been intensified by the contrast with his 
 former station. But that was not all. He 
 came back from another world a different 
 
276 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART SECOND. 
 
 man, deeply estranged from his environment. 
 He was in spirit a denizen of the Greco- 
 Roman era, Italianized. Also we may call 
 him, alienated from his native land and its 
 folk, and therefore from himself. His man- 
 ner was altered, had become statuesque, 
 marble-cold, even if marble-grand; his style 
 of expression was transformed, no longer 
 direct and spontaneous, but measured and 
 serene, freed from its old ebullience. Ho 
 sought to manifest in act and writ the eternal 
 when he said: "I would occupy myself only 
 with permanent relations." 
 
 Thus his very personality is changed, hav- 
 ing been shifted from its native base in his 
 own country and people by his present clas- 
 sical pursuit. In some such mood he comes 
 back to Weimar during his thirty-ninth year, 
 hence on the brink of his middle life, which 
 should contain his best and greatest achieve- 
 ment. His whole line of return from Eome 
 seems to have been strewn with sighs, which 
 became deeper when he touched German soil. 
 He says that his companion was the melan- 
 choly of "a passionate soul which feels itself 
 dragged irresistibly to an irrevocable ban- 
 ishment." Thus he intimates again that he 
 deemed Eome his true fatherland, which he 
 had to quit. 
 
 Still Goethe knows in the deepest and best 
 
.* 
 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 277 
 
 of him that he is a German and must return 
 to his own in Germany. Nevertheless he 
 shows the wrenching scission in himself be- 
 tween two cultures, he is halved within, 
 divided at present in his very soul, and the 
 two halves are pulling him asunder in oppo- 
 site directions. Yet he will not stay at Rome, 
 does not, and he knows what he has to do in 
 spite of all his suspiration. So he trips back 
 to Weimar and home, away from Italy's 
 beauty and allurement. 
 
 Externally, then he has returned ; but now 
 arises the far harder and deeper problem of 
 an internal return, the spiritual reconcilia- 
 tion of the two sides, or of the two halves of 
 his warring self. And this conflict is not 
 merely his own, or subjective, it lies in the 
 time, yea in civilization itself. Far-reaching, 
 then, is the collision which Goethe has to 
 meet and solve in his way. This is what prop- 
 erly constitutes the woi^k of his Second 
 Period, upon which he has now started. It 
 will last more than twenty years after his 
 arrival from Italy, and bears in itself a great 
 spiritual movement which is not only indi- 
 vidual but universal. It embraces the mature 
 middle-aged activity of the poet, very diver- 
 sified in its multitudinous manifestations, and 
 not easy to put into a transparent order. 
 
 Upon what thought, then, does the whole 
 
278 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Period hinge 1 As before said, Goethe has 
 returned to Weimar profoundly estranged 
 from his environing world and from his true 
 self, through his Italian experience. The 
 supreme object henceforth must be to get 
 back to his own internally and externally, 
 without losing his great new gain gotten from 
 abroad. He has to work through to the har- 
 mony of the two clashing world-views which 
 now keep him in discord and alienation. This 
 will give a long list of writings, for his 
 method of winning peace and atonement is 
 his pen. 
 
 In other words, the poet in the present 
 Period is to pass through a complete process 
 of mediation, which word may be taken as 
 the best for expressing his inner movement. 
 This process will show three sweeps or stages 
 each of which makes a fresh Epoch in his 
 life's total round. These may be briefly des- 
 ignated as follows: 
 
 (I). The solitary Goethe isolated, es- 
 tranged, shut up alone in his classical fort- 
 ress, unreconciled and unmediated with his 
 people and with himself Chapter Fourth. 
 
 (II). Goethe's friendship with Schiller, 
 which breaks up his solitariness and associ- 
 ates him anew. He is no longer single, but 
 twofold and manifold in his reconciliation 
 with life. Each poet becomes the other and 
 
. 
 GOETHE'S MIDDLE PERIOD. 279 
 
 is through the other to a large extent. 
 Goethe is now mediated with the world and 
 himself. This Epoch, the central one of 
 Goethe 's whole career, lasts as long as Schil- 
 ler lives, about ten years, hence we shall often 
 call it the Goethe-Schiller Decennium Chap- 
 ter Fifth. 
 
 (III.) Goethe is alone again after the 
 death of Schiller, yet not solitary and un- 
 reconciled but renovated and restored to him- 
 self and to the world not only mediated 
 through another, but self -mediated, becoming 
 his own center of life and achievement. More- 
 over, his distinctively classical stage, with its 
 dualism, is brought to a close in a renewed 
 unity with himself and his own. 
 
 Such is a brief forecast of the sweep of 
 this Second Period, which is to receive more 
 fully its illustration in the exposition which 
 follows. It is the abiding worth of Goethe 
 for human culture that he passed through 
 this peculiar discipline, and left it recorded 
 for us who come after him, in forms of lofty 
 art. Thus literature in its deepest strain 
 reveals its vicarious character; the great 
 writer suffers for us and portrays his deed 
 for our lesson, if we can take it, through his 
 transmitted experience. For Goethe's classi- 
 cism had its values to be gained as well as 
 its limits to be transcended, its sorrows along 
 
280 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 with its joys, its negative as well as its posi- 
 tive side. 
 
 To-day Italy is still more nearly the mod- 
 ern home of the ancient world than any other 
 land on our globe, notwithstanding many re- 
 cent changes. The Italian Journey is yet in 
 order for the man of culture who wishes to 
 find his own pre-suppositions and those of hip 
 age. More completely than any other mod- 
 ern man Goethe went through this purga- 
 torial discipline and set it down in writ that 
 bids fair to be eternal. 
 
THE SOLITARY GOETHE. 281 
 
 CHAPTER FOURTH. 
 
 THE SOLITARY GOETHE. 
 
 Thus we designate the poet immediately 
 after his return from Italy in accord with his 
 own repeated declarations alone, isolated, 
 unappreciated. Here is a passage in which 
 he pathetically tells his situation: "From 
 Italy the formful to Germany the formless 
 I was turned back, having to exchange bright 
 skies for gloomy ; my friends instead of com- 
 forting me and drawing me to themselves, 
 brought me to despair. My enthusiasm over 
 far-off and hardly known objects seemed to 
 offend them, as did also my suffering and my 
 laments over the lost paradise ; I received no 
 sympathy, nobody understood my language. ' ' 
 Such was his solitary position; no friends, no 
 interchange of ideas, not even a common 
 speech. One of his old admirers wrote of 
 him at this time : ' ' He is no longer good for 
 anything, quite out of place in Weimar now. ' ' 
 When he would impart his new "experiences, 
 a cup of cold water seemed to be dashed upon 
 him from every countenance. He exclaims: 
 "I could not adjust myself to such a painful 
 condition, the deprivation was too great. " 
 Still he could not flee back to Italy, that would 
 be to renounce his destiny. 
 
282 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 So the desolate poet roamed about his fami- 
 liar little city as if in a desert. The deepest 
 bond, that of love, which formerly tied him 
 to the place, was broken. The breach with 
 Frau Von Stein could not be healed. There 
 is no doubt that Goethe's loneliness contrib- 
 uted not a little to drive him to the fateful 
 Christiane, when she appeared at the right 
 moment. Phileros had to have somebody to 
 love, and at last in a kind of desperation he 
 took the sudden chance which dropped on his 
 path. Then the rupture with Frau Von Stein 
 became deeper and more acrid, and she began 
 to play the part of ill-croaking Cassandra to 
 the poet and his house. 
 
 Also his literary audience failed him com- 
 pletely. Nobody liked the new style which 
 he had brought from Italy. Great was the 
 disappointment of the public at the strange 
 evolution of the author of Wertlier, who, 
 from being the most favored writer of Ger- 
 many, passed into an almost total eclipse of 
 unpopularity. Herder, his old literary 
 friend, falls off, and becomes more critical 
 than ever. Yet he also soon takes the jour- 
 ney to Italy as if in a kind of rivalry, but its 
 import is nothing in comparison to that of 
 Goethe, who therein illustrated an era of his 
 own and of the world's culture. 
 
 Goethe's attitude toward German litera- 
 
.* 
 THE SOLITARY GOETHE. 283 
 
 hire at this time was that of the solitary poet. 
 What he had gone through some dozen and 
 more years previously, and had transcended, 
 he found in full swing. That is, the Epoch 
 of Storm and Stress he saw rise up 
 before him on the topmost wave of popular 
 favor, to his unspeakable disgust. Long 
 afterwards in a conversation reported by 
 Riemer he described the situation with 
 warmth: " After my return from Italy, 
 where I had labored to unfold myself to 
 greater definiteness and purity in all depart- 
 ments of Art, I found poetical works, old and 
 new, enjoying the greatest distinction works 
 which filled me with the last degree of dis- 
 gust, of which I shall mention two, Heinse's 
 Ardinghello and Schiller's Robbers/' These 
 were essentially dramas of the Storm and 
 Stress, which he had actually started and 
 made universally famous during his Frank- 
 fort Quadrennium, but he has come to loathe 
 his former Self and its expression through 
 his Italian training. So he hisses at his old 
 outgrown Epoch now revivified and made 
 the time's vogue by lesser and immature 
 poets, while the works of his new-born spirit 
 lay not only neglected but spurned. Thus: 
 "I was terrified at the thunderous applause 
 given throughout my whole country not only 
 by the uproarious student, but by the highly 
 
284 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 cultivated court-lady to such monstrosities; 
 for I thought I saw all my efforts completely 
 lost; the objects for which, as well as the 
 method and style in which I had developed 
 myself, seemed to me lamed and thrust 
 aside." Such is the melancholy overture of 
 the now solitary and unappreciated Genius, 
 quite supplanted and undone by his own 
 diminutive creatures. Nothing can he do but 
 take a dismal backlook: "I who sought to 
 nourish and to impart the purest views of art 
 found myself helplessly wedged in between 
 Ardinghello and Franz Moor" (Heinse's and 
 Schiller's heroes). 
 
 It was a pitiable plight indeed for the new- 
 fledged spirit, but one of which he has to take 
 the bitter discipline till the day of relief 
 dawns. This was when he had his first sym- 
 pathetic meeting with Schiller, whose friend- 
 ship breaks down the walls of his solitary 
 Self's prison and lets him forth again into 
 the world, starting his new freedom and re- 
 conciliation. This friendship was gradually 
 cemented in the middle months of 1794, quite 
 six years after Goethe's return from Italy. 
 That was surely a long and lonely incarcera- 
 tion, not of the body, but of the soul, and 
 the day of his liberation as well as his libera- 
 tor became in Goethe's memory objects of 
 almost worshipful gratitude. Such, then, are 
 
. 
 THE SOLITARY GOETHE. 285 
 
 the limits in time of this Fourth Epoch, which 
 including the Italian Journey lasts some 
 eight years. Again we may note that it is 
 Goethe himself who has repeatedly and with 
 precision marked this Epoch of his life lying 
 between Italy and Schiller. 
 
 Much takes place in these days: in the 
 World's History it is the time of the French 
 Eevolution, which runs so dizzily and terribly 
 its first round from the Convocation of the 
 States General till the appearance of Bona- 
 parte. But from this great event also Goethe 
 was in spirit quite isolated, hardly getting 
 at present a glimpse of what it really meant. 
 But he was active, and of this activity we 
 must not fail to give due account. 
 
 Still we are not to forget Goethe himself 
 has to take his part of the blame for his iso- 
 lation. Everybody complained of his chilling 
 haughtiness, of his lack of sympathy. From 
 his long, intense study and appropriation of 
 Sculpture, he had himself turned to a statue, 
 living indeed, but belonging to cold, snowy 
 Olympus. In his case we think of the ancient 
 conception of deity as movens non motus. He 
 might arouse feeling, but he himself was not 
 to feel in turn; he had quite lost his social 
 instinct and his desire of imparting himself. 
 
 Moreover, the Duke had practically freed 
 him from his official duties, at least the most 
 
286 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART 8ECOND. 
 
 onerous ones. Thus he was isolated from the 
 State, and had no co-ercing tasks of vocation. 
 So in the matter of occupation he was left 
 largely to himself. A dissociated man in the 
 midst of a social order, he could not help feel- 
 ing all the more solitary. It might almost be 
 said that his Greek ideal had become incor- 
 porate in his own body. He was indeed the 
 Olympian Goethe, Zeus-like, modeled in life 
 after the bust of Otricoli, which was his favor- 
 ite piece of statuary. Still let us not forget 
 that this is but a stage of the total Goethe, 
 which he has to take up, live through, and 
 then transcend, when it has given to him its 
 full fruitage. 
 
 But Goethe 's ultimate passion after all 
 was the written word. Suggestive it is to 
 watch him in Italy turning away from his 
 dear sculpture and archaeology and nature 
 to poetic composition in answer to the deep- 
 est call of his spirit. Under Italian skies 
 even he could not help writing German 
 poetry, of course more or less Italianized. 
 After his return in his issolation he kept on 
 writing, though the output contains a good 
 deal of perishable stuff. Of this Epoch we 
 shall set down the leading items. 
 
GOETHE'S DRAMATIC TRILOGY. 287 
 
 I. 
 
 Goethe's Dramatic Trilogy. 
 
 Three dramas of Goethe deserve to be put 
 together under a common rubric on account 
 of their common origin, development and 
 time of completion, as well as on account of 
 their common place in the poet's evolution. 
 These are his Egmont, his Iphigenia at Tau- 
 ris and his Tasso. All three had their start- 
 ing-point back in the Frankfort Epoch, the 
 time of the poet's supreme creativity. They 
 were carried by him to Weimar, during whose 
 quiescent Decennium they were brooded 
 over, wrought at, but in the end lay unfin- 
 ished and unfinishable. Finally they were 
 borne by him to Italy and put through the 
 Italian crucible with the result that all were 
 completed either during his Journey or not 
 long after his return. Thus their outward 
 destiny was quite the same, and links them 
 together in a joint title, that of Trilogy, 
 which means in general three parts of one 
 comprehensive theme. 
 
 The old Greek Trilogy with its three dra- 
 mas turned on the career of one heroic per- 
 sonage, each of whose three distinctive 
 phases or stages was made the subject of a 
 
288 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 play. For instance the Trilogy of Prome- 
 theus revealed the Titan's career in three 
 different dramas, only one of which has come 
 down to us. But the Trilogy of Aeschylus, 
 called the Oresteia from its central character, 
 who is Orestes, has been preserved entire. 
 Now in the Trilogy of Goethe, as we shall 
 call it, each of the three dramas* has its own 
 separate story and its own separate charac- 
 ters, and so far is disconnected from the rest. 
 Still their unity, is Goethe himself, in whom 
 they represent three lines of contemporane- 
 ous development rather than successive 
 stages of his spirits unfolding. Each is an 
 evolution running parallel to the others, yet 
 all reveal finally one character of whose total 
 life-poem they form a special part. Hence 
 for our biography the present Trilogy is but 
 one strain or canto of the entire song. 
 
 In what order should the three dramas be 
 looked at and studied, and finally arranged 
 as related to one another? Biographers have 
 differed about the question. The three being 
 essentially synchronous in their conception, 
 growth and completion, we may fall back 
 upon their inner relation. Egmont in our 
 view is to be put before Iphigenia though it 
 appeared the year after (1788). It naturally 
 takes its place as the first member of the 
 Trilogy; it still has many reminders of its 
 
EGMONT. 289 
 
 origin in the volcanic Frankfort Epoch, it is 
 less Italianized than its other two dramatic 
 mates. It still retains its old egg-shell of 
 prose, which they have cast off; even its ex- 
 ternal appearance on the printed page recalls 
 Gotz with its mass of multitudinous person- 
 ages of all classes commingled high and low, 
 its sudden changes of scene and its detailed 
 stage directions. The style, too, though much 
 toned down and classicized, shows many a 
 boulder indicating the violent upheaval of a 
 former era. Accordingly we shall look at 
 Egmont first, showing more the preliminary 
 stage out of which the whole Trilogy has de- 
 veloped. 
 
 EGMONT. 
 
 This is one of Goethe 's permanent produc- 
 tions, it continues to be played upon the 
 stage and is read still more as literature ; be- 
 sides, it reveals a distinctive phase of the 
 poet's total evolution. 
 
 I. There is a very broad historic back- 
 ground to the drama, but rather indetermin- 
 ate and not much employed. Still it is that 
 which helps very decidedly to keep the work 
 alive today. There is the conflict between the 
 foreign Spaniard and the native Nether- 
 lander between political freedom and na- 
 tional servitude, between the rule of self-im- 
 
290 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 posed law and the reign of absolutism. Still 
 deeper runs the religious struggle which rises 
 against the old church in favor of the inbreak- 
 ing Reformation. Moreover, there is the at- 
 tempt to introduce the Inquisition from 
 Spain which the Netherlanders are quite 
 unanimous in resisting. Thus the time-set- 
 ting of the drama is thrown back into the up- 
 heaving sixteenth century, when the whole 
 German world of the North had the tendency 
 to break loose from the Papacy, and from 
 Southern leading-strings, to make a fresh 
 start for itself. 
 
 The drama of Egmont, accordingly, strikes 
 one note of that perennial racial and cultural 
 conflict which began far back in old Rome al- 
 ready before the Christian Era, and, contin- 
 uing through some two thousand years is 
 furiously going on in Europe at this mo- 
 ment (1915) the strife between the Latin 
 and the Teuton. In the drama 's phase of this 
 millennial conflict the two sides are repre- 
 sented by the Spaniard and the Netherlander. 
 Hence it comes that Germania thrills even 
 now to the representation of Egmont, which 
 touches the deepest chords of her folk-soul, 
 throbbing back into her primeval forests. It 
 is worth while to look through the play and 
 observe how many times the poet reaches 
 down to this profoundest substrate of Teu- 
 
EGMONT. 291 
 
 tonic consciousness, and sets it to vibrating. 
 In the here presented stage of the wrestle of 
 the two races and civilizations, Philip II., 
 King of Spain, is the upholder of the Latin 
 element, of course in its Spanish form. So 
 we hear quite from the start secret thrusts 
 against him and his rule, from the people, 
 one of whom says in the first scene, ' l a Neth- 
 erlander does not find it easy to drink to the 
 health of his Spanish majesty from his 
 heart. " 
 
 The prime historic fact about Count Eg- 
 mont is that he was treacherously seized by 
 the Duke of Alva and beheaded at Brussels 
 in 1568. Philip II., of Spain, one of the gloom- 
 iest, most bigoted tyrants in all history, suc- 
 ceeded his father, Charles V., as King of the 
 Netherlands in 1555. He first appoints Mar- 
 garet of Parma, his half-sister, regent, and 
 at once starts trouble by enforcing his arbi- 
 trary behest in matters of State and Religion 
 through a foreign army upon a free-minded 
 people. But the regent Margaret is too leni- 
 ent and too tolerant for the monarch of pure 
 absolutism, and so she resigns in 1567 and 
 the pitiless Alva takes her place. This change 
 of the regents from Margaret to Alva marks 
 the turning point in the dramatic action, and 
 signifies the doom of Egmont. 
 
 We should not leave out of mind the his- 
 
292 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 toric fact that Spain at this time, in the sev- 
 enteenth century, was the greatest nation on 
 the globe, was verily filled with the World- 
 Spirit as no other people of the time. This 
 its deeds show in multifarious directions, as 
 well as its limit-transcending character. It 
 had explored, colonized and organized Amer- 
 ica. It had great men, a great literature, 
 great possessions. So we say that the World- 
 Spirit was for a time Spanish. 
 
 Strangely it's king, and seemingly its 
 statesmen, thought their call was to annihi- 
 late not only outer institutional freedom, but 
 the souPs inner freedom, the conscience it- 
 self. The Inquisition sought to reach men's 
 inmost conviction with its hidden power and 
 to shape that by outer means. Every point 
 of faith was to be dictated to the individual ; 
 he was to have no spiritual being of his own, 
 but to be moved as a mere automaton of 
 Church and State. Thus Spain collided with 
 the movement of the age, which was toing 
 ing forth the free individual, the independent 
 subjective Self, represented in the North- 
 Holland, Germany, England. Naturally she 
 undid herself and lost her own soul, and thus 
 ceased producing great men, 
 
 II. Such is the general historic back- 
 ground which Goethe preserves in outline and 
 purport. The universal nature of the con- 
 
EGMONT. 293 
 
 flict he never lets us forget, even if he flings 
 it in more or less externally. But when it 
 comes to the details of history, he alters them 
 in every way to suit his dramatic purpose. 
 For instance, the real Egmont was a married 
 man with numerous children, well advanced 
 in middle age at his death; he was not the 
 gay, unmarried Lothario whom Goethe plays 
 before us. He exposed himself to the snare 
 of Alva chiefly through anxiety for his fam- 
 ily, not on account of his demonic daring of 
 fate, as the poet portrays him. And Count 
 Hoorn, who was executed with Egmont, is not 
 mentioned, for a good artistic reason. Still 
 more profoundly is the actual historic moti- 
 vation set aside. Goethe's Egmont is no 
 great leader of the people against despotism, 
 his part is not that of the hero slain in the 
 struggle for freedom; that is the deed of 
 Orange, who is dismissed after one scene of 
 the play in which he endeavors to forewarn 
 his associate of the plot laid for both. But 
 Egmont, the demonic fate-defier, marches 
 straight into the trap. 
 
 Goethe was often called upon to defend 
 these alterations, if not perversions of His- 
 tory. He said long afterwards to Eckermann : 
 "If I had made Egmont the father of a dozen 
 children, as History gives him, he would have 
 appeared absurd, " So the poet moulded him 
 
294 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 over "into my Egmont, as Clara calls him." 
 That is, Goethe makes the historical Egmont 
 over into Goethe, the young lover and eri- 
 trancer of women, as when he fascinated 
 Frederika and Lili. But such a character 
 must also have its environing world, and ac- 
 cordingly he sets it down in the midst of a 
 great revolutionary epoch more than two cen- 
 turies rearward of his own age. So we read 
 in Egmont what part Goethe would have 
 played in that mighty religious and political 
 upheaval. He would have cast state and 
 church out of his career largely, deigning in- 
 deed a few side glimpses at both, but he would 
 have become the lover amid the throes of bat- 
 tle itself, for is he not the lover supremely, 
 our Phileros upon this earth? 
 
 Suggestive, too, of his view of history is 
 this passage written in 1785: "I have often 
 said it and shall again often repeat that the 
 Causa finalis of all the world's conflicts is to 
 furnish material to dramatic poetry, for the 
 stuff is good for nothing else." Here he de- 
 nies that universal History has any end or 
 content of its own; it exists to be kneaded 
 over by the poet into his drama. " Where- 
 fore," he asks, " should a poet merely copy 
 the historian?" So he scoffs at the historic 
 fact by itself as incapable of poetic presenta- 
 tion. Indeed he declares openly: "No person 
 
EGMONT. 295 
 
 is historic for the poet, ' ' his right function is 
 to take certain names from history and to 
 pour into them his own creations, or per- 
 chance, himself. Thus he certainly has done 
 with his Egmont. All this, however, goes to 
 show that the historic sense was not one of 
 Goethe's gifts a point which we shall often 
 have to note in the course of his life. For 
 nothing is more certain than that history has 
 its own goal toward which it is working; we 
 may say that it contains its own distinct psy- 
 chological evolution as well as the individual 
 person, or as well as Goethe himself, and thus 
 is capable of poetic treatment as much as a 
 man. In other words history has a soul quite 
 as have you and I, and it can be set forth dra- 
 matically in its own way, as Shakespeare has 
 done, and others too, notably Schiller. 
 
 We have the advantage of Schiller's criti- 
 cisms of this drama when it first appeared. 
 Many things in it were duly praised, but the 
 censure fell upon the defective historic pres- 
 entation of Egmont who, as connected in time 
 and fate with the great revolution, ought to 
 be shown forth as its hero, marching at its 
 head and fighting its battles, winning its peo- 
 ple by the charm of his personality, and at 
 last perishing for its principle. It is true 
 that Egmont talks of these things, but does 
 none of them; is none of them in the drama, 
 
296 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 which is, therefore, essentially undramatic, 
 leaving out the great institutional act of the 
 age and country. So Schiller exclaims: 
 ' i That is just the misfortune that we are com- 
 pelled to take Egmont 's services upon hear- 
 say, while his shortcomings we see with our 
 eyes." The truth is Egmont 's weaknesses 
 were just Goethe's own, namely, those of 
 Phileros dallying with love, mid the very 
 crash of a world-historical collision in whose 
 jaws he gets crushed to an ill-timed death. 
 Yet mark again! Goethe making his hero 
 tragic, seems to free himself from his own 
 tragedy, and lives to tell the story. 
 
 We are, then, to note Goethe's limitation: 
 he could not write an historical tragedy; he 
 always makes it personal, even when it is set 
 down in the midst of the greatest events of 
 historic time. In Gotz he tried hardest, but 
 only half succeeded in composing a drama of 
 history after the pattern of Shakespeare. In 
 Egmont we find everywhere traces of imita- 
 tion of the British poet, especially of Julius 
 Caesar which so emphatically introduces the 
 People like Egmont. But the outcome is very 
 different. Goethe cannot sink himself into 
 the event objectively, rather he sinks it into 
 himself subjectively. 
 
 III. What then is Egmont in character 
 and deed? Goethe many years afterward, in 
 
EGMONT. 297 
 
 the last book of his Autobiography, felt him- 
 self called upon to give his own interpreta- 
 tion of his work. He must have often heard 
 the reproach, during the long contest of his 
 people against Napoleon: Why did you not 
 portray for us a national hero in his desper- 
 ate fight against foreign tyranny? How does 
 it come that you did not give to your coun- 
 tryman a Teutonic Wilhelm Tell, or even a 
 Herrmann in his struggle for freedom 
 against the Latin oppressor! Especially at 
 the time of the war of Gerraan Liberation 
 when all Teutonia rose in a prodigeous 
 ground-swell to throw off her chains, must 
 the poet have felt the national shortcoming 
 of his work. Orange, the real leader, is curtly 
 dismissed from the drama, with one scene, 
 while Egmont, incapable of leadership, is 
 limned to over-fullness in all his native paral- 
 ysis through love ? s sweet revelry. 
 
 The principle which the poet invokes for in- 
 terpretation as well as for self-defense, is 
 what he calls the Demonic, word and concep- 
 tion suggested doubtless by the famous 
 demon of Socrates. It was a mysterious 
 super-sensible Power of which he says : 
 "Everything which limits us appeared pen- 
 etrable to it ; with the necessary elements of 
 our existence it seemed to deal ; it could com- 
 press Time and expand Space. In the Im- 
 
298 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 possible alone did it appear to find its satis- 
 faction; the Possible it spurned from itself 
 with contempt. " A superhuman energy, 
 then, descends into the human and lifts it to 
 the mighty performance; the Overman takes 
 possession of the finite man and exalts him 
 to his highest achievement. But why should 
 not this demonic obsession seize its recipient 
 and elevate him into the victorious defender 
 of the Fatherland? Only one reason: that 
 would not have been Goethe, he could not do 
 it by the necessity of his birthright. So he 
 takes away from his Egmont all his limiting 
 relations of life, those of his family and 
 largely those of his country and of his time; 
 he reduces him (so he says) quite to the 
 single untrammeled individual, endowed, 
 however, with a demonic charm of personal- 
 ity which neither man nor woman can resist. 
 Thus Goethe looks back at his Egmont or 
 really at himself in his Autobiography: 
 "Having set him free from all restraining 
 conditions, I gave him an unbridled joy of 
 life, a boundless self-confidence, a gift of 
 drawing all men to himself by his personal 
 fascination, and hence of winning the favor 
 of the people, the secret inclination of the 
 Princess, the passionate devotion of a 
 maiden, the friendly participation of a 
 shrewd politician, and even the strong re- 
 
.4- 
 EGMONT. 299 
 
 gard of his murderer's own son." So the 
 poet recounts out of his drama the striking 
 instances of Egmont's demonic power of fas- 
 cination it is the young Goethe living again 
 through the eyes of the old Goethe. Still 
 there was one man whom the all-charmer 
 could not put under his spell: it was the 
 sombre Satanic Alva, the new regent from 
 Spain. Here then he runs upon his tragic 
 limit ; the moment he finds the personality he 
 cannot fascinate, that moment means his 
 doom, he is judged to perish. 
 
 At this point we may see what the poet 
 sought to do in his Egmont. It portrays the 
 tragedy of the Demonic which at last drives 
 upon a Power mightier than itself and goes 
 down. But what pertinence has this to the 
 poet's own career! Goethe finished his Eg- 
 mont practically in Italy as he was looking 
 back and taking a survey of his former stage, 
 that of Frankfort. What a conqueror he had 
 been, especially as Phileros, the All-lover! 
 He began his drama already in Frankfort, 
 but could not finish it; worked at it in Wei- 
 mar unfinishable still. But the clear Italian 
 atmosphere had clarified his soul's vision till 
 he could see himself in his complete round; 
 now he can bring to a close his work, behold- 
 ing himself as demonic Phileros to be under 
 judgment. The superlative charm of the 
 
300 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Overman working through him, after untold 
 successes, begets the Fate-defying insolence 
 which hurls him to his end. But this supernal 
 energy gave him his poetic power, being the 
 source of all his Titanic works; still it se- 
 creted a negative backstroke which means 
 tragedy. 
 
 In the drama of Gotz, which in many re- 
 spects is cognate with the present play, we 
 behold the enchantress, Adelheid, the woman 
 endowed with the demonic power of fascina- 
 tion. But in Egmont it is the man who is the 
 world-charmer, and cannot in fact help his 
 gift really it is Goethe himself revealed in 
 one phase of his Genius. But Adelheid 's 
 demon is a destroyer, Satanic, negative to all 
 instituted order, which she would fling to the 
 fiends through her fiendish might of pas- 
 sion's enchantment. That cannot be said of 
 Egmont, rather is he inactive in a great 
 cause, hamstrung by his demon, and so fails 
 just through his supreme gift to be the prac- 
 tical hero of his age. 
 
 IV. In the evolution of Goethe's person- 
 ality, Egmont means the tragedy of the De- 
 monic when allowed to run to its uncon- 
 trolled fullness. It is the classic Goethe look- 
 ing back -at and measuring the fate of Goe- 
 the the Titan, who embodies this demonic en- 
 ergy. Some such tragic outcome he must 
 
EGMONT. 301 
 
 have forefelt even amid all his Titanic ex- 
 cesses. He could not help the uncanny sen- 
 sation that he was dashing his head against 
 the walls of the universal order, but the uni- 
 verse is larger than any terrestrial Titan, 
 and will in the end subsume him even through 
 death. 
 
 Then comes the question, and it came to 
 Goethe already at Weimar : Canst thou con- 
 trol thy demon, confining it to its due sphere 
 of activity? Mighty is its power indeed; it 
 is just the original elemental energy of the 
 great individual but can he harness it and 
 make it do the work of the world? Such is 
 the primordial problem of the young Genius, 
 restless at the limits put upon him by birth. 
 Hence so often he goes to pieces in youth. 
 He sinks in a colossal protest, though he 
 make a huge hubbub and arouse terror and 
 pity at his untimely fate. It is a peculiar 
 fact of literary history that Goethe's great- 
 est English contemporaries in poetry, Byron, 
 Shelley, and even Keats, sank to death while 
 young and still in their demonic stage, 
 Heaven-storming and unreconciled with the 
 World's Order, which they would pull down 
 over their heads unless Keats be the excep- 
 tion with his unique original harmony of 
 soul, as if spheral. But Goethe passed 
 through the demonic stage, came out of it, 
 
302 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 and in the Italian Trilogy is singing of it and 
 its solution especially is that the theme of 
 our present Egmont. 
 
 Goethe, being a poet, made his demon write 
 poetry, which at first demonic in its defiance, 
 finally becomes the composer of its own trag- 
 edy. Thus the poet saves himself. The uni- 
 versal Genius writing tragedy, shows up 
 some finite phase of himself, and thereby 
 transcends his own fate by portraying it to 
 its last thrust. Egmont also is a confession 
 of the author concerning his own limitation, 
 which he could not quite overcome in writ till 
 he had taken the Italian discipline, even if 
 little of this can be found directly in his play. 
 
 V. Egmont as Goethe must likewise be 
 Phileros, and hence he has to have his coun- 
 terpart in a woman, who is in the present 
 drama taken from the ranks of the people, 
 Clara, the heroine of the play. The demonic 
 lover, Egmont, coming into Clara 's presence, 
 demonizes her, so to speak, fills her with the 
 same defiant power which possesses him. 
 She has another suitor, Brackenburg, wor- 
 thy, devoted, favored by the good, quiet 
 mother, but he is the undemonic lover, hence 
 an impossible mate for the woman in her de- 
 monic obsession for Egmont. Doubtless, if 
 she had never met him, she would have be- 
 come an honest burgher's wife, borne and 
 
EGMONT. 303 
 
 reared his many Dutch children, and have 
 passed off life's stage in unfamed worth and 
 unheroized of the world's literature. But 
 now in her soul Egmont 's demon has become 
 lodged, and is working at highest intensity, 
 which makes her greater and more heroic 
 than even Egmont, for she has not his inac- 
 tive limit of character. When he is captured 
 by the Spanish, she summons the people to 
 aid in his rescue, yea to rise now and throw 
 off the oppressor's yoke, headed by Egmont, 
 who is, however, wholly incapable of any 
 such national deed, as little as Goethe him- 
 self was. Still the poet has endowed his best 
 female characters with lofty traits which he 
 himself did not possess hence the oft-re- 
 peated remark that Goethe's women are of a 
 higher order than his men they are his 
 ideals, his exemplars The Eternal-Womanly 
 draws us onward the us being especially 
 Goethe himself. So Clara is the true heroine 
 of the play and rightly its favorite charac- 
 ter. Still she is whelmed into the tragedy of 
 her lover just through her demonic, death- 
 defying love, across which also flashes mo- 
 mentarily another love, that of country, in 
 the grand crisis of her people. 
 
 In this drama by way of comparison we 
 often recall Schiller, whose Wilhelm Tell, 
 placed in similar circumtances politically 
 
304 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 with those of Egmont, makes such a different 
 impression, and has had such a different 
 fame. And Clara brings up the Maid of Or- 
 leans as Schiller's model of representing the 
 heroic woman. The two poets, seen in this 
 aspect of their work, are two sides of one 
 greater whole, or two opposite tendencies 
 which are destined to be. united in the su- 
 preme Epoch of both. 
 
 VI. Significant is the fact that the people 
 appear four times in the drama, being a kind 
 of personage of the play from beginning to 
 end. They are portrayed vividly as a mass, 
 also separated into four or five popular types. 
 Still, as a whole, they are listless, sodden, 
 unheroic, too. Perchance this was Goethe's 
 unfortunate idea of the folk, even later of his 
 own German folk, although at times he bris- 
 tled up into sharp denials of such a view. But 
 in Egmont the Netherlanders are not truly 
 shown forth as they actually were in history ; 
 they did rise against the Spanish yoke in long, 
 national struggle and throw it off, after a 
 contest lasting a hundred years, as it is some- 
 times reckoned. In this drama Alva remains 
 the dark remorseless, irresistible power 
 crushing Dutch liberty, but he in history 
 failed and gave up his task. So again we see 
 that history was but a foil for Goethe's po- 
 etry, having no right in itself, indeed no prin- 
 
EGMONT. 305 
 
 ciple. The same fact we notice in Goethe's 
 treatment of the French Revolution which 
 ran through so many years of his mature 
 life; its significance he never could quite re- 
 alize. 
 
 The question will always be asked why did 
 not the poet in Italy transform his prose Eg- 
 mont into the blank-verse of poetry, as he 
 did with the two other dramas of the Trilogy. 
 He was in the classical mood and was cer- 
 tainly master of its metrical expression. 
 Moreover, he insisted strongly in a letter to 
 Schiller that "all dramatic works should be 
 rhythmical, " that is, should have some form 
 of measured melody. This declaration, how- 
 ever, was made several years after his Italian 
 trip. As Goethe himself has given no 
 grounds why he should except Egmont from 
 his classic transformation in form and meter, 
 we are compelled to dig up some reason for 
 ourselves. First, we may note that the 
 theme is Northern, Teutonic, anti-classic, 
 portraying a conflict with a Latinized people 
 who spoke a Latinized tongue and possessed 
 a Latinized culture and civilization. But at 
 present Goethe's face is turned southward, 
 he is seeking to appropriate the Mediterran- 
 ean life and art, he has changed for the nonce 
 from Northerner to Southerner. Hence he 
 could not help feeling discordant with the 
 
306 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 purport of Egmont, and of itself the theme 
 would not classicize, like Iphigenia or Tasso, 
 both of which subjects belonged already to 
 the soil of the South in their origin. So Goe- 
 the corrected much in his work, but could not 
 metamorphose it into a classic drama. The 
 same experience he had with his Faust which 
 he took along and hoped to complete in Italy. 
 How could he? For Faust is also Teutonic, 
 sprung of a Northern legend and a Northern 
 consciousness, and thus was profoundly in- 
 harmonious with Goethe's Italian atunement. 
 So he has to bring back his Faust to its Ger- 
 man home still unfinished, and wait for an- 
 other epochal mood, in which he can again 
 Teutonize his poem. 
 
 Still there is evidence that he did not have 
 an easy time in working at his Egmont while 
 in Italy. Already in January, 1787, he writes 
 from Eome : ' ' Now I am going to tackle Eg- 
 mont/' and he hopes soon to finish it with 
 Tasso and Faust. But several months pass 
 and we hear that "the fourth Act will soon 
 be done." Still there is delay and he has to 
 whip himself to his task, which opens not a 
 smooth path but rather thorny. At last, how- 
 ever, September 5th, he can announce its com- 
 pletion and send it to his friends in Weimar. 
 He adds an utterance of his great relief: "It 
 was an unspeakably hard task, which I never 
 
EGMONT. 307 
 
 could have accomplished without an unlimit- 
 ed freedom of life and mind, ' ' which he found 
 of course in Italy. ,But the work had to be 
 done, even if it often went against the grain. 
 In a later letter from Rome he emphasizes 
 once more the difficulty. "Let anyone im- 
 agine what it means to take in hand a work 
 which was written twelve years earlier, and 
 to complete it without writing it over. ' ' This 
 indicates that he followed the original prose 
 copy going back to 1775 at Frankfort. 
 
 As before said, Egmont is deeply twined 
 with Gotz in form and significance, as well 
 as in the time of origin. Still it shows decid- 
 edly the influence of the Weimar Epoch, dur- 
 ing whose ten years it lay germinating, but 
 unable to flower out. We recollect that Gotz 
 flung himself into rebellion against the es- 
 tablished social order, defying even the Em- 
 peror. But Egmont will preserve the exist- 
 ing institutions of his land against the tyran- 
 nical foreign oppressor. Thus he is not a 
 revolutionist in the sense that Gotz is ; rather 
 is he a conservator of his country's transmit- 
 ted rights. This is in accord with the insti- 
 tutional training . which he received at Wei- 
 mar after his Frankfort eruption against the 
 ordered world. Still Egmont talks patriot- 
 ism rather than acts it, he proclaims his peo- 
 ple 's independence, but does little for it; his 
 
308 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 will is paralyzed by what Goethe calls the 
 Demonic, which seems also a later elabora- 
 tion. To be sure no copy has been preserved 
 of the first Frankfort Egmont, or of the sec- 
 ond Weimar Egmont which was probably 
 the one which Goethe worked over in 
 Italy. No five different redactions of Eg- 
 mont exist as they do of Iphigenia, showing 
 various gradations in its evolution. Still, 
 compared with Gotz, it bears the impress of 
 Weimar. Thus it is a kind of overture start- 
 ing with Frankfort, but sending repeated 
 strains through Weimar to Italy. 
 
 Also there may be found a link of connec- 
 tion between the two dramas of Egmont and 
 Iphigenia at Tauris in the characters of the 
 two women. Both are endowed with the 
 spirit of willing sacrifice of themselves to 
 what they deem their supreme end, and there- 
 in are heroic. Clara gives her life unflinch- 
 ingly to her love and her cause, and perishes 
 immediately through her deed; she dies a 
 sacrifice. But Iphigenia lives a sacrifice, and 
 devotes the long years of banishment to the 
 uplift of her human environment till the day 
 dawns for her return home. Her work and 
 character as presented by the poet we are 
 to consider next. 
 
IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS. 309 
 
 IPHIGENIA AT TAUEIS. 
 
 This is the only drama of the present Tril- 
 ogy which is based upon a Mythus, a story 
 elaborated by the people which shows man in 
 some connection with the Upper Powers, the 
 individual in relation to the providential 
 order as conceived by the age. The Mythus 
 of which Iphigenia is a very important mem- 
 ber is Greek, even early Greek, having 
 sprung originally from the primal conscious- 
 ness of Greece, since it reaches back of the 
 Trojan war into the shadowy aforetime. 
 
 When Iphigenia tells Thoas, the King of 
 Barbary, who is wooing her for marriage : "I 
 am of the race of Tantalus, " she intends to 
 frighten him off through the fate-smitten 
 character of her ancestors who form a dread- 
 ful line of cruelties and impieties reaching 
 up to the very seat of the Gods. Tantalus, 
 son of Zeus and of a human mother, was a 
 favorite of the Olympians, being admitted to 
 their table, and sharing in the divine coun- 
 sels and purposes, though only a mor- 
 tal. But he is declared to have betrayed their 
 secrets to men and also to have stolen nectar 
 and ambrosia from their feasts, and to have 
 brought the- divine food and drink to our 
 lower world. That was a great sacrilege 
 
310 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 though a philanthropic action; the stern de- 
 cree followed: Tantalus "for his pride and 
 treachery, as the poets sing, was hurled from 
 Jove's table down to the disgrace of old Tar- 
 tarus, " the dark realm below where the 
 other violators of Olympic majesty atone for 
 their offenses. Iphigenia adds : "Alas! and 
 his whole race must bear the hate of the 
 Gods." Thus she proclaims herself a Tan- 
 talid with a divine curse laid upon her from 
 birth. 
 
 As the love of Thoas is not terrified by this 
 record of her first ancestor, she continues her 
 account of the horrors and guilty deeds done 
 by three generations of the progeny of Tan- 
 talus Pelops, Atreus and Thyestes, Aga- 
 memnon son of Atreus till the line of bloody 
 ferocities ended in herself who was sacri- 
 ficed by her own father, as far as his inten- 
 tion went, at Aulis to the Goddess Diana. 
 "But the Goddess was reconciled, did not 
 wish my blood, and rescued me in a cloud." 
 Thus she was conveyed to Tauris in whose 
 temple she awoke from death. "I am she 
 herself, Iphigenia." Thus she reveals her- 
 self along with the taint of her blood and its 
 hereditary curse the motive being to dis- 
 suade the barbarian King from his suit, as 
 she wished to return to Greece, which was 
 her heart's deepest love and longing. Still 
 
IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS. 311 
 
 Thoas is not deterred, he renews his pro- 
 posal; if refused he threatens to relapse to 
 his old barbarism and to sacrifice some 
 strangers who have just arrived upon his 
 coast. That would be quite the undoing of 
 all her work of all these years, for truly she 
 has been the Greek Missionary to the bar- 
 barous world. 
 
 Thus the poet in the first Act of his drama, 
 brings down the Mythus of the Tantalids to 
 the beginning of the Trojan War, of whose 
 course and outcome Iphigenia knows nothing, 
 since it has wholly taken place during her 
 stay at Tauris. The continuation she hears 
 in the next Act from Pylades, one of the 
 newly arrived strangers, who has come to 
 the temple and finds there a priestess talking 
 Greek. She learns from him about the fall 
 of Troy, the return of her father Agamem- 
 non and his death at the hands of his wife 
 Clytemnestra aided by her paramour Aegis- 
 thus. Thus she hears a new chapter of the 
 horrors of the House of Tantalus, her moth- 
 er's vengeance wreaked upon her father for 
 her sake. In a later Act she is told of the 
 fate of her mother slain by the son Orestes, 
 her brother who has come to Tauris hounded 
 by the Furies and seeking release from them 
 by doing a work of atonement for his guilt 
 which is to be brought about through her 
 
312 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 mediation. Thus we are told the long venge- 
 ful story of -the House of Tantalus, blood- 
 stained especially with the gore of its own 
 kindred. 
 
 Such is the mythical substrate of the whole 
 drama which permeates its structure through 
 and through into every living corpuscle of 
 its organism. In no other poem of Goe- 
 the has a Mythus been so completely 
 wrought out and interwoven into the fab- 
 ric of his imagination. Not even Faust, 
 though based on a legend of his native 
 land, is so pervasively mythical as this 
 old Greek tale in the hands of the poet. 
 Moreover it seems to us the most carefully 
 and cunningly constructed of Goethe 's works. 
 Naturally we ask why has the poet such a 
 persistent interest in that old sanguinary 
 record of domestic fatalities? As he never 
 wrote anything, so he says, without its being 
 drawn from his own deepest experience, we 
 grope for the connection between the drama 
 of Iphigenia and what lurked far down, per- 
 haps unconsciously, in the secret depths of 
 his being. 
 
 It is generally agreed that the conception 
 of the work goes back to the Frankfort 
 Quadrennium, that Epoch of his greatest 
 creative energy. Critics have assigned its 
 first start to the year 1776, some ten years 
 
IPHIGENIA AT TAURI8? 313 
 
 before its final completed form. Of its earl- 
 ier stages we have no less than four different 
 shapes upon which the investigators have 
 spent a good deal of discussion. The first 
 theatrical representation in prose is usually 
 dated April 6, 1779, at Weimar, in which 
 Goethe took the part of Orestes and Corona 
 Schroeter that of Iphigenia. The appearance 
 as well as the acting of Goethe in this part 
 roused great astonishment in the audience. 
 He threw a personal power and emotion in- 
 to the role so that it was then said : Lo, he is 
 Orestes. Ever since he has been more or 
 less identified with that character by inter- 
 preters of the play. 
 
 Here again we impinge on the fact that this 
 poem also is confession wrung from him by 
 his sense of guilt, the atonement for which 
 he seeks to obtain through his writing. 
 Goethe, taken at his word in general, would 
 never have portrayed Orestes pursued by the 
 Furies unless he himself had been pursued 
 in the same manner. In a letter of 1775 (al- 
 ready cited) we may hear his sigh of pun- 
 ishment: "Perhaps the invisible scourge of 
 the Furies will soon lash me again from my 
 native land." Thus he had realized in his 
 own person the soul-harassing conception of 
 Orestes years before the first known copy of 
 Iphigenia. The thought must have been long 
 
314 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 familiar to him, possibly from his boyhood 
 when he read the Greek tragic poets in his 
 father 's library along with the woeful tale of 
 Tantalus and the Tantalids. In his speech 
 at the Shakespeare festival (October 1771) 
 he ejaculates an admiring exclamation to the 
 English poet: "If thou wert Orestes, how 
 delighted would I be to play with thine the 
 lesser part of a Pylades." Evidently the 
 theme of his IpJiigenia at Tauris had taken 
 deep hold of Goethe already in his youth. 
 More than ten years, yea more than fif- 
 teen years had this subject been fermenting 
 in his mind, or more especially in his con- 
 science. The facts and his own utterances, 
 therefore, would seem to show that ever since 
 his Strasburg time, when he met, wooed and 
 abandoned Frederika the image of Orestes 
 hounded by the guilt-avenging Eumenides, 
 had lodged in his soul and could not be banned 
 except by his pen, that wonderful instrument 
 of his expiation through contrition, confes- 
 sion, and works meet for repentance, one of 
 which works was just this confessional poem 
 of Ipliigenia. Hence it has taken such a sig- 
 nificant place in his total life-poem, being 
 read, studied, and more deeply felt than any 
 other of his dramas, excepting Faust. But 
 it is not well adapted for external repre- 
 sentation on the stage, it is an inward-turn- 
 
. 
 
 IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS. 315 
 
 ing drama, its appeal is directly to the soul 
 alone, being an experience of the spirit which 
 communes with the spirit. 
 
 Undoubtedly Goethe had done no crime 
 like a mother's murder, and so his deed, 
 whatever it may have been, has a different 
 character from that of Orestes. Still the of- 
 fence against conscience must have been very 
 actively present, else such throes of remorse 
 would have little meaning. From this and 
 other striking instances we come to the con- 
 clusion that Goethe must have had a keen 
 sense of guilt, especially in certain directions, 
 though he is generally regarded as little 
 capable of the feeling of sin. But we have 
 his word and the proof that all his litera- 
 ture, particularly his greatest and most con- 
 vincing literature, springs from his contrite 
 heart for some violation, which it is just the 
 function of his artistic word to expiate. Such 
 is doubtless the ultimate view to be taken of 
 Goethe's writ: it is remedial, purificatory, 
 purgatorial; the author, like Dante, goes 
 through a realm of guilt and suffering in 
 person, and tells of it for his own redemption 
 and that of others perchance like him. Yet, 
 unlike Dante, he does not relegate such a 
 penitential journey to the future state of 
 man, but he places it here and now in this 
 life a journey to be made in some form 
 
316 GOETHE'S* LIFE-POEM PART SECOND. 
 
 daily, yearly by every son of Adam. Such 
 we may deem the ultimate purpose of his 
 books, though they have other lesser and 
 more superficial meanings. 
 
 It was in classic Italy that Iphigenia re- 
 ceived the final form in harmony with the 
 locality and its artistic tradition. In the 
 poet's letters from Italy we trace his strong 
 inner push to finish just this work first. At 
 Lake Guarda we find him already busy with 
 it, as soon as he has descended the Alps and 
 touched Italian soil.- At Verona we get an 
 inkling of the intensity of his Muse when he 
 says he has written the live-long day on his 
 poem. Finally he reports it completed at 
 Eome in December, 1786, and sends a copy to 
 Herder who has helped him with advice. It 
 was published in 1787, and therewith Goethe 
 was quit of his long brooding over the work, 
 which he had so often rewritten. From prose 
 it has been transformed into blank-verse, 
 doubtless after the model of Shakespeare, 
 and is one of the great masterpieces of versi- 
 fication whose deep underlying harmony is a 
 resonance of the spirit of the peom, that of 
 atonement and reconciliation. No Titanism, 
 no eruption, though there is passion enough 
 underneath the calm exterior. 
 
 And this suggests the meaning of the work 
 in the evolution Goethe's career. It should 
 
IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS. 317 
 
 be taken as the artistic counterpart and con- 
 trast of the Titanic upheavals of the Frank- 
 fort Epoch. It may be true that Tantalus is 
 not spoken of as a Titan by ancient writers, 
 so the learned commentators declare; still 
 he commits a Titanic offence in defiance of 
 the Gods, and is whelmed into murky Tar- 
 tarus like the other great Titans of fable. 
 And then his progeny, the Tantalids, are co- 
 lossal in their deeds of guilt, whose mon- 
 strous line reaches down to Iphigenia the 
 priestess at Tauris. Now it is her function 
 and object to put an end to this ever-beget- 
 ting series of monstrosities, through her own 
 life and sacrifice as well as through the ex- 
 piation of the crime of Orestes. Thus Goethe 
 poetizes his grand transition out of his for- 
 mer Epoch into his present classic mood of 
 harmony and reconciliation. Moreover the 
 mediatrix who performed for him personally 
 this act of mediation is pointed out, also a 
 woman, Frau Von Stein. In his letters to 
 her he has often hinted her mediatorial func- 
 tion for his passion-torn life. He declares 
 that she knew him better than he knew him- 
 self. That was, of course, in the earlier Wei- 
 mar days of his love. And it was in these 
 days that he wrought out and lived out, yea 
 acted out his drama of Iphigenia, which cen- 
 ters upon the priestly woman whose remedial 
 
318 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 power put an end to the curse of the Tan- 
 talids, though she herself was a Tantalid, 
 and it would seem, a drop of the old inherited 
 poison remained in her bosom. 
 
 This very suggestive point is indicated by 
 Iphigenia in communing with herself (Act 4, 
 Scene 5,) when she prays that she may not 
 relapse to the old Titanic defiance: "May 
 the deep hate of the old Gods, the Titans, not 
 at last sprout afresh in my bosom against 
 you, Olympians, and tear my tender breast 
 with the claws of a vulture. " So she seems 
 to identify herself with the Titans, the old 
 revolters against Zeus and his new order. 
 But the main fact is she feels that she can 
 backslide, and again become herself a Tan- 
 talid, interlinking in the hate-forged chain of 
 her family's guilt and retribution, whose 
 ever-repeated clash of bloody horrors she has 
 sought to cleanse and atone "with pure hand 
 and pure heart " by her long priestly dedica- 
 tion in a strange land. Still further the ques- 
 tion arises, did Frau Von Stein ever have any 
 such relapse, she being the supposed living 
 model of Iphigenia in the master 's workshop 1 
 And did the poet forefeel in her character 
 that from love she could drop back into hate, 
 to be sure under strong provocation, and 
 could turn from the priestly mediatrix to the 
 cursing prophetess of ills for him and his 
 
.4- 
 I PHI GEN I A AT TAURIS. 319 
 
 house! Already we have noted that she be- 
 came the poet's evil-boding Cassandra after 
 his return v f rom Italy, that is, after this poem 
 of Iphigenia had been written and printed. 
 So we catch a strain of presentiment in re- 
 gard to the poet's coming life; a vein of 
 prophecy runs through the present drama 
 which to us is its subtlest and most suggest- 
 ive characteristic, as if he were unconscious- 
 ly forecasting his own future destiny. 
 
 The best readers, or the most of them, 
 have always selected the Hymn of the Fates 
 (Parcas) as the deepest-toned passage in the 
 drama, and as that portion in which the poet 
 poured forth the full utterance of his 
 wrought-up Genius, reaching down to his ul- 
 timate creative depths when he beheld in 
 foreshow his own future, as well as his own 
 Last Judgment. Listen to their ominous 
 chant: "Let the mortal who has been exalt- 
 ed by the Gods fear them most," as he is 
 already dangling on the precipices and clouds 
 of Fate. "For if a conflict arises between 
 him and them, down he is hurled, despised 
 and disgraced, into the nighted domain" of 
 Tartarus, "where he will await forever Jus- 
 tice, being chained in the gloomy underworld, 
 whence the breath of smothered Titans as- 
 cends like the incense of sacrifice to them 
 sitting at their eternal banquets on the gold- 
 
320 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 en chairs " of Olympus. So Goethe cast a 
 shadow of his former self in the conflict be- 
 tween Titan and Olympian, with a shudder- 
 ing hint of the penalty. Verily he has been a 
 kind of Tantalus himself, else he never would 
 have written this poem, for only his personal 
 experience could be forged through his goose 
 quill into artistic shapes. Then comes the 
 prophecy of the divine curse: "The Gods 
 avert their eye of blessing from whole gen- 
 erations of men, and shun in the offspring 
 the once loved lineaments of the ancestor. " 
 So the Tantalids have felt the heavy doom 
 of the forefather, "who listens now, banned 
 in the caverns of night ' ' to this song * l of the 
 Fates " and "the old man thinks of child and 
 grandchild and shakes his head." Here the 
 Goethe of not yet forty forecasts with the 
 seer's prophetic vision, the Goethe of eighty 
 looking upon his own child and grandchil- 
 dren and even naming them Tantalids, the 
 progeny of Tantalus. For from what other 
 source could his grandson, Walter Von Goe- 
 the derive that fate-laden expression of his 
 (in a letter of 1848) calling himself "a relict 
 of the House of Tantalus?" He as a boy 
 doubtless heard it drop from the lips of the 
 "old man," his grandfather, in some mo- 
 ment of sighful retrospect. Such, at least, 
 is our construction of the situation. 
 
IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS.'*' 321 
 
 In this same fact lies the reason why Goe- 
 the shunned the representation of this drama 
 on the stage. He was Director of the Weimar 
 theater, and yet he would not produce it, in 
 spite of solicitation. Finally Schiller per- 
 suaded him, but had to take charge of its 
 theatrical preparation throughout. In the 
 Correspondence with Schiller, we observe 
 with surprise the unwillingness of Goethe to 
 have anything to do with his own great 
 drama. ' ' I must keep aloof from Iphigenia, ' ' 
 he writes. "I do not wish to see a single 
 rehearsal/' he says with sharp emphasis. 
 Why! We ask with wonder. Certainly, not 
 because he was ashamed of his work on ac- 
 count of its unpopularity, that would not be 
 Goethe. Some biographers say he had lost 
 interest in it; rather the contrary, in our 
 opinion the work stirred in him too strong 
 and painful an interest. So his drama had 
 to wait fifteen years in his own theater for 
 its first presentation, and then this took place 
 through the persistency and labor of Schiller. 
 He could not bear to listen to the story of 
 Tantalus and his offspring whose imaged 
 fate was realizing itself so terribly in his own 
 life. He averted his face from the picture of 
 his own deed begetting a race of Tanta- 
 lids. 
 
 The same disinclination to see his 
 
322 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Iphigenia acted would show itself during liis 
 later life. In 1825, on the occasion of a 
 great festival in Ms honor, the play 
 was given, but he quit the theater be- 
 fore it was over. In 1827 he declined to wit- 
 ness a famous actor in the part of Orestes, 
 excusing himself thus to his friend Zelter: 
 "It is impossible for me to go. What good 
 will it do me to recall the days when I felt, 
 thought, and wrote it all." But the reason 
 why just this drama is so painful to him he 
 keeps hidden from his most intimate compan- 
 ions. The secret of Tantalus seals his lips for 
 the sake of the living. And how could he, look- 
 ing back at his fateful deed through a vista 
 of forty years endure to listen to that dread- 
 fully prophetic Hymn of the Fates I 
 
 Doubtless he chose the theme- of Iphigenia 
 at Tauris in preference to that of Iphigenia 
 at Aulis as more profoundly consonant with 
 his poetical instinct, which already felt him 
 to be an Orestes haunted by the Furies. Also 
 the mediation of the woman lay deep in his 
 personal experience. Nor did the poet see 
 the real ground for the return of the priest- 
 ess to Hellas, which needed her mediatorial 
 service as well as Tauris; witness the deeds 
 of her royal parents as typical of the time 
 and people. Hence no Iphigenia at Delphi 
 could complete itself from Goethe's pen. Nor 
 
.* 
 I PHI GEN I A AT TAURIS. 323 
 
 did it ever seem to rise into his consciousness 
 that in golden Mycenae, where she was born 
 and whence she came to Aulis for her sacri- 
 fice, there was a theme for a poem to show 
 her preparatory training for her work. Her 
 life at Tauris pre-supposes a long prelude, 
 which did not involve him personally. 
 
 Thus the mentally vigilant reader, looking 
 backwards and forwards from Goethe's one 
 Iphigenia, may catch the outlines of three 
 others going before or following after this 
 central figure, who is but a single phase of 
 the total mythus. But also we should behold 
 the poem inwardly, and mark its prophetic 
 character as its truly immortal soul. For in 
 it the poet becomes the seer of himself, fore- 
 shadowing his own future in the most inti- 
 mate strand of his existence. 
 
 But there are other very important and 
 edifying points of view for fully appropriat- 
 ing Goethe's Iphigenia. We delight in con- 
 templating her as the prototype of the media- 
 torial woman, who has suffered much, yet has 
 transfigured her suffering into a blessing for 
 herself and still more for others. 
 
 She has endured not death, but what she 
 probably deems worse a long exile from 
 her native Hellas to a barbarous land in 
 which she has performed the function of the 
 humane priestess and civilizer during many 
 
324 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 years. Thus she casts an image of all Greek 
 culture in its influence upon the ruder non- 
 Greek nations of the world. In her story we 
 catch a glimpse of Hellas imparting her 
 civilization to backward peoples. Goethe 
 called himself often the Northern barbarian, 
 who went to the South for the Hellenic spirit. 
 Even in the ancient drama of Euripides such 
 a missionary idea glimmers through to the 
 watchful eye. But in the reproduction of the 
 German poet this character of Iphigenia 
 comes out far more emphatically. For the 
 author himself is now the recipient of Iphi- 
 genia 's gift and may well deem himself the 
 beneficiary of her sacrifice. The old Greek 
 poet, Euripides, could not feel such gratitude 
 to his heroine. 
 
 Still he utters very suggestively the value 
 of such sacrifice to the sufferer herself. It 
 becomes her true salvation. In the most 
 striking passage of the ancient drama 
 (Iphigenia at Aulis, line 1440) she cries out 
 in exalted prophecy to her mother who 
 deemed her lost: "But I am not lost, I am 
 saved. " Hardly has the world yet reached 
 this lofty pinnacle of conduct. Goethe vivifies 
 such an Iphigenia more completely than 
 Euripides, but beyond Goethe there is still 
 room for a higher fulfillment. 
 
 The eternal charm of the Iphegenia legend 
 
.* 
 
 IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS. 325 
 
 in its ancient and modern forms is its similar- 
 ity to the story of Christ. To lose life is to 
 find it is instruction given by both. Then the 
 missionary spirit, in spite of their different 
 ways, is common to both. In each case the 
 innocent soul gives itself for the guilty. Greek 
 Iphigenia, as a free-will offering, is borne to 
 savage Tauris, where she becomes the em- 
 bodiment as well as the doctrine of her own 
 sacrifice. Thus the old sages and seers of 
 Greece were conscious of their universal mis- 
 sion. 
 
 On the subject of Iphigenia the ancient 
 Greeks have left numerous scattered hints, 
 but it was Euripides who concentrated the 
 somewhat drifting legend in two plays which 
 have become immortal (Iph. at Aulis and Iph. 
 at Tauris). Mankind has refused to let such 
 a striking conception of its own supreme 
 ideal pass into oblivion; the result is a long 
 line of Iphigenia dramas and poems down to 
 the present day. It may be said that this 
 Mythus has shown its inner power by evolv- 
 ing with civilization down the ages, and re- 
 flecting the same in many works of art (for 
 a much more complete account of the Iphi- 
 genia story, and its place in the world's 
 literature, see our Agamemnon's Daughter, 
 p. 196, etc.) 
 
 We may next consider more specially Goe- 
 
326 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 the 's treatment in its general significance and 
 in its very distinct personal relation to him- 
 self. For in her he saw, we repeat, the 
 mediatorial woman projecting a phase of his 
 own deepest experience into an ancient tale. 
 This character of hers we shall emphasize in 
 particular points. 
 
 I. She, through her own spiritual gift, has 
 shown the power to mediate herself from her 
 fatal inheritance and environment. She 
 knows and says that she belongs to the guilty 
 House of Tantalus, whose bloody vengeful 
 horrors form the most gruesome chapter of 
 Greek mythology. Eevenge upon revenge, 
 and retribution upon retribution pile up the 
 mountain of its tragedies. But Iphigenia 
 through herself, through her sacrifice and de- 
 votion to humanity, has turned off the curse 
 of her kin and become her own mediator with 
 herself and with the Divine Order through 
 her long trial of priestly service. 
 
 II. She has mediated the barbarous world 
 from remorseless savagery to a higher life 
 and civilization through her example and doc- 
 trine. She has even transformed the old 
 cruel religion of the Taurians, who sacrificed 
 to their pitiless deity the man cast by ship- 
 wreck or other chance upon their shore. Thus 
 she is the missionary of humanity to all in- 
 humanity. As she has mediated herself out 
 
I PHI GEN I A AT TAURIS. 327 
 
 of her ferocious blood, so she mediates the 
 inborn ferocity of an uncivilized people. 
 
 III. And now comes her supreme act of 
 mediation in Goethe's drama. She has to 
 mediate her own brother Orestes pursued by 
 the Furies of his special deed of guilt which 
 is also that of the House of Tantalus gener- 
 ally. As she has redeemed herself from the' 
 deep-seated taint of her family, so she is now 
 to redeem her next of kin who is still under 
 the doom of his own curse and that of his 
 House. Such is the heaven-wide contrast: 
 both brother and sister are Tantalids, of one 
 blood and under one judgment, but stand at 
 the extreme opposite points of the spiritual 
 universe the reconciled and the damned. 
 But reconciliation cannot be truly itself till 
 it reconcile its other, now its very brother. 
 So Iphigenia mediates Orestes and brings 
 to an end the curse of her house. 
 
 IV. So far Goethe carries us in his intern- 
 al way; also Euripides reaches the same 
 point, though in a much more external man- 
 ner. - Thus both the ancient poet and the mod- 
 ern one indicate the healing of Orestes, and 
 therewith the return of Iphigenia to Hellas. 
 But when she gets back home, has she noth- 
 ing to do 1 We hold that here a new work be- 
 gins for her : nothing less than the regenera- 
 tion of all Hellas which is more or less in the 
 
328 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 condition of the Tantalids given up to re- 
 venge and hence hounded by the Furies. 
 Later Hellenic history, especially during the 
 Peloponnesian War, show both the character 
 and the deeds of the whole people, which call 
 up the scourging Eumenides, like those of 
 Orestes. In fact every Greek was an Orestes 
 -of some sort. 
 
 It should be added that the truth of this 
 way of mediating man's guilt has been not 
 merely questioned but stoutly denied. Iphi- 
 genia cannot set free her brother as the mur- 
 derer of his mother, she cannot ban the 
 Furies of such a heinous deed. The church 
 naturally says that true absolution can come 
 only through priestly mediation invoking the 
 intercession of the Mediator himself, the Son 
 of God, the source of all true forgiveness. On 
 the other hand we may hear the disbeliever 
 declaring that Orestes had done the deed in- 
 expiable on earth and in Heaven, that he can- 
 not repent and live, his sole absolution can 
 take place only through his own free-willed 
 death (See Engel's Goethe, p. 292). Suicide 
 is the one atonement of matricide. The act 
 of Orestes is tragic and cannot be mediated, 
 he must perish; Yet old Aeschylus gave him 
 expiation at last through the Court of the 
 Areiopagus, a politico-religious tribunal. 
 
 Goethe wrote long afterward (1827) a 
 
IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS. 329 
 
 verse which pertains just to this act of Iphi- 
 genia: "Pure humanity can atone (or 
 mediate) all human shortcomings (Gebre- 
 chen)." It is contended, however, that such a 
 work of expiation and forgiveness is as mir- 
 aculous as the external command of the God- 
 dess in Euripides, or as the Christian pro- 
 cess of repentance and restoration. So we 
 record the denial of the mediatorial act of the 
 drama: Iphigenia as merely human, as sim- 
 ply an individual, cannot absolve the guilty 
 one that can be accomplished only through 
 the saving institution or through death. Thus 
 we may hear from two opposite sides the 
 negation of Iphigenia 's priestly or reconcil- 
 ing function, which she is supposed to have 
 derived from the long service of the Goddess. 
 Still a great majority of the deeper read- 
 ers have come to accept Iphigenia for what 
 she stands in Goethe's poem, which at its 
 best inculcates the mediatorial power exist- 
 ent in every human being. Every man can 
 become a Christ, and that is the true imita- 
 tion of the Savior, namely to save. Of course 
 Goethe's work was not understood at its first 
 appearance, it had to train its readers and is 
 still training them. At present it is much 
 studied in the schools at home and abroad ; it 
 is truly a pivotal utterance of his life-poem. 
 
330 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 TASSO. 
 
 Again must be emphasized that statement 
 so often made before: all of Goethe's impor- 
 tant works are confessions, wherein he sets 
 forth his spirit's sufferings and his recovery 
 through artistic utterance. So he himself 
 has declared in his Autobiography, written 
 some twenty years or more after his Tasso, 
 which also expresses the same fact in a highly 
 poetic way. "A God has given me the power 
 to tell what I suffer " ; such we may deem the 
 pivotal sentence of Tasso, which throws its 
 light backward and forward over Goethe's 
 whole life. Other men "turn dumb" in their 
 sorrows, but the Muse has endowed him with 
 the gift of transfiguring his tribulations of 
 life into poetry, and thereby of finding his 
 heart 's alleviation. Tasso we may, therefore, 
 expect to be a record of his outer and inner 
 experiences at a throeful turn of his career. 
 So it was regarded by all his acquaintances 
 at Weimar when it first appeared. Herder, 
 perhaps his most intimate interpreter, had 
 hardly read the first scene, according to the 
 report of his wife, when he burst out: 
 "Goethe has to idealize himself and write 
 everything from what he has experienced." 
 Speaking to Eckermann against foisting an 
 
TASSO. 331 
 
 idea upon the work, the poet unfolded his 
 own idea of it : ' i I had Tasso 's life and mine 
 own, I put the two peculiar characters to- 
 gether, and so arose the image of Tasso, in 
 prosaic contrast to Antonio, for whom also 
 I had models. The other relations of life, 
 love, and the court, were quite in Weimar as 
 in Ferrara. Thus I can rightly say of my 
 poetic presentation: it is bone of my bone 
 and flesh of my flesh. " Here the poet cer- 
 tainly interprets himself : Ferrara is an ideal- 
 ized photograph of Weimar, especially as 
 Goethe had experienced it during his first 
 Decennium in that little capital. But we 
 should add that it has something that means 
 a good deal more, namely, the element of 
 universality which belongs to all times and 
 places. Tasso 's conflict in both its phases is 
 man's, particularly the ideal-seeking man's, 
 he being not confined to any city or nation. 
 
 Hitherto the poet has revealed himself in 
 the multitudinous shapes of his characters, 
 who, however, veil his talk in a kind of dis- 
 guise. But now the leading character is the 
 poet himself speaking in his own name and 
 right, and portraying his own conflicts. That 
 is, the poet poetizes himself. Goethe previ- 
 ously has been the secret demiurge making 
 his little worlds and filling them with his peo- 
 ple. Hence we have there to detect him in 
 
332 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 his work and to drag him forth to the light. 
 But in his Tasso he introduces the world- 
 maker himself in his environment, and un- 
 masks him to the very soul. Thus Goethe 
 tells on himself at his confessional, which is 
 his creative literature. The collisions as well 
 as the dangers of the poetic temperament, 
 yea its temptations and transgressions are 
 narrated unsparingly. Goethe once desig- 
 nated his Tasso as showing "the dispropor- 
 tion of talent with life," talent here signify- 
 ing probably poetic genius, which feels itself 
 hampered on all sides by the existent order. 
 Such was his own condition, especially during 
 the Frankfort Quadrennium, when he would 
 burst over all limits "to the Infinite" in his 
 Titanic mood. So Tasso has his bitter strug- 
 gles, outer and inner, reflecting undoubtedly 
 Goethe 's own. But the poem does not stop 
 at this point. It mediates the poet in his two 
 main conflicts, the one with the prose of life 
 and the other with the anguish of an impos- 
 sible love. Else he were verily tragic, which 
 is the view taken by numerous readers and 
 critics. But at the end of the play he declares 
 himself saved from shipwreck, and he is rec- 
 onciled with Antonio, the man of affairs hith- 
 erto his foe. "So the sailor is rescued by the 
 rock on which his ship went to pieces." But 
 more deeply remedial is his poetic art, which 
 
.* 
 TASSO. 333 
 
 enables him to transfigure his suffering and 
 obtain relief and redemption. Tasso is thus 
 at last self-mediated, wherein this poem 
 shows a difference from Iphigenid, in which 
 the woman is the mediatrix of the Fury- 
 pursued Orestes. But in the present drama 
 the woman does not succeed in reconciling the 
 poet with himself and with the world, though 
 two women try it, each in her own way, and 
 fail. To be sure, Tasso ascribes his power 
 of telling and thus mediating his woes to a 
 God, whom, however, he communes with and 
 voices. Thus he must essentially perform the 
 act himself. Such we may deem the chief 
 advance of Tasso upon the previous drama 
 of Iphigenia. 
 
 If we make the personal application which 
 always underlies Goethe's poetic characters, 
 we see that no longer Frau Von Stein can 
 mediate him in his new stage as she once 
 did in the Weimar Epoch. He had already 
 forefelt some such limit in her power when 
 he secretly took flight from her presence to 
 Italy. Still in Ipliigenia her previous medi- 
 atorial influence is celebrated, and fully rec- 
 ognized and brought to a close. But the poet 
 must at last mediate himself through his own 
 supernal gift of genius. So he transcends his 
 former mediatrix, who is unable to heal his 
 malady, like Tasso 's, of emotion and imagi- 
 
334 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 nation. In his soul lie must become self- 
 remedial, limit-transcending through his own 
 divine endowment; his poetic nature must 
 cure its own wounds, like the spear of 
 Achilles. In the poem this process is briefly 
 suggested rather than explicitly wrought out 
 to its fulness; hence many do not see it or 
 disregard its significance, deeming the work 
 to be really a tragedy. 
 
 There is another faci in this connection 
 which connot be omitted. The composition 
 of Tasso was completed in July, 1789, his first 
 meeting with Christiane in the Weimar Park 
 was in July 1788. Thus for the whole year 
 during which he was bringing his drama to 
 its last finish, he had begun to feel the ban 
 which Weimar society visited upon him on 
 account of his open violation of the Family. 
 This was his deed which isolated him more 
 than anything else, more than his Olympian 
 manner and his changed style of writing. 
 Hence the reader often feels a peculiar mood 
 of loneliness in Tasso, who receives so many 
 rebuffs from the world, being driven back 
 upon himself by Antonio and also by the Prin- 
 cess, and being put in confinement by the 
 Duke. Though the Roman Elegies express 
 the sensuous delights of the poet's life with 
 Christiane, there must have been another side 
 to the picture when the transgressor stepped 
 
TASSO. 335 
 
 forth into the community whose deepest law 
 he had defied. We may hear in the suffering 
 Tasso many an echo of the solitary Goethe 
 isolated by his act in his own social environ- 
 ment. Such is the new fate which Goethe the 
 lover has brought upon himself, and which 
 will weave a tragic tale through his whole 
 life-poem. We may catch its first shadow in 
 the sorrows of Tasso, though the circum- 
 stances be very different in the case of the 
 two poets. 
 
 Indeed, Goethe afterwards was inclined to 
 criticise himself as having put too much of 
 his own into his work : " I had transfused into 
 my Tasso more of mine own heart's blood 
 than was fitting." Hence it comes that he 
 avoided seeing it represented on the stage, 
 as it would call up his past sufferings. In his 
 old age (1827) he declared that he had never 
 read Tasso through in its printed form, and 
 that in the theatre he had heard only frag- 
 ments of it. Still it was often given on the 
 Weimar stage. Even more intense was his 
 avoidance of his own Iphigenia, and for a 
 deeper reason, already given. 
 
 I. This drama we place as the third of the 
 Italian Trilogy, as it was written or rather 
 re-written, in the Italian mood, and was 
 churned over a good deal in Italy. It sends 
 its roots back to the Frankfort Epoch, even 
 
336 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 to the poet's boyhood in the paternal home 
 where he read Tasso in a German translation, 
 and also in the original it seems. But dur- 
 ing the Weimar Epoch the life of Tasso came 
 home to him with a new meaning, for he felt 
 the marvelous identity of the Italian poet's 
 situation with his own. He must then have 
 deeply realized that Tasso, the poet at Fer- 
 rara, was Goethe the poet at Weimar. So he 
 starts, in accord with his literary bent, to 
 uttering his most vital experience in a poem. 
 Already in 1780 we see by a brief jotting in 
 his diary that the subject was fermenting 
 strongly in him, and was beginning to take 
 form; in November, 1781, two acts were 
 done, but it refused to complete itself for a 
 good reason : he was still in the toils of Frau 
 Von Stein, and that situation was all that 
 this first dramatic attempt could portray. 
 But the finished drama, as we have it, turns 
 finally on the breach with her love, though 
 setting forth in great amplitude the signifi- 
 cance of this love for the poet and his career. 
 In its early form, the drama was, as he 
 says, written in prose like Iphigenia, though 
 no copy of this original fragment has yet 
 been found. But obeying that curious fore- 
 cast of his coming poetic renascence, he took 
 his unfinished and as yet unfinishable Tasso 
 in manuscript to Italy, along with his other 
 
TA880. 337 
 
 torsos ; and there he lived out and hence could 
 write out its fulfilment. When his Italian 
 Journey was nearing its end, he says in a 
 letter to the Duke: "As the fascination 
 which first drew me to this subject sprang 
 from my innermost nature, so my effort, now 
 undertaken to bring it to a close, tacks onto 
 the end of my Italian career. " He connects 
 his separation from Rome with that of Tasso 
 from his loved princess at Ferrara, and he 
 begins to knead over the passages of the 
 drama which involve the situation and its 
 emotion with "a peculiar delight." Hence 
 he motives "the painful strand which runs 
 through the whole piece. " While winding 
 around in Italy on the way homeward, he 
 composes, various portions of the poem, as 
 the mood stirs him. He seems to have writ- 
 ten it backwards in part; at least, it is re- 
 corded that the last scenes were composed at 
 Florence in the Boboli Gardens; then the 
 fourth Act, and even the third at Weimar on 
 his return, the whole being finished in 1789 
 and published the next year. 
 
 Thus we observe that it stands third in 
 the order of its evolution and of its comple- 
 tion among the dramas of the Italian Trilogy. 
 It has a note of pensive reminiscence all the 
 way through as of a happy time past and 
 transcended. It is Goethe in his present state 
 
338 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 looking back and brooding over his long re- 
 lation to Frau Von Stein. Her love was for 
 him a deeply disciplining and reconciling 
 principle for many years, which, however, 
 has shown its limitations, and these he must 
 now surmount or perish as a soul unfulfilled 
 of its true mission. Such is his confession 
 in this drama: the most poignant suffering 
 was his, but it had to be met, being the pang 
 of a new birth for him. Nay, it had to be 
 poetically recorded in all its fullness if he 
 were ever to get relief from his pain and 
 find atonement. 
 
 In fact, it is just this redemption through 
 poetic utterance which Tasso unfolds and 
 reveals in his long and fearful trial, and thus 
 mirrors Goethe at his deepest. The pivotal, 
 quite untranslatable lines of the poem have 
 often been recognized : ' ' Though man turns 
 dumb in his anguish, a God has given me the 
 power to say what I suffer. " This might be 
 taken as the literary thought of Goethe 9 a 
 whole life : mine is the God-given voice which 
 taps in me the last sources of sorrow and 
 lets them rise into words for my relief and 
 reconciliation. So his writings are his soul- 
 stricken confessions, and for him literature 
 is mediatorial, verily its truest and deepest 
 function. In his late autumnal days he cites 
 the above-mentioned lines as the motto to 
 
TASSO. 339 
 
 his verses in which a God gave him again 
 to say what he suffered in his love for Ulrike, 
 whereby he was restored and lived. 
 
 The play of Goethe's Tasso is not, there- 
 fore, a tragedy, as it is often called and re- 
 garded, but its total sweep means the media- 
 tion of the otherwise tragic man through his 
 poetry. Over and over again Goethe has in- 
 timated that his gift of poetic utterance has 
 saved his life or at least has lifted him out 
 of the slough of mortal agony and despair, 
 so violently have his emotions torn him to 
 pieces within. Tasso, after terrific convul- 
 sions of feeling, which rage through love and 
 folly, reaching even a psychic insanity, is 
 cured by the divine gift of the Muse, which 
 enables him to throw into speech the malady 
 of his Genius. On the other hand, this play is 
 not a comedy in the ordinary sense; it is in- 
 deed a most serious, sombre piece, which, 
 however, is redemptive of its hero. Thus it 
 belongs to a class which we find also in 
 Shakespeare, namely, a tragic soul destined 
 to perish, mediated through sorrow for its 
 transgression, followed by confession and re- 
 pentance. But Shakespeare has nowhere 
 portrayed the poet as mediating his own 
 tragedy just through his God-sent word of 
 deliverance. Yet the reader often feels that 
 Shakespeare in writing Hamlet freed his own 
 
340 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. -PART SECOND. 
 
 soul of Hamlet's tragedy,, and especially in 
 elaborating so fully Antony and. Cleopatra 
 he won relief from "the perilous stuff " of his 
 own bosom. But in Tasso we behold the poet 
 poetizing his own doom as it were, and there- 
 by escaping from it, depicting his own dis- 
 eased imagination in all its frantic contor- 
 tions, and with such medicine curing himself 
 of his poetic malady. 
 
 It is no wonder that Goethe had a tendency 
 to connect his Tasso with his Werther, of 
 which it is an " intensified " copy, says 
 Goethe to Eckermann in a conversation cit- 
 ing the view of the French critic Ampere, 
 who has also noted that "in the first ten 
 years of my Weimar service I accomplished 
 as good as nothing," and that "despair drove 
 me to Italy, ' ' where with new creative power 
 "I seized upon the story of Tasso in order 
 to free myself of the painful memories of 
 Weimar. ' ' Also, Goethe notes and praises this 
 very significant thought in his French appre- 
 ciator who "points out the relation between 
 the created product and its creator ' ' ; but es- 
 pecially "he judges the different works of the 
 poet as the different fruits of different 
 Epochs in the life of their author." Sugges- 
 tive are these remarks as indicating how 
 Goethe, now an old man, looks back at his own 
 biography and intimates the way in which 
 
TASSO. 341 ' 
 
 it should be written, namely, with emphasis 
 upon its Epochs. 
 
 II. The first thing, though not the deep- 
 est, to be grasped in this dramatic concep- 
 tion is the opposition between the two char- 
 acters of Tasso and Antonio. This opposi- 
 tion is what Goethe seeks to reconcile from 
 beginning to end. Tasso is, of course, the 
 poet in the midst of the business world and of 
 state affairs, which have their right and must 
 be looked after by the man especially trained 
 to their administration, who is thus Antonio, 
 a worldling doubtless, but indispensable. 
 Tasso, on the other hand, is the dreamer liv- 
 ing in his own ideal realm, the fabrication of 
 his brain; he is extremely sensitive and sub- 
 jective, and easily becomes the victim of his 
 own fancies ; he has been praised and coddled 
 at the Court, especially by its two leading 
 women, till he can endure no limitation, not 
 even his own ; the exclusive poetical habit has 
 so etherealized him, that he has lost his rela- 
 tion to the solid world of reality and takes 
 the fictions of his imagination as the facts of 
 life. Thus he shows the mental malady which 
 may come of a one-sided devotion to poetry, 
 without the corrective of practical affairs. 
 Still he is the genius to whom the Muse whis- 
 pers her choicest message ; therein he stands 
 unique in a divine endowment. Hence he is 
 
342 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 the favorite of the Court, its supreme orna-. 
 ment, the like of whom no other Court of 
 Italy at that time can show, the Kohinoor 
 diamond, the only one in the world. The 
 Duke apreciates the treasure and seeks in 
 every way to keep it, and even to secure it 
 more firmly. So he has to put up with much 
 in magnanimous patience from the wild ca- 
 reenings of his Pegasus-mounted singer. 
 
 Quite the opposite, both in temper and ed- 
 ucation, is the prosaic hard-headed Secretary 
 of State, Antonio Montecatino, who indeed 
 in vacant hours can trifle a little with poetry, 
 as a rather idle amusement. Hence he likes 
 Ariosto as a pretty fabler and spinner of fan- 
 ciful romances, whom he praises in secret 
 contrast to Tasso, who, of course, gets irri- 
 tated. But Antonio is the practical man, 
 whose life has been to deal with practical 
 men, whose soul is indurated in utility and 
 can grasp only finite ends, wherein lies his 
 ultimate conviction. An indispensable man, 
 with his part in the world's order certainly; 
 but he gets to thinking that he is the totality 
 of it, and so scoffs at the other half of the 
 universe, and its representative in the poet 
 Tasso, who repays contempt with contempt 
 and something more, for we shall behold the 
 ideal drawing its literal blade upon the real. 
 
 Thus we have the conflict which envelops 
 
TASSO. 343 
 
 the whole poem embodied in two personages. 
 What shall we call it! In its immediate form 
 it is Prose against Poetry, Imagination fight- 
 ing the Fact, the Supersensible clashing with 
 the Sensible, the subjective underworld boiling 
 up against the objective over world and still 
 further we might categorize the battling dual- 
 ism. But let the culmination be told at once : 
 after a furiously fought word-contest, Tasso 
 uncontrolled pulls his sword upon Antonio the 
 self-controlled, to settle the world-old diffi- 
 culty just there when suddenly the Duke ap- 
 pears, stops the combat and sends the poet, 
 caught in the act, to his room under arrest. 
 Thus a power over both brings a truce, after 
 which begins the attempt of the drama to heal 
 the heart-deep scission of the two antagon- 
 ists, or we may say to mediate the collision 
 between the two men of two different worlds. 
 Here again we may see an intimate con- 
 fession of Goethe himself thrown out into 
 his art. The poet, passing from his creative 
 epoch at Frankfort into his official life at 
 Weimar, is plunged suddenly from the 
 heights of imagination into rude actuality; 
 his Muse hitherto ranging in freedom, has to 
 get into harness and has to work at earth's 
 tyrannous tasks; for ten years and more his 
 servitude (like that of the God Apollo to the 
 mortal monarch Admetus) lasted till finally 
 
344 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 the deity in him broke his chains and fled to 
 Italy for a new liberty and redemption. All 
 officialdom had risen in hostility to the ad- 
 vent of the poet at Weimar ; not one but many 
 Antonios showed animosity and jealousy, but 
 he put them down in the end, though at the 
 cost of his genius, which, however, was through 
 such a training to burst forth in new splen- 
 dor. Now this very poem has in it Goethe look- 
 ing backward to his testful discipline of life's 
 prosaic drudgery, and is a record of his inner 
 upheavals. To us Tasso is Goethe's internal- 
 ity turned outward in poetic confession; the 
 love, the agony, yea the nagging suspicion 
 and jealousy of Tasso unroll a vivid pano- 
 rama of Goethe's underworld in his strife 
 at Weimar with not only one but many An- 
 tonios, who abounded there in officialdom. 
 
 But we have to add that Goethe not only 
 conquered Antonio, but appropriated him; 
 in fact, he became Antonio also in himself, 
 the man of affairs, making his own completely 
 the business consciousness, and sucking out 
 of it whatever worth it had. He must be the 
 whole man Goethe, not the half-man Tasso, 
 though so beautifully poetic, nor the half- 
 man Antonio, so skillful in all practical mat- 
 ters. Thus in himself he has harmonized 
 their collision, but only after the toughest 
 kind of a battle, of which this poem is the 
 
TASSO. 345 
 
 idealized account. Now the process of the poet 
 Goethe, here the whole man, is that he splits 
 himself into the two parts of himself in his 
 former conflict, and projects them into char- 
 acters who are also existent individuals whom 
 he actually knew at Weimar, and whom he 
 reads of as living at Ferrara hundreds of 
 years ago. Only the total Goethe in Italy 
 could have projected these characters and 
 their conflict as stages of his former Self. 
 And we can trace the same evolution in the 
 total Shakespeare who through the experi- 
 ence of life came to hold in his personality 
 his entire dramatic population. 
 
 Leonore, the Countess, the keenest-witted 
 personage of the drama, has hit off this pecu- 
 liar mental division of one entire soul into 
 two different men (III. 2). She declares 
 that Nature cast the twain, Tasso and An- 
 tonio, into opposites because "she could not 
 weld them into a single man," such as is 
 Goethe, who probably took this view of him- 
 self, and applied it also to the two women of 
 the drama, who, different as they are in char- 
 acter, are unified in one trait, that of loving 
 Tasso ; both of them also seek in quite oppo- 
 site manners to mediate the recalcitrant 
 super-sensitive poet with his environment 
 and with himself. 
 
 III. This peculiar device, accordingly, of 
 
346 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 halving a whole man into two opposite coun- 
 terparts, each of which is a personage, is also 
 employed in the two women, both of them 
 characteristically called by the same name 
 Leonore, which, however, separates into two 
 family titles. Princess Leonore of Este, sister 
 of the Duke, and Countess Leonore San- 
 vitale may be deemed two sides of one whole 
 woman, and in other ways are the female re- 
 flection of the two males. The one Leonore 
 (the Countess) is the designing woman with 
 the subtlest insight into the weakness of those 
 about her; her expressions concerning peo- 
 ple and things are the keenest and brightest 
 in the drama ; Goethe puts into her mouth the 
 most exquisite lines on poetry and on poets ; 
 she has wit, epigrammatic terseness, and 
 usually gives the best advice on the various 
 emergencies which arise. There is, no 'doubt, 
 too, that she takes special 'delight in exercis- 
 ing her power. She has a husband and son, 
 both of them absent and never appearing but 
 once for a moment in the field of her con- 
 sciousness. She is accordingly wife and 
 mother, but these relations seem quite to have 
 dropped out of her life at Ferrara; she is 
 seen as the untrammeled individual exploit- 
 ing her unique gifts to her own pleasure. 
 Then is to be added the fact that she is in 
 love with Tasso after her fashion, which is 
 
i- 
 TASSO. 347 
 
 not very deep, but is gratifying to her ambi- 
 tion, for she wishes somehow to get control 
 of the famous young poet and direct him in 
 her leading-strings. Cool calculation is her 
 trait, yet coupled with genuine admiration, 
 and a practical side which hastens to help 
 people out of difficulty. Tasso does not quite 
 like her, for he complains that he always feels 
 her intention beneath her act, and her inher- 
 ent doubleness repels him. 
 
 There has been a good deal of discussion 
 among Goethe commentators concerning the 
 original model at the Weimar court for Leon- 
 ore Sanvitale. Some have thought that the 
 Duchess Amalia, mother of Karl August was 
 the prototype. This is very doubtful for a 
 number of reasons. The character is not 
 unusual, Goethe must have met a good deal 
 of this sort of femininity in his forays. We 
 believe that the Countess reveals the secret 
 of her own identity when she implies that the 
 two characters, Antonio and Tasso, are oppo- 
 site sides or phases of one man; this is also 
 the case with Leonore Sanvitale, who forms 
 one woman with her counterpart. It would 
 not be hard to show that Frau Von Stein held 
 both these opposing characters in her own 
 one Self. 
 
 The female counterpart of the Countess 
 Leonore, symmetrical yet opposite, is the 
 
348 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Princess Leonore. A profoundly emotional 
 and sincere nature is hers, trained by long- 
 suffering and the sternest discipline of life, 
 which has now mounted up to quite a sum of 
 years. Perhaps her -deepest and most winning 
 trait is her mediatorial character, finest fruit- 
 age of her much-tried existence ; she will har- 
 monize the collisions around her, especially 
 that of the unhappy ideal soul in its conflict 
 with the merciless reality. It is on this side 
 that she is so attractive to Tasso and indeed 
 furnishes to- his life what he completely lacks, 
 adjustment of the inner to the outer world. 
 The poet flies to her as his missing part, and 
 the result is a unity of souls at their primal 
 fountain, in spite of the obstacle of rank and 
 age. Their love is mutual, but it has a fatal 
 birth-mark upon it, for it can never blossom 
 out into the flower of marriage. Still the 
 Princess will keep the young man for herself 
 and detain him at the Court of Ferrara if 
 possible, wherein she shows the last selfish- 
 ness of love. It is at this point that between 
 the two Leonores an antagonism shows itself, 
 secret and suppressed indeed, but active, 
 which may be felt already in the first scene of 
 the play. She will try to mediate the sensi- 
 tive and irascible poet with the conditions of 
 life at court through their mutual oneness, 
 through love ; but this is just what Tasso can 
 
TASSO. 349 
 
 least control in himself; at the culminating 
 moment of passion he tries to clasp her to his 
 bosom, violates at its most sensitive point the 
 courtly propriety which she had tried to in- 
 stil into him, and now he has to leave. On 
 the other hand, the Princess, in spite of her 
 strong emotion, has revealed that love is not 
 the ultimate principle of her nature, she is 
 not ready to make the final offering to it, and 
 so she too is rejected, or rather rejects her- 
 self and vanishes. There is a love still deeper 
 than hers, she cannot be the last mediator of 
 Tasso. 
 
 It may be added that here Goethe calls up 
 his Werther in depicting a situation of im- 
 possible love. The passion is present with 
 full intensity in both cases, but how different 
 the expression! Phileros has been in Italy 
 and has become classicized, yea formalized, 
 into courtly ways. Still the old volcano is 
 in him and breaks forth into one sudden erup- 
 tion that uncourtly act which undoes his 
 love but saves him, driving him really to his 
 self-redemption. 
 
 Much ingenuity has been spent by German 
 commentators in trying to identify this high- 
 born personage with women of Goethe's en- 
 vironment at Weimar. Our view is that the 
 Princess is the Frau , Von Stein disguised 
 in the mask of the Duchess Louise. Undoubt- 
 
350 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 edly many points can be picked out which do 
 not fit either person. But that is a part of 
 the disguise. The attitude of the Princess 
 toward Goethe and her place in his inner life 
 can be paralleled surprisingly in many pas- 
 sages from his Letters to Frau Von Stein. 
 This has been generally recognized. But the 
 second important fact in this connection is 
 that the other Leonore is the other Frau Von 
 Stein, that is, the other side of her total 
 womanhood, for she too had abundance of 
 artifice, calculation, even courtly intrigue in- 
 terwoven with a strongly emotional and rec- 
 onciling nature. She had also a genuine in- 
 tense love for her poet in response to his tem- 
 pestuous outbursts, and sought to calm him 
 into social and especially courtly proprieties, 
 which he would at times break over. And 
 the final fact is also true of her: Goethe at 
 last brushed against the limit of her love, 
 and mid mighty resurgences of pasion re- 
 solved to quit her and flee to Italy. She could 
 not mediate him ultimately with his highest 
 genius, with his supreme aspiration he had 
 at last to mediate himself through his Muse, 
 as is reflected in Tasso at the close of the 
 drama. So the Muse is ultimately the ideal 
 woman who mediates him (Das Ewig- 
 WeiblicJie). And we hold that the two Leon- 
 ores are the two halves which Goethe had ex- 
 
TA880. 351 
 
 perienced in the double nature of Frau Von 
 Stein, neither of which could bring to him 
 complete reconciliation. So each of the 
 Leonores, seeking to mediate the poet in her 
 way, fails at Ferrara and fails at Weimar. 
 He must go back to his God-given creative 
 power, to the utterance of his Genius, for his 
 blessing. 
 
 In our judgment, at this point lies the 
 distinctive fact of the play, which indeed 
 might be wrought out to greater fulness and 
 clearness than we find it here. Tasso is 
 thrown back upon himself for his final medi- 
 ation; is he equal to the new crisis of his 
 life ? We think that he is, and that the author 
 shows him so ; the poet is going to reveal the 
 poet not destroyed by love, but able to medi- 
 ate love's deepest conflicts and live. Herein 
 Tasso is not a Werther, but a decided ad- 
 vance upon the early novel. Still many a 
 reader holds that the poet makes the poet 
 tragic, never again to return to Ferrara or 
 Weimar. 
 
 Such are the two sets of characters, each set 
 composed of two people, of the same sex, but 
 of opposite natures; each set forming one 
 whole personality which splits in twain. 
 Then there is another fact of the poetic or- 
 ganism : the four form two pairs opposite in 
 sex; Antonio shows his attachment to Leon- 
 
352 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ore, the Countess, who coquets with him in 
 order to attain her deeper end of winning 
 the control of Tasso. Still this sexed pair 
 have certain decided traits in common: both 
 are designing and dissembling of their de- 
 sign, keen to perceive and use human weak- 
 ness, and can indulge in light amatory sport. 
 They are thus drawn in emphatic contrast to 
 the two other lovers, Tasso and the Princess. 
 But Love is nowhere the triumphant medi- 
 ator in this drama nor, on the other hand, 
 the tragic destroyer. Phileros is taught a 
 great lesson; having run up against an ob- 
 stacle, he is not to kill himself, but to mediate 
 himself through the deepest principle of his 
 nature, his poetic genius. Werther could not 
 do this, for he was no poet, but only the lover. 
 Eichard Wagner, who was also a mighty 
 lover, indeed the very Phileros of music, has 
 left on record his view of this drama: "for 
 the one who sees to the bottom there is here 
 properly one conflict, that between Tasso and 
 the Princess. To the deep-looking mind the 
 conflict between Antonio and Tasso is of less 
 interest. ' * Very true ; still this conflict is not 
 one of life and death, for the poet, though 
 prostrated in the struggle, gets up again, rec- 
 onciling himself through the self-portrayal 
 of his defeat by means of his art. 
 Thus Tasso is the drama of the artist him- 
 
TASSO. 353 
 
 self, who makes his art the instrument of his 
 spiritual salvation. True it is that art should 
 also furnish the means of bodily sustenance 
 to the man who practices it; but that is the 
 case with every handicraft. Perhaps the best 
 lesson to be won from this work is that every 
 writer who realizes the worth of his vocation, 
 employs it not merely to earn his bread and 
 butter, but to save his soul from perdition. 
 Every book that has ultimate value shows the 
 purgatorial landmark of its author in his 
 struggle against the fall of man, and his tri- 
 umph over some fate-drawn limit of his own 
 nature. Goethe has often told us how he has 
 rescued himself from his own Furies by his 
 power of self -utterance in poetry. So every 
 man is to elevate his vocation, however hum- 
 ble, into the way of his redemption. Other- 
 wise, he is going to live in Hell-fire his whole 
 life, however it may be in the future. 
 
 All this, we may repeat, is hardly more 
 than glimpsed in Tasso at the very close, but 
 we shall see more of it in later works. 
 
 The Trilogy. It is worth while again to 
 emphasize the fact that the three foregoing 
 dramas- are intimately bound together by 
 many links, and form what we call a Trilogy. 
 They run quite parallel in origin, develop- 
 ment, and completion, overarching the poet ? s 
 past creative life from Frankfort, through 
 
354 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Weimar, to Italy. Thus they impart a strik- 
 ing lesson in his evolution, and take their 
 place as a significant component of his life- 
 poem which we are trying to mark out in its 
 main outlines. 
 
 Separately they should be read, and then 
 put together as one work or one supreme 
 manifestation of Goethe 's genius, which lies 
 between and connects his earlier outburst in 
 Gotz and Werther, and his later mature mas- 
 terpieces, Meister and Faust. They realize 
 and conclude certain incipient phases of the 
 Frankfort Epoch in which they have budded, 
 but they are also prophetic of much which 
 lies as yet unborn, in the poet's future. They 
 are strictly held within dramatic bounds, 
 hence we feel in them all a confinement or 
 limitation compared to the younger or older 
 Goethe. He keeps inside the prescribed lim- 
 its of his dramatic art, one of the immediate 
 results of his classic Italian training, which 
 he will later transcend. 
 
 Still not one of the three is a good acting- 
 play, each is lacking in the external require- 
 ments. They are inner dramas made for the 
 soul's stage; the scenic effects move on the 
 mind's retina, less on the eye's. Even Eg- 
 mont, the most boisterous action of the three, 
 appeals more to the reader than to the spec- 
 tator, who has no time to go back and reflect 
 
FJL&89. 355 
 
 upon niceties of idiom, of character,, of or- 
 ganization. Still less can he detect the real 
 underlying personality, namely., Goethe Jtim- 
 self in one of his confessions disguised as 
 Egmont or Orestes or Tasso, All this de- 
 mands an inward-turning, not outward. 
 
 Their rapid production indicates that 
 Goethe has recovered his creative power in 
 and through Italy, from his long Weimar par- 
 alysis. Freed of the grinding routine of of- 
 ficialdom, of a fateful love, and of an oppres- 
 sive nature laden with fog, cloud and cold, 
 his Genius rises from its living grave to a 
 fresh resurrection. Thus his Italian environ- 
 ment gives him just the spiritual food he 
 craves and stimulates him to life's renewaL 
 The diagnosis of his case was correct, as well 
 as the prescribed medicine for those "phys- 
 ico-moral ills" which sickened his productive 
 energy in Germany. In these three dramas, 
 then, we hehold the giant springing up from 
 his prostration and again taking possession 
 of his true birthright. 
 
 The classicized form of two of them, 
 Ipkigema and Tasso, is shown externally in 
 the meter, this being the Goethean transform- 
 ation of Shakespeare's blank-verse, which had 
 been known to our poet from youth, but poet- 
 ically left untried till he reached the classic 
 atmosphere of Italy. One queries, why this 
 
356 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 long delay in finding such a manifest poetic 
 implement? The fact is that English blank- 
 verse, which came to Shakespeare in its 
 early freshness, was a product of the Renas- 
 cence, and this chiefly belongs to Italy. Some- 
 how Goethe felt himself at the fountain-head 
 of a new metrical form, and was first stirred 
 to reproduce it on Italian soil, saturating it 
 deeply with the harmonies of his own soul. 
 Thus Iphigenia and Tasso have a metrical 
 power which is unique "even in Goethe, and 
 it may be added, in literature. Such is their 
 first and most permanent charm their woo- 
 ing words seem to caress the thought in meas- 
 ured cadences of manifold harmony. This 
 poetic music seems to have been imparted 
 directly to Goethe by melodious Italy, for 
 never afterwards could he quite recover its 
 soulful strain. For instance, the blank-verse 
 of his Natural Daughter, written some years 
 later, has largely lost the Italian musical 
 witchery of the two dramas composed in the 
 echoes of the classic land. 
 
 We have already noted that the three lead- 
 ing men of these plays rise in gradation till 
 they -culminate in Tasso, the self-mediated 
 poet. In like manner the three leading 
 women, Clara, Iphigenia, and the Princess, 
 may be compared in regard to their power of 
 mediation. But underneath all these charac- 
 
.* 
 
 GOETHE'S LIVING DRAMA. 357 
 
 ters is the one, Goethe himself at his confes- 
 sional, and he is giving utterance to that 
 deepest element of his nature, love. Phileros 
 is writing these dramas for the alleviation of 
 his past conflicts still throbbing painfully in 
 the present. 
 
 But now drops down into his life startlingly 
 a fresh violation involving a deeper trans- 
 gression than any yet it has committed, and 
 therewith a heavier and longer penalty. Thus 
 Phileros starts a wholly new strain in this 
 fate-recording life-poem of his, already quite 
 diversified. 
 
 II. 
 
 Goethe's Living Drama. 
 
 We have just been contemplating Goethe's 
 written drama, the Trilogy, which poetizes 
 salient lines of his past career and which rises 
 up mountainous about midway in the total 
 sweep of his fourscore years and more. But 
 now we are to set forth his unwritten 
 drama, making it an essential part of his en- 
 tire life-poem, which was lived by him as well 
 as lettered in his books. In fact this unwrit- 
 ten drama of his became the hidden source of 
 much that he afterwards wrote; but he him- 
 self was its continuous actor as long as he 
 lived, and he played it before the whole world 
 
358 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 and all time with a gigantic defiance and 
 mightiness. In one view it is a perpetual 
 tragedy, whose unique tragic hero is the poet 
 himself who in the very clutch of Fate reveals 
 himself the Fate-compeller of his own life's 
 tragedy. 
 
 So we have now come to the most singular 
 action of the poet during his entire career, 
 the best-known occurrence pertaining "to him, 
 and repeated by many tongues whose brains 
 have little or no acquaintance with his writ- 
 ings. Phileros, the lover, aye the lover of 
 Love, is now led by the ruling passion of his 
 nature to commit the offence which turns his 
 very love to a tragedy never-ending while his 
 breath holds out, and always getting more 
 and more actively interwound with his deep- 
 est being. The result is that Goethe himself, 
 after his Italian Journey till his last pulse- 
 beat, becomes on one side of his existence a 
 tragic character, yea the chief tragic charac- 
 ter in his own life-poem, and as such we have 
 now to introduce him at this point. We call 
 it a life-tragedy because it was alive and go- 
 ing-on, not an houred drama which he wrote 
 out and finished for the stage, or for the 
 reader, like the three which we have just con- 
 sidered. It was an ever-living, stayless action 
 which continued recurring all his days with 
 manifold repetition and variation. And we 
 
GOETHE'S LIVING DRAMjf.' 359 
 
 must add that this tragedy did not conclude 
 with his death, but kept up its fatal swoop 
 afterward, clutching even his grandchildren, 
 as they recognized and said. Thus he makes 
 himself a Tantalus through his sin against 
 the Divine Order, and begets a family of Tan- 
 talids. Blame him not, excuse him not, but 
 let the fact tell itself in its full round of trans- 
 gression and suffering, of guilt and punish- 
 ment, of Hell and Heaven. 
 
 Goethe, solitary, feeling himself neglected 
 and isolated, was taking a walk in the Wei- 
 mar Park less than a month after his return 
 from Italy, for which he was probably in a 
 state of deep longing, being separated from 
 its art, its genial sunshine, and its free life. 
 Then Phileros at Weimar had no love, the 
 light of his existence ; Frau Von Stein, paled 
 and crumpled with the years, was tran- 
 scended; the other lesser stars of his former 
 time gave no sheen. He, a man in his phys- 
 ical prime, at the age of thirty-eight, rejuve- 
 nated and indeed reborn (he said) by the trip 
 to Italy could not help brooding over Rome 
 and its treasures ; but especially with the en- 
 ergy of youthful imagination he called up his 
 Roman love-life, and its central figure who 
 has already flitted before under the name of 
 Faustina. And then who appears to him just 
 at the right moment in all the living fullness 
 
360 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 of flesh and blood with red cheeks and spark- 
 ling eyes, as it were leaping into the place of 
 that empty far-away phastasm, and accosting 
 him with the tender voice of supplication? 
 Yes, who is it for of all the incidents of Goe- 
 the 's career, amatory and otherwise, this is 
 to have the farthest-reaching, deepest-search- 
 ing consequences. 
 
 Her name is Christiane Vulpius, a young 
 woman just turned of three and twenty, who 
 crosses the poet's path at this conjuncture, 
 and hands him a petition for her brother who 
 is out of work and asks the man of influence 
 for a place. This brother had studied at the 
 University and was the author of some tales 
 and poems by which he sought to support 
 himself and his sisters. Later he gave to the 
 world a famous robber-story Rinaldo Rinal- 
 dini, the delight of boys, which was published 
 about the same time that Goethe's Wilhelm 
 Meister's Apprenticeship came out, and far 
 outstripped the work of his great brother-in- 
 law in immediate saleability, if not in ever- 
 lastingness. But the real petition which 
 Phileros heard was that of love throbbing out 
 of the. prayerful words and looks of the ma- 
 ture young woman. Both sides were ready 
 and in deep need of each other, so down comes 
 the Love-God and fetters their hearts in his 
 invisible chain so that neither can get away. 
 
. 
 GOETHE'S LIVING DRAMA. 361 
 
 Such was our world-famous Christiane, a 
 bright, plump little blonde, with winsome blue 
 eyes and a round full face enwreathed in mas- 
 sive brown locks. A sketch of her by Goe- 
 the about 1789 has been found which shows 
 her countenance peeping out rather roguishly 
 from under her enveloping shock of loose 
 hair. She was a work-girl, being compelled 
 to earn her own living in a factory of artifi- 
 cial flowers; she bore an honest name, all 
 later gossip to the contrary was doubtless the 
 product of malice or envy. For she, with her 
 little pin-hook, had caught the biggest fish in 
 the Weimar social pool, where many fisher- 
 women of the higher classes sat waiting for 
 a nibble. Jealousy will not fail to sharpen 
 that female poniard, the tongue, to its keen- 
 est point. And good reason they have, for 
 they can claim to be defending their own 
 hearth and its institution against the deepest 
 violation of its sanctity. 
 
 Let the result be told : On the 13th of July, 
 1788, the distinguished poet, the high aristo- 
 cratic official celebrates with the humble folk- 
 girl what he calls his "marriage of con- 
 science, " being not yet four weeks at home 
 from Italy. The day he afterwards observed 
 as the anniversary of his "nuptials without 
 ceremony, ' ' the nature of which he hints in a 
 letter to his friend Schiller. But the affair 
 
362 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 did not stop at this point. The girl had won 
 his heart as well as stilled his sensuous ap- 
 peal; her sunny looks and cheery ways had 
 lit up his gloom, companioned his solitude; 
 she had brought back to him Home and radi- 
 ant Italy. At once the poetry begins to flow 
 in gleeful vein which transfuses old Rome 
 into modern Weimar, classic measures into 
 German speech, and especially Eoman Faus- 
 tina into Teutonic Christiane. Thus Phileros 
 the lover now poetizes his soul's frisky iri- 
 descent fancies into ancient hexametral forms 
 of the antique world, endowing them with a 
 more rapturous life than they ever possessed 
 in their native land. Goethe's Roman Elegies 
 celebrate not only his "marriage of con- 
 science," but chant the most internal poetic 
 epithalamium of the ancient wedded to the 
 modern spirit known in literature. That sim- 
 ple Teutonic maiden had the power of Teu- 
 tonizing again the estranged classic Goethe, 
 and of making him pour forth in native tones 
 the wedlock not only of two persons, but of 
 two worlds as it were in love's embrace. But, 
 Phileros, forget not the counterstroke of 
 the law amid happiness forbidden. 
 
 Not long afterwards Goethe takes this bride 
 of his conscience to his abode and installs her 
 as the mistress of his home, where, on Decem- 
 ber 25, 1789, his first child, August Goethe, 
 
GOETHE'S LIVING DRAMA. 363 
 
 was born, the earliest scion of the House of 
 Tantalus, of fateful memory. The infant 
 was baptized two days later by Herder, the 
 court preacher, while the Duke of Weimar 
 stood as god-father. Thus the anxious and 
 probably foreboding parent sought to invoke 
 for his uninstitutional offspring the favor of 
 those two primal institutions, Church and 
 State, whose laws he had deeply violated or 
 rather defied by his deed. We learn that amid 
 his great joy he felt overwhelmed with his 
 great responsibility. Well he may, for has he 
 not brought a human being unlawfully into a 
 world ruled by law which judges and inflicts 
 the penalty of man's infraction? Could he, 
 as a poet visioning the regnant order of the 
 universe, help asking: Will there be any re- 
 quital of my deed upon me and mine in the 
 upper Tribunal of Justice? What was he 
 thinking about even at the baptismal font! 
 We have already witnessed Goethe's power 
 of forecast in his Hymn of the Fates as it 
 preluded the destinies of the Tantalids in his 
 Iphigenia. 
 
 Thus the act, starting apparently as a lit- 
 tle escapade with a work-girl who met him in 
 a public place, grew portentously by adding 
 one violation to another till it became Goe- 
 the's most daring and persistent defiance 
 of the ethical consciousness of society. 
 
364 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Strangely he drops back into his Titanic 
 mood, and we may well deem it his culminat- 
 ing deed of Titanism, taking this to mean his 
 open challenge of the institutional world. We 
 have designated his Frankfort Epoch, the 
 time of Gotz and Wertlier, as the peculiar 
 stage of his Titanic protest which he set down 
 in writing ; while the Weimar Decennium was 
 emphatically his training out of his recalci- 
 trant anti-social temper. Italy still further 
 laid upon his character and poetry its spell of 
 classic serenity and order. In fact he had 
 fallen out with his former volcanic self, and 
 disliked its expression- in literary production 
 which was still alive, for instance in Schiller's 
 early plays. But now comes the strange re- 
 lapse into a transcended state of his former 
 self a dozen years after his proper Titanism 
 he does the most Titanic act of his whole life, 
 yea of his time. He, the highest spokesman 
 of Literature, the first official of the State, the 
 greatest Genius of the age, suddenly assumes 
 an attitude defiant of man's basic institution, 
 and indeed of the total social fabric. For it 
 is no sudden whiff of passionate indulgence, 
 no hidden illicit relation, but publicly assumed 
 and persisted in to the last, even if at first he 
 tried to conceal it. He flung openly his action 
 of demonic insolence into the face of Ger- 
 many, of Europe, yea of all time on account 
 
GOETHE'S LIVING DRAMA. 365 
 
 of the eternal greatness of the man, and there 
 it stands today, a most important node of his 
 life-poem, unfolding into tragic catastrophes 
 doomful as those of the ancient Houses of 
 Laius or Pelops. Already it has been said 
 that he has re-enacted the deed of old Tanta- 
 lus guilty of arrogance toward the Gods a 
 designation of himself doubtless sprung from 
 his own lips. 
 
 It is true that many years afterward, in a 
 moment of great external trial and anxiety, 
 he seeks some adjustment to law and institu- 
 tion by formally marrying his Christiane and 
 legimating his son, then nearly seventeen 
 years old, who was present at the ceremony. 
 But the fatal deed had been done and its 
 tragic fruits had been maturing with the 
 march of time, whereof the record will be 
 given hereafter. And that youth, an institu- 
 tional outcast through the act of his father, 
 what doom might he not hear even in the wed- 
 ding-bells ! 
 
 Phileros has now consummated the deed 
 which lay inherent in his nature without the 
 corrective of an institutional order, which is 
 indeed above him, but which is really what 
 secures him and his at last. The lover of 
 Love, taken by himself, is fated, and Goethe 
 simply pushed forward to the extreme reali- 
 zation of what was born in him. Again and 
 
366 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 again he will get the counterstroke of his con- 
 duct, and will record it indirectly, and will 
 through self-expression escape destiny. It is 
 a curious fact that the poet has never directly 
 dramatized or even recorded his life-tragedy, 
 though fragments of it we can trace under 
 numerous alien forms. But his life-poem can- 
 not neglect this deepest strain of his total 
 career. Here, too, it must be noted that Goe- 
 the always showed the power of parrying the 
 mortal back- thrust of his own deed; the gift 
 of his Genius was to utter his fate and there- 
 by transcend it, and live on. The deadly 
 Parcas often gripped him and made him suffer 
 terribly, but could not hold him in their clutch 
 of death, till the whole cycle of his existence 
 had rounded itself out to its last complete- 
 ness in his eighty-third year. But all the rest 
 of his Family were not Fate-compellers like 
 him, they could not expiate through a divine 
 gift the curse lowering upon their House; 
 they perished tragically as TantalidsJ even if 
 they were the children of the self -redeeming 
 Tantalus. 
 
 Soon Goethe began to feel the social pen- 
 alty of his conduct. All Weimar was roused 
 to indignant gossip which encircled its most 
 famous man wherever he went. Especially 
 the women, the natural guardians of the fam- 
 ily 's honor, were in a state of frenzied revolt, 
 
.* 
 
 GOETHE' '8 LIVING DRAMA. 367 
 
 and hissed with tongues of venom, like a nest 
 of rattlesnakes, especially at poor Christiane, 
 more the victim than the victimizer. Her boy, 
 even in his baby-carriage, became a center of 
 buzzing, malicious whispers which wafted to 
 him his irregular birth. What a fatal atmos- 
 phere for the innocent child to grow up in, 
 where everybody would know and tattle his 
 blotted history ! Still, underneath all the mal- 
 ice and jealousy of evil hearts, we may see 
 the violated institution using its weapons of 
 defense and punishment. It was the mad- 
 dened cry of the true instituted Family in a 
 furious battle against its destroyer now rep- 
 resented in the negative Family of Goethe. 
 Let the scandal-monger do her worst. She is 
 now scandalizing scandal itself, and burning 
 up Hell in its own brimstone. So, according 
 to the old legend, the Devil is just the one 
 whose function is to punish deviltry. 
 
 Of all these female tongues, that of Frau 
 Von Stein was the most sibilant and poison- 
 ous, and with no little reason. She, the aris- 
 tocratic, highly cultured lady, had been sup- 
 planted in the heart of her poetic lover by an 
 ordinary folk-girl without rank or education. 
 Goethe, well knowing her power of sting in 
 speech, and sympathizing with her situation, 
 and probably feeling a prick of remorse, 
 sought to console her and to retain still some 
 
368 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 hold in her affection, even if she, now a wilted 
 rose of more than forty, was to play second 
 to his young blooming odalisk. Not a bit of 
 it ; she took sick in her distress, wrote him a 
 letter of final separation, and hurried off to 
 a watering-place for recovery. When she re- 
 turns, she becomes the rancorous censor of 
 all Goethe's shortcomings, and they were cer- 
 tainly a fertile theme. She writes a little 
 drama with the title of Dido, filling Vergil's 
 picture of the forsaken woman with her own 
 woe and bitterness. In venomous scorn she 
 satirizes even his bodily shape with its fresh 
 corpulency, and sneers at his utter degrada- 
 tion of spirit, making him say, "I count my- 
 self now among the worms, and find my great- 
 est pleasure in living with vermin" a hit at 
 humble Christiane. She goes so far as to call 
 him a Faun "with horned head and hoofed 
 feet, to whom no vow is holy. ' ' Thus she fills 
 all Weimar with her vengeful outcries, and 
 coins stinging epithets for every unbridled 
 tongue of the town, while she, like ancient 
 Cassandra of Troy, utters frantic prophe- 
 cies of evil for this newest House of Tanta- 
 lus. And her uncanny bodements of coming 
 ill were based upon the terrible fact, and in 
 one way or other marched toward fulfilment. 
 While August Goethe was still a mere boy, 
 she gave a startling outlook upon his fate. 
 
GOETHE'S LIVING DRAMA. 369 
 
 Truly in Goethe's life-poem she enacts the 
 part of a maddened sybil who mirrors in 
 frenzied forecast the consequences of Ms 
 deed. 
 
 Thus Phileros, loving his Love without the 
 restraint and the oversight of law and insti- 
 tution, has done the culminating act of his 
 career, having carried out to its ultimate re- 
 sult what we have already seen to be the in- 
 nermost elemental power of his nature. 
 Herewith, we repeat, his real tragedy of life 
 opens, a very long but unwritten drama of 
 retribution, suffering, and fatality which 
 involves not only himself but his entire be- 
 gotten family to its last member. Of course 
 Anti-Phileros has seized upon this act with 
 gloating avidity and preached many a sermon 
 of sulphurous damnation against our sinning 
 Phileros. Only too true, we have often to cry 
 out; still such is not our way. We shall not 
 bemoralize the in itself dooming deed with 
 unctuous reflections, but let it work itself out 
 in its own time and manner that it may show 
 what it really is the doer's life-tragedy 
 which tells on itself in its long line of tragic 
 consequences. Thus the poet enacts a work 
 of art in his life, which becomes an essential 
 constituent of his total life-poem. We cannot 
 well puritanize Goethe, he will not fit into 
 such a world-view. We have already seen him 
 
370 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 anguishing, confessing, and punishing him- 
 self in his vicarious literary Purgatory, and 
 there winning atonement, or at least relief. 
 In his writ at its best he makes himself a 
 world-judge over his deed and metes the pen- 
 alty to his vice-gerent characters, and thus 
 saves himself. So we shall let Goethe etliicize 
 himself (in the right sense of the term), be- 
 holding him summon himself before the ob- 
 jective institutional tribunal of the ages, and 
 there passing judgment upon himself for his 
 transgression. That is a very different thing 
 from moralizing him according to some sub- 
 jective standard or possibly prejudice of our 
 own. 
 
 The deeply suggestive fact has already 
 been noticed that Goethe had a lurking pre- 
 monition of this deed and its consequences 
 before it took place. He, as Phileros, could 
 hardly help feeling far down in his underself 
 the possibility of his present action. One 
 thinks that he must have been haunted by that 
 Fate-forecasting Hymn of the Fates, a pro- 
 phetic song of himself welling up from the 
 last depths of his Genius, which doomfully 
 forewarns him against committing the grand 
 deed of insolence against the Gods who 
 whelm the violator into gloomy Tartarean 
 abysses. To be sure all this is told myth- 
 ically, throwing a far-away uncanny shadow 
 
GOETHE'S LIVING DRAMA. * 371 
 
 upon things to be. As he looked upon his 
 new-born babe, could he not hear the awful 
 reverberation of his own words from within : 
 
 His children's doom he ponders 
 And bows down his head. 
 
 Nearly two generations later, and long 
 after the death of Goethe, his grandson 
 writes in a letter : Das Reich der Eumeniden 
 geU zu Ende (Engel's Goethe, p. 581). The 
 rule (or realm) of the Furies is drawing to 
 a close, having gripped its last victim in that 
 grandson who tells his own doom.' Thus ends 
 the House of Tantalus, or the life-tragedy of 
 Goethe, still working in its sole survivor. 
 
 But let us turn back to the more agreeable 
 and more immediate result of this problemat- 
 ical match. Christiane brought cheer and 
 company to the downcast and isolated Goe- 
 the, she filled in part and for a time the social 
 chasm made by his Italian Journey. She 
 looked after his household, she attended to 
 his little wants, she made a home for the 
 homeless man, something which he had never 
 fully enjoyed before, not even in the house of 
 his parents at Frankfort. There is abundant 
 evidence that Christiane was a genuine Ger- 
 man home-maker, and thus laid a solid foun- 
 dation for Goethe's attachment, even if in 
 later years she degenerated. Senses and 
 
372 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 heart she could gratify, but she could not re- 
 spond to the highest part of his being, namely 
 the poetic and intellectual. For this he had 
 to go elsewhere. Still some of his best lyric 
 poetry was written in her honor, indicating 
 how closely she was tied to his passion and his 
 heart. A true marriage- of the higher order 
 has three capital links uniting the pair: the 
 sensuous, the emotional and the spiritual, the 
 latter being more the eternal element which 
 indeed eternizes the other two with its ageless 
 dower. Christiane could in no adequate man- 
 ner supply this uppermost link; the result 
 was as she grew old, the bond grew old and 
 both fell apart though in different ways ; they 
 were not everlastingly wedlocked in the triple 
 link of passion, heart, and spirit. 
 
 As Goethe has often declared that life is 
 symbolical, and especially that his own was 
 such, we inquire what did his marriage with 
 Christiane represent? She, the simple Teu- 
 tonic folk-girl was joined to the classic Olym- 
 pian Goethe, or at least when he was in his 
 most intense classic mood. Will he indicate 
 any such union in the deepest layer of his be- 
 ing, in his poetic Genius? Will he strive to 
 marry Italy with Teutonia in his art, sym- 
 bolical of what he had done in his life ? Much 
 later in the Second Part of Faust he brings to- 
 gether German Faust and Greek Helen in love 
 
.- 
 
 GOETHE'S CLASSIC MEASURES IN GERMAN. 373 
 
 and marriage, a conscious symbol of the con- 
 junction and interfusion of the classic and 
 northern spirits. But now the Hellenic form- 
 world of which he has become the actual em- 
 bodiment, is personally wedded to and living 
 with the Teutonic sense-world. As he must 
 always experience what he writes, let us see 
 how he poetizes this ultimate fact of his pres- 
 ent life. 
 
 III. 
 
 Goethe's Classic Measures in German. 
 
 The most unique poetic achievement of Goe- 
 the during the present Epoch, which is the 
 first after his return from Italy, lies in the 
 fact that he now makes classic measures talk 
 German, and thus widens the horizon of all 
 Teutonic versification, not excepting English, 
 which might herein take a weighty lesson 
 from him, even if it has failed to do so as yet. 
 The ancient meter which he chiefly employed 
 at this time was the hexameter of which he 
 uses two forms : the pure and the elegiac. The 
 pure hexameter has six regular beats, each of 
 which may be followed by one or two unac- 
 cented syllables. Let it here be noted that 
 Goethe does not try to quantify his measures, 
 like the ancient poets, but proceeds by accent 
 in accord with the nature of Teutonic Ian- 
 
374 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 guages. Still the effect is hexametral, hav- 
 ing a classic echo even in our modern speech. 
 Such is indeed its greatest charm when skill- 
 fully constructed. Thus in the meter, the 
 outer garb, we find an intermarriage of the 
 old and new, of the Classic and Teutonic. 
 
 The second kind of hexameter used by Goe- 
 the at this time is the elegiac, which takes 
 one pure and one abbreviated hexameter and 
 puts them into a distieh. Both lines have the 
 six beats of the hexameter, but the second line 
 rejects the unaccented syllables at the end 
 and in the middle, hence it is often called a 
 pentameter. This elegiac measure is the one 
 that Goethe employs in his Roman Elegies, 
 already alluded to, which celebrate the full 
 sensuous glow of his union with Christiane. 
 And here we may note the underlying sym- 
 bolism of this group of poems. They start 
 when the deeply classicized Goethe meets, 
 within a few weeks after his return from 
 Italy, the German maiden Christiane, and 
 forms with her his tender alliance. Thus in 
 the two persons there is a marriage of two 
 worlds, the antique and the modern, more or 
 less unconscious on the part of both. Un- 
 doubtedly such a union is an impulse, an im- 
 mediate irresistible passion, each needs and 
 must have the other at once. 
 
 I. But we have to mark something more 
 
i- 
 
 GOETHE'S CLASSIC MEASURES IN GERMAN. 375 
 
 than this merely personal side in the poetry. 
 There gleams out of the raptured verse a 
 deeper suggestion, an universal purport 
 which makes it a significant document in Goe- 
 the 's evolution; and it may be said to have 
 its little niche in the World's Literature. The 
 hexametral measure chanting its German 
 words, already suggests the marriage of the 
 classic and the modern, which the content of 
 the poems in many an exquisite image cele- 
 brates, even if the moral sense at times gets 
 a shock, as it does in Shakespeare. They run 
 double we behold Borne and Weimar, Faus- 
 tina and Christiane, the Italian and the Ger- 
 man lover. The environment, incidents, 
 meter are Southern ; the speech, the soul, the 
 genius are Northern ; yet they are intergrown 
 indissolubly two experiences of love are 
 here indeed, yet fused by the fire of art into 
 one exalted outpour of the passion to which 
 "my life and my poesy have been dedicated. " 
 We may think that Goethe ought to marry 
 Christiane if he is to fulfil his call of uniting 
 Classic and German art in his country's lit- 
 erature. He claims he did. At any rate he 
 has first to live what he writes, he must en- 
 act in his own immediate experience what- 
 ever of worth he sets down in his verse. .So 
 we may construe the poet in this enigmatic 
 episode : by the spontaneous unconscious ne- 
 
376 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 cessity of his own being he takes to his bosom 
 and to his soul a naive, unsophisticated folk- 
 girl, who represents in all its primal sim- 
 plicity her people's native strain. Already 
 he has loved an artless rural maid in Fred- 
 erika, who also taps for him at Strassburg a 
 little rill of the original Teutonic spirit which 
 he sets to song. But that was an easy return 
 to his own; he then had never been in Italy 
 and undergone his supreme estrangement 
 from his native land, to whose hearth Chris- 
 tiane brings him back, giving him home and 
 family. 
 
 The Roman Elegies, on account of their 
 outspoken classic freedoms were long with- 
 held from publication, which the poet's two 
 chief friends, Herder and the Duke, opposed, 
 evidently thinking that they ought never to 
 see the light. But Goethe knew well their 
 pivotal place not only in his own evolution, 
 but also in general literature. At last in 
 1795, after, some six or seven years' delay, 
 they were printed in Schiller's new period- 
 ical (Die Horen) with the omission of a few 
 numbers. Their old Eoman prototypes may 
 be found in the Latin "triumvirs of love," 
 Catullus (or Ovid), Tibullus, and especially 
 Propertius, whom Goethe himself has pointed 
 out as an ancient influence. But in the deep- 
 est matter the modern poet was more original 
 
GOETHE'S CLASSIC MEASURES IN GERMAN. 377 
 
 than his originals, and of course his Roman 
 Elegies have a significance far more univer- 
 sal than those of the old Roman poets. 
 
 II. In this revival and transfusion of clas- 
 sic forms Goethe also tried his poetic hand at 
 the ancient epigram, which enterprise of his 
 may be best seen in the group which he calls 
 Venetian Epigrams, since the general setting 
 of them is Venice, in which Italian city he 
 stayed some months in 1790. Their content 
 as well as their length varies a good deal; 
 some of them, the best and most affirmative 
 ones, are short Elegies and treat of his love 
 for Christiane from whom he is now sepa- 
 rated. This separation makes him bitter, and 
 deeply negative toward quite all that he sees, 
 hence the querulous ill-natured tone in many 
 of these epigrams ; he becomes the furious 
 critic and tears his former fair Italy to very 
 tatters, as if she were not ragged enough al- 
 ready. Such critical use of the epigram he 
 will later develop in his short arrowy Xenia 
 which, venom-laden he will shoot against his 
 literary foes in Germany. The most striking 
 psychical fact about the Venetian Epigrams 
 is his strong reaction against Italy ; he marks 
 his surprise at himself when after some acrid 
 outbursts he cries out: "And this is the 
 Italy which I quit with so much pain" only a 
 short time ago. What is the matter ? 
 
378 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 The magnet which draws him is no longer 
 Southern but Northern, he does not look wist- 
 fully toward Rome but toward Weimar. In 
 the Roman Elegies there was no such separa- 
 tion, Phileros was in the immediate enjoy- 
 ment of love's presence; now he is tortured 
 by love's absence. Thus the Venetian Epi- 
 grams form a sort of counterpart to the pre- 
 ceding Elegies. Doubtless the pendulum of 
 itself had to swing backward from the exhil- 
 iration of the Italian Journey. Still we have 
 here a test that the German folk-maiden had 
 become intimately ingrown with his heart. 
 
 This antique epigrammatic form will be 
 employed a good deal by the poet hereafter 
 for a variety of purposes. He transforms it 
 into a very subtle and pliable instrument to 
 express his many varying moods prophetic, 
 enigmatic, satirical, descriptive. Already be- 
 fore he went to Italy he had tested himself in 
 it, chiefly through the example and influence 
 of Herder who had made numerous transla- 
 tions of Greek epigrams. But the strange 
 fact is that the epigrammatic mood seems not 
 to have taken hold of Goethe during his Ital- 
 ian rambles, in which it would be most na- 
 tural. For the epigram meant originally an 
 inscription, which would spontaneously bub- 
 ble up from a poetic soul at view of almost 
 any passing object statue, landscape, per- 
 
. 
 
 GOETHE'S CLASSIC MEASURES IN GERMAN. 379 
 
 son, event. The Greek Anthology has pre- 
 served a few thousands out of innumerable 
 examples, indicating how even the ordinary 
 Greek consciousness was poetic, and would 
 throw out an iridescent jet of itself under 
 small provocation. Doubtless all Hellas and 
 all Italy were strown everywhere with such 
 epigrams brief pointed inscriptions telling 
 the essence of the thing or of the occasion at 
 hand. The traveler of today in classic lands, 
 probing down into that wonderful underlying 
 substrate of poetry in those old peoples, will 
 seek to lift the buried treasure himself, and 
 will become epigrammatic in sympathetic cre- 
 ation, building some epigrams responsively in 
 his own tongue after the classic model. 
 
 Though Goethe did not epigrammatize him- 
 self during his classical trip, as it appears by 
 the record, he developed much activity in 
 this sphere after his return home, as we shall 
 have occasion to note. This cluster of Vene- 
 tion Epigrams is the first evidence of his de- 
 cided epigrammatic bent, which spurts little 
 classic effusions of poetry along his path 
 pretty much at random. He now employs for 
 their metrical form the elegiac hexameter, 
 derived from Greek antiquity and reproduced 
 often in Eoman poets. Herein he classizes 
 himself again, but later he will drop this clas- 
 sic form and fall back upon his native Teu- 
 
380 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 tonic verse in his so-called Tame Xenia. But 
 that stage lies far ahead of us; now he has 
 turned elegiac epigrammatist, in deep accord 
 with his present stage of poetic evolution. 
 
 It should be added that Goethe employs the 
 Greek mythology in these hexametral poems, 
 but after his own fashion. From Jupiter 
 down to the Faun he sports with the old di- 
 vinities, invoking them in playful prayer, yet 
 with an undercurrent of undivine meaning. 
 He is not herein seriously mythical but para- 
 mythical, using the Gods not in true faith but 
 with a second intention. Sometimes he makes 
 a deity for his own convenience, out of some 
 thought or abstraction, in right old-Roman 
 fashion, as when he deifies Opportunity in 
 one of his Eoman Elegies. He also calls to 
 his aid the lesser Gods of the ancient Pan- 
 theon, such as Nymphs, Dryads, Fauns, and 
 especially little blind Amor, the very deity of 
 Phileros, the lover of Love. 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Classical Reynard the Fox. 
 
 The most daring literary feat of the soli- 
 tary Goethe in his castle of defiance was to 
 transform the Low-German folk-poem Rey- 
 nard the Fox, from its humble and even 
 
4 
 
 THE CLASSICAL REYNARD THE FOX. 381 
 
 despised doggerel into the exalted, heroic 
 hexameter, perhaps the most dignified of 
 verse, at least in our mental association. But 
 now comes a kind of inverted epic of man 
 turned animal, having its hero Achilles and 
 even its king Agamemnon among the beasts 
 of forest and field, who can tongue the lofty 
 hexametral roll in the epical measures of the 
 Gods. Thus a secret world-irony may be 
 felt even in its metrical beat, very character- 
 istic of the present temper of the world-ta- 
 booed poet himself. 
 
 But the living shape which will rise up and 
 flit mid all this classic exuberance is none 
 other than humble Teutonic Christiane now 
 wedded "in conscience " to Olympian Goe- 
 the, who is thus enacting in his life what he 
 is putting into his poem, which here cele- 
 brates the happy union and marriage of the 
 Classic form with the Teutonic soul in one 
 long nuptial narrative, even if there be many 
 satirical flings against the waspish world. 
 So it comes that Goethe in his Reynard the 
 Fox is writing a phase of his own pivotal ex- 
 perience. 
 
 This work, therefore, represents a unique 
 stage of his present solitary Epoch which is 
 bent on classizing all Teutonia along with 
 himself. So he -takes the most native ele- 
 mental product of the Teutonic folk, and 
 
382 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 whelms it into his classical melting-pot, bring- 
 ing forth a distinctive work of his Genius. 
 Reynard the Fox originally sprang out of a 
 vast protoplasmic reservoir of popular fable 
 which showed the animal world playing the 
 part of men in the various relations of life. 
 This fable had especially evolved in Germany 
 and belonged peculiarly to her people, start- 
 ing far back in the primeval forest and un- 
 folding through the medieval into the modern 
 era. Like every true Mythus it had thrown 
 off many varying forms and had shown itself 
 as so much plastic material for the poets who 
 handled it. Moreover it grew differently 
 among different peoples and tribes to which 
 it was transplanted, reflecting their spirit 
 after its fashion; one French redaction of it 
 is said to have reached a total of 50,000 lines, 
 another 30,000; but its favorite and lasting 
 home was doubtleas Northern Germany whose 
 dialect and consciousness it best expressed. 
 Such was the vast mythic material of the 
 people which Goethe tapped by his Reynard 
 the Fox, giving to it a new speech and a new 
 form, and transfiguring it into a permanent 
 work of literature. Doubtless the story was 
 known to his boyhood, since Frankfort had 
 been a chief center of its early publication 
 and distribution, and his myth-loving mother 
 must have kept it in her big reservoir of ever- 
 
. 
 THE CLASSICAL REYNARD THE FOX. 383 
 
 flowing storydom. But it lay dormant till he 
 was ready. He says that the horrors of the 
 French Revolution, in which men had re- 
 lapsed into beasts, provoked him to take up 
 Eeynard which came into his hands ' ' through 
 a special providence, ' 9 being just the utter- 
 ance of the time and of himself. " I took it 
 with me to the blockade of Mainz, and found 
 consolation and joy in my labor devoted to 
 this unholy world-bible. ' ' He began the work 
 early in 1793, and ended it in May of the same 
 year, though he doctored this first sponta- 
 neous outburst a good deal before it was pub- 
 lished. 
 
 But the chief interest for us is that he 
 turned this Teutonic folk-poem with its orig- 
 inal Low-German doggerel into lofty classic 
 hexameters, using as a medium Gottsched's 
 High-German prose translation (1752). What 
 does such a fact mean? That he could han- 
 dle the doggerel with supreme success he had 
 already shown in his Faust, which is written 
 in that measure. Indeed the doggerel, short 
 rhymed Iambic lines of four feet mainly, is 
 the most natural, easy, and popular measure 
 in all Teutonic literature, and is found in a 
 larger body of poetry than any other metrical 
 form. In medieval German verse down to 
 Hans Sachs it prevails, and reaches its last 
 supremacy in Goethe's greatest poetical 
 
384 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 achievement Faust. In English also the dog- 
 gerel has been much employed; we find it in 
 the old metrical romances; early Chaucer 
 uses it as well as recent Sir Walter Scott; 
 the best specimen in our American poetry is 
 Whittier's Snow-bound. We may deem it the 
 native measure of Teutonic people, the most 
 nearly universal among them, even if it has 
 a certain taint in its very name. 
 
 Now Goethe in his present classical bent 
 is going to classicize this original Teutonic 
 folk-poem, changing its inborn metrical vest- 
 ure into an imported hexametral garb. It is 
 again that marriage which he is celebrating 
 both in his life and in his works between the 
 Antique and the German. It was an auda- 
 cious enterprise. Has he succeeded? We 
 think he has, though not a few have said and 
 still say that there is no true reconciliation 
 between the form and content of his poetic 
 performance. But Goethe's Reynard the 
 Fox is read today as a product of universal 
 literature, having been transmuted by the 
 poet's genius from its quite formless myth- 
 ical protoplasm into a work of art. Undoubt- 
 edly both the native fable and the foreign 
 hexameter are changed in spirit a good deal ; 
 still they are wedded and are happy together. 
 Much fault has been found with the hexam- 
 eters by formal metrists like Voss ; but they 
 
THE CLASSICAL REYNARD THE FOX. 385 
 
 live and march gaily to their new tune. Un- 
 doubtedly they are not Homeric or Vergilian, 
 and are not intended to be. 
 
 The new fresh atmosphere which is suf- 
 fused through the whole poem is its peculiar 
 humor, quite different from that of the Low- 
 German original, which was naive and hearty, 
 but coarse and often cruel the animals were 
 too much animalized for human enjoyment. 
 Goethe has refined all this without losing the 
 flavor ; he has humanized the crude bestiality 
 and given it a courtly polish. But the chief 
 ingredient which he has added is wholly novel, 
 as it belongs neither to the original poem nor 
 to the verse in itself. This peculiar quality 
 is the humerous sensation which arises when 
 the animal population here is heard speak- 
 ing in lofty heroic hexameters, and celebrat- 
 ing their petty bestial exploits. The roll of 
 the verse has of itself a dash of humor which 
 the old doggerel could not possess. The an- 
 tique measure applied to such a theme turns 
 mock-heroic in its very sound; many a verse 
 has its own fun just in the intonation; the 
 happy incongruity between word and thing 
 keeps the smiles rippling. The old Greek also 
 had his mock-heroic literature, in which the 
 heroic Homeric hexameter was decidedly un- 
 heroized, witness the old skit called The Bat- 
 tle of the Frogs and Mice, which also human- 
 
386 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 izes the petty animals. But that was hardly 
 more than a travesty of the one poetic world- 
 view, the ancient Homeric; while Goethe's 
 poem conjoins two cultures, putting the one 
 into the other's vesture, in a mood of per- 
 vasive ironical humor. It may be added that 
 Don Quixote produces a somewhat similar 
 impression of heroic mockery. So we have 
 to think that Goethe lived this mock-heroic 
 measure, and felt it as he wrote it singing 
 from his deed. 
 
 Thus we stress metrical form not only in 
 Goethe's verse but also in his life, so deeply 
 intergrown were they in his Genius. For va- 
 riety of metrical power he probably stands 
 unique among all the poets of the world. 
 Every reader who seeks in some degree to 
 catch the total sweep of his literary person- 
 ality, will be drawn to grapple with the prob- 
 lem of his varying meters, which are so man- 
 ifold and so subtly adapted to their themes. 
 His greatest poem, Faust, contains many, 
 though by no means all, of his measures. One 
 of the puzzles of that work to the inquisitive 
 student is the frequent shifting of metrical 
 schemes. Why such a diversified interplay 
 of rhymes, feet and lines in the Easter scene 
 (Faust, Part I) f And the question we ask 
 here concerning one little scene of one of his 
 poems, we may well ask in regard to the 
 
.* 
 
 THE CLASSICAL REYNARD THE FOX. 387 
 
 whole multiform output of his poetical 
 life. 
 
 In general we can divide the measures of 
 Goethe into two great divisions, ancient and 
 modern. His greatest works, both dramatic 
 and lyric, move in modern or Teutonic 
 rhythms, as his most natural spontaneous ut- 
 terance. Still there is a body of excellent po- 
 etry which follows the ancient or Greek ca- 
 dence. Indeed it may be said that Goethe was 
 altogether the greatest master of Greek 
 meters in a modern tongue that Europe has 
 produced. He heard the voice of the old Par- 
 nassian Muse and made it sing in German. 
 
 These ancient Greek measures he started 
 to use already at Frankfort, and continued to 
 employ them at Weimar. In this earlier ten- 
 dency Pindar seems largely his inspiration. 
 The free flight of irregular and rhymeless 
 lines unhampered by exact measurement of 
 foot and verse was congenial to his bound- 
 bursting tendency at that time. His measure 
 has in its form a Titanic reflection, like the 
 choruses of Aeschylus. At the present time 
 (1915) there is a tendency especially in the 
 younger poets to return to these free rhyme- 
 less rhythms, which Goethe employed in one 
 of the stages of his poetic evolution. 
 
 Hintful is the fact that during his Weimar 
 Epoch we find him passing from his unmeas- 
 
388 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ured to his measured schemes of verse. The 
 hexameter starts to appear rather tentatively 
 in brief scattered examples chiefly in its 
 elegiac form. He had begun to look into 
 the Greek Anthology, still not fully appreci- 
 ated today as the vast depository of elemen- 
 tal poetry of the Hellenic race. Hence he 
 commences to throw down some Epigrams in 
 the old classic sense, that is, inscriptions on 
 persons, actions, events, giving in a few lines 
 their ideal poetic essence. 
 
 Goethe's contribution in the matter of clas- 
 sic form has come to stay, though its valid- 
 ity in modern literature has often been ques- 
 tioned. According to our judgment he is in 
 this field a forerunner whose work is still to 
 be fully appropriated and unfolded in the fu- 
 ture. Hence we have sought to set forth its 
 significant place in his total achievement. 
 But during the present Epoch he wrote much 
 in prose which drops below the level of his 
 genius and which we shall have to leave un- 
 mentioned. Narratives, novelettes, even dra- 
 mas satirizing the French Revolution, make 
 the sandy tract of his Genius which we hurry 
 through with a swift side-glance just to 
 glimpse the Sahara of his life-poem. Still 
 these products have their significance as 
 showing the sunken Goethe during his soli- 
 tary Epoch, unlaureled of Fame and for- 
 
.i- 
 
 THE CLASSICAL REYNARD THE FOX. 389 
 
 saken by his Muse. Is his Genius departed 
 forever? He thought so himself at times, 
 and said so. But in this condition his deeply 
 estranged, if not yet quite lost soul is met 
 by Frederick Schiller, like that other poet 
 who comes to Dante " astray in a dark wood" 
 and is to lead him through and out of his In- 
 ferno. The isolated Genius is now associ- 
 ated by a kindred sympathetic Genius, asso- 
 ciated creatively, whereby each is brought to 
 the full flowering of his highest creativity. 
 Thus we come to a new Epoch which unfolds 
 the supreme inflorescence of Goethe's life- 
 poem. 
 
390 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 CHAPTER FIFTH. 
 
 GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 
 
 From the solitary Goethe we now pass to 
 the associated Goethe a transition which, 
 though long prepared, took place with some 
 degree of rapidity. We have just seen how 
 the poet, after his return from Italy became 
 spiritually isolated without and within, alien- 
 ated from his environing world and from 
 himself. The result was he had about re- 
 solved to give up poetry, and thus to re- 
 nounce his very Genius, as he says. He, now 
 at the ripest middle-age, the most creative 
 time of life, had come to feel old and outworn, 
 quite transcended by other younger talents. 
 Thus he was in the act of laying himself upon 
 the shelf when he met Schiller, not for the 
 first time, but at the pivotal moment for both. 
 Then followed his new youth, his "second 
 puberty " he names it, which he believed to 
 be a distinguishing mark of great men 
 generally, and which recurred in his own ca- 
 reer not merely once but several times, as we 
 shall hereafter see. He possessed the power 
 of being re-born, yea of re-bearing himself 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 391 
 
 spiritually into a fresh creative juvenescence 
 after a time of lapsed energy and senility. 
 Thus he passed through old-age several times, 
 and also through youth quite as often. 
 
 It was indeed an Epoch-making transition. 
 Schiller observes the fact in a letter to his 
 friend (1797) : "You are now going back to 
 your youth, fully developed and mature, and 
 you will unite the fruit with the flower. " 
 Then he idealizes the occurrence as was his 
 wont: "This second youth is the youth of 
 the Gods, and immortal as theirs. " A year 
 later Goethe writes to Schiller in their Cor- 
 respondence: "You have brought me a sec- 
 ond youth, and made me a poet again, which 
 I had quite ceased to be." Certainly a grand 
 reconciliation with his own true destiny, 
 from which he had been estranged how did 
 Schiller bring it about? Through his unique 
 friendship which meant something far more 
 than the relation of individual to individual, 
 since Schiller restored Goethe's lost Genius 
 to its right vocation, stimulated it to renewed 
 activity, and associated the lonely poet afresh 
 with himself and his world. This rescue Goe- 
 the was in the habit of acknowledging till his 
 last day, as in his confession to Councillor 
 Schultz: "I really do not know what would 
 have become of me without Schiller's incite- 
 ment." Then he goes on to say that this sec- 
 
392 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ond renascence of his Genius would not have 
 been unless the right mediator had appeared 
 at the right instant. 
 
 I. Goethe in his later years was fond of 
 recalling his time with Schiller, as we see by 
 his many allusions in his talks with Ecker- 
 mann and others. He designates it as "an 
 Epoch which will not return and still is work- 
 ing at the present day, exerting a vital and 
 powerful influence not on Germany alone. " 
 Observe that Goethe in this as well as in 
 other passages calls his friendship with 
 Schiller an Epoch, in which designation we 
 shall follow him, as most writers on both po- 
 ets have done. The Goethe-Schiller alliance 
 is something distinctive, not only in the poet's 
 life, but in literature. We may add for the 
 purpose of avoiding confusion, that it does 
 not embrace a Period which Goethe calls a 
 leading Epoch (Hauptepoche). For instance 
 the Journey to Italy opened a Period in the 
 total sweep of Goethe's career; and during 
 the present Epoch Goethe still maintained 
 the classical bent which he received from 
 Italy. Hence the Goethe-Schiller time is 
 properly to be regarded as an Epoch of the 
 poet's second or classical Period, of which it 
 undoubtedly is the longest and most prolific 
 part. 
 
 Such, then, is the Epoch now under consid- 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 393 
 
 eration. It lasted about ten years, or per- 
 chance a little more, from Goethe 's first piv- 
 otal interview with Schiller in late May, 1794, 
 till Schiller's decease, after some months of 
 serious illness on May 9,^ 1805. Perhaps the 
 best way to date their mutual activity is to 
 start with the first letter of Schiller in the 
 Goethe-Schiller Correspondence, June 13, 
 1794, and compare it with his last letter, writ- 
 ten on his death-bed at the end of April, 1805. 
 This indicates some ten full years of contin- 
 uously active intercourse between the two 
 poets, and so the whole time may be distinct- 
 ively entitled the Goethe-Schiller Decennium. 
 It should also be noted that this Epoch is 
 the middle one of Goethe's total life, being 
 the fifth Epoch out of the nine into which the 
 complete round of his creative activity falls. 
 Thus it is the culmination of the poet's tem- 
 poral existence, lasting from his forty-fifth 
 till his fifty-fifth year on the whole the choic- 
 est of man's allotted days for best productive 
 authorship. There can be no question that 
 Goethe brought forth his greatest and most 
 lasting works during this Epoch, beginning 
 with Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and 
 ending with The First Part of Faust. Un- 
 doubtedly he had already written famous 
 things, and hereafter his cunning will not fail 
 him even in his old age; still the present 
 
394 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Decennium is the cap-stone of his life's great 
 arch of more than eight decades. 
 
 Thus it comes that Goethe's life gives a 
 sense of fullness and of completeness surpass- 
 ing that of any other recorded individual, 
 with its total human gamut of good and bad, 
 of fulfilment and failure, of the positive and 
 the negative man. Far narrower and more 
 incomplete, even if more ideal and exemplary 
 was the poet Schiller's career. In the first 
 place he was cut off at the age of forty-five 
 while in the full process of development ; com- 
 pared to Goethe he had hardly finished one 
 Period of his earthly activity, though he had 
 passed through several stages or Epochs, 
 concluding with the most brilliant and the 
 the most creative one in conjunction with 
 Goethe. In the next place he was limited on 
 many sides by persistent ill-health, by lack of 
 education and of travel, by downright pov- 
 erty. Thus he was straitened to the life 
 particular while Goethe kept expanding to- 
 ward the life universal. 
 
 II. The growth of the friendship of the 
 two poets has its history and passed through 
 a stage of mutual repugnance if not of down- 
 right hate. Schiller speaking of him in a let- 
 ter declares: "This man, this Goethe just 
 stands in my way. He reminds me so often 
 that Fate has treated me harshly. How eas- 
 
i- 
 GOETHE' 8 ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 395 
 
 ily was his Genius borne forward by his lot, 
 and how have I had to struggle up to this 
 minute!" Thus Schiller cannot forbear a 
 touch of jealousy when he compares their 
 conditions. More poignant is this sentence : 
 "He has awakened in me a strange mixture 
 of love and hate, a feeling not dissimilar to 
 that which Brutus and Cassius must have 
 borne toward Caesar." Here Schiller con- 
 fesses that it is Goethe's towering greatness, 
 as in the case of Caesar, which makes him feel 
 little and envious. So true is it that whom- 
 soever or whatsoever the World-Spirit in- 
 dwells, be it individual or nation, is certain 
 to be hated by those who know themselves 
 beneath such transcendent power. Hence he 
 acknowledges his inferiority: "With Goe- 
 the I dare not measure myself when he puts 
 forth his whole strength. He has far more 
 Genius than I have, and then too a far greater 
 wealth of knowledge, a more certain sensu- 
 ous grip, and an artistic insight clarified and 
 refined by information of every kind. ' ' Still 
 Schiller's deepest longing is to come into 
 communion with the Great Man somehow, 
 and really to get hold of him. * ' Goethe is sel- 
 dom alone," he complains, "and I would like, 
 not merely to behold him at a distance, but 
 to snatch out of him something for myself." 
 Such was the situation for several vears 
 
396 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 before 1794, during which Schiller was often 
 in Weimar and its neighborhood, and saw 
 Goethe in society and even spoke with him, 
 but always "at a distance." Moreover they 
 had mutual friends who sought to bring them 
 together, but with no result. Schiller was 
 even appointed professor at the University 
 of Jena through Goethe's recommendation, 
 but the interval of icy politeness remained 
 impassable. Schiller again hits the nail on 
 the head in a letter : i l Goethe makes his ex- 
 istence beneficent, but only as a God, without 
 giving himself." A very striking designa- 
 tion of the Olympian Goethe: divine indeed, 
 as is Zeus, but he will not give himself 
 movens non motus like the Greek God, stat- 
 uesque in his loftiness, but cold as the mar- 
 ble. Such is truly the solitary Goethe, whose 
 very soul has been sculptured in his classic 
 workshop, but he has begun to feel the limit 
 of such training, the drawback of such isola- 
 tion. Moreover the man has appeared, is in- 
 deed just here, who is battering away at his 
 self-walled fortress, and will soon break it 
 down, letting the prisoner out into the world 
 and into his true self. 
 
 Still not yet could be the consummation. 
 Schiller had written offensive words in pub- 
 lic print which were secretly aimed at Goe- 
 the who was well aware of the fact. The 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 397 
 
 writer had disparaged his Genius "as a mere 
 product of Nature " which he could not help 
 if he would. Goethe was too Godlike for re- 
 venge, yet too Godlike to condescend to for- 
 give. Long afterwards in a retrospect he 
 hints the wound: "No companionship could 
 be thought of; all intercession of friends 
 proved fruitless ; my reasons could not be re- 
 futed. We were antipodal, the Earth's diam- 
 eter lay between us, thus we were completely 
 polarized, and could not be drawn together. ' ' 
 Still as poles they are on the way to find 
 themselves necessarily interrelated and in- 
 separably conjoined together. Schiller also 
 will cry out in despair: "Goethe never over- 
 flows toward any human being, he always 
 keeps himself in reserve ; you cannot get hold 
 of him anywhere, I believe him to be a con- 
 summate Egoist. " So the see-saw kept up 
 for several years between the two poets, each 
 needing the other, each far down in his heart 
 longing for the other. Schiller in his better 
 moments forefelt the coming bond, which 
 would be all the stronger for its long and 
 tense trial, and he could prophetically hint, 
 "if one tries his best, he cannot remain un- 
 recognized by the other forever." 
 
 III. At last the psychological moment ar- 
 rived, and the two souls feeling their diver- 
 sity but also their deep unity, began slowly to 
 
398 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 clasp and to become ingrown not only for life 
 but for all time. Goethe, looking back at this 
 determining node of his career in later life, 
 has told of it with some degree of fullness. 
 Both were at a lecture in Jena on Natural 
 Science, and happened to go out the door to- 
 gether, when they began conversing on what 
 they had just heard. Both agreed that the 
 treatment of the subject was faulty on ac- 
 count of its piecemeal method of exposition. 
 Whereat Goethe took fire and declared that 
 there was another way of unfolding Nature 
 different from this separated, analytic man- 
 ner. They reached Schiller's house, Goethe 
 stepped over the sill a big step for him to 
 take. Thus he narrates: "the conversation 
 enticed me inside where I set forth my meta- 
 morphosis of plants with energy, and by 
 means of strokes of the pen I caused a sym- 
 bolic plant to grow up before his eyes. Schiller 
 understood the matter well, but shook his 
 head saying: 'That is no experience; that is 
 an idea.' I was taken aback, somewhat 
 vexed; the old point of difference had ap- 
 peared, and with it a streak of the old dis- 
 like ; but I drew myself together and replied : 
 'That is a new delight for me that I have 
 ideas without knowing it, and even see them 
 with my own eyes.' Then arose a lively dis- 
 cussion between me, the obstinate realist, and 
 
i- 
 
 GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 399 
 
 Schiller, the trained Kantian, but neither side 
 would give up." So Goethe reports, but in 
 the deeper sense he had given up. Hence he 
 adds that "the first step had been taken," es- 
 pecially by him, for Schiller did not need to 
 take it. Goethe felt that he had now met the 
 man who dared meet him face to face, who 
 could break down his isolation and mediate 
 him afresh with his own true selfhood, with 
 his very Genius. Accordingly he here con- 
 fesses that "Schiller's power of attraction 
 was great, he bound fast to himself all who 
 might approach him" and that was what 
 now happened; "I took part in his plans, I 
 promised to contribute to his periodical (Die 
 Hor en) ; and his wife whom I had known and 
 was fond of from childhood, helped to cement 
 the bond which became lasting." 
 
 Still the difference remained and persisted 
 through all their long and intense friendship : 
 Schiller the idealist, Goethe the realist; the 
 one essentially subjective, the other essen- 
 tially objective ; the former more the woman, 
 who loves the man, the latter more the man 
 who loves the woman, even if both of them 
 were masculine. But that "symbolic plant" 
 (so called here by Goethe) was verily char- 
 acteristic. Schiller sees it not with the outer 
 eyesight, but with the inner vision as idea, 
 hence his idealism ; Goethe sees it, or claims 
 
400 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 to see it, with his own eyes, visible there be- 
 fore him, hence his obstinate realism. That 
 is, he visions immediately the plant as uni- 
 versal, from which all particular plants are 
 generated, and he can actually draw the same 
 with his pen. Such is indeed his poetic act: 
 his symbolic or universal plant he beholds or 
 re-creates as particular ; he cannot grasp it as 
 thought or idea, he must make it a real indi- 
 vidual. Thus we also catch a glimpse of his 
 limit: he is the born poet who has to learn 
 philosophy if he gets it; while Schiller is 
 rather the born philosopher who has to learn 
 poetry, and this is just what he will do with 
 a marvelous result. 
 
 There is no doubt that through this conver- 
 sation Goethe has come to feel the limitation 
 of his purely poetic consciousness which he 
 must transcend if he would rise to be in him- 
 self the universal man and therewith the poet 
 of all culture. Hence he at once begins with 
 Schiller a profound abstract study of his art 
 and of the fine arts generally; his persistent 
 probing and searching into the philosophy of 
 Aesthetics we can trace in their Correspond- 
 ence which now rays forth in eager and ear- 
 nest amplitude. Undoubtedly Goethe had 
 deeply contemplated poetry and art before 
 this time, especially in Italy; but now he 
 philosophizes his work and even his Genius, 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 401 
 
 seeking to get consciously to the bottom of his 
 own procedure with the very suggestive help 
 of his friend. Indeed that is largely what 
 Schiller has at present to do : show Goethe to 
 himself, tell him what he is, for he hardly 
 knows himself. He must rise from the poet 
 more or less unconscious to the conscious poet. 
 To be sure Goethe will often take a growl at 
 this labor, which is not native to him, though 
 he has to do it ; he will complain that he has 
 "no philosophical organ, " and indeed philos- 
 ophy is not organic with him ; he will make 
 mouths at "empty speculation, " but he has 
 to swallow the pill if he is going to get well 
 and be the whole man. So he will speculate 
 with Schiller, often very profoundly and to 
 our mind poetically, for not a few of his let- 
 ters are poems, having the Goethean poetic 
 vision and aroma. 
 
 Then we are not to forget that just the 
 present Goethe-Schiller Epoch was pecu- 
 liarly an era of philosophy, for this was the 
 time's very discipline in matters spiritual, 
 and the center of it was the University of 
 Jena which was under Goethe's personal ad- 
 ministration. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel 
 had all been there as professors ; the brothers 
 Schlegel and other leaders of the Eomantic 
 movement gathered about Jena as their chief 
 point of radiation; Natural Science, Goethe's 
 
402 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 own darling, had there creative workers. But 
 the grand sunburst of that University was 
 philosophical, the counterpart in the inner 
 world of what the French Eevolution, going 
 on at the same time, was in the outer world. 
 Now Goethe, the child of his age, had to know 
 something of its chief discipline, if he would 
 live spiritually in his own time ; still further 
 he had to philosophize himself and his self's 
 very art, if he would swim abreast of his cen- 
 tury. All this he must have felt, and must 
 have been waiting for the moment and the 
 man to mediate him with his present deepest 
 need; behold, he comes, here they are, both 
 of them, and the poet embraces at once "his 
 dear Goddess Opportunity," at first with a 
 smart scowl at his necessary medicine. 
 
 IV. Thus the bond of association was 
 formed, and Schiller was ready to say after- 
 ward that it could not have taken place profit- 
 ably at an earlier time fortune had thwarted 
 his efforts till the right conjunction of the 
 stars. Goethe in talking with Eckermann 
 (March 24, 1829) has stated his view of the 
 tie with Schiller in his peculiar terms : ' ' The 
 higher a man stands, the more he is under the 
 influence of the demons, and he must be al- 
 ways on the look-out" that he hit the favor- 
 able moment. For instance "there was 
 something demonic in my getting acquainted 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 403 
 
 with Schiller. We might have met earlier or 
 later, but the all-important fact is that we 
 were brought together just at the Epoch 
 when I had the Italian Journey behind me 
 and Schiller was getting tired of his philo- 
 sophical speculations. " So Goethe again 
 marks off his Epoch with Schiller as well as 
 the Epoch which went before it. Elsewhere 
 such a meeting was called "a divine coinci- 
 dence, " perchance like the intervention of 
 one of Homer's Gods coming down from 
 above. Supernally ordered by a demonic 
 power it was, else it could not have been 
 Epoch-making; so the poet poetizes the grand 
 node of his career. 
 
 Now what is the point at which their unity 
 begins and from which it unfolds! Strangely 
 it was philosophy or the much-decried spec- 
 ulation; Goethe needed more abstraction 
 which Schiller could give, and Schiller needed 
 a good dose of sensuous concreteness which 
 Goethe could administer. Says Schiller: 
 "We first found ourselves in unexpected 
 agreement on the theory of art, which was the 
 more interesting as it proceeded from oppo- 
 site viewpoints. " Thus they discovered their 
 theoretical harmony to start with. Goethe 
 likewise writes to his friend: "You know, 
 my dear sir, that after our fortnight's con- 
 ference we were united in principles," from 
 
404 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 which began to flow other co-incidences and 
 concordances. In a letter, Schiller very 
 'frankly gives to his great pupil a pivotal les- 
 son in psychology: "You have one labor 
 more: as you have already passed from in- 
 tuition (sensuous) to abstraction, so you 
 must now reverse the process and turn your 
 abstract concepts back into intuitions, and 
 your thoughts into feelings, for only by means 
 of these can your poetic genius be product- 
 ive/' Thus through Schiller and his philos- 
 ophy Goethe is to rise from the unconscious 
 to the conscious artist, of course without 
 jeopardizing his masterful spontaneity. But 
 how about Goethe 's classical bent in a North- 
 ern world? What is to be done with such a 
 double-natured poet? Hereupon also Schil- 
 ler imparts his word of instruction which has 
 its significance for the future: "As you are 
 a born German and as your Greek spirit was 
 cast into this Northern world, there remains 
 no other choice for you than either to become 
 wholly a Northern artist or to supplement 
 your imagination with that which is lacking 
 to it by the power of thought, and to repro- 
 duce a Hellas as it were from within out- 
 wards by way of reflection. " Schiller fore- 
 sees Goethe's tendency "to reproduce a Hel- 
 las in Germany," which is the result of the 
 Italian experience, and intimates that it must 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 405 
 
 be done "by the power of thought M rather 
 than by the simple spontaneous outburst of 
 his native talent, such as was the case with 
 his earlier productions of the Frankfort Ep- 
 och. -That first immediacy of his poetry has 
 passed away, and his divine gift must now be 
 restored and supported by a conscious knowl- 
 edge of his art. 
 
 V. In this statement is indicated that 
 double strand in Goethe which will run 
 through the entire present Epoch, namely his 
 Classic and his Northern creations, or his 
 Greek and his German tendencies. Upon 
 these two lines quite parallel his poetic ac- 
 tivity will unfold, and throw off splendid ex- 
 amples of each kind. And not only he will 
 proceed thus, he will impart the same double- 
 ness to Schiller who will also write in classic 
 forms though he never had the Italian bap- 
 tism. He too will seek "to reproduce Hellas 
 in Germany, " having caught the poetic thrill 
 of it from his friend. He will build the lofty 
 hexameter, especially in its elegiac form, and 
 will revel in epigrams and elegies, flinging 
 them off after the example of Goethe in cre- 
 ative rivalry. But Schiller's Northern 
 achievement is far greater than his Classic; 
 especially his ballads are today the most pop- 
 ular work of the German Muse, and thus 
 would seem to be the most native expression 
 
406 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 of the Teutonic folk-soul. In this field again 
 he is paralleled by Goethe, whose ballads 
 spring from the deepest sources of literature, 
 but are said hot to equal those of Schiller in 
 popularity, though on the whole the pro- 
 founder and more poetic readers give them 
 the preference. 
 
 Here then, we are to emphasize a salient 
 fact of the present Epoch: the one great lit- 
 erary movement is composed of two poets, 
 interacting and co-operating to a single end ; 
 each of them while pursuing his own special 
 tendency reflects the tendency of the other 
 also in his creations ; Schiller naturally Ger- 
 man or Romantic joins to his own native 
 strand the Classic adopted from Goethe; 
 while the latter, at present full of his Classic 
 bent is stimulated by Schiller to realize his 
 German heritage. Thus they circle about 
 each other, double suns as it were, each in its 
 own orbit, yet influencing the motion of the 
 other, and both together producing one grand 
 illumination. So they run double, each poet 
 sharing in the other while remaining him- 
 self, whereby they become one great totality 
 of spirit. Hence it comes that Goethe re- 
 peatedly speaks of himself as a half of this 
 one higher process ; when Schiller has passed 
 beyond he feels that he is but the moiety left 
 behind. 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 407 
 
 The foregoing statement is peculiarly true 
 of their lyrical production, which rises to the 
 best of its kind. But when it comes to what 
 may be in general called their epic and dra- 
 matic creation, they showed a tendency to 
 separate. Schiller became supremely the 
 dramatic poet while Goethe leaned to the epic 
 though by no means eschewing the drama. 
 Still the interest is that even as different or 
 as opposite they form one transcendent spir- 
 itual Whole which constitutes the unity of 
 the Epoch. Each of them to be the other's 
 adequate counterpart is spurred to his high- 
 est endeavor just in the fruitful season of 
 life. The result is an enormous output of ex- 
 cellence rivaled nowhere else at that time in 
 the literary realm; Weimar became the po- 
 etic voice of Europe, the World-Spirit spoke 
 German during this Goethe-Schiller Epoch. 
 
 VI.- No account of these spiritually 
 twinned souls can be complete without con- 
 sidering their physical contrast and its effect 
 upon both. Schiller was a perpetual invalid ; 
 when Goethe invited him to make a visit, he 
 accepted with the proviso that he should have 
 the privilege of being sick. He represented 
 mortality itself in his body, ever nagging 
 him with pain and unstringing him for work. 
 Still he valiantly kept up the struggle, fight- 
 ing death's hand at his throat for these ten 
 
408 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 years the mortal striving to circumvent 
 Fate and to become immortal. No wonder 
 he wrote tragedies; he lived them, ever re- 
 minded by suffering of his approaching evan- 
 ishment. The ideal versus the real was incor- 
 porate in Schiller, who had good reason to 
 hate the physical element in himself which 
 tortured him so cruelly and persistently. 
 Thus he was born fated by nature; even 
 barely to live he had to be a fate-compeller. 
 He seems to have had a premonition of his 
 early dissolution, and so he wrought in defi- ^ 
 ance of illness and pain that his immortal 
 task might be fairly done when the bell tolled. 
 Very different in physical equipment was 
 Goethe, who towered up Nature's darling in 
 form, health and activity. To be sure he. had 
 at times furious spells of illness, doubtless 
 his body's punishment for violation of its 
 laws. But he would get up again in recov- 
 ered strength and spirit. Why should he not 
 love nature who loved him with a sort of pas- 
 sion and showered him with her rarest gifts ? 
 In his physical frame the ideal lived incar- 
 nate and never had to fight for its very exist- 
 ence as was the case with Schiller. His or- 
 ganism was already an ideal realized; the 
 fierce dualism between the two sides, which 
 was so characteristic of Schiller's work and 
 even of his body, was not practically present 
 
.* 
 GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 409 
 
 to Goethe. So we may say that the idealism 
 of the one and the realism of the other was 
 primarily conditioned in their corporeal ex- 
 istence. By themselves they were in danger 
 of excess, each needed the corrective of the 
 other. Goethe's very shape was the native 
 home of love, he was the born Phileros in out- 
 ward figure, the sensuous counterpart to 
 etherialized Schiller. 
 
 VII. There was another and deeper side 
 to Schiller's invalidism, which Goethe did not 
 fail to feel and of which he drew the religious 
 analogy. The latter compares Schiller on 
 account of his incessant pain, to the suffering 
 Christ, and after he was gone, looked back at 
 him with a reverential feeling akin to behold- 
 ing the Crucified. So the poet meditates : "in 
 Schiller this Christ-tendency was inborn. " 
 The sight of the visible passion of a great man 
 who was his dearest friend was able to make 
 Goethe realize in his heart and intellect the 
 Christian Idea, which he saw actually em- 
 bodied in that anguished frame still doing its 
 work. The literal fact before his eyes for 
 years affected him far more deeply than all 
 the pictured crucifixions of which Italy was 
 full, and from which he turned away with in- 
 difference if not with aversion. We may well 
 suppose that his one-sided Greek world-view 
 got a shock when he contemplated Schiller's 
 
410 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 life-long tribulation not only patiently en- 
 dured but spiritually transcended. Of this 
 peculiar experience he has cast a shadowy 
 image in his Meister's Journey manship 
 where he puts stress upon the religion of 
 suffering, which is the Christian, and where 
 he employs veneration so strikingly as an 
 element of youthful education in his so-called 
 Pedagogic Province. Goethe was in his way 
 Christianized by the epiphany of Schiller 
 whose life, suffering and death became to 
 him an actual manifestation, or if you wish, 
 re-incarnation of the Great Sufferer, and 
 their common life during the present Epoch 
 was transfigured into a unique religious ex- 
 perience which in his latter days he contem- 
 plated with a kind of worship. I believe that 
 the religious tone which runs through a good 
 deal of his J ourneymansliip of Meister, writ- 
 ten mostly in his old age, takes its origin from 
 his sympathy with the living sorrow of Schil- 
 ler, who thus became to him a sort of sacred 
 mediator enacting a Gospel of Suffering pres- 
 ent, visible, real. We have often heard him 
 say already that he could only write what he 
 had actually experienced, making it also his 
 confession; so in the present case he must 
 have written what he had already lived. 
 
 We may also note in Schiller 's own poetry 
 the effect of his never-resting struggle with 
 
GOETHE' 8 ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 411 
 
 the pain of existence, over which he had to 
 rise triumphant in every piece he wrote. 
 Hence there is in his style an uplift even of 
 the words, an elevation of the spirit over its 
 earthy physical portion, a winged flight of 
 the ideal away from the real, to which Goe- 
 the on the other hand was inclined to cling, 
 fetching down to it his ideal. Thus Schiller's 
 Genius hoists him out of suffering through 
 his pen, and his utterance bears deeply the 
 stamp of such an act of exaltation. His life 
 shows what man is to do with pain, misfor- 
 tune, sorrow transcend it, yea, transfigure 
 it into an immortal deed. 
 
 In this way we conceive the deepest strain 
 of Schiller's character to be mediatorial; es- 
 pecially was he a spiritual mediator" for his 
 friend Goethe, the estranged, isolated, soli- 
 tary, reconciling the latter with himself and 
 his world, and thereby starting again his 
 Genius into a new era of creation which in 
 productivity resembles the Frankfort Epoch. 
 He needed a second Self to reflect him, to 
 show him what he was and could still do, and 
 to dare even correct him if he should stray. 
 He recognized Schiller's function toward 
 himself and cried out in joyous approval: 
 "Go on and continue to make me acquainted 
 with my own work and myself. 9 ' Many pas- 
 sages of their Correspondence have this pur- 
 
412 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 port. He sends one of his productions to 
 Schiller and begs him to tell what it means, 
 as he himself does not know, having written 
 it in his supra-conscious mood: " Think it 
 over and then as true prophet interpret my 
 dreams. " Goethe claimed that when writing 
 he fell into a state resembling somnambulism. 
 It is perhaps not too much to say that Goe- 
 the won his poetic salvation through his as- 
 sociation with Schiller. He was a lost soul 
 till he was picked up and saved by Schiller, 
 as he himself intimates. Still this is not to 
 affirm that Schiller was the greater poet. 
 Says he in a letter: "Compared to Goethe 
 I am and remain a poetical blatherskite 
 (Lump). 99 Nevertheless he was aware that he 
 possessed qualities which Goethe had not: 
 1 i something remains to me and is mine which 
 he can never reach. ' ' Moreover he had a pre- 
 sentiment that he would never live to round 
 out his career. Pathetic is his fbrecast of a 
 life unfinished: "I shall hardly have time to 
 complete in myself a great and universal 
 spiritual revolution; but I shall do what I 
 can, and when the building at last collapses, 
 I shall have rescued perhaps something wor- 
 thy of preservation from the ruin." (From 
 a letter to Goethe in 1794). He seems also 
 to have had a forefeeling that Goethe was 
 destined to fill to completeness the full cycle 
 
GOETHE'S ASSOCIATION WITH SCHILLER. 413 
 
 of life in contrast to his own limited achieve- 
 ment sapped by sickness and finally cut short 
 by fate. 
 
 VIII. In such way we seek to realize to 
 ourselves the place of the present unique 
 Epoch in Goethe's total life-poem, in which it 
 performs a sovereign function different from 
 that of any other Epoch before or afterward, 
 centered as it is in the middle of them all. 
 Genius now falls in love with Genius, each 
 stirring the other to an intense productive 
 energy, which culminates in the greatest 
 works of both. We may call it friendship, but 
 it was something more ; each had friends out- 
 side of this tie which was singular in demand- 
 ing the responsive power of creation. Goe- 
 the's Genius was the portion of him which 
 was isolated till he found its comrade in Schil- 
 ler who feels its loneliness and despair, and 
 starts it to fresh activity and hope. Goethe 
 was solitary because he had no Genius to 
 love and to be loved by; that part Christiane 
 could not fill. He had reached the nodal Ep- 
 och in his evolution when he must find his 
 creational counterpart in order to be whole 
 himself. He needs a .complementary spirit 
 not simply to appreciate him but to recreate 
 him in his very creation, and thus to reveal 
 him to himself and to bring him to his com- 
 plete fulfilment. As the one solitary Genius 
 
414 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 standing by himself he had quite done his 
 task, and was drooping to inactivity, if not 
 exhaustion. He must now produce not sim- 
 ply great works, but reproduce his Genius 
 itself in living independent activity, which 
 runs a creative parallel with his own. The 
 highest act of God is to create another God 
 quite on a par with himself. So Goethe loves 
 Schiller's Genius creatively and without 
 question brings it to its highest productive 
 efficiency. And Schiller loves Goethe's 
 Genius creatively, stimulating it and even 
 unfolding it to its sovereign supremacy. 
 Thus they not only made great poems, but 
 made one another making great poems. Both 
 at their best seemed to share in God's crea- 
 tional love, not so much man's that love 
 which primordially created the Universe. 
 
 But what then about our Phileros, the 
 lover of love, peculiarly of woman's love? 
 The fact is that the intensely sexed emotional 
 nature which he has hitherto manifested 
 drops into the background during the entire 
 present Decennium, seeming to become qui- 
 escent with the advent of Schiller. Such is 
 probably the most strangely elusive psycho- 
 logical phenomenon of his whole love-life. 
 Hitherto the love of woman has been Goe- 
 the's chief stimulus to literary production; 
 but now a man's love, therefore quite un- 
 
t- 
 WORKS IN' PARTNERSHIP. 415 
 
 sexed, is what stirs his fresh creative energy; 
 his Genius has risen to love its own, its very 
 selfhood in another Genius, which in turn 
 impregnates it to a new birth of its highest 
 potency. There has arisen the mutual bond 
 of love, not of female with male, but seem- 
 ingly supra-sexual, universal, as participat- 
 ing in the original divine essence of creation. 
 So we may well deem it a unique manifesta- 
 tion not simply in Goethe's life-poem, but in 
 all Literature. 
 
 Thus, however, our Phileros passes into a 
 time of eclipse, not by any means dead, but 
 reposing quietly in a state of abeyance. Take 
 heart, 0, Phileros; Fate will snatch Schiller 
 away, and thou shalt pass out of thy ob- 
 scuration ; thou shalt love again in full youth- 
 ful fervor, love woman again, defiant of all 
 the envious wrinkles of old-age. 
 
 i. 
 
 Works in Partnership. 
 
 The associated life of Goethe and Schiller 
 may be first regarded as immediately and per- 
 sonally co-operative in producing certain of 
 their works. That is, they wrote some books 
 in common, and neither of the two at times 
 could separate his respective share of author- 
 
416 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ship. Then each of them would perform his 
 distinct part in a joint production. This col- 
 laboration was specially pronounced in the 
 earlier part of their decennial friendship. 
 We shall select three works which illustrate 
 various phases of their partnership in writ- 
 ing as well as of their deep community of feel- 
 ing, whereby each seemed to supplement 
 what was lacking in the other, thus forming 
 a kind of common personality in which both 
 participated yet it was over both. The works 
 selected are The Correspondence, The Xenia, 
 and The Ballads and Elegies. 
 
 I. The Goethe-Schiller Correspondence 
 runs through the entire ten years and more, 
 and lasts, according to the dated letters, from 
 June, 1794, till April, 1805. It may well 
 be considered a unique book in literature, in- 
 ducting the reader into the very workshop of 
 two great poets who were bringing forth a 
 world-historical Epoch in their art. More- 
 over both were at the culmination of their cre- 
 ative power, and stimulated each other to the 
 topmost excellence. We follow their pro- 
 found study in literary forms epic dra- 
 matic, lyric, novelistic and other lesser ones 
 which study they undertake not for the 
 purpose of constructing a methodical Aes- 
 thetic, but of applying immediately their 
 principles to produce the highest original 
 

 WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP. 417 
 
 works. Thus it is a kind of living Poetic, 
 hence far more vital than any philosophical 
 treatise from Aristotle down. They are 
 bent on becoming conscious of their artistic 
 process that it may reach its supreme ful- 
 filment. Both poets have had their instinct- 
 ive, unconscious time Schiller in his Rob- 
 bers and Goethe in the products of his Frank- 
 fort Epoch which time, though Titanic in 
 its outbreak, they must transcend and be- 
 come ordered, rational, self-knowing in their 
 work, yet with the full spontaneous flow of 
 their Genius held within the bounds of rea- 
 son. Such is the first very suggestive lesson 
 to be derived from this book: knowledge is 
 not going to destroy invention, but to give it 
 intelligent direction; philosophy is not hos- 
 tile to poetry, but necessary to its perfect 
 creation ; Goethe 's intuition has to be supple- 
 mented by Schiller's reflection ere it can 
 again be productive of its poetic wealth, and 
 achieve its true destiny. Each imparts him- 
 self to the other and thus both form one com- 
 plete supereminent Whole, a kind of Over- 
 man, in them yet above them, and greater 
 than either alone. Thus their association is 
 not merely internal or subjective in each, but 
 a grand objective fact, 'existent of itself in the 
 world and epochal in its literature. 
 
 Goethe, the long survivor of the twain, was 
 
418 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 well aware of the value of this Correspond- 
 ence. Nearly twenty years after its conclu- 
 sion he began to revise these letters for 
 print ; he speaks of them at the time in a let- 
 ter to Zelter : i ' the work will be a great gift, 
 which is offered not only to Germans, but I 
 dare say, to mankind. " When this was writ- 
 ten, he was well aware of his place in uni- 
 versal literature, in which the Goethe-Schil- 
 ler Epoch occupies a lofty original niche. 
 Hence this book, which is a record of the in- 
 ner evolution of that Epoch in the souls of 
 its two protagonists, he could rightfully pro- 
 claim as a great present to the literary world. 
 Goethe, in his dedication to King Louis I. of 
 Bavaria, intimates the part which the work 
 played in his personal development, since it 
 recounts the breaking-up of his previous iso- 
 lation, when he lacked a friend who could give 
 him "an inner confidential sympathy/' and 
 when he missed all * ' spiritual incitement and 
 whatever might stimulate a praiseworthy 
 emulation. ' ' Thus the book marks the transi- 
 tion from his solitary Epoch to his associated 
 life with Schiller. 
 
 The chief part of the Correspondence took 
 place while Schiller was at Jena. But in 
 1799 he changed his residence to Weimar, 
 where the two friends could communicate per- 
 sonally whenever they chose. So the book 
 
.*- 
 
 WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP. 419 
 
 droops somewhat in the latter portion. Also 
 they had largely uttered themselves, and the 
 zeal had become more quiescent, of course 
 without ceasing. Besides, Schiller had 
 evolved into his independent career as a dra- 
 matist, in which domain he had outstripped 
 Goethe, who, however, gave him all sorts of 
 support, practical and theoretical. Schiller's 
 "Camp of Wallenstein," staged in 1798, was 
 the beginning of the poet's literary auton- 
 omy; his work stood in its own right of su- 
 premacy and had no rival. This position he 
 held till his death. 
 
 Which of the two writes the best letters, is 
 a question which has been much discussed, 
 and which often comes up to the reader. Goe- 
 the has generously given the palm to Schil- 
 ler: "My letters are not equal to those of 
 Schiller in internal and independent value; 
 he was more inclined to reflection concerning 
 persons and writings than I," and so he sur- 
 passes me. Still the fact that Goethe's are 
 more direct and spontaneous makes a point 
 in their favor with some people. There is no 
 doubt that Schiller 's are written with greater 
 thought and care for expression than those 
 of his friend. Moreover they have a different 
 purpose from Goethe's, they seek to stimu- 
 late the solitary Genius through apprecia- 
 tion, in fact through recreation of his work. 
 
420 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 II. In the famous Xenia the bond be- 
 tween Goethe and Schiller is not only co-op- 
 erative and mutually instructive, each one 
 holding a mirror up to the other after his 
 own way, as in the Correspondence, but it 
 becomes intergrown in a common work, the 
 friendship turns to a twinship both in con- 
 ception and execution. This was strikingly 
 stated by Goethe long afterwards in a talk 
 with Eckermann: "Often I had the thought 
 and Schiller made the verses, often just the 
 opposite took place ; often Schiller made one 
 line of the distich and I the other. How can 
 anybody talk of mine and thine in such a 
 case!" Such was indeed the most intimate 
 stage of their association: the two brains 
 were composing not merely the same book 
 but the same sentence. Here we may well be- 
 hold their most internal point of conjunction : 
 two strong poetic individualities were fused 
 into one creative act. Schiller gives his bit 
 of evidence to the same effect in a letter to 
 W. Von Humboldt: "There was a formal 
 agreement between Goethe and myself that 
 our special rights of property in the epi- 
 grams singly should never be explained but 
 we resolved to let the matter rest on itself to 
 all eternity. " Still the secret got out and it 
 is known pretty well today which belong to 
 each. 
 
.* 
 
 WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP. 421 
 
 These Xenia are elegiac hexameters of two 
 lines, and go back for their meter and gen- 
 eral character to the Roman poet Martial, 
 who, however, found his original as to pur- 
 port and form in the Greek Epigram, sam- 
 ples of which may be seen in the Greek An- 
 thology. Thus they are of classic birth, and 
 were suggested by Goethe in regard to both 
 their form and scope. Hence they show a 
 continuation of his epigrammatic mood which 
 has been already noted. Schiller adopted 
 eagerly the idea, and soon surpassed the mas- 
 ter who praised his associate's Xenia as 
 "more pointed and home-hitting " than his 
 own, and it is evident that they are more 
 carefully composed and metered. The in- 
 teresting fact here is that Schiller is appro- 
 priating Goethe's classicism, and in the best 
 sense is learning to reproduce Hellas in Ger- 
 many, which instruction he will not fail to 
 keep up and realize. Both poets are making 
 the Greek spirit talk German. 
 
 The chief purpose of the Xenia was to at- 
 tack and burn up with satirical fire-brands 
 the existent mediocrity in literature, art, and 
 science. That was certainly a large job, for 
 the vast majority of writers would be in- 
 volved. The result was an explosion violent 
 and wide-spread, producing what is known as 
 the war of the Xenia, for the trick of the 
 
422 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 verses was at once caught up and turned up- 
 on the inventors, often with telling effect. It 
 was largely a bitter personal fight, which to- 
 day is unrefreshing, and also hard to fol- 
 low, since most of the people and things as- 
 sailed have sunk into total night, and have 
 left behind to us simply their obscurity. It 
 was indeed a negative book whose object was 
 to destroy a negation and then vanish out of 
 the world. 
 
 Fortunately the work was so regarded by 
 its authors, who stopped it with a single fu- 
 rious cannonade. Schiller writes in a letter : 
 "Such weapons are to be used only once, in 
 order to lay them aside forever." Goethe 
 also declares to his ally: "After such a piece 
 of deviltry we must occupy ourselves with 
 great and worthy works, and transform our 
 Protean nature into the forms of the good 
 and noble, to the shame of our enemies." 
 Very delightful and suggestive is it to see 
 both the great poets getting sick of their de- 
 bauch of revenge, and turning to produce 
 great positive masterpieces, which each of 
 them now sends forth in astonishing fecun- 
 dity. To be sure Goethe is not going to get 
 rid of the negative strain inborn in his very 
 nature; here in the Xenia he is the classic 
 Mephistopheles who will later assume his 
 Teutonic garb in Faust. As to Schiller he 
 
WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP. 423 
 
 has become quite classicised by his present 
 experience, having learned to handle skill- 
 fully the Greek epigram both in its measure 
 and meaning. Moreover he has become an 
 integral portion of Goethe's brain as well as 
 heart, having participated in the very act of 
 the poet's creation. 
 
 The Xenia were started in 1795, the year 
 after the first friendly interview between 
 Schiller and Goethe, already recounted. Thus 
 they form an early but pivotal stage in their 
 association. 
 
 III. As a third manifestation of the Goe- 
 the-Schiller partnership we shall place the 
 Ballads and the Elegies (not including the 
 Eoman Elegies which have already been con- 
 sidered). These two rubrics indicate the 
 double character and achievement of the two 
 poets and likewise of their whole movement 
 taken together. The Ballad is essentially a 
 Northern or Romantic product, a native po- 
 etic growth of the Teutonic folk; the Elegy 
 is classic in form and suggestion, even if 
 filled with a modern spirit an interfusion of 
 Hellas and Germany, or to use Goethe's ideal 
 symbol, the marriage of Faust and Helen, or 
 to take his acted symbol, the coupling of 
 Goethe with Christiane. Each poet tried 
 both kinds, in a Parnassian rivalry with the 
 other ; the culmination was the so-called Bal- 
 
424 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 lad-year of 1797, though it was just as much 
 an elegiac time, especially for Goethe, who 
 produced during these months of 1796-7 his 
 finest Elegies (Alexis and Dora, Amyutas, 
 and Euphrosyne, with several others) as well 
 as a good number of his best Ballads, headed 
 by the famous epical Ballad entitled The 
 Bride of Corinth. Schiller also, let it be re- 
 peated, was wrought up to the same dual pro- 
 ductivity, and especially brought forth a 
 choice lot of his Ballads, which are today the 
 favorite poems of the German people. But 
 he likewise took a tilt at the classic elegiac 
 stanza and produced a noteworthy cluster of 
 Epigrams and Elegies in the ancient manner. 
 
 Schiller would be the first to confess that 
 he was stimulated to both these forms of po- 
 etic utterance by Goethe's precept and exam- 
 ple. His glory is that following another in 
 deep love and loyalty, he found himself and 
 reached his own independent creative power. 
 It is unjust to say that Schiller merely imi- 
 tated and reflected Goethe ; he did so undoubt- 
 edly, but that was only a stepping-stone to 
 his own true Self ; he was trained by a Genius 
 to discover and realize his own Genius . 
 
 In the Ballads we find the most striking 
 manifestation of their respective powers. 
 Schiller was essentially dramatic, he loved 
 the action, even the external action, for its 
 
WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP. 425 
 
 own sake, being full of life and movement. 
 But Goethe's Ballads on the whole lack this 
 outer push, they turn to the inner world and 
 set forth its resurgences and conflicts and 
 harmonies. Emotion rather than motion, 
 sentiments more than sensations, were his 
 in comparison ; the play of incident was less, 
 the play of internality was more for him; 
 Schiller was deeply historic, Goethe deeply 
 unhistoric. Schiller loved the moral, Goe- 
 the loved the mythical, and was strongly 
 inclined to set forth the upper mysterious 
 Energies as interwoven in the human 
 deed. Hence Goethe's Ballads chiefly spring 
 from a Mythus either borrowed or made 
 by himself on the spot. Here lies a 
 fundamental distinction: Schiller was not 
 easily mythical, though he trained himself 
 forcibly in that direction; on the other hand 
 Goethe was at his deepest a myth-maker, and 
 could hardly help himself when nature broke 
 loose into creation. Hence he is epical while 
 Schiller is dramatic. Another difference be- 
 tween the two is that Schiller cares little for 
 motivation ; he paints the occurrences follow- 
 ing one another outwardly with an upspring 
 and a delight simply in the happenings ; Goe- 
 the runs to the contrary and seems ill at ease 
 unless he can mirror the motives of the ac- 
 tion directly or indirectly. 
 
426 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 So much for the Northern or Romantic 
 strain which both poets evolved to a supreme 
 excellence. Never before or since has the 
 Ballad, an elemental form of verse throbbing 
 directly from the popular heart, attained such 
 a stage of poetic affluence, and been made the 
 bearer of so much of the highest literary cul- 
 ture. The Ballads of Goethe and Schiller, in 
 their unity as well as in their diversity, 
 through their form as well as through their 
 content, are epochal in the history of Litera- 
 ture. They stream along the greater part of 
 the present Decennium, and in the opinion of 
 many, are its topmost product, not excepting 
 Wallenstein and Faust. 
 
 The second strain, the Classic or South- 
 ern, is seen in the Elegies, with many a little 
 spurt of poetry jetting up in the elegiac epi- 
 grams, which were cultivated by both poets, 
 but must be here passed over. Their Elegies 
 cannot be said to have ever been fully popu- 
 larized, in spite of their excellence, on ac- 
 count of their alien classic measures. Still 
 the culture seekers may well read this poetry 
 as the best introduction to the source of all 
 culture, namely the Hellenic spirit. It is still 
 the highest part of a complete classical 
 course ; two great poets make the dry gram- 
 mar and dictionary of the ancient Latin and 
 Greek flower forth into present life. Thus 
 
WlLHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 427 
 
 these antique-metered poems of Goethe and 
 Schiller form the most delightful itinerary 
 from the old world of the past into the world 
 of today. Nowhere else in European Litera- 
 ture is to be found such a poetic avenue con- 
 ducting us back to Rome and Hellas. 
 
 II. 
 
 WilJielm Meister's Apprenticeship. 
 
 Hardly can it be blamed or praised too 
 much; yet it contains deeply imbedded in 
 all its errors and transgressions an eternal 
 element. Thus it is like Goethe himself, a 
 very human mixture of good and evil, of sin- 
 ner and saint, of Inferno and Paradise. 
 Hence stream out of it two lines of criticism, 
 damnatory and laudatory; indeed the same 
 person reading it and appropriating it with 
 open-minded impartiality is jerked through 
 the whole gamut of damnation and laudation. 
 Not only is Wilhelm discerned in Goethe 
 himself who once called him "my beloved 
 Double;" not only is he the rather mysteri- 
 ous and mystifying uncle, or the variable 
 lover Lothario, or any other personage with 
 whom he has been identified; the book itself 
 is Goethe, its character his character, both in 
 its strength and weakness. It is accordingly 
 
428 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 the best picture of his Protean nature at this 
 time, being a kind of summary of his ex- 
 periences up to date, a biographic novel in his 
 life-poem. 
 
 In origin it reaches back to the early part 
 of his Weimar Epoch, quite contemporary 
 with Werther to which the first portions of 
 it bear frequently a resemblance in style and 
 content. The earliest written intimation of 
 its existence we have in Goethe's .diary: 
 "February 16, 1777 in the garden, dictated 
 on Wilhelm Meister." This would imply 
 that the work was already in full swing. It 
 was an evolutionary product and could not 
 be completed till time had ripened it. So it 
 meandered underground through the Frank- 
 fort and Weimar Epochs, and took a plunge 
 into Italy along with the author, who writes 
 thence : "At last all will be taken up and in- 
 cluded in Wilhelm" all his experiences, ob- 
 servations and even personal acquaintances. 
 Still the work would not get completed, 
 though he put himself under the outer press- 
 ure of a promise to his publisher. So the mat- 
 ter stood in 1794, w r hen his association with 
 Schiller came to his aid with its inner incite- 
 ment through appreciation and loving 
 urgency. It may be doubted if Goethe would 
 or could ever have finished it, at least in its 
 present form, if the right man with the right 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 429 
 
 help had not come to him at the right mo- 
 ment. 
 
 Thus Schiller was a kind of collaborator 
 with Goethe in this part of Meister, the one 
 as philosopher furnishing the principles, the 
 other as poet applying them to his art. Goe- 
 the writes to his friend: "You will not fail 
 to recognize your influence upon the book, 
 for certainly without our relation, I would 
 hardly have been able to have brought the 
 whole to a conclusion, at least not in this 
 way. A hundred times, when I have been 
 discussing with you theory and example, I 
 had in mind the situations which lie before 
 you in the novel, and I judged them silently 
 according the principle on which we agreed. ' ' 
 That tells the story (Correspondence, July 
 7, 1796), and many similar citations could be 
 made from this one source. In the same let- 
 ter Goethe begs "his other half," the reflec- 
 tive, to take a survey over "the entire mass" 
 before it goes back to the printer, "as I am 
 totally unable to do anything of the kind, 
 and what I can not see through your eyes, 
 will perhaps remain long concealed from 
 me." He cannot behold his own as it is, or 
 himself as he is. Hence he cries out: "how 
 much more advantageous is it to mirror 
 yourself in others than in yourself!" This 
 suggests the general character of the entire 
 
430 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Correspondence: each letter-writer is train- 
 ing the other in what he lacks and thus to 
 reach a completer selfhood. Goethe is learn- 
 ing to see himself, and thus to transcend his 
 limitation. The truth is he had little power of 
 reflective introspection and did not like it; 
 Schiller was, therefore, his spiritual looking- 
 glass, no doubt very favorable, still faithful 
 even if magnifying. Goethe needed a soul to 
 mirror him, not for flattery but for self- 
 knowledge. Eckermann performed such a 
 function for him in late life, but was only ap- 
 preciative, hardly creative. But Schiller re- 
 flected him not alone imitatively but cre- 
 atively, could enter into the genetic source 
 itself of the work and start that to flowing in 
 idea, and thus show wherein the execution 
 had fallen short. He was Goethe's own re- 
 vealer to himself, not in all things of course, 
 but in some of his subtlest crooks and cor- 
 ners. He philosophized not only Goethe's art 
 but Goethe's self. His letters on the poet's 
 Meister, while this was in the very process of 
 being formed show him the participator in 
 the act of its creation, especially of the later 
 Books. Hence the Novel belongs profoundly 
 to the associated life of the two friends. 
 
 We have said that Wilhelm Meister is 
 Wolfgang Goethe, or at least a large part of 
 him in a certain stage of his career. We may 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 431 
 
 go further and say that Wilhelm Meister is 
 Germany, especially as Goethe saw it during 
 this time. Its tendency to disunion and na- 
 tional paralysis, to dreaminess and excessive 
 speculation, to a highly cultivated and di- 
 versified subjectivity, while neglectful of a 
 corresponding outward energy, has its shift- 
 ing image in Meister. The nation 's Will 
 seemed quite hamstrung while its Intellect 
 grew to enormous proportion, with a corres- 
 ponding productivity. It became the su- 
 preme creative home of philosophy, music, 
 and poetry still unapproached and still to 
 be 'fully appropriated by the rest of the 
 world. But the back stroke of this intellec- 
 tual plurisy was a certain national will-less- 
 ness, the folk's indifference' to its own unity 
 and concentrated endeavor as an organized 
 whole; its Genius shunned the deed and 
 turned inward to the spirit; its Great Men 
 were not men of action, but men of the in- 
 ner life the philosopher, the poet, the mu- 
 sician Kant and Hegel, Schiller and Goe- 
 the, Mozart and Beethoven, not to speak of 
 other lesser, yet lofty intelligences in the 
 same line of development. 
 
 Now we hold that Germany in this work 
 was fulfilling a function higher than that of 
 the nation, a duty which for a while de- 
 manded the sacrifice of national unity; she 
 
432 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 was obeying, had to obey the bidding of the 
 time's uppermost authority, the behest of 
 the World-Spirit. Today it is evident that 
 she was performing a service for universal 
 human culture, doubtless at the expense of 
 her particular nationality; but she got tired 
 of that, or perchance finished her work, and 
 turned off to the next stage. Slowly she 
 reacted from her theoretical bent to the prac- 
 tical, from the Superman of Intellect to the 
 Superman of Will, from Germany the univer- 
 sal to Germany the particular, passing at the 
 same time from a dominating spiritual to a 
 dominating material pursuit and achieve- 
 ment. A similar transition we may observe 
 in Meister as he moves out of his vague and 
 varied cultural striving to the practical do- 
 main of Lothario, from the world of appear- 
 ance on the stage to the world of actuality in 
 life. But mark ! the first trend is more fully 
 accentuated than the second. 
 
 So we dare say that Meister is Goethe or 
 a stage of him, is Germany or a stage of it, 
 is indeed the World-Spirit in a faint and far- 
 off phasis which can only be glimpsed now 
 through the historic perspective of more than 
 a century, and from a standpoint outside of 
 Germany. Very suggestive is the fact that 
 the recent German biographers of Goethe 
 discredit this novel, denying it as one of the 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 433 
 
 supreme works of Goethe, declaring it to be 
 transcended, unpopular, quite rejected by the 
 German folk-soul. Their report is probably 
 true, reflecting both themselves and their 
 country in its present reaction and disgust at 
 its former Meister character and epoch. Still 
 the rest of cultured mankind continue to read 
 it and study it as a world-book, which mirrors 
 the man, the nation and the age, hence a uni- 
 versally representative piece of writing, 
 wherein lies its eternal element. Thus it is 
 a great book when we penetrate to the heart 
 of it, which does not lie on the surface, though 
 a light-ballasted novel in form; masterful it 
 is, in accord with its name, despite all its 
 sins and they are many sins of omission 
 and commission, ethical and aesthetic, charm- 
 ing and disgusting. 
 
 Goethe was occupied some twenty years 
 and more in its composition, thus it was a 
 slow deposit of his life. In October, 1797, 
 Wilhelm Meister 's Apprenticeship started on 
 its printed career down time, and is still go- 
 ing. In fact the work kept on evolving in the 
 author's career till his old age, when in 1829 
 more than thirty years later Meister's Jour- 
 neymanship was completed. So it runs par- 
 alleled with Faust through all his epochal 
 turns from his youthful start at Frankfort. 
 As there are two parts of Faust, so there are 
 
434 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 two parts of Meister, in fact the Elective Af- 
 finities was originally intended as a tale for 
 Meister 's Journey manship. Thus the struc- 
 tural plan of this novel overarches Goethe's 
 whole achievement. Still it is but one span 
 in his total life-poem which we are here try- 
 ing to grasp and to set forth. One of his 
 early appreciators said to him : ' ' What thou 
 livest is better than what thou writest." 
 Each of his Meisters and all his writ are but 
 fragments of his total experience called life, 
 which must be finally seen in its full cycle of 
 realized personality. 
 
 Goethe's opinion on his own works should 
 always be consulted even if not always ac- 
 cepted. For he sought to be the self-con- 
 scious artist ; especially at the time when he 
 was engaged on Meister, he was discussing 
 with Schiller the nature of the great perma- 
 nent forms which literature takes epos, dra- 
 ma, novel all of which he would employ cre- 
 atively. The central idea of his book was 
 continually haunting him in spite of his ex- 
 pressed impatience and dislike of such a way. 
 of envisaging his work. So his outburst in a 
 talk with Eckermann: "You hunt for a cen- 
 tral idea : that is hard to find, and is of little 
 account when found. I should think that a 
 rich manifold life unrolling before our eyes 
 were in itself somewhat, without any pro- 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 435 
 
 nounced tendency. " So he takes his grum- 
 ble seemingly at the other man, but really at 
 himself. In like fashion he writes in his An- 
 nals : "It is one of the most incalculable pro- 
 ductions, regarded either in itself or in its 
 parts ; I doubt if I have myself the criterion 
 by which to judge of it. ' ' Still he will judge 
 of it and state its leading thought in a kind 
 of protest : "If you must have its idea, take 
 these words directed to Wilhelm at the end 
 of the novel: 'You appear to me like Saul, 
 the son of Kis, who went out to seek his fa- 
 ther's asses and found a kingdom.' Stick to 
 that." Not very illuminating here is the 
 Scriptural text, or close-hitting; so he adds 
 the following: "at bottom the whole book 
 will say nothing but this, that the human be- 
 ing, in spite of all his stupidities and errors, 
 is guided by a higher hand and attains the 
 happy goal." So the author claims that an 
 upper world dominates the career of his 
 Meister, a kind of hidden providential over- 
 sight. In a letter to Schiller he gives a dif- 
 ferent turn to the kaleidoscope: "I doubt 
 if any other unity will be found in the book 
 than a steadily progressive evolution." That 
 is, the hero moves regularly from one stage 
 of development to another: which gives a 
 hint of the manner but not of the matter. 
 But who is the hero? Goethe is reported to 
 
436 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 have declared that Mignon is not an epi- 
 sode, " since the whole work was written for 
 this character. " 
 
 These diverse opinions of the author him- 
 self may be deemed so many varying phases 
 of the many-sided book, which is not easy to 
 focus into one central principle. The title sig- 
 nifies an educational novel, a species com- 
 mon in the eighteenth century which was so 
 creatively pedagogical the century of Rous- 
 seau in his culmination, and also of the early 
 efforts of Pestalozzi. Life is here an appren- 
 ticeship to the world-order. Even the nar- 
 row setting of a wandering theatrical troupe 
 had been used before Goethe as the little mo- 
 ment's stage representing the great stage of 
 time. It has been often questioned whether 
 such an environment for the hero was a 
 happy choice. Still he transcends it and 
 passes into a different and larger sphere of 
 activity. But all the while there is some- 
 thing tentative, uncentered, unwilled about 
 him ; he is hunting for his vocation yet keeps 
 trying to do that for which he has no talent. 
 Goethe has expressed this side of his work 
 also : ' " The beginning sprang from a dim 
 presentiment of the great truth that man will 
 undertake what nature has denied him and 
 will persist in practicing some art for which 
 he has no ability. " This is Goethe, espe- 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 437 
 
 cially in his many attempts to be a painter, 
 and gives the basis for his aversion to dilet- 
 tantism, almost monomaniacal. Meister is a 
 dilettant, not merely in commerce, poetry, 
 theater, but in the art of life. Impression- 
 able, ever receptive to the outside sensation, 
 especially responsive to the charm of women, 
 he is Phileros now looking back and sum- 
 moning before him the long line of female 
 shapes through which he has passed with 
 varied experiences in the last two decades. 
 What a gallery of feminimity, from Mariana 
 of the first Book to Natalia of the last Book, 
 each set forth with her own individuality, yet 
 all forming rungs of a ladder of his evolu- 
 tionary ascent! Many a woman reader re- 
 sents this experimental use of her sex and 
 throws the book into the fire. Goethe him- 
 self in a talk of 1821 called Meister "a poor 
 dog," because of his centerless inconstant 
 character, susceptible especially to every lit- 
 tle flicker of the female eye which, however, 
 was irresistibly drawn toward him, the un- 
 resisting lover Phileros. No wonder, as even 
 love-proof Emerson could confess that every- 
 body loves a lover. 
 
 This novel is accordingly a vast reservoir, 
 of experiences which are put into the form 
 of an apprenticeship to the art of life. The 
 best way to catch its sweep is to find its or- 
 
43B GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ganism which shows two large parts, and 
 what we may for the nonce call an intermezzo. 
 So we have the following outline : 
 
 I. The first five Books give Wilhelm in 
 his theatrical environment, which passes 
 through a number of gradations till he cul- 
 minates in playing Hamlet, and concludes 
 this part of his career. 
 
 II. The last two Books show Wilhelm in 
 a new stage of his apprenticeship to life and 
 art; he enters the practical sphere at Lotha- 
 rio's castle (Book Seventh), whence he 
 passes to the directly cultural realm in the 
 Hall of the Past, where he beholds antecedent 
 stages of culture eternized in art. This has 
 the educative tendency to universalize him 
 (as the trip to Italy did for Goethe). 
 
 III. The Sixth Book, lying between the 
 foregoing two parts, seems an episode, and 
 is known as the Confessions of a Fair Soul 
 (Carlyle's translation is Fair Saint).. Still 
 it has certain strands connecting it with the 
 whole work, though under the form of an in- 
 termezzo breaking into the connected story. 
 It may be deemed the evolution of the purely 
 religious spirit, which comes to feel its lim- 
 itation, and so takes up Art and Nature, re- 
 taining its own deepest truth yet transcend- 
 ing its one-sidedness. Thus it has a lesson 
 for Wilhelm 's own training in a very differ- 
 
.4- 
 WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 439 
 
 ent sphere. This Sixth Book is founded up- 
 on Goethe's experience with the religious 
 mystic Fraulein Von Klettenberg, of whom 
 an account has already been given in a for- 
 mer chapter. 
 
 The transition from the first part to the 
 second part of the novel (omitting the inter- 
 mezzo) is the main organic fact of the whole 
 work. It takes various meanings according 
 to the viewpoint of the reader. We may 
 deem it the rise out of the mere appearance 
 of life on the stage to its reality. Or we may 
 say it to be the passage from a disordered 
 existence to one ordered by society, from self- 
 will to renunciation, from one to many or all 
 Apprenticeships (every person being an ap- 
 prentice like Wilhelm), from a Lower World 
 of chance to an Upper World of guidance. 
 Finally we may note the change from the 
 Classic to the Eomantic the last Books be- 
 ing full of romantic incident, treatment and 
 characters. This fact reflects a change in 
 Goethe from his purely Italian Epoch, to his 
 double-strained Epoch with Schiller, which 
 unfolds creatively on both lines, the antique 
 and the modern, or the Classic and the 
 Romantic. The spiritual transition of Meis- 
 ter is the spiritual transition of Goethe at 
 this time. Moreover the conception and the 
 composition of the first part belong largely 
 
440 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 to an earlier period this part was once com- 
 plete in itself and was called Wilhelm Meis- 
 ter's Theatrical Mission. But after Italy 
 had universalized the author, such a work 
 seemed narrow, and so in harmony with his 
 own new culture he universalized his book 
 and its hero by adding the second part, and 
 carefully revising and re-styling the whole so 
 that it would read like a homogenous product 
 in form and matter, which on the whole it 
 does, even if we may come upon certain re- 
 minders of the Werther Epoch. 
 
 The second part of the work is, then, dis- 
 tinctive through Goethe's attempt to con- 
 struct an Upper World for the novel, its ep- 
 ical or providential element somewhat like 
 Homer's Gods. He evidently felt the deep 
 necessity of such a supernal Order over his 
 work. Here we may note the Sixth Book, 
 which is a unique religious experience, can 
 be regarded on this side as a bridge leading 
 over from the lower to the higher realm. For 
 in the first part as above decribed, the move- 
 ment seems quite left to itself, going pretty 
 much whither it listeth like the anchorless 
 wind; the man and the book appear as if 
 handed over to fate or rather accident, and 
 this is Wilhelm 's spiritual conviction as well 
 as his conduct in this part. And yet mid all 
 these wanderings he was secretly under guid- 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 441 
 
 ance, not unseen by a Providence which now 
 and then steps out of the air and speaks a 
 warning word, and which in the second part 
 is to manifest itself openly in its own right, 
 and even as an organization of which Wil- 
 helm is to become a member. 
 
 It may be added that the German critic of 
 today usually rejects this second part of 
 Meister, declaring it to be mystical, unreal, 
 romantic. He dislikes it for the very quali- 
 ties which at the time of its appearance made 
 it a great and much-read favorite. Hence 
 the book has become a kind of touchstone for 
 marking the difference between the present 
 Germany and Goethe 's Germany. Before me 
 lie two eminent recent biographers of the 
 poet, both of whom prefer the first or the 
 rambling theatrical part to the second or 
 ideal part with its organized Providence. In 
 like manner we hear in Homeric criticism 
 that "the Gods do not count, " being at most 
 a cunning piece of poetical machinery. 
 
 On its literary side, there is a plastic sense 
 and perfection which show how deeply Goe- 
 the was transformed by his stay in classic 
 Italy. One feels the plasticity of his words, 
 as they flow serene, limpid, transparent into 
 sentence and paragraph, and build up before 
 us a Greek temple of speech. His sunniness 
 of style is that of the shining statue of the 
 
442 GOETHE'S LIFE -POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Olympian who lias whelmed the old dark Gods 
 into gloomy Tartarus, and who now rules 
 above in the daylight of clear outline. Hence 
 we ramble mid the sculpure of his many 
 characters which rise and pass before us like 
 plastic shapes in an antique gallery. Verily 
 the Titans of the Frankfort Epoch lie chained 
 in the underworld. Such is the dominant 
 classical strain of this work, which, however, 
 is not exclusive, for there drops into it as it 
 were from an invisible upper source a mys- 
 terious unsunned, unclassical element which 
 has always caught the eye of the romanticist 
 with his look into the Beyond. 
 
 What Goethe said of his works in general 
 is true of his Meister. It contains many a 
 confession in regard to his life; especially 
 Christiane and his boy, both of them out- 
 lawed by his deed, are often imaged directly 
 as well as indirectly, along with the penalty 
 which is harassing his soul,, especially by way 
 of anticipation for the future. We shall make 
 only one brief citation (Book VIII, Chap. 2), 
 which shows the father's anxious terror, as 
 he looks upon his illegitimate scion (here 
 named Felix) asleep in innocence: "0 who 
 knows what trials are before me ! how sharply 
 bygone transgressions will punish me!" 
 Certainly some anguish speaks in this. He 
 prays to Fate: "Take not away from me 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 443 
 
 this treasure which I now possess " the one 
 child left to him. l i Should this best part of 
 myself be snatched away, should this heart 
 be torn from my heart, farewell reason and 
 understanding, and may madness destroy 
 my very consciousness ere death brings on 
 the long night. " Such was the tragic wail 
 which rose from the domestic hearth some 
 seven or eight years after his "marriage of 
 conscience " with Christiane. Certainly he 
 heard again the song of the Fates whose echo 
 we cannot help catching in the preceding pas- 
 sage; throughout this book too he feels the 
 "conflict between him and the Gods" as he 
 visioned it in the case of Tantalus "whelmed 
 into gloomy Tartarus," for surely here is 
 gloom enough. Great is the parent's affec- 
 tion, rising into harrowing anxiety, for his 
 natural son whom he now calls Felix, who, 
 however, is to become Infelix to himself, to 
 his father, as well as to his own wife and chil- 
 dren. Some such anticipation of destiny we 
 may feel in the undercurrents of this Meister, 
 as we catch a foreglimpse of Tantalus who 
 "looks on his child and shakes his head." 
 
 The farthest-reaching and deepest-search- 
 ing problem of Goethe 's own life is suggested 
 in the First Book by the appearance of Mari- 
 anne, who represents illicit love with its ille- 
 gitimate offspring. Such was his deed of 
 
444 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Tantalus which called down upon him the 
 Judgment of the Gods with which he wrestled 
 all his days, and which from now on gives 
 the innermost thread which winds through 
 his life-poem. A gigantic struggle with the 
 Fates of his own deed we witness, one consid- 
 erable phase of which stands recorded in this 
 Apprenticeship. As already stated, Phileros 
 is now working out the tragic side of his in- 
 born character, feeling the counterstroke of 
 love itself, yet without becoming tragic on his 
 part, since he through his Genius as the Fate- 
 compeller can outface the very wrath of 
 Doom, singing his own Dies irae as his paean 
 of salvation. 
 
 III. 
 
 Goethe's Epical Mood. 
 
 During these years uprose in the poet 
 what we may call his epical mood and became 
 overwhelming in its push for utterance. Un- 
 doubtedly it sprang from a renewed study 
 of Homer, with w^hom he had been more or 
 less familiar from youth. But after his clas- 
 sical experience in the South and the con- 
 templation of Greek Art, the old bard of Hel- 
 las began to have for him an altogether new 
 meaning and to drive him to poetic creation 
 
.* 
 
 GOETHE'S EPICAL MOOD. 445 
 
 or rather re-creation.- He commenced to feel 
 that out of Homer unfolded that beautiful 
 world which he had beheld with such rapture 
 in Italy. Thus Goethe has pushed back to 
 the fountain-head of the antique in all its 
 forms poetry, sculpture, architecture, in 
 fact civilization generally. Such an outreach 
 he had not attained during his Italian Jour- 
 ney, in which he had enough to do if he would 
 appropriate what was immediately present to 
 his senses. But now after years of deep 
 brooding and study he has mounted up to the 
 ideal genetic source of what he saw there 
 realized, especially in its artistic manifesta- 
 tion. Homer 's work appeals to him directly 
 for it is poetry and sotos cognate with his own 
 deepest genius, which starts at once its cre- 
 ative energy, seeking to reproduce and to 
 transfuse that old Homeric world into his 
 native speech and consciousness. 
 
 Such bursts forth our poet's present epical 
 mood, since Homer was the father of the 
 epos as a literary form for all time, and is 
 now the father of Goethe's chief productive 
 bent. To be sure this is but a stage of him 
 which he will embody in writ and then tran- 
 scend, being only a single phase of his total 
 poetic fulfilment. Thus Goethe sings old 
 Homer's strain, making it one canto of his 
 complete life-poem, or one note of his total 
 
446 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 song. Very intimate becomes their acquaint- 
 ance, though separated by more than twenty- 
 five centuries. Indeed for a time Homer rises 
 to being Goethe's Bible; the latter calls the 
 Homeric poems his Breviary, from which he 
 reads his daily prayers, communing with the 
 Greek Gods and their Olympian Order 
 through their revealer, the poet. Thus Goe- 
 the, often titled the old heathen, not only 
 learned but lived the Homeric world-view 
 that he might make his own the native epical 
 consciousness of the aforetime. Worshipfully 
 he sought to share in the form-creating spirit 
 of Hellas by getting back to its primal origin. 
 Another kindred phenomenon we may 
 stress in this connection : Goethe's unique 
 sympathy with and loving mastery over the 
 hexameter, the epical verse. He made it the 
 responsive vesture of his Genius in his pres- 
 ent mood; his soul seemed naturally to take 
 this antique measured shape, living and lov- 
 ing in it. The result is the hexameter has 
 been naturalized in both branches of Teu- 
 tonic speech, German and English, not with- 
 out strenuous and even abusive opposition. 
 It is, however, true that the poet will get over 
 this hexametral spell, but not till he has fully 
 uttered it and made it an integral strain of 
 the time's measured speech as well as of his 
 own life-poem. The hexameter is indeed the 
 
.* 
 GOETHE'S EPICAL MOOD. 447 
 
 outer sensible appearance of the classic Goe- 
 the poetizing himself, or we may see in it 
 Greek Homer re-incarnating himself in Ger- 
 man Goethe an antique body with a mod- 
 ern soul, which thus takes a dip back into its 
 pre-existent shape, in order to be wholly 
 itself and round out its evolution. 
 
 We are not surprised then to hear that 
 Goethe overflowed with epics during these 
 years. Some remained mere conceptions or 
 designs, like The Chase which the poet long 
 afterward wrote out in prose and called No- 
 velle (translated by Carlyle in his Miscella- 
 nies). Another conception was the epic of 
 Wilhelm Tell which he conceived on a visit 
 to Switzerland in 1797, at the view of the 
 grandeurs of the scenery, and on hearing the 
 story of its hero. The hexameters, he says, 
 began to whistle through him, though none, 
 it seems, were written down, while the action 
 and characters would play out before his 
 imagination. But when he came back to Wei- 
 mar, he, after some brooding, imparted his 
 material to Schiller, who made out of it his 
 famous drama. The truth is Goethe was not 
 the poet to write the poem of Wilhelm Tell, 
 who is the hero of freedom, an anti-Goethean 
 theme, especially during the French Eevolu- 
 tion, and probably at any time, if we may 
 judge by his Egmont. But for Schiller it was 
 
448 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 just the subject suiting his temperament and 
 his genius. 
 
 We know that G-oethe worked a good deal 
 at Homer in Italy, especially during his Sici- 
 lian trip, where the Odyssey rose promi- 
 nently into his vision. But the peculiar fact 
 is that then his bent was toward dramatic 
 composition in classic form; so he conceived 
 of a Nausicaa and even of a Ulysses, thus 
 dramatizing the shapes of old Homer. These 
 works, however, were not realized; he ut- 
 tered his Italian dramatic mood in his Tril- 
 ogy (already considered). But now the ep- 
 ical strain, doubtless an original though as 
 yet implicit element of his poetic self, rises to 
 the surface and insists upon expression as 
 never before or afterward. It must have 
 been nursed by the composition of his Meis- 
 ter, which has not a few analogies to the 
 epos. Then his Reynard ike Fox gave its 
 discipline, initiating him into the scope and 
 soul of the hexameter, especially when talk- 
 ing in German. At any rate there bubbles 
 up from depths hitherto unseen his epical 
 mood which asserts itself for several years. 
 We have already noticed that his ballads are 
 dominantly epical in their treatment, while 
 Schiller's manner is dramatic. The epos re- 
 quires in some form or other an upper world 
 or supernal order playing into the deeds of 
 
GOETHE'S EPICAL MOOD. 449 
 
 its hero; a providential over-sight co-op- 
 erates with man's action to bring him to his 
 heroic goal. We have already heard Goethe 
 declaring such to be the leading thought of 
 his Meister's Apprenticeship. Therein the 
 poet himself was apprenticed to Providence 
 in his earthly discipline, and thus has real- 
 ized in himself the epical consciousness as 
 never before. Such is his present fundamen- 
 tal experience which his. Genius must throw 
 out into art. 
 
 Two works survive which mirror this 
 nodal turn in Goethe's life-poem Hermann 
 and Dorothea, a completed product, and the 
 Achilleis which remained a torso with good 
 reason, being a conception impossible of 
 birth in spite of long and wrenching labor- 
 pains. Both are hexametral, reflecting Goe- 
 the's classic tendency, though in different 
 ways one being the way of success, the other 
 of failure. In a letter to Voss (1796) Goe- 
 the speaks of his delight in passing from his 
 novel to his epos: "I am very glad that I 
 see this work (Meister) at last behind me, as 
 its nature is not purely poetic. Now I can go 
 at something else not so lengthy and more 
 satisfactory. Soon you shall hear the an- 
 nouncement of an epical work," which had 
 indeed been many months pulsating for ut- 
 terance underneath the laborious duty of fin- 
 
450 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ishing first his novel. The intensity of the 
 rebound of his loosened Pegasus is indicated 
 in Schiller's report to a friend at this time 
 (September, 1796), which describes Goethe's 
 rush of creation in starting his Hermann and 
 Dorothea as follows: " Every day for nine 
 days in succession he has written down over 
 one hundred and fifty hexameters!" But 
 they all had to be carefully revised after- 
 ward, as they could hardly have been me- 
 tered during a wild ecstacy of this sort. With 
 such a furious orgasm of creative energy 
 his repressed epical mood crushed in upon 
 him and kept him at work for years. 
 
 Still this native paroxysmal Muse of his 
 must now be wooed to a classic serenity, she 
 cannot go careening madly heels over head as 
 she did in his Frankfort Epoch, for Goethe 
 has been in Italy. The deep throb of emo- 
 tion is to be retained and fostered, still it 
 must not become explosive but plastic, form- 
 ful not formless. The poet spoke of this ep- 
 ical time to Schiller: "All the advantages 
 which I have turned to account, I have 
 learned from formative art." Thus the Clas- 
 sic and the Eomantic, the Greek and the Ger- 
 man are blended in an artistic expression 
 more universal than either taken by itself. 
 
 I. In his Hermann and Dorothea the poet 
 produced a work which took hold of the na- 
 
.* 
 GOETHE'S EPICAL MOOD. 451 
 
 tional spirit in its depths, and has remained 
 a permanent German favorite. But it is a 
 good deal more, namely a world-book, in 
 which all peoples of universal culture will 
 find not only delight but also an image of 
 their own spiritual evolution, a symbol of 
 what has taken place in the World's History, 
 though reflected in the humblest idyllic en- 
 vironment. We have here Goethe's happiest 
 interpenetration of the old and the new, of 
 the Antique and the Teutonic, the poetic mar- 
 riage of the lofty classized poet with his own 
 German folk, whereof Christiane will rise up 
 as representing his poem and himself in the 
 living deed. The title of the book is un- 
 doubtedly Goethe's own thought and pur- 
 pose; what does it mean? The name of the 
 woman is Greek, and she comes from the out- 
 side as if she mighLbe an emigrating Helen; 
 the name of the man is Teutonic, yea of a 
 primeval Teutonic hero, who in the hoary 
 aforetime resisted the inbreaking Roman 
 and his classic world. Now behold their love 
 and marriage, Hermann and Dorothea, a kind 
 of foreshow of the later nuptials of Faust 
 and Helen. Such suggestiveness lurks al- 
 ready in the title, double yet united, which 
 indeed preludes the deepest fact of the poem. 
 On the other hand comes streaming down 
 into this small rural community the mightiest 
 
452 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 event of the age, indeed of modern Euro- 
 pean history, the French Revolution. Goe- 
 the says of himself: "I have aspired to re- 
 flect from a little mirror the great movements 
 and mutations taking place on the world's 
 stage. " Here, then, we catch a glimpse of 
 his epical treatment; an upper movement 
 plays down into the petty village, nothing 
 less than the World's History, which deter- 
 mines the present destiny of the hero and 
 heroine. No Greek or other mythical instru- 
 mentality is employed, but the time's su- 
 preme reality is taken in its own historic 
 form and value, voiced of course by individ- 
 uals of the poem. So the greatest will image 
 itself in the least with the full fresh particu- 
 larity of poetry. Hence we may well name 
 the work an idyllic epos. 
 
 Phileros is of course. present he cannot 
 bo left out of any work which pulses from 
 Goethe 's heart ; the action pivots on an affair 
 of love, and the two leading characters are 
 lovers, whose happy end is marriage. But 
 strangely, our Phileros has turned over a 
 new leaf of his life and literature : he has be- 
 come deeply, sympathetically institutional. 
 The State, the Church, and especially the 
 Family, are all represented in their immedi- 
 ate positive reality without a breath of pro- 
 test ; indeed, if there be any criticism in this 
 
GOETHE'S EPICAL MOOD. 453 
 
 regard, one will feel that the poem has too 
 little social conflict; only in the far-off hori- 
 zon glimmers the great world-historical col- 
 lision of the age which has sent its line of 
 victims into the small village, and thus 
 stirred its emotional life. The whole action 
 runs right contrary to Goethe 's domestic con- 
 duct on its institutional side, and does not 
 tally with much that he has set forth in his 
 antecedent novel. What means the change? 
 From this viewpoint, Goethe's Hermann and 
 Dorothea is one of his literary confessions 
 in which he writes down his repentance. He 
 has now had for some years a family, but an 
 uninstitutional family, and bitter has been 
 his experience. In one sense he, as minister 
 of State, has been above the law, and he has 
 not been directly haled before its tribunal to 
 answer for his violation. Still he has been 
 personally condemned, and his family damned 
 to social outlawry. Thus he has taken a cru- 
 cial lesson in the significance of institutions, 
 especially of the one which he has openly de- 
 fied. Hence we cannot help feeling some sur- 
 prise at the deep and strong institutional 
 emotion which throbs everywhere through 
 this poem, and makes it popular in the best 
 sense, for the people are wedcled to their in- 
 stitutions, if they have any love at all. So 
 we may well see in this work Goethe again 
 
454 GOETHE 1 8 LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 at his confessional, as he sets forth in his 
 poetic art a stage of his long penitential jour- 
 ney of life, which results from an intense 
 heart-felt experience of his own transgres- 
 sion. 
 
 Like all of Goethe's highest works his Her- 
 mann and Dorothea has been prolific in the 
 World's Literature. Its most famous child 
 is doubtless our American Longfellow's 
 Evangeline, also hexametral, idyllic, and a 
 love-story which has been fully as popular as 
 Goethe 's and which has had a great influence 
 upon English verse. Still there is a wide dif- 
 ference between the two productions; Her- 
 mann and Dorothea is far more profoundly 
 motived than Evangeline which is an ideal 
 school-girl's poem, such designation hinting 
 both its excellence and its limitation. In Ger- 
 many Voss' Luise, which antedated Goe- 
 the's work, was formerly much compared 
 with it and sometimes preferred to it ; but to- 
 day, according to the critics, Luise has quite 
 fallen aback, while Evangeline more than 
 holds its own still; and aside from its purely 
 poetic value it has been the main factor in 
 calling up the great metrical fight over the 
 hexameter in English the hottest and most 
 lasting contest in the history of prosody, and 
 it is by no means yet over. The battle is really 
 for the liberty of versifying in accord with 
 
GOETHE'S EPICAL MOotf'. 455 
 
 the new time and new poetry. Whitman broke 
 loose from the old metrical fetters, and cre- 
 ated an epoch in spite of his many sins and 
 follies. It should never be forgotten that the 
 English hexameter, along with the German, 
 is not the Greek or Latin ; it is a free-moving 
 measure of six feet, each foot having two or 
 three syllables. Thus it has a marvelous in- 
 ner freedom of movement within its six re- 
 current beats. Instead of being ancient it is 
 really the most modern of true poetic meas- 
 ures, and, as we believe, has a future. At 
 present our versifiers seem bent upon break- 
 ing away from all fixed recurrence of the 
 beat, and to revel in irregular rhythms, 
 rhymed and unrhymed. This choral ten- 
 dency has its undoubted place in prosody; 
 still it is only a part of the great totality of 
 versified utterance. In like manner the ac- 
 cented hexameter in Teutonic tongues has 
 asserted its place, being peculiarly adapted 
 to the idyllic epos. To have revealed this 
 fact is the merit of Goethe's work, without 
 which Evangeline would never have been 
 written. To be sure Goethe generously ac- 
 knowledged that he got his hint from Yoss. 
 If Tennyson had been master of the English 
 hexameter, and had employed it for his 
 ' ' Idyls of the King," his work might have 
 rivaled Goethe and Longfellow in the same 
 
456 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 field. But Tennyson's metrical ear was very 
 narrow in its range, though exquisitely re- 
 fined as far as it went. 
 
 It may be added that Hermann and Doro- 
 thea exhibits the modern heroism of every- 
 day life; it heroizes the unheroic through 
 humble service. A non-aristocratic poem by 
 the aristocratic Goethe (though he resents 
 the epithet), it deals with the simple burgher- 
 life of a small village, which accepts itself as 
 transmitted from the indefinite past, and in- 
 quires not after its origin. How different an 
 American town on the frontier, which is the 
 product of a great migration and knows 
 whence it came! Active community-builders 
 are its people, not merely the passive recipi- 
 ents of inherited forms ; it has often a French 
 Revolution going on inside itself, not out- 
 side. And its life always connects with the 
 State and the Nation, whereof in Goethe we 
 hear very little, except that the youth Her- 
 mann at the close declares his willingness 
 to fight for his fatherland and home. Quite 
 a burst of patriotism for unpatriotic Goe- 
 the ! Still the true heroic character of the 
 poem is not the man but the woman yes, 
 again the woman. 
 
 II. The second significant product of Goe- 
 the 's epical mood is the AchUleis whose hero 
 belongs to antiquity and specially to Homer. 
 
GOETHE'S EPICAL MOOD. 457 
 
 The poet has come to the conclusion that 
 "the epos, as a form of poetry, is the one 
 most suited to my years, and harmonizes best 
 with my present inclination as well as my 
 circumstances. " No longer young, not yet 
 old, he is turning toward his fiftieth year, 
 which he deems just the epical time of life. 
 His idyllic epos of Hermann and Dorothea 
 has had a wonderful success, which has 
 spurred him to try his hand at the loftier 
 heroic epos in a kind of rivalry with the old 
 Hellenic bard, whose hero Achilles he will 
 present in a new poem which lies between the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey, and in a manner con- 
 nects them together. Thus he writes to Schil- 
 ler hinting his plans: "I am investigating 
 whether still another epic poem is not en- 
 sconced between the death of Hector (Iliad) 
 and the departure of the Greeks for home" 
 (Odyssey). There is no doubt that Schiller 
 sees the danger of such an attempt on the 
 part of the German poet, and in his answer 
 gently warns him ' ' against quitting his native 
 soil, and running counter to his own time." 
 Do not try to go back thousands of years and 
 be an old Greek poet you will surely fail. 
 "Your beautiful call is to be a citizen of both 
 poetic worlds," ancient and modern, mould- 
 ing your German spirit into a classic form. 
 This sound advice Goethe did not heed; if 
 
458 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 not a Homer, he would still be a Homerid, as 
 he hints. So he sets to work, and in 1799 the 
 first canto gets done, but he cannot budge 
 the work further. The chief difficulty lies in 
 Homer's Upper World of the Gods, in whom 
 Goethe does not believe, and who, therefore, 
 become subjective playthings or external ma- 
 chinery of the poem. Thus the supreme ep- 
 ical element of an over-ruling divine order 
 simply vanishes. For instance the interven- 
 tion of the Goddess Aphrodite turns to a fan- 
 ciful sport of love; she is no longer truly 
 mythical but paramythical a character 
 which suits Goethe's Roman Elegies but not 
 the Homeric epos. 
 
 Still our Phileros could not help showing 
 his deepest nature in this far-off theme of 
 hoary antiquity. The Greek hero Achilles 
 had to fall in love with the Trojan maiden 
 Polyxena, and thereby in some way meet his 
 .fate. This cataclysm was to happen in later 
 cantos which were never written. The sole 
 surviving torso has its merit, but also its ad- 
 monition. Goethe worried over the subject 
 a good deal, having grown very fond of it as 
 well as ambitious to be "the last Homerid"; 
 but the inherent dissonance of the theme kept 
 getting louder in his soul, till he threw the 
 whole torment overboard, and with it seem- 
 ingly went all desire of writing any more 
 
. 
 GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 459 
 
 epic poetry. Thus his present mood came to 
 an end, after haunting him for some years, 
 and finding expression in one supreme 
 achievement. 
 
 Accordingly Goethe in his Achilleis runs 
 counter to his Genius which demands a con- 
 tent immediately experienced by him, even if 
 he should clothe it in antique form, as he does 
 his Iphigenia. He is not to abjure his own 
 consciousness and that of his time to become 
 old Homer, who can in truth pray to Apollo, 
 but Goethe cannot. Still he has acquired one 
 experience in this broken-off poem: he has 
 pushed his classicism beyond itself and has 
 begun to feel its limitation. But he is not 
 done with it yet. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Goethe's Reversion to the Drama. 
 
 Noteworthy is the fact that Goethe's dra- 
 matic bent began to stir in him once more, 
 after his epical mood had started to wane. 
 This was a reversion to one of his earliest 
 tendencies reaching back to Leipzig and to his 
 Frankfort time. Later in Italy his poetic 
 trend again ran to the drama, as we see by 
 the composition of his Trilogy already con- 
 sidered. But after exercising his Genius 
 
460 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 some ten years in the novelistic, lyrical and 
 epical spheres, he returns to his previous 
 dramatic form of expression. Then there is 
 no doubt that the great success of Schiller's 
 dramas, to which he had largely contributed, 
 awakened in him a fresh ambition to exert his 
 skill and experience in the same field. Be- 
 sides, we are to remember that Goethe never 
 could content himself for any great length of 
 time with one kind of literary expression. 
 His Genius required the whole realm of let- 
 ters in its various channels to utter his uni- 
 versality. This is indeed the chief interest 
 of his life, which, taken as a whole was an 
 ever-flowing reservoir of literary forms, not 
 to speak of his other manifold activities, sci- 
 entific, social, political, artistic. To be sure 
 in literature alone lay the deepest and most 
 abiding strain of his spiritual being. 
 
 Accordingly we are now to witness Goe- 
 the in his third great upburst of dramatic 
 authorship. The first may be represented 
 by his Gotz Von Berlichingen, omitting other 
 less considerable efforts before it and after 
 it in the Frankfort Epoch. The second 
 notable upburst took place a dozen years and 
 more afterwards, the Italian Trilogy we may 
 call it as it shows the influence of classic 
 Italy. But now after another long spell of 
 dramatic quiescence the Goethe-Schiller Ep- 
 
GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 461 
 
 och of Goethe's productivity in the field of the 
 drama breaks out afresh and lasts several 
 years. The first distinct designation of the 
 new resurgence in him may perhaps be 
 caught from the brief jotting in his diary un- 
 der the date of December 6, 1799 : The Na- 
 tural Daughter. Such is the name of the 
 new play which he is incited to plan and com- 
 pose from reading a book of French memoirs 
 which recounts the troubles of an illegitimate 
 daughter of the princely house of Bourbon- 
 Conti of France. It should be added that be- 
 fore this date in the Correspondence between 
 Schiller and Goethe we may glimpse many a 
 little throb of the rising dramatic impulse in 
 the poet. 
 
 The above-mentioned three epochal stages 
 in the evolution of Goethe's dramatic work 
 can be specially characterized as follows : the 
 first is his immediate, native, Teutonic over- 
 flow of Titanism (Gotz) ; the second shows his 
 subdued, formful, classic spirit (Tasso) ; the 
 third on the whole will take up both his pre- 
 vious tendencies and will culminate in two 
 dramas, one of which is Classic in form (The 
 Natural Daughter), and the other is Teutonic 
 and Romantic (The First Part of Faust). 
 Both these plays belong to the present Goe- 
 the-Schiller Epoch, and reveal its double 
 character throughout, especially as regards 
 
462 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Goethe, though Schiller had in himself the 
 same twof oldness of literary production. Ac- 
 cordingly we shall concentrate attention up- 
 on these two dramas as manifesting the in- 
 herent nature of this Epoch, and bringing 
 it to a conclusion. 
 
 I. The most obvious fact of The Natural 
 Daughter, is the title, and its direct connec- 
 tion with one of the deepest-searching expe- 
 riences of Goethe's whole life which may be 
 summed up in the one brief sentence : he had 
 a natural son. This son was his only surviv- 
 ing child, the source of a torturing paternal 
 solicitude for a number of reasons, and the 
 object of his most intense love. It is no won- 
 der then that when he read these memoirs of 
 an outlawed child he at once called up his 
 own boy then some ten years old, also ille- 
 gally born and socially tabooed in spite of the 
 position and fame of the father. Such must 
 have been the primary fact which led to the 
 selection of this theme by Goethe who could 
 write nothing except what he had taken out 
 of the book of his personal experience. But 
 why did he fling into the face of his public 
 such an unsavory title of his play? It was 
 a challenge to the world ; from much persecu- 
 tion or rather punishment for his deed, he 
 had grown reckless, yea vengeful in word 
 and attitude. He might have labeled his 
 
.* 
 GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 463 
 
 drama Eugenia, after the beautiful name of 
 the heroine; and so he did often designate it 
 in his journals and letters with a peculiar 
 fondness. But he would not flinch before 
 society's gossipy clamor, and so he still fur- 
 ther called down the penalty of his conduct 
 upon his production in whose very forehead 
 he branded the scarlet stigma of his life's 
 supremely tragic deed, with a strangely fate- 
 ful cynicism. 
 
 Such was the ominous title which every- 
 body read on the play-bill, read doubly and 
 could not help so reading it. This undercur- 
 rent of satirical scandal provoked by the 
 name was voiced by Herder who in a conver- 
 sation with Goethe praised the piece but sud- 
 denly blurted out: "I like your Natural 
 Daughter better than your natural son. ' 9 The 
 result was an immediate and permanent dis- 
 solution of their long friendship. Verily tact 
 was not a virtue of the Herderian tongue, be 
 it the husband's or the wife's. Goethe has 
 not mentioned the demonic taunt, but he has 
 recorded "the terrific feeling which seized 
 me ; I stared at the man, but said nothing ; the 
 many years of our intimate life terrified me 
 in this dreadful symbol. So we separated 
 and I never saw him afterwards." But Her- 
 der only spoke out what everybody was think- 
 ing or privately whispering in mockery ; Goe- 
 
464 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 the must have known all this, and he indi- 
 cates that Herder's act was merely " sym- 
 bolic" of what was universally taking place. 
 Still he was steeled to the last point of pub- 
 lic defiance ; even the name of his illegitimate 
 heroine, Eugenia (which means the well- 
 born), seems to have been chosen and doted 
 upon in a spirit of malicious irony against 
 Weimar, Germany, Europe, yes against the 
 future. Such then was Herder's bodeful 
 word which shook Goethe like the sudden 
 crack of Doom. 
 
 Now let us glance in the other direction 
 and listen to what Goethe himself says about 
 his purpose in composing the present drama : 
 "My plan was to make a vessel into which I 
 could pour all that I had written and thought 
 concerning the French Revolution and its 
 consequences with fitting earnestness. ' ' Thus 
 his intention was to produce a grand world- 
 drama having as its content the mighty his- 
 toric event of his age. The whole was to be 
 a Trilogy in the old Greek sense with one 
 leading character running through the three 
 parts. Thus the illegitimate scion of a noble 
 stock was somehow to be elevated into the 
 heroic bearer of the French Revolution. Cer- 
 tainly a daring, indeed defiant conception it 
 is, which we have to see springing out of his 
 own immediate personal experience. But 
 
GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 465 
 
 such a plan could not be carried out ; only one 
 part of the Trilogy was ever completed, and 
 that was very incomplete though done in five 
 acts. Goethe had little historic sense; re- 
 peatedly he sneers at the World's History in 
 talk and writ. Again he re-enacted the de- 
 fects of his Egmont as an historic play. 
 
 The drama has its place in the life-poem of 
 Goethe since it reflects powerfully the fa- 
 ther's relation to his natural son who is now 
 an adolescent requiring a right education un- 
 usually difficult under the circumstances, and 
 who is getting fully conscious of a painful so- 
 cial situation. What is to become of the boy? 
 The parental love and the gnawing anxiety 
 we can catch in the play from the words of 
 the parental Duke, and we often have to think 
 of the son when we hear the aspirations of 
 the like-conditioned daughter. What a heart- 
 throbbing eagerness on her part to become 
 legitimate ! In such passages the poet, draw- 
 ing from the deepest wells of his direct pres- 
 ent experience is at his best. But there is a 
 totally different strand in the work ; the stiff 
 formal, icy Goethe weaves also his part into 
 the action. From this element sprang the 
 famous dictum of a contemporary critic, Hu- 
 ber, who labeled the work "marble-smooth 
 and marble-cold ' ' a rubric which has clung 
 to it till today. But only half-true is the 
 
466 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 4 
 
 phrase, since Goethe's personal portion glows 
 like a white-hot furnace, even if the courtly 
 part is cold and hard as a statue. So the 
 poem has in its style and spirit a profound 
 dualism; Goethe's classicism may be noted 
 here in its two extremes, on the one hand 
 lapsing to mere external pompous statuesque- 
 ness, or on the other hand filled with his 
 most passionate heart-beats. 
 
 Thus again we have to trace here one of 
 Goethe's literary confessions, and to mark 
 the inherent bent of his Genius in the fact 
 that when intending to set forth the World's 
 History in one of its supreme collisions, he 
 drops back into his domestic conflict as being 
 just then his experience most urgent for ut- 
 terance. It should be noted that Goethe dur- 
 ing the composition of this drama fell very 
 ill, so that for a time he lay face to face with 
 death, at whose appearance he could not help 
 questioning Fate as his boy stood at his bed- 
 side with anxious sobs: "If I die, what is 
 to become of thee, my son?" So when we 
 enter into the heart-beat of this work, we find 
 a seething undercurrent of apprehension 
 which surges out of his own tragic deed, a 
 dread presentiment of what is to happen to 
 his child as he forefeels into what kind of a 
 man such a youth is to unfold, who all his life 
 has been and is still to be the victim of a 
 
.* 
 GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 467 
 
 guilt not his own. Have we not the right to 
 imagine that Goethe at such a solemn hour 
 again heard that awful Hymn of the Parcas 
 which he had sung out of his own soul more 
 than ten years before and which echoes 
 through all his creative work like the chant 
 of doom, and which we may name his Dies 
 ira bursting up into his life-poem along its 
 entire course. 
 
 Still Goethe maintains his defiant negative 
 attitude, refusing to comply with the behest 
 of the social order. Hence he will evolve in 
 time his Mephistopheles, really his own 
 fiend, of whom we catch psychical glimpses 
 in this Natural Daughter, already unfolding 
 1 < the Spirit that denies. " 
 
 Two other dramatic attempts in classic 
 form during this time can only be noted in 
 passing. The Greek title Palaeophron and 
 Neoterpe indicates a bright brief skit. Goe- 
 the also wrought at his classic drama called 
 Helena, but could not now finish it; some of 
 it was long afterwards included in The Sec- 
 ond Part of Faust. But the crowning litera ry 
 fact of the present Epoch is the completion 
 of The First Part of Faust, usually regarded 
 as Goethe's supreme effort, and as a sov- 
 ereign masterpiece of the World's Literature. 
 To its consideration we shall devote a few 
 thoughts regarding its place in his life-poem. 
 
468 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 II. The completion of The First Part of 
 Faust belongs decidedly to the Goethe-Schil- 
 ler Decennium. Without the association of 
 his poetic friend, it may be doubted if Goe- 
 the had ever fulfilled the chief task of his 
 life and finished his greatest work. Already 
 in 1794, the first year of their bond, Schiller 
 began gently to nudge Goethe by asking for 
 the privilege of reading the unprinted frag- 
 ments of Faust. The next year brought a 
 somewhat stronger prodding, and so it went 
 on for the whole ten years of their mutual 
 labor with increasing urgency, till at last the 
 poem was finished, but Schiller never saw the 
 final stroke of its completion. 
 
 As already indicated (see preceding p. 167) 
 the first form of the written Faust goes back 
 to the Frankfort Epoch of the poet's Titan- 
 ism. Then doubtless arose the Urfaust so- 
 called, or the primordial Faust, the manu- 
 script of which was brought to light as late as 
 1887, more than a century after its composi- 
 tion. Goethe had already published in 1790 
 his Faust a Fragment, omitting important 
 portions which already existed. Finally in 
 1808 the completed First Part reached publi- 
 cation which had been delayed quite two 
 years on account of the unsettled condition 
 of Germany. 
 
 Of the two leading strands which run 
 
GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 469 
 
 through this Goethe-Schiller Epoch, Faust 
 represents most emphatically in its First 
 Part the Northern, the Teutonic, the Roman- 
 tic, in contrast with the Southern and Clas- 
 sic. Thus it indicates a considerable change 
 in the poet's artistic consciousness. There 
 is no doubt that to make this transition pro- 
 duced in him a great repugnance; it seemed 
 to work like a disgusting medicine which, 
 however, he had to take if he would become 
 the whole of himself and of his time. One is 
 amused to watch him making wry faces (in 
 his Correspondence) as he looks at his task. 
 He heaps upon his Faust all sorts of vituper- 
 ative epithets: it is "a barbaric composi- 
 tion, " the very opposite of beautiful plastic 
 classicism; it is the native product of the 
 foggy North as distinguished from the sunny 
 South, of wild Teutonic fantasy over against 
 serene Hellenic repose. He bemocks it as a 
 hybrid monstrosity, naming it "a tragele- 
 phus," that is a goat-deer, for Goethe in- 
 tended to unite in it his two life-lines of art, 
 the Teutonic and the Classic. So -he spurts 
 venom at his own greatest creation, of which 
 poison he had to relieve himself before going 
 to work. 
 
 It is evident that a large portion of the poem 
 had already been written, but that a huge 
 chasm gaped in it which Goethe had never 
 
470 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 been able to fill up. Seemingly it was the 
 sight of this chasm which would unfailingly 
 bring on a paroxysm of damnation. It must 
 have been to him a kind of Hell-pit through 
 which he had to pass and meet old Splay-foot 
 face to face in furious tussle. Moreover it 
 could only have been a direct personal expe- 
 rience, else he would never, according to his 
 own repeated statements, have poetized it, 
 or have heard the call of the Muse. So with 
 many foul names and curses and blasphe- 
 mies, he has to tackle again Mephistopheles, 
 the old black Teutonic Devil himself whom 
 he once deemed to have banned forever from 
 his world of classic sunshine. Yea, his task, 
 as he peers into that yawning abyss of 
 Tophet, which opens murky and bridgeless in 
 the very heart of his book, appears desperate 
 and unfathomable by mortal vision. Hence, 
 with maledictions upon his supreme poetic 
 vocation, he rebounds again and again, only 
 to be scourged back to his work by the Powers 
 presiding over his destiny. 
 
 But what then is this chasm from which 
 the poet shrank in awe and execration for 
 more than thirty years ! It can be distinctly 
 seen by the reader who compares the three 
 redactions of Faust. The first of them 
 belongs to the Frankfort Epoch and is 
 the Urfaust, usually dated 1774-1775; the 
 
if 
 
 GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 471 
 
 second is the Fragment of 1790; these 
 two incomplete stages show one great 
 omission when compared with the com- 
 pleted First Part of 1808. This hiatus lies 
 between lines 253 and 1415 ; that is, 1162 lines 
 were added in one long passage of the com- 
 pleted edition, making more than one-fourth 
 of the total poem (the figures are taken from 
 Loeper's accurate count). There are other 
 omissions, some small and some large; but 
 they are of little significance alongside of this 
 one colossal omission which makes the Sty- 
 gian demon-haunted chasm yawning before 
 Goethe during this entire Decennium. We 
 may well suppose that this literally infernal 
 job, imposed upon the poet by the imperial 
 edict of his deepest Genius was what made 
 him think at times of fleeing again to Italy 
 with its bright upper realm in order to es- 
 cape from the gloomy nether world of Teu- 
 tonic diablery. 
 
 Now if we peer into this huge dark chasm 
 and seek to explore by the light of the com- 
 pleted First Part what monstrous megathe- 
 rium lies hidden there, we find that it is noth- 
 ing else but the modern Devil himself in his 
 various stages of growth. We shall name it 
 the evolution of Mephistopheles from the pri- 
 mordial No of Faust and of the age, through 
 many grades of metamorphosis represented 
 
472 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 by the little poodle, the huge animals, the 
 traveling 1 scholastic "the spirit that always 
 denies, " till we listen to the diabolic person- 
 ality bargaining with Faust for the sale of 
 his immortal soul. Such is the germinal cen- 
 ter of the whole poem, of both its Parts, First 
 and Second. This, too, was the core of the 
 poet's grand struggle of creation, the evolu- 
 tion which made him "sweat terribly" for so 
 many years. Mark, then, the line of evolving 
 shapes of destruction from Faust's primal 
 negation till his contract with Satan signed 
 in his own blood, when he is ready to go forth 
 with his new companion "to see both worlds, 
 the great and the little " (we may be permit- 
 ted here to refer the reader who wishes to 
 trace step by step this evolution of Mephis- 
 topheles, to our Commentary on Goethe's 
 Faust, Part First). 
 
 There remains the question concerning 
 the literary development which trained Goe- 
 the to complete his work during this present 
 Epoch. Already we may observe him deal- 
 ing with his Romantic heritage in Meister's 
 Apprenticeship, especially in the latter por- 
 tion. But more decisively he began to poet- 
 ize the Teutonic spirit in his ballads which 
 culminate in 1797, the so-called ballad-year; 
 the Northern mythus he likewise employed in 
 various ways. His Faust is a German fable, 
 
.$ 
 GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 473 
 
 even if it strikes its early roots far back in 
 the ages. Along with his ballads in 1797 we 
 see him tackling his task as it were on the 
 outside by writing the Prelude and the Pro- 
 logue to his Faust drama. He veers off for 
 a while to composing the more congenial clas- 
 sic portion, called the Helena, but he finds 
 that he must drop it and take up the more 
 imperative problem, which is his poetic fight 
 with the Devil. Another deflection toward 
 the classic side was his Natural Daughter, 
 which he could not finish as a Trilogy, but 
 whose disciplining composition drove him to 
 complete his evolution of Mephistopheles. 
 Thus amid many reactions and divagations 
 he at last brings his infernal labor to its con- 
 clusion. 
 
 The deepest fact of the poet's experience 
 during these years, is that he evolved Mephis- 
 topheles in himself, in his own life. Through 
 his defiance of the social order, he became an 
 embodied negative ; he echoed himself in the 
 line "I am the spirit that always denies. " 
 His mood turned Mephistophelean, as we 
 may often note in the Natural Daughter 
 which is indeed a kind of overture to his gen- 
 eration of Mephistopheles, indicating the true 
 origin of the fiend to lie in Goethe's domestic 
 violation. Thus his own negative deed has 
 begotten his devil armed with the torments 
 
474 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 of Hell. The culmination is reached in the 
 famous curse of Faust which embraces in its 
 sweep the entire social world, including spe- 
 cially "wife and child, " the dearest objects 
 which had caused the bitterest woes, chiefly 
 through his own transgression. 
 
 Such is the personal experience which lies 
 behind the poet's greatest and most compell- 
 ing character. Undoubtedly the denial of 
 Mephistopheles was also intellectual and phil- 
 osophic; it took up the time's speculative 
 negation emanating in Germany particularly 
 from Kant, whom Goethe studied. But Faust 
 is also a confession of the poet, yea in a sense 
 is the confession of the age which acknowl- 
 edges its devil, and thus gets to know itself 
 better. The negative Eighteenth Century, 
 increasingly negative in its thought from 
 Locke to Kant, and finally manifesting its 
 practical negation of the whole transmitted 
 world of institutions in the catastrophic 
 French Revolution, has found its deepest and 
 mightiest poetic voice in the First Part of 
 Faust, especially in this central portion which 
 we call the evolution of Mephistopheles. Now 
 Goethe in his anti-institutional deed at Wei- 
 mar had personally gone through the same 
 evolution, and thus by means of his own ex- 
 perience was enabled to become the poet of 
 his age. 
 
GOETHE'S REVERSION TO THE DRAMA. 475 
 
 Still Goethe does not perish of his own 
 curse, though it whirls back mightily upon 
 himself, and serves up to him his own nega- 
 tion. So we may likewise read in this poem 
 the penalty of the damning deed uttered in 
 the most crushing words. But just this ut- 
 terance is the penitential process which brings 
 relief and atonement; literature is again the 
 poet's way of expiation, and of rescue from 
 the fiend. Thus he not only for himself but 
 for many an erring mortal creates a new sal- 
 vation in this world-poem of Faust, when the 
 old ways do not suffice. Such must always 
 remain its deepest worth and significance. 
 
 We may hear this turn from death to life, 
 from destruction to construction, in the very 
 depths of Faust's universal curse, when the 
 song of the spirits hovers over him in sor- 
 rowing chorus: "Woe! woe! thou hast it 
 destroyed, the beautiful world, " namely of 
 man's institutional order. But after this 
 painful outcry there rises quite the opposite 
 exhortation: "Thou mighty one of the 
 Earth's sons, build it up again more grandty, 
 build it up in thy bosom!" This hints the 
 affirmative outcome which lurks just in 
 Faust's last negation. So he is to be s^ved 
 even here at the lowest circle of his Inferno, 
 where is glimpsed already the germ of the 
 Second Part of Faust. Still there is no deny- 
 
476 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ing that Goethe became the Devil in order to 
 get rid of the Devil, exorcising him at last 
 through the magic of his pen, not merely for 
 himself but for a vast array of readers. 
 
 In such fashion we seek to correlate the 
 present work, deemed Goethe's supreme po- 
 etic creation, with his other works, written 
 and even unwritten. Not all that he lived has 
 he put into letters. This Faust poem is, 
 therefore, but one strain in Goethe's entire 
 life-song, some outline of which we are here 
 trying to limn in its totality. Hence the 
 drama before us may well be regarded the 
 center of Goethe's whole living drama, and 
 of this center in turn the genetic germ is the 
 evolution of .Mephistopheles into full activ- 
 ity, yet with the outlook upon his subordina- 
 tion. Thus the poem embraces the universal 
 process of man begetting the negative and 
 then overcoming it in himself and in the 
 world. (Whoever wishes a fuller interpre- 
 tative commentary, which carries out in de- 
 tail the view of the present author on Faust, 
 is referred to his book already cited.) 
 
. 
 
 GOETHE ALONE AGAIN. 477 
 
 CHAPTER SIXTH. 
 
 GOETHE ALONE AGAIN. 
 
 * 
 
 After the death of Schiller, which took 
 place May 9, 1805, Goethe felt himself not 
 merely alone in the world, but severed in 
 twain. He had become so intergrown with 
 his friend that they formed, if not one body, 
 one spirit in which each participated through 
 his own independent Genius. In a letter to 
 Zelter he writes not long afterwards: "I 
 thought to lose myself and now I lose a 
 friend, and in him the half of my existence. 9 ' 
 Quite undone he looks out upon the future: 
 "Properly I ought to make a new start in 
 life, but there is no way to that in my years. 
 So I take every day immediately as it comes, 
 and do what is at hand without thinking of 
 the consequences. " Still let it be noted that 
 Goethe himself is not dead, though for the 
 present stunned quite into non-entity. Give 
 him time, and he will "make the new start," 
 whereof the record will come hereafter. But 
 now his pen is paralyzed, as he indicates in 
 a later account : "My diary of that time is a 
 blank; its white leaves tell my blank condi- 
 tion. Other accounts show that I simply let 
 my business conduct me instead of my con- 
 
478 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ducting it." Thus he bespeaks his prostra- 
 tion in several remaining documents. 
 
 It is evident that Goethe regards the pass- 
 ing of Schiller as the turn of an Epoch in his 
 life. Doubtless he is aware, as he looks back, 
 that the most fruitful season of his Genius 
 has come and gone ; he knows that he cannot 
 find another such partner in creative power. 
 The Goethe-Schiller Decennium is now 
 rounded out to fulfilment, and stands before 
 us in definite outline as the central Epoch of 
 a great poetical career. From the first meet- 
 ing of the two poets in 1794, till Schiller's 
 evanishment, there is the unique prolific asso- 
 ciation of Genius whereby each shares in the 
 other's gift while keeping and realizing his 
 own. Many years later Goethe tells of his 
 personal bereavement, which "deprived me 
 of all intimate participation, I missed the 
 spiritual push to effort, and the furtherance 
 through a friendly rivalry.'' 
 
 Accordingly, we are now to behold Goethe 
 entering upon a new Epoch of his life, which 
 shows him solitary again, but under condi- 
 tions very different from those which isolated 
 and estranged him on his return from Italy. 
 He has risen to be the great Goethe with an 
 ever-increasing recognition in his own coun- 
 try and in the rest of Europe. Visitors be- 
 gin to throng Weimar, eager to catch a word 
 
GOETHE ALONE AGAIN. 479 
 
 from him or even a glimpse of him on the 
 street. Particularly after the publication of 
 his First Part of Faust in 1808, he is getting 
 to be acclaimed a world-poet of the first mag- 
 nitude, brothered with Homer and Shakes- 
 peare. To be sure, there was then decided 
 opposition to the man and his work, and it 
 still is not silent. But his place not only .in 
 German but in universal Literature can no 
 longer be gainsaid. 
 
 The first effect of Schiller's death upon 
 Goethe was a kind of stupor which lamed his 
 production. Then followed during the next 
 year the overwhelming calamity of Na- 
 poleon's invasion of Germany. Troops were 
 marching everywhere, preparing for the con- 
 flict; unspeakable anxiety oppressed all the 
 people and paralyzed the mental activity of 
 everybody except the philosopher Hegel, who 
 is "said to have completed his " Phenome- 
 nology" to the thunders of the cannon at the 
 battle of Jena. French soldiery poured into 
 Weimar, plundering, burning, murdering. 
 They entered Goethe's house with insolent 
 demands; two drunken marauders are said 
 to have pushed into his private room, where 
 they were met by Christiane with heroic dis- 
 play of courage which saved the life of the 
 poet. At last a guard was sent for his pro- 
 tection, but officers were billeted on his house- 
 
480 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 hold sometimes in large numbers, till the war- 
 cloud rolled away. Thus a great national 
 crisis crushed in upon the poet not long after 
 the loss of his other Self in Schiller. At 
 last peace came, and a new activity began to 
 announce itself in his life. 
 
 The strange psychologic fact now rises to 
 the surface that Goethe, being deprived of 
 the communion with Schiller, falls back into 
 a youthful resurgence of his fundamental 
 passion. When his Genius is no longer 
 stirred in its creative sources by another cor- 
 responding Genius, there wells forth from 
 the depths his former love of woman as the 
 controlling power over his destiny. Young 
 Phileros wakes up slowly, and begins to throb 
 again with fresh ardor in the breast of the 
 graying man. The old age of Goethe is ar- 
 riving by tale of years, but with it blooms 
 afresh the youth of his love. During the last 
 Decennium the presence of Schiller seems to 
 have satisfied his heart's deepest longing, 
 and to have diverted his genetic energy into 
 poetic creation ; but now that stimulating pro- 
 pulsion of his Genius is gone, and he returns 
 to his primal endowment of nature, to his 
 original Self as revealed in his early career. 
 
 Thus in the first years of the present Epoch 
 Goethe's Muse is almost benumbed into 
 speechlessness by two overwhelming, truly 
 
.4- 
 GOETHE'S LEGAL MARRIAGE. 481 
 
 cataclysmic occurrences, one a personal and 
 the other a national, the decease of Schiller 
 and the submergence of Fatherland. But 
 listen! in the last months of 1807 the poet 
 was staying in Jena and there in the house of 
 the bookseller, Frommann, he looked upon 
 Minna Herzlieb, a beautiful maiden of nine- 
 teen, and at once Phileros, the lover of Love 
 starts to rise if not from his grave, at least 
 from his long quiescence of almost twenty 
 years in furious resurrection of his soul's ul- 
 timate passion, which will equal the volcanic 
 outburts of his youth. Then follows the 
 needful utterance in literature for his life's 
 rescue from his own tiger-fierce emotions, 
 since of course obstacles mounted up before 
 him insuperable whereof we shall say some- 
 what hereafter. But just now we must watch 
 Phileros enacting a new scene in the fatal 
 sweep of his life-tragedy. 
 
 Goethe's Legal Marriage. 
 
 The battle of Jena took place October 14, 
 1806, the victorious French soon overflowed 
 Weimar, when Christiane is said to have 
 saved the life of the poet by throwing herself 
 between him and two marauders who brand- 
 
482 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 ished drawn daggers. Her deed has been 
 variously reported, but the chief result of it 
 is world-famous:' Goethe, after eighteen 
 years' hesitation, resolves to marry legally 
 the maker of his home and the mother of his 
 son, now in his seventeenth year. The cere- 
 mony is to be performed by the Court's chief 
 clergyman, to whom Goethe sends by letter 
 (October 17) the following request: "Dur- 
 ing these days and nights an old purpose of 
 mine has come to maturity. I wish to recog- 
 nize fully and legally as mine the little female 
 friend who has done so much for me, and also 
 has lived through these hours of trial with 
 me. Tell me what steps are necessary, as 
 soon as possible, etc." Whereupon the mar- 
 riage takes place two days afterwards in 
 presence of the son, August Goethe, who is 
 said to have been "enormously delighted " at 
 what seemed his new legitimate birth. Ob- 
 serve that he was already an adolescent who 
 must have been completely aware of his an- 
 omalous station in the social world. In hun- 
 dreds of ways that had been* brought home to 
 the sensitive youth and was already having 
 its effect upon his conduct and character. 
 
 Goethe says that it was "an old purpose," 
 which, however, had been continually de- 
 ferred until now when the consequences of his 
 deed could not be escaped. But what a tre- 
 
A- 
 
 GOETHE'S LEGAL MARRIAGE. 483 
 
 mendous pressure it took to bring him at last 
 to his final action ? His many warnings have 
 passed over him, usually with the one result, 
 which produces a fresh confession and expia- 
 tion in some written book. Severe illness had 
 brought him to death's portal, calling forth 
 another crop of good resolutions, which were 
 forgotten on the return of health. Thus his 
 "old purpose" was merely getting older, till 
 the roar of artillery and the tramp of inrush- 
 ing triumphant soldiery must have reminded 
 him of the Last Judgment just at hand. Hence 
 "during these days and nights " his work of 
 conscience did actually mature and get itself 
 done. But it took all the cannonading of the 
 Jena battle nearby, and the seeming overturn 
 of a world along with the presence of Eu- 
 rope's mighty conqueror in person to drive 
 him "to recognize as mine the little female 
 friend (Freundinn) who had done so much 
 for me," nothing less than saved his life 
 at the risk of her own. But give him credit 
 that in the distant gunnery he heard the very 
 crack of Doom, and hastened to make peace 
 with that institutional order which he had so 
 long and so defiantly violated. 
 
 Now tell us, ye Powers, will he escape the 
 penalty of his deed? Many years have yet 
 to run ere we behold the full round of this 
 life-tragedy. But certain significant points 
 
484 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM, PART SECOND. 
 
 may already be observed. Christiane, who 
 could give little if any response to his spir- 
 itual appeal, is distinctly going backward; 
 she shows her retrogression in shape and 
 conduct, having become fat, beery and gross ; 
 she is excessively given to dancing and its 
 wild excitement, and often she keeps ques- 
 tionable company. She, too, has grown de- 
 fiant, especially of public rumor, which even 
 scandalizes her name. Not all is to be be- 
 lieved which the venomous tongues of Wei- 
 mar's high-toned women tattled about her 
 character. Still enough proof is documented 
 that she surrendered herself to an excessive 
 indulgence of her lower nature. There are 
 indications that her son was ashamed of her, 
 thus receiving a new humiliation in addition 
 to that of his birth. Goethe, while adhering 
 strictly to the forms of married life, gave her 
 up and let her run quite at will, while he 
 sought other company. Certainly that house- 
 hold was decadent, and moving toward its 
 fate. 
 
 Hence it comes that Phileros in his home 
 was desolate, and he, lonely and loveless, was 
 longing for a heart's response. He took his 
 own freedom and gave Christiane her free- 
 dom. Though verging toward sixty, he feels 
 his youth unfettered again and starts on a 
 new phase of his career. He is no longer re- 
 
GOETHE'S LEGAL MARRIAGE. 485 
 
 strained by the presence of Schiller or kept 
 creatively active by the latter 's Genius. And 
 practically he finds in his family no adequate 
 answer to his emotional nature still intense 
 and throbbing for recognition. So much we 
 shall hear him confessing indirectly after his 
 fashion. 
 
 But how about the son in whom the trag- 
 edy centers? Already we read ominous 
 words about his resignation to his fatal in- 
 heritance coming from both his father and 
 his mother. Does he not know what it is, and 
 how it pursues him everywhere? Alas! his 
 fame is co-extensive with that of his great 
 parent; he cannot get beyond its periphery 
 of nagging gossip. Let him but pay a visit to 
 his grandmother at Frankfort; as he walks 
 down the street with the old lady, what a 
 buzzing susurrus whispers along its whole 
 length ! When he reaches the right age he is 
 sent to the University of Heidelberg, but with 
 small result. Then he goes to Jena to study 
 finance, but his fate follows him; he could 
 hear the students there making dubious jokes 
 about his mother, and not sparing "old 
 Goethe, " whose passion for Minna Herzlieb 
 of that town was not hid under a bushel. The 
 young man shunned society as much as pos- 
 sible, and brooded in solitude, so that he 
 was nicknamed the monk; human association 
 
486 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 became a curse to him, and lie fled to the coun- 
 try at the age of twenty-one "to study agri- 
 culture at Capellendorf . " Still this occupa- 
 tion did not detain him long. In the great 
 upheaval of Germany against Napoleon he 
 volunteered as a soldier a very creditable 
 act which, however, cost his father untold 
 anxiety. Suffice it to say he did not go to 
 war, but he did get into trouble with a mili- 
 tary officer, and a duel was in prospect when 
 the anxious parent again interfered through 
 a mediator. The cause of this affair of honor 
 has remained obscure, or perchance sup- 
 pressed, but every reader can imagine what 
 taunts would hum around the wretched vic- 
 tim in the barrack or at the mess. So the 
 son lived his tragedy. 
 
 And the father also did not escape the 
 social penalty of the same sort. This is strik- 
 ingly indicated in a letter which he wrote in 
 1792, while on a visit to Frankfort. He 
 speaks of a certain pleasure in seeing the old 
 friends of his native city ; then comes the bit- 
 ter dose of wormwood: "it is impossible for 
 me not to feel disgust in all the social circles 
 here, for wherever two or three are gathered 
 together, you hear the song now four years 
 old strummed pro and contra, and not even 
 with variations, but the crude theme itself. " 
 In 1788 (four years since) we recollect that 
 
GOETHE'S LEGAL MARRIAGE. 487 
 
 Goethe met Christiane in the Weimar Park. 
 Such, then, is the music which plays around 
 the poet wherever he may go, and will accom- 
 pany him during' his whole life, yea for all 
 time. But the pathos of the situation is that 
 his innocent offspring has to listen to that 
 "same old song" of disgraceful birth. And 
 yet this buzzing environment of everlasting 
 tattle is not all or the worst, as we see by the 
 same letter, in which Goethe growls at his 
 printed deed: "Unfortunately the newspa- 
 pers go everywhere ; these are now my most 
 dangerous foes." Publicity is verily the 
 devil's arch-enemy, or rather he turns it into 
 an instrument of his subtlest torture. So it 
 comes that the low transitory whisper is en- 
 dowed with a voice of thunder, which rolls 
 through space and over time, and moreover 
 becomes the persistent undertone of Goethe 's 
 life-poem. 
 
 What is the solution of his son's desperate 
 problem! What can he, now a grown man, 
 do with himself in this environment of Hell, 
 which broils him in torment and damns him 
 guiltless? One monition only can be given 
 him: "flee, much-enduring youth, get away 
 from Weimar, from Germany, perchance 
 from Europe, break out of the doomful 
 shadow of thy parent's name, begin thy life 
 anew, unknown it may be, but still thine. 
 
488 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Here thou canst not compel thy lot, too weak 
 art thou for that, so flee if thou wouldst avoid 
 thy tragedy now surely approaching. " 
 
 The father is in the same fatal atmosphere, 
 and doubtless feels a deeper conflict on ac- 
 count of his deed of guilt, source of all these 
 woes to himself and to his own. But he is 
 the Fate-compeller, and the tragic counter- 
 stroke though it makes him wince in agony 
 cannot undo him. Let us note him again at 
 his task of self-expression, which has in his 
 case the power of loosening the grip of 
 destiny. 
 
 II. 
 
 Pandora. 
 
 This drama is again one of Goethe 's mighty 
 fragments, and shows the poet himself as a 
 fragment when composing it during the pres- 
 ent Epoch. It reaches backward and for- 
 ward, mirroring past and future, in the stress 
 of the present; classic in form, it is highly 
 symbolic and often enigmatic in content. 
 Europe, civilization, the new incoming eco- 
 nomic order play into it, requiring the far- 
 thest outstretch of our thought ; yet it also 
 reveals the intense personal experience of 
 the poet, his immediate emotional overflow. 
 To us it hints a grand transition, giving the 
 
PANDORA. 489 
 
 first throbs of the coming third period of his 
 total career; he begins to return upon him- 
 self in order to renew and restore his Genius. 
 Still his face is set frontward. He goes back 
 to his Titanism for the purpose of recon- 
 structing it and himself ; also that wonderful 
 youth of his he will repossess and.graft upon 
 his aged trunk. 
 
 The original name of the drama was Pan- 
 dora's Return, in which designation is sug- 
 gested the deepest fact of the poem as well 
 as of the poet during this Epoch. She, the 
 all-gifted woman of his youthful love, is com- 
 ing back, yea has already come back, if the 
 truth be spoken out ; he has felt her presence 
 rejuvinating him with his early elemental 
 passion which she has stirred from its primal 
 sources. Hardly has he had any such com- 
 pelling experience of heart for two decades, 
 not since he fatefully met Christiane in the 
 Weimar Park. Note with care that he has 
 been gotten ready by the formative power of 
 life's events, when across his path on the mo- 
 ment flits the maidenly shape, just the right 
 one out of hundreds and hundreds. Thus tho 
 senescent poet is dipped into the fountain of 
 youth and suddenly becomes creative, rising 
 from his baptism with the conception born of 
 his living experience. Pandora has returned. 
 Great is his delight at the divine appearance 
 
490 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 of woman's love which the Muse bids him 
 celebrate at once in song. 
 
 Unfortunately Pandora is not present in 
 this fragment which lies between her first 
 coming and her return. Thus she is both a 
 memory and a hope a glory that is past and 
 a beauty that is to be. Between these two 
 ideals the poem floats airily and iridescently 
 like a sky-borne balloon, giving rise to much 
 wondering and conjecture. Many an inter- 
 pretation of the work is longer than the work 
 itself which sends indeed rapid lightning 
 flashes in all directions, from the old Greek 
 Mythus down to the present. The title itself 
 is an oracle which runs double, indeed sev- 
 eral meanings often glimmer around persons 
 and incidents. The whole is not an allegory, 
 though it has its allegoric spots; rather we 
 may call it a phantasmagory, employing a 
 term applied by the poet himself to his Hel- 
 ena, with which piece this Pandora is closely 
 akin in poetic mood and form, as well as in 
 its varied metrical scheme. It is kept mainly 
 in antique measures, yet with inbreaking 
 rhymes of love. Thus it belongs still to the 
 poet's classic Period, into which, however, 
 is pushing a new era. That twofoldness of 
 his art, manifesting its Hellenic and Teutonic 
 strains we yet find, but it now creates only a 
 fragment, and this is the last of its kind, with 
 
' .4- 
 PANDORA. 491 
 
 possibly one exception. Still the general 
 meaning is plain enough, and winds through 
 the whole poem : Goethe is swaying between 
 his past and future, between youth and age ; 
 Pandora, the ideal of love belongs to his two 
 Paradises, the one that has been and the one 
 that is to be ; though gone she is coming back. 
 The present intermezzo looks behind and be- 
 fore, is charactered with hindsight and fore- 
 sight as suggested in the names of Epime- 
 theus and Prometheus; the reader goes up 
 and down, teetering between senescence and 
 juvenescence often in a poetical ecstasy. In 
 this poem is a kind of bridge not only between 
 its two unfinished portions, but between the 
 middle and last Periods of the poet's own 
 career. 
 
 The two Goethes, the old and the young, 
 appear before us in the first two characters 
 of the drama under the names Epimetheus 
 and Phileros. The former looks back to his 
 youth in a vein of pensive reminiscence, and 
 soliloquizes over the time when "my heart 
 beat joyously as Pandora came down to me 
 from Olympus." But that time is past, still 
 he, though advanced in years, awaits hope- 
 fully her return. Well, who is this young 
 man coming upon him and chanting a raptur- 
 ous song of love: "Nor rest nor repose can 
 quiet my throes. " Thus appears Phileros 
 
492 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 (so named here) his youthful counterpart 
 who presents a vivid image to him of his for- 
 mer passion for Pandora. Here we see the 
 two Goethes, with a full generation between 
 them, yet both one in love. Phileros, the 
 lover of Love, has something of a* career in 
 this poem, but is not developed to his full 
 promise ; for his fruition we must follow him 
 as a character through Goethe's whole life- 
 poem in which he moves from beginning to 
 end. 
 
 Such is the one thread of the present work. 
 But there is interwoven in it a wholly differ- 
 ent set of characters who are filled with an 
 opposite tendency and belong to another phy- 
 sical as well as social world. This is the part 
 of Prometheus here representing Productive 
 Industry, with his retinue of smiths, shep- 
 herds, workmen. He stands for will-power in 
 strong contrast with his brother Epimetheus, 
 who is more the subjective, emotional brood- 
 ing element, with a strain of art and philoso- 
 phy. The realist and idealist, the active and 
 the contemplative souls are the antithetic 
 brothers, the practical and the theoretical, 
 even the material and the spiritual. Two Ger- 
 manies we may likewise deem them, so that 
 Goethe here shows his prophetic glance ; Epi- 
 metheus is the Germany of the poet's time, 
 with its creative philosophy, music, poetry 
 
PANDORA. 493 
 
 and lack of will ; Prometheus is the Germany 
 of to-day with its marvelous industrial de- 
 velopment, its materialism, militarism, its 
 superabundance of will but a corresponding 
 lack of the creatively ideal spirit. Thus Goe- 
 the throws a foreshadow of his nation's fu- 
 ture, faint indeed but at present very sug- 
 gestive. 
 
 Again the poet tries his hand at the ever- 
 fascinating old Greek Mythus of Prometheus 
 which he had already tackled far back in 
 his Frankfort Epoch of Titanism. Pro- 
 metheus was then portrayed as the God- 
 defiant Titan; in fact the poet seems to 
 have composed at Frankfort two distinct 
 fragments, a dramatic and a lyric on the 
 subject of Prometheus, though some hold 
 that the two are really one and the 
 same work. But much later, in his Goethe- 
 Schiller Epoch, he takes again a Prome- 
 thean spell, and will write in the wake of 
 ancient Aeschylus, a Prometheus Unbound 
 but without any finished result. Shelley 
 seized the same theme, but in spite of his 
 overflowing poetry has he really unbound 
 Prometheus? Can the chained Titan be un- 
 bound in Europe? Doubtful; at any rate its 
 greatest recent poet, after testing his 
 strength gave up the attempt. But now in 
 Pandora, a decade or more afterwards, Goe- 
 
494 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 the again picks up Prometheus and recon- 
 structs the fable from a totally different 
 point of view, which, however, is hinted in 
 the old account. But once more his work re- 
 mains a torso; he evidently breaks down at 
 the part of Prometheus; moreover his class- 
 icism is seen to be waning, if not passing 
 through its final stage; after a marvelous 
 creative Period it is being transcended by the 
 ever-evolving poet. So we feel like affection- 
 ately saying: Good-bye, Prometheus, and 
 thy ancient Hellenic WjDrld. 
 
 But there is a vital part of this drama 
 which is not going to vanish. Beautiful Pan- 
 dora may not return to her old Epimetheus 
 in her antique shape ; the poet can no longer 
 conjure her back. Yet her living, new-born 
 form of youth cannot be kept away; behold, 
 here she comes in all the freshness of young 
 life and beauty. 
 
 III. 
 
 . Love's New Epiphany. 
 
 The return of Pandora into Goethe's life 
 is now to be set forth, not symbolically and 
 enigmatically through an old Mythus, but as 
 an actual living presence appearing in per- 
 son to his physical eye-sight. Let us, accord- 
 
LOVE'S NEW EPIPHANY. 495 
 
 ingly, scan with some precision the young 
 lady who stands at such an important stage 
 in Goethe's evolution, quite as important is it 
 as the Italian Journey. For she possesses 
 the charm to whelm the poet, now touching 
 the fringe of his gray years, into the foun- 
 tain of youthful love in which he will make a 
 new turn, rising from his deep tribulation 
 over the loss of his friend, over the political 
 misery of his land, over the hapless deca- 
 dence of his own household (which Schiller 
 had already designated as wretched), and 
 unfolding into a supreme recovery and re- 
 newal of his Genius. The epiphany of Minna 
 Herzlieb is an engrossing event in Goethe's 
 life-poem, she becomes the pivotal personality 
 through whom he wheels about not simply to 
 a new Epoch, but to a new Period of his total 
 career. For the naive simple-hearted maid- 
 en of nineteen possessed the magic power, 
 quite unknown to herself, of waking up Phil- 
 eros, the lover of Love, from his long som- 
 nolence if not deep sleep. 
 
 She was the adopted daughter of the book- 
 seller Frommann, with whom Goethe dealt 
 in Jena, and in whose house he was a visitor. 
 Thus she had come under his eye as a child, 
 and had attracted him, as he long afterwards 
 confessed in a letter to Zelter, but only as a 
 charming little girl. But behold! the little 
 
496 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 girl has grown up, yea has flowered out into 
 the first and fairest bloom of woman's most 
 entrancing season. The poet, paying a call 
 at the Frommann household, witnesses the 
 divine vision; the call is repeated as Goethe 
 is somewhat solitary, and Minna, at the time, 
 it seems, is sole housekeeper, the foster- 
 mother being absent from town on a trip, as 
 the record tells us. Thus the Goddess Op- 
 portunity has deftly laid the train when fol- 
 lows the explosion. The poet in a sonnet ad- 
 dressed to her, compares himself to a maker 
 of fireworks, who with all his careful fore- 
 thought and skill finds that "the power of 
 the element is stronger than himself, and be- 
 fore he knows it he is blown to pieces up in 
 the air." Thus Goethe again experiences one 
 of his mightiest elemental loves, which be- 
 comes the more intense as it is impossible of 
 fruition, like that of Lotte Buff, for he has 
 now a legal wife, and the young lady is al- 
 ready engaged. Hence rises a strain which 
 will wind itself through all the work of his 
 old-age, the sad antiphony to Love's joyous 
 renewal, namely Love's renunciation. 
 
 It is acknowledged that Minna Herzlieb 
 possessed no great amount of bodily or intel- 
 lectual strength ; she was a slender, spare- 
 waisted, dreamy maiden, truly an innocent 
 flower-nature. A keen-eyed woman gives this 
 
LOVE'S NEW EPIPHANY. 497 
 
 description of her: "The loveliest of all vir- 
 ginal roses, with childlike features, with 
 large dark eyes. The black braids fell spark- 
 ling down her back, her pleasing countenance 
 was enlivened by the warm fresh glance of 
 color ; her form was slender and supple. Of 
 happiest proportion, and exceedingly grace- 
 ful in every motion. ' ' Thus Goethe now be- 
 held her, doubtless at the most beautiful mo- 
 ment of her life when she was just putting 
 forth the finest bloom of young maidenhood. 
 Long he had watched her in the bud with a 
 paternal interest, but sudden and overwhelm- 
 ing is the surprise of love at her flowering, 
 so that he sings : "In the train of the spring- 
 tide she steps forth glorious I recognize 
 her, I seize her, and am undone. ' ' 
 
 But now the other side comes up did she 
 requite his love and what was her fate thus 
 to be passioned of a Genius, loved as it were 
 by a demigod! She has left a slight record 
 of her feeling: "indescribably happy and yet 
 so full of woe in his presence. " She confesses 
 that when she went back to her own room 
 after hearing "the golden words flow from 
 his mouth for an evening " she broke down in 
 tears, as she thought "what the man could 
 make of himself. " There is little doubt that 
 the simple but deeply receptive girl's heart 
 heard the most exquisite passes of Goethe's 
 
498 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 Genius, for he could not help doing his best 
 under tha-t all- summoning spell of love. She 
 might not understand it wholly, but she cer- 
 tainly felt the supernal treasures of the Muse 
 to be pouring down at her feet. And yet we 
 hear from certain forlorn reporters that Min- 
 na Herzlieb never knew of Goethe's love, 
 still less did she requite it. Impossible for 
 any mortal woman in such a presence with a 
 young heart like hers; besides, such a state- 
 ment contradicts what her own words imply, 
 and what Goethe more than implies in his 
 sonnets, which pertain mainly to her and him- 
 self. Then her reflection in certain of his 
 characters hints the truth of the situation. 
 
 But next we ask with some anxiety, what 
 became of the sweet little creature who had 
 quite unawares called down upon herself 
 such an overpowering Olympian passion. It 
 seems that her first early betrothal was 
 broken off, and the following spring (1808) 
 she quit Jena and remained absent for years. 
 Why was she hurried away from her home 
 in that fashion ? Fourteen years later when 
 she was thirty-three, she married a Jena Pro- 
 fessor, but the union was not happy, and a 
 separation soon took place. Alas, the fate- 
 ful woman in whose heart was throned the 
 love of a demi-god how can she ever again 
 give that heart to a common mortal ! In fact 
 
LOVE'S NEW EPIPHANY. 499 
 
 her whole being, reason itself became in- 
 volved in this overturn of her destiny, and 
 we read that her mind passed into an eclipse 
 which hung over the rest of her long life, she 
 surviving till 1865. Thus we have to see in 
 her a tragic lot, and we are reminded of Clara 
 in Egmont who, already promised to an ord- 
 inary man, Brackenburg, breaks away from 
 her engagement when she meets an heroic 
 lover and becomes filled with his demonic 
 spirit so that she dies the death of the hero- 
 ine. Thus Goethe has portrayed a woman 
 obsessed with an all-controlling love for her 
 ideal man; but such power tender gentle 
 Minna does not own, and hence she collapses 
 within under the awful burden, recalling Ot- 
 tilia in Elective Affinities for whose portrait 
 she furnished important features to the poet. 
 But what about Goethe himself in this des- 
 perate wrestle with passion? He too was 
 caught in the resistless maelstrom, and per- 
 haps was more intensely affected than the 
 woman as there was more of him 'to be af- 
 fected. Again and again he has left on re- 
 cord hints of his prolonged agony, he could 
 not recover from the continued upbursts of 
 his deepest nature, he calls it an ever-bleed- 
 ing wound " which will not let itself be healed, 
 a heart which is afraid to get well." Such 
 are the passionate words which he sets down 
 
500 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART SECOND. 
 
 in his diary, as if he too were a lost soul in 
 the Inferno of love. Yet he is not, he cannot 
 perish in this way, for see him again seize 
 hold of that Fate-defying weapon of his, 
 namely his pen, out of which begin to flow all 
 his sorrows with confession, expiation, then 
 final relief and recovery. But poor little Min- 
 na, the dear soft-hearted creature, she wields 
 no such implement of salvation, and so she 
 sinks under the soul-cleaving, life-long tra- 
 gedy of her love. 
 
 But such was the length and the strength 
 of this conflict in the poet, its oft-recurring 
 and heart-wrenching paroxysms, that it will 
 require not merely a single book but quite a 
 library for its exorcism through expression. 
 More than one big dose of his quill-craft he 
 will have to administer to himself, for the 
 awful convulsions of his passion keep return- 
 ing, his wounded heart " is afraid to get well," 
 and keeps bleeding afresh. The result is that 
 a small Herzlieb literature springs up around 
 this node of his Career. No other woman of 
 his many loves ever compelled him to write 
 so many tomes before he could get rid of her 
 haunting presence. Four works directly be- 
 long here: (1) the Sonnets, the least of all, 
 yet the significant starting-point; (2) Pan- 
 dora, a drama already considered; (3) Elec- 
 tive Affinities, a novel to be noted later; (4) 
 
LOVE'S NEW EPIPHANY. 501 
 
 Goethe's Autobiography, which is the axial 
 work of a wholly new Period in the poet's 
 life. This is what we are next to consider. 
 
 Here, then, ends the present Epoch, and 
 with it the entire Second Period, which we 
 may remember, took its start when Goethe 
 set out for Italy. But now he sets out for his 
 last home, by way of returning to his first. 
 
/ne 
 
 (1809-1832.} 
 
 Evidently we are now to behold Goethe en- 
 tering upon his Third Period, the final one 
 of his life, and having its own distinctive 
 character. As indicated by the given dates, 
 it continued some twenty-three years, thus 
 being of quite the same duration as his pre- 
 vious Second Period, of which it is both the 
 antithesis and the fulfilment. Its first begin- 
 ning, however, cannot well be dated to the 
 precise year, if we take into account all the 
 
 (502) 
 
GOETHE THE OLD MAN. 503 
 
 precedent signs of its gradual growth. There 
 is no single sudden act to emphasize its start- 
 ing-point, like Goethe 's departure for Italy, 
 of which the exact time is known, and which 
 gives the commencement of the Second Pe- 
 riod. We might take Goethe 's meeting with 
 Minna Herzlieb in the fall of 1807 as the germ 
 of this new transition ; but that germ had to 
 develop in order to show what it truly meant. 
 In Pandora it was certainly present, although 
 still infolded in the peculiar vesture of the 
 Second Period of the poet, namely his clas- 
 sicism. But with the completion of Elective 
 Affinities in 1809, the old wrappage is thrown 
 off and the evolution is complete. Moreover, 
 other works were then ripening which indi- 
 cated the new pivotal transition to the fu- 
 ture, the transition from Goethe's middle 
 life to his ageing time. And we hold that 
 this slow inner development accords with the 
 man's years; the birth of the infant is a sud- 
 den jet lightwards, and may be registered to 
 the hour, but the birth of old-age is hesitat- 
 ing and gradual, often eddying backwards in 
 youthful resurgences, yet on the whole driv- 
 ing tardily forwards to the close. And here 
 we may dare whisper a theory of ours : the 
 entire career of Goethe, especially this last 
 part, is best understood and realized by an 
 old man who also can write from his own liv- 
 
504 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 ing experience and sympathy the poet's com- 
 pleted biography. We think that we have no- 
 ticed in younger authors an impatience, es- 
 pecially with this Third Period, which in gen- 
 eral has its own literary style, poetic form, 
 and spiritual world-view, all of which are 
 often contemptuously ascribed to Goethe's 
 senility. It is our intention, however, to 
 grasp it and to correlate it as the necessary 
 integrating arc of his all-rounded cycle of 
 achievement. In his sixtieth year he is now, 
 and will keep at work till his eighty-third, 
 finishing in deed and writ the last great song 
 of his life-poem. 
 
 I.' In what way does this Third Period 
 differ from the foregoing Second Period? 
 First of all we may note that his devotion to 
 the classical world and its forms comes to an 
 end, if we except rare fitful relapses. Few 
 if any elegies, epigrams, epics after the old 
 Hellenic pattern; the antique dramatic style 
 drops out of his literary creation with one or 
 two spasmodic regurgitations. He evidently 
 feels that he has delivered his classical mes- 
 sage; wonderful indeed has been his work 
 herein but it is done; through literature he 
 has recreated that ancient art-world, and 
 transfused it into modern speech and life. 
 Thus we say that he has reproduced and 
 eternized in his poetry the old Mediterranean 
 
GOETHE -THE OLD MAN. 505 
 
 civilization on the side of its culture of 
 beauty, and made it a possible part of every 
 man's education today. To that civilization 
 we have to go back, if we would know our own 
 and ourselves; if indeed we would become 
 integral as our race has been. Goethe, there- 
 fore, is a great mediator of our present with 
 our past, universalizing us by adding to our 
 fragmentary self what it lacks of wholeness. 
 
 Such is the task of the foregoing Second 
 Period in which we have pointed out the two 
 interweaving strands under various names 
 Classic and Romantic, Greek and Teutonic, 
 Southern and Northern. Hence was often 
 noticed the twofoldness of that Period, which 
 runs through it from beginning to end, cul- 
 minating in the two poets, Goethe and Schil- 
 ler, each of whom has in himself the same 
 dualism. But in the present Third Period 
 this peculiar separative character ceases; 
 there is in it a deep pervasive unity of form 
 and spirit ; in fact we note a significant unity 
 in its one primordial passion, that of love, 
 which is to be more fully considered later as 
 its pivotal phenomenon. 
 
 II. A change in Goethe's style has often 
 been remarked as taking place during this 
 time. He becomes the conscious symbolist, 
 working rather from the side of the inner 
 meaning than the immediate vision of the 
 
506 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 poetic object. We may observe such a ten- 
 dency already in the Second Period. His 
 classic figures he often turns into symbols or 
 even allegories, as may be examplified in 
 Pandora, which tendency, however, culmi- 
 nates in the Second Part of Faust. Indeed 
 he passed into his more pronounced symbol- 
 ism by way of his classicism. The Greek 
 Mythus he no longer seized directly in its 
 own right but as the bearer of some thought. 
 Iphigenia is still a concrete individual, even 
 if she suggests a higher meaning; but Epi- 
 menides is an abstract conception wearing a 
 Greek mask. In the last strain of the Faust 
 drama he says: " Every thing transitory is 
 only a likeness (Gleichniss) ," an image or 
 symbol of what is not transitory. This ex- 
 presses, however, not simply a literary 
 method, but his deepest conviction, the world- 
 view of his later years. Thus he speaks to 
 Eckermann in 1824: "I have regarded all 
 my doing and achieving as only symbolical, ' ' 
 filled with a content beyond its immediate ap- 
 pearance. Such is now his consciousness, 
 the principle of his living as well as of his 
 writing. Long before (in 1797) he had des- 
 ignated the poet as he who " calls the partic- 
 ular thing to its universal consecration, ' ' that 
 is, who symbolizes the whole finite world. 
 On reading again his Wilhelm Meister's Ap- 
 
GOETHE THE OLD MAN. 507 
 
 prenticeship in his old-age he expresses his 
 delight and comfort of soul "to find that the 
 whole novel is symbolical, " which he evi- 
 dently did not think of when he wrote it ; he 
 also remarks that "behind the projected 
 characters there lies hidden something 
 higher, something universal/' Nay, he af- 
 firms that even "in the trivialties of Meister 
 lurks an upper meaning. ' ' Such is the sym- 
 bolic Goethe of this Third Period looking 
 back at the classic-romantic Goethe of the 
 Second Period. It is an orderly evolution: 
 the old man casts his view beyond, with the 
 tendency to see the supersensible in the sens- 
 ible, the eternal in the changeful, the pure 
 idea in the real. 
 
 Such a way of poetizing may seem to con- 
 tradict the view of him which we have so 
 often emphasized: Goethe can only produce 
 in his art what he has personally experienced. 
 Not a few critics declare that now he creates 
 only abstractions, unrealities, phantasms, 
 that the symbolic Goethe is the unpoetic Goe- 
 the. But to the mind which wishes to grasp 
 and sympathetically appropriate the whole 
 poet in all his stages of evolution the present 
 Period with its evolved consciousness is a 
 necessary phase, for it is something deeply 
 experienced, we believe more deeply than 
 ever before, even if different from what has 
 
508 GOETHE*S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 preceded it. Conscious symbolism becomes 
 increasingly Goethe's new experience, being 
 at last a clearer vision of the eternal entities 
 which appear in the world of sensation and 
 particularity. 
 
 From this point of view we may glance at 
 his three Periods in their development. As 
 the young poet he seizes the immediate fact 
 or event, and portrays it in all its sensuous 
 fullness; still there is in his work uncon r 
 sciously the secret pulsation of a higher en- 
 ergy which we feel for instance in his Gotz. 
 Hence this may well be deemed his time of 
 unconscious symbolism. In his Second Pe- 
 riod he wins the classic form and so pos- 
 sesses two methods, two symbols, we may call 
 them, in his poetic procedure. These come 
 together in his Third Period whose charac- 
 teristic is that of conscious symbolism which 
 bespeaks the deepest experience of the old 
 poet when he delights to behold the Beyond 
 in the Now, the infinite gleaming through the 
 finite manifestation, the idea in the reality. 
 So it comes that when he looks back at his 
 early productions, he finds secretly ensconced 
 in them the symbol, to his great happiness. 
 
 Now with this deepened world-view arises 
 a corresponding change of his poetic proc- 
 ess. He once declared that the right way of 
 poetizing is to take the real and to idealize 
 
GOETHE THE OLD MAN. 509 
 
 that in its own form. This he said was one 
 of Merck's suggestive lessons. The other 
 and wrong method was to grasp something 
 imaginative or ideal beforehand and then to 
 realize that. But the fact now pushes to the 
 front that Goethe in this Third Period be- 
 gins to follow the very maxim so strongly 
 forbidden and denounced in his First Period ; 
 that is, we often see him start with the idea 
 or even the abstraction, and proceed to give 
 to it a poetic shape. What else is his Hom- 
 unculus and other figures in the Second Part 
 of Faust, which have so often roused the 
 wrath of the narrow-souled critic who seems 
 unable to see and sympathize with the total 
 poet in all the stages of his evolution? The 
 same change we may note in Shakespeare; 
 Caliban is not a real creature but an imag- 
 ined thing or idea endowed with its own 
 shape by the poet who showed this tendency 
 also in his ageing time, since his Tempest was 
 probably his last drama. In fact we can 
 catch hints of a similar poetic evolution in 
 ancient Homer, if we contrast in this regard 
 the Iliad with the Odyssey, for in the latter 
 we find the figure of Polyphemus which is 
 certainly not a real man but a product of the 
 imagination put into its own shape. 
 
 Thus we follow Goethe truly universaliz- 
 ing himself in the full cycle of his life-poem, 
 
510 GOETHE' '8 LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 as he reaches out to art-forms which were at 
 first beyond him, and which he, therefore, ab- 
 jured even with contempt. Still he is su- 
 premely the evolving spirit, indeed, we may 
 call him the very Genius of evolution, espe- 
 cially in its literary expression, which he 
 manifested not only in writing but in living. 
 III. But the supreme world-surprising 
 fact of this Third Period is the return of the 
 old man to the youthful intensity of his ele- 
 mental passion, the rejuvenescence of love, 
 really of the lover of Love. As this turn of 
 his struck down to the bottom of his whole 
 emotional nature, it had to report itself in 
 writ, and thus we have here one of the most 
 singular chapters in all literature. Phileros 
 goes through a great new stage of man's dis- 
 cipline, that of having a young heart in an 
 old body, and this young heart throbs and 
 quakes with its juvenile intoxication till it 
 threatens to shatter its senile frame work, 
 both physical and mental. Such is the grand 
 node which he now rounds in his life-experi- 
 ence and in his life-poem. Let us mark again 
 that he, endowed with such an inner volcano, 
 cannot help himself; the overflow from the 
 deepest sources of his existence bursts up 
 ere he can look about, and he finds himself 
 struggling in the stormy ocean of his own 
 heart. Not once but thrice in the course of 
 
I 
 
 GOETHE THE OLD MAN. 511 
 
 the present Period does this shock of pas- 
 sion recur with a vehemence which brings 
 him to the verge of dissolution. Still he es- 
 capes through that wonderful instrument of 
 his, which has left us the Goethe literature, 
 whose message we are now considering, 
 really the record of his way of salvation 
 from the Furies of his own Nature, from the 
 tragedy of his supreme gift, of his very 
 Genius. 
 
 Undoubtedly Minna Herzlieb had the pe- 
 culiar stroke of personality which whirled 
 the senescent lover back to his primal start- 
 ing-point, so that he re-lives his early days 
 again, as we see in his Autobiography. Her 
 love moved him creatively to reproduce his 
 first young loves, which he narrates with so 
 much fullness and zest. Here we reach down 
 to the basic fact of the present Period: the 
 return of a self-completing human career to 
 its germinal commencement which thus cir- 
 cles to the full its last stage, and interlinks 
 with the first. We see the old man now go- 
 ing back not only to review his youth but to 
 renew and re-live it, thereby re-enacting 
 afresh and so finishing his life-poem. The 
 pivot of this ultimate return we may say of 
 this soul to itself is that original elemental 
 love which joins him with creation itself. 
 
 So it comes that Phileros again rises to the 
 
512 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 front and resumes his place as the central, 
 all-compelling character of the poet's work. 
 He is rejuvenated and thus endowed with a 
 fresh power of man's love for woman, which 
 is so deeply coupled with the creative instinct 
 of his Genius. A new-born Phileros, then, 
 we behold, both in action and in poetic pro- 
 duction; another palingenesis it may be 
 deemed, bringing forth the soul again with 
 renewed generation ; to employ Goethe *s own 
 suggestive word about himself, it is his third 
 "puberty," no longer his second, which he 
 has outgrown, and of course not his first, to 
 which, however, he goes back, and which 
 through writing he reproduces in its fervid 
 energy. Passion is here, but with the mighty 
 deep-flowing momentum of years, not so 
 much with the bubbling buoyancy or with the 
 tempestuous outburst of youth. 
 
 Already we have watched this profoundest 
 strain of Goethe 's Genius, and traced it from 
 his boyhood as it weaves through all his 
 activity, unwritten as well as written, till the 
 present Period when it revolves around to 
 where it begins, yet carrying with it the full 
 experience which he has won up to date. But 
 mark the difference between then and now: 
 then in his First Period he was pushing for- 
 ward unconsciously, instinctively in soul- 
 wrenching throes to his youthful production, 
 
GOETHE THE OLD MAN. 513 
 
 such as Werther; but now he turns backward 
 to his life's first fountain, as if to re-bear 
 himself through his own creative act of 
 Genius, to re-enact his birth by his art, thus 
 originating his own origin and rounding his 
 ideal cycle of being. Note once more, that 
 love, the primordial creative power of the 
 universe, is what is driving him to this act 
 of his own re-creation, which is the grand 
 climacteric of his life as well as the final ful- 
 filment of his poetic career. 
 
 In this Third Period, accordingly, we must 
 see Goethe transcending his Second Period 
 so that the latter becomes a part or constit- 
 uent of his total self, as well as a part or con- 
 stituent of human culture. For that is just 
 his power : he elevates his own individual ex- 
 perience to be that of man, yea of the uni- 
 verse; he makes it the spiritual heritage of 
 himself and therewith of his race. Thus the 
 Second Period with all its marvelous pro- 
 ductivity though transcended is not lost, 
 rather it is preserved ideally forever. Still 
 in order to be the completely realized man, 
 he must rise out of it, and go back to his first 
 creative time and re-make his own native 
 Genius as the made or given, thus re-creat- 
 ing, so to speak, his own very creation. 
 
 IV. Still higher must we carry the thought 
 of this Third Period as the completion and 
 
514 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 fulfilment of the poet's creative selfhood, 
 which thus brings down into humanity the 
 process of the All-Self reflected in the life of 
 an individual. Moreover this individual, be- 
 ing the supreme poetic Genius adumbrates 
 not only in his life but in his writ the Cre- 
 ator himself from whom he delivers a mes- 
 sage unto mankind. Not merely the single 
 composition, but all of his works taken to- 
 gether form a revelation of the supernal 
 process of the universe, which therefore must 
 seal its last and highest impress upon his life- 
 poem. 
 
 Hence it comes that this returning point 
 with its sweep backward is the most impor- 
 tant node of a full human personality, being 
 that portion which completes it according to 
 the perfect supernal vision, and leaves it not 
 a pitiful torn fragment of a life. It is that 
 which rounds out and fully finishes the living 
 activity of the mortal, making it even in its 
 brief span of time the image or type of the 
 Universal Self, or rather of the very Self of 
 the Universe. Thus, the poet's earthly ca- 
 reer becomes the imprint of the Divine Mind, 
 and his writ is transfigured into a transcript 
 of God. 
 
 Here we also reach down to the germinal 
 fact (already noted) that Goethe became 
 universally symbolic in this Third Period, 
 
.* 
 
 GOETHE THE OLD MAN. 515 
 
 which indeed rounds out his life into a sym- 
 bol of the All. Thus he symbolizes whatever 
 he sees and does, for he has himself turned 
 to a symbol not only incarnate but insouled 
 of the Highest. Such is the import of this 
 Third Period: his life has enacted the sym- 
 bol, his poetry has written the symbol, his 
 very consciousness has become the symbol of 
 the all-conscious Self bearing the seal of its 
 sovereign process. No wonder he declares 
 to Eckermann in old-age: that he looks 
 back on everything achieved by himself "as 
 symbolical. ' ' 
 
 And yet further we must carry out this re- 
 turn of Goethe during the present Third Pe- 
 riod. There is strikingly manifested in him 
 the psychical return, which shows his inner- 
 most original Self going back and regarding 
 itself under many forms, and in these realiz- 
 ing itself as eternally objective and present, 
 as immortal. For in some way we have to 
 account for the immortality of Goethe, where- 
 in his Self through his accomplishment par- 
 took of the Eternal Self in its deathless proc- 
 ess. Thus his life in its complete cycle may 
 be deemed a Theophany, the appearance of 
 God in the finite individual, whose writ with 
 its special inspiration is a kind of new Scrip- 
 ture of which the supreme function is media- 
 torial like all Greatest Literature, mediating 
 
516 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 the limited, erring, discordant creature with 
 the universal harmony of the whole Creation. 
 Undoubtedly Goethe has the Negative, both 
 in the deed and in the record, more of ii> per- 
 haps than any other modern poet; still he 
 shows the Negative overcome especially in 
 this third Period. Mephistopheles defines 
 himself "a- part," and further "a part of the 
 part," but even he is to be integrated with 
 the great Totality and "work the Good," 
 though willing the Bad. So we catch the 
 poet of Faust far back making the Devil 
 prophesy his own undoing, which in fact is 
 perpetually going on. 
 
 Thus Goethe's biography may be taken as 
 revealing the principle and the process of 
 Universal Biography, of which it is the most 
 typical instance, or the largest, most compre- 
 hensive symbol yet realized in the life of an 
 individual man. 
 
 V. In what work of Goethe is the present 
 Period most distinctively represented! Our 
 judgment speaks for the book which we shall 
 call his Autobiography (Wahrheit und Dich- 
 tung), best known in English translation un- 
 der the name of Truth and Fiction (or Po- 
 etry). Significant is the double title indicat- 
 ing Goethe 's present view of his life and art 
 as symbolic; really the two words might be 
 rendered "Fact and Symbol," or the literal 
 
GOETHE THE OLD MAN. 517 
 
 events of his time and their higher meaning. 
 Thus the name of the book already hints the 
 general artistic character of the Third 
 Period. 
 
 Moreover, the composition of this work 
 will be continued through the rest of the po- 
 et's life, thus overarching the whole of the 
 Third Period, from beginning to end. The 
 last portion of the Autobiography was fin- 
 ished in 1831, some months before his death. 
 The starting-point is declared by Eiemer to 
 have been August 28, 1808, the poet's birth- 
 day when he was fifty-nine years old. But 
 there is no doubt that the subject before that 
 date had been simmering in his mind, till it 
 crystallized to a definite plan and purpose. 
 Naturally we ask what was the deepest im- 
 pulse which drove him to seize his pen and to 
 give such a long account of his early days. 
 His narrative includes many matters of 
 many sorts, often heterogeneous, even if con- 
 nected historically with his town, his home, 
 and himself. Moreover its portions are writ- 
 ten with varying degrees of literary power 
 and of personal interest. 
 
 Now amid such a diversified mass there is 
 one strand in which we feel the poet's heart- 
 throb more directly and intensely than in any 
 other : it is the record of his early loves vary- 
 ing from Gretchen to Lili. When the latter 
 
518 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 affair winds up, the entire work of twenty 
 Books is br6ught to a conclusion. To be sure, 
 the whole remains again a fragment by the 
 great torso-maker of himself who has strewn 
 so many shining pieces of his soul along the 
 pathway of his whole life. Goethe never took 
 his Autobiography to Weimar, but stopped 
 it abruptly at the close of his Frankfort 
 Quadrennium, shrinking back seemingly from 
 the appearance of Frau von Stein, once the 
 Muse of his Genius, but now at the writing 
 of this work, the Cassandra of his fatal deed. 
 Thus his Autobiography deals with the 
 basic elemental passion of his existence at a 
 time when this passion ran the gamut of many 
 young ladies, not of the one old one. Already 
 we have classed these amatory episodes un- 
 der the name of novelettes (see preceding 
 pp. 46-173), being parts of one great novel 
 which is the book of his life. Many have been 
 the works of the disguised Goethe, masking 
 himself hitherto under different names in 
 drama, novel, poem, but now it is the real 
 Goethe telling on himself directly and refus- 
 ing to hide himself any longer behind his va- 
 rious characters. Thus it is an act of liv- 
 ing self -consciousness, in which his whole life 
 dips back upon itself and therein becomes 
 self-aware. His Autobiography shows his 
 inner world turned outward into an actual 
 
GOETHE THE OLD MAN." 519 
 
 existence which is made permanent in writ- 
 ing; more technically, his subjective Ego 
 gives its own self-creating form to its highest 
 objective realization. Herein his life-poem 
 enters its final sweep toward its goal of com- 
 pletion, and lets us glimpse the supreme func- 
 tion of Biography which is to reveal as ulti- 
 mate in human consciousness the very form 
 and movement of God-consciousness. 
 
 VI. Such, then, is the outer figuration as 
 well as the inner purport of this Third Period 
 of Goethe's life-poem, in which we seek to 
 embrace its written and unwritten portions. 
 As already indicated, it lasts some twenty- 
 three years, a long stretch of life which also 
 has its distinct epochal turns. Hence the 
 question arises, upon what salient point do 
 these Epochs revolve? And how many of 
 them? And what is their common ground of 
 unity! 
 
 Now comes to light the fact that during, 
 this Period occur three grand resurgences of 
 love in the soul of the ageing Goethe, includ- 
 ing the one already described. Thrice the 
 senescent poet sweeps back to his youth in an 
 overflow of his elemental passion which wells 
 up into a wonderful rejuvenescence. This is 
 accompanied by a corresponding renewal of 
 creative energy which leaps forth in fresh 
 poetic production. Thrice he gets old and 
 
520 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 drooping, senile and impotent; thrice at the 
 vision of youthful beauty he grows young, 
 buoyant, creative, with a fresh radiant ema- 
 nation from his heart's new sunrise. Thus 
 his Genius seems re-born over and over again, 
 reckless of frosting Time, through the ever- 
 renewing might of love, which for him is the 
 primordial regenerative power of Nature. 
 
 Woman's love, then, recreates the poet, 
 and becomes the pivot of his epochal returns 
 to youthful passion and its productivity. Ac- 
 cordingly we shall name the three Epochs of 
 the present Period after the three women 
 who possessed the unique personal gift of 
 rousing through their love Goethe's ageing 
 Genius to a thrice-repeated youth and poetic 
 renascence. Their names, made immortal by 
 a poet's glance, run as follows: I. Minna 
 Herzlieb ; II. Marianne Willemer ; III. Ulrike 
 Von Levetzow, 
 
MINNA HERZLIEB. 521 
 
 CHAPTER SEVENTH. 
 
 MINNA HERZLIEB. 
 
 It was Minna Herzlieb, then, who made 
 Goethe autobiographic, driving him through 
 a real love to remember and to recount the 
 loves of his youth. She is verily the axis 
 upon which he turns about to his starting- 
 point, thus periodizing the last stage of his 
 life. To be sure he was ready, the years had 
 to prepare him for his new node of exist- 
 ence, his own Self must evolve to the point 
 where its bent was to look back upon its past. 
 Longevity is naturally reminiscent. But just 
 at such a conjuncture appeared Minna Herz- 
 lieb, and in his heart made him young again, 
 causing him not only to recall but to renew 
 its fiercest youthful throbs at the sight of the 
 entrancing maiden. Thus she determines 
 the chief direction of his looking backwards, 
 in fact she unconsciously dictates to him just 
 that upon which he is to focus his soul and 
 his pen. 
 
 Moreover he will no longer veil his ex- 
 periences behind' other names than his own, 
 but will tell on himself openly; so he drops 
 
522 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 the disguises which he has put on in drama, 
 novel, lyric, and unashamed recounts the 
 secret love-life of Phileros from its begin- 
 ning. Thus he unmasks his heart, has to do so, 
 since he now recognizes himself as universal 
 lover, in whose career any particular love is 
 but a transitory manifestation. This latter 
 he can disguise in some special character and 
 has done so hitherto; here, however, in his 
 Autobiography he must make his confession 
 not partial but absolute. Hence we see him 
 aligning, as far as his work goes, all his loves, 
 each of which has its literature, in one com- 
 plete revelation which reaches down to the 
 deepest fountain of his Genius, and which 
 can no longer masquerade in any alien form, 
 but must utter his own self in its native re- 
 ality. 
 
 Minna Herzlieb, however, rouses in the 
 poet not only a reminiscence of his former 
 love, but she is also an immediate presence 
 here and now, which starts him to creation 
 in her own right. Hence the direct work 
 which she inspires on the spot is the Elective 
 Affinities. But that is not all: she gives to 
 poet the key-note of this whole Third Period, 
 and will, so to speak, reproduce her own es- 
 sential part in two later shapes of women, 
 each of whom will be also epochal. Thus she 
 is a prelude of the future as well as a rem- 
 
MINNA HERZLIEB. 523 
 
 iniscence of the past ; also she is the fountain 
 of the present in the poet's activity. 
 
 Her Epoch lasts some six or seven years, 
 in fact till it inpinges upon that of Marianne 
 Willemer in 1814-15. According to his re- 
 porting friend Boisseree Goethe still in 1815 
 recalled his love for Ottilia (Minna) with 
 much emotion, and told how unhappy she 
 had made him (for he had to renounce her), 
 till "at last his speech became wholly enig- 
 matic, and full of strange premonitions." 
 There is no doubt that his novel, Elective Af- 
 finities is the record of his present experi- 
 ence. He writes long afterward to Zelter: 
 "There is not a stroke in the book which I 
 have not lived, but it is not given as I lived 
 it. ' ' Another declaration of his may be noted 
 in this connection : ' ' The use of my personal 
 experiences has been everything to me; to 
 invent out of nothing was never my business ; 
 I have always regarded the world as gifted 
 with a greater genius than mine." With 
 these indications of the author in our mem- 
 ory we may take a glance at his novel of 
 Minna Herzlieb, though here again he throws 
 a disguise over his love as not reminiscent of 
 long-ago but as actually present in full tide 
 of its energy. 
 
524 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 I. 
 
 Elective Affinities. 
 
 Grip this book at its center and we shall 
 find love ensconced there as the subtle demi- 
 urge who is undermining legal marriage and 
 thus producing a tragic conflict. Was that 
 Goethe's compelling experience when he 
 wrote it? Would he have touched pen to 
 paper unless he could have recorded himself 
 at an ultimate crisis of his own destiny! Not 
 unless we wish to discredit his hundredth as- 
 sertion to that effect. 
 
 The theme is the elemental power of love 
 just the poet's primordial endowment of 
 Nature in its conflict with man's basic insti- 
 tution, the Family. Hence he takes the action 
 of the four chemical elements as a symbol to 
 prefigure the four human characters two 
 men and two women who are in a state of 
 decomposition and recomposition. An orig- 
 inal elemental force of Nature is at work in 
 each of them sapping man's instituted order. 
 Thus the novel reaches down to the funda- 
 mental collision which runs through the rise 
 of all human society from the very beginning. 
 And it is also the basic struggle of Goethe's 
 own individual existence, as we have watched 
 him in the unfolding of his life-poem, of 
 
4. 
 
 ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 525 
 
 which it is the ever-recurring pulse-beat; it 
 is the self renewing conflict of Phileros, the 
 lover of Love from boyhood to old-age. Here, 
 accordingly, lies before us one pivotal stage 
 of his perennial battle. 
 
 Edward and Charlotte, the married pair, 
 are getting along well enough humanly con- 
 sidered, when upon the scene is brought the 
 unmarried pair, the Captain and Ottilia. 
 Then the mutual disarrangement and rear- 
 rangement of the two pairs sets in, each per- 
 son being driven by an unconscious unwilled 
 force of Nature into a new and deeper affinity 
 in violation of the established legal relation. 
 Now in this furious cross-fire of passion, 
 Charlotte the married wife and the unmar- 
 ried Captain do not succumb to Nature's ele- 
 mental stroke, though they feel it with no 
 little energy. On the contrary Edward yields 
 to the fateful impulse and is tragic, involv- 
 ing in his net of destiny Ottilia guiltless but 
 crushed by the inner might of her conflict. 
 
 Goethe himself had done like Edward, had 
 followed the immediate push of Nature, defy- 
 ing the institution and its law, and celebrating 
 his disobedience in a reckless exuberance of 
 fancy as we have noted in his Roman Elegies. 
 But in the two decades since then, the insti- 
 tution has given him a memorable lesson, 
 society has disowned his wife and branded 
 
526 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 his son born out of wedlock with a stigma the 
 more terrible because its object was guilt- 
 less. The poet's act of legitimating his out- 
 lawed family could not evitate its tragic 
 doom. So he mirrors his own lot in advance 
 by the fate of Edward. 
 
 Ottilia is portrayed also as the bearer of 
 this elemental passion, but she resists it, be- 
 ing aware of its bent toward ethical violation. 
 She manifests the native power of love in 
 woman and excites its emotional response 
 unconsciously wherever she comes in contact 
 with men. Moreover the author connects her 
 peculiar gift with certain hidden forces 
 which are working far down in Nature's lab- 
 oratory, and which seem to give her a mys- 
 terious control over the human heart. Goe- 
 the is here looking at himself and trying to 
 account for the all-coercing influence which 
 gentle, slight, weak-willed Minna Herzlieb 
 propels through his whole being by her mere 
 presence. The poet also forefeels and fore- 
 tells her tragedy long before it occurred ac- 
 tually, in the fate of Ottilia. But his counter- 
 part Edward he does not endow with his own 
 fate-challenging gift of utterance, and hence 
 the poor weakling sinks down under his own 
 deed, or rather his lack of the man-making 
 deed, at the close. 
 
 Both parents, Edward and Charlotte, ap- 
 
. 
 ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. 527 
 
 pear not to have oared much for their off- 
 spring born inside the law but outside of 
 love. Here Goethe must have thought of his 
 own child born outside the law but inside of 
 love. At any rate he makes the legitimate 
 infant fated through the unlove of its beget- 
 ters, even if it perishes by a seeming acci- 
 dent. Ottilia who has mothered it, tries to 
 save it, but destiny is stronger, and at last 
 grips both the babe and herself. But how 
 about the poet's own deed whose outcome 
 was the unlawful child was it too fated? 
 Already we have noted his grinding anxiety. 
 In this connection we may cite the words of 
 one of the novel's characters (Mittler) who 
 evidently voices the confession of Goethe at 
 this period: "Who ever attacks the mar- 
 riage relation, " is a man who assails ' l the be- 
 ginning and culmination of civilized society." 
 Verily our Goethe has become institutional 
 through his bitter experience, and we may 
 hear him say still further : i i Whoever under- 
 mines this basis of all social order through 
 his word, aye through his deed" such a 
 man has been just myself but is no longer: 
 so we catch his indirect confession which the 
 reader will feel like interjecting at this point 
 in his narrative. 
 
 There is little doubt that Goethe in these 
 spontaneous actions of Ottilia intended to 
 
528 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 suggest what was that inborn power of hers 
 which seemed to win every man who glanced 
 into her face: maternal love. She looked it, 
 acted it, created its atmosphere about her; 
 thus she was endowed with the elemental na- 
 ture of women as the primal source of hu- 
 manity. Nor can we hesitate to think that 
 Goethe therein transferred to her what he 
 deemed the ultimate attraction in the char- 
 acter of Minna Herzlieb. We recollect that 
 this same trait was doubtless the deepest link 
 which held him so long to Frau Von- Stein. 
 And his own mother claimed for her mater- 
 nity the chief crown of her existence. More- 
 over the poet along the same line transforms 
 Ottilia into a sort of Madonna, suggesting 
 the Divine Mother with her mediatorial 
 power in the case of trouble and disease. 
 
 But for the poet himself there is one pe- 
 culiar word which winds through the novel: 
 renunciation. He is a Titanic lover again, 
 going back to his Frankfort Epoch; yet he 
 also knows that he must renounce. Not only 
 his time of life, but his conviction in regard 
 to the institution demands the subordination 
 of his elemental passion. Because of its sub- 
 ject the book has often been denounced as 
 immoral ; but the deepest strain of its mean- 
 ing is institutional, enforcing the lesson of 
 violation through tragedy. Here again we 
 
.i- 
 
 THE APHORISTIC GOETHE. 529 
 
 may read Goethe's confession at this node of 
 his life-poem. He can still feel the volcanic 
 upheaval of youthful love, but upon it falls 
 the counter stroke of the old man's resigna- 
 tion. 
 
 This novel is the most thoroughly unified 
 and most carefully constructed of all Goe- 
 the's larger works. Moreover it was writ- 
 ten at a gush and is not the result of a ladder- 
 like evolution of many years, such as are 
 Meister and Faust. To compose it Goethe 
 ran off to Jena and practically hid himself 
 till it was done (in the summer of 1809). 
 Such concentration shows his coercive need 
 of utterance for relief. Next we are to see 
 this internally smelted unity of form and 
 matter exploding into a thousand scintillas. 
 
 II. 
 
 The Aphoristic Goethe. 
 
 Thus we may name an important and per- 
 sistent strain of Goethe's complete life-po- 
 em, which culminates in the present Epoch. 
 The best commentator on this art-form of 
 the poet, namely Loeper, declares that Goe- 
 the has his distinctive, aphoristic year, which 
 was 1814, quite as he has his special ballad- 
 
530 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 year in 1797. The tendency to express his 
 immediate state of mind in short snappy sen- 
 tences or aphorisms belongs to his whole life, 
 though it took various forms. One of his 
 friends records him as saying that the events 
 of the day passing through his soul would 
 often explode of themselves into versicles. 
 Such utterances might take the form of the 
 proverb ; indeed the collection of them in his 
 works constitutes the greatest, deepest and 
 most comprehensive of all proverbial philos- 
 ophies. Goethe loved the proverb, the pithy 
 worldly-wisdom of the people, and often 
 translated and transformed old samples of it 
 coming down the ages. 
 
 In general his aphoristic manner is a sud- 
 den spirt from his underworld, and shows 
 quite every phase of his native Genius. It 
 perpetuates his youthful outbursts breaking 
 up into the placid stream of his old-age. And 
 many of them are protests against the ten- 
 dencies of the time, literary, scientific, polit- 
 ical, and carry a quick sharp sting. Thus 
 they too have in them a reminiscence of his 
 early period and frequently bear a tinge of 
 Titanism. Compared to his Elective Affini- 
 ties, which is one of his most concentrated 
 and most carefully organized books, his 
 aphorisms are scattered irregular fire-works 
 shooting in all directions. Each of them on 
 
.* 
 
 THE APHORISTIC GOETHE. 531 
 
 the whole is individualized, and demands its 
 own special interpretation. Thus they rep- 
 resent the single atoms of the one great or- 
 ganism of Goethe's life-poem, they are the 
 primordial units, or perchance, thought-cells 
 of which his Genius built its edifice. Spe- 
 cially characteristic of his Third Period is 
 this atomizing of his creativity; we should 
 note that even into the close texture of 
 Elective Affinities bursts up the gnomic jets 
 of Ottilia's diary. Something of the same 
 sort, but less pronounced we find already in 
 Meister's Apprenticeship, especially in the 
 so-called Indenture. 
 
 Such aphorisms will hardly bear connected 
 reading, because their nature is disconnec- 
 tion itself. The poet compels the reader to 
 make of his mind a microscope, in whose field 
 is held for minute examination the wee bright 
 particle of molecular Genius. Our excellent 
 editorial guide, Loeper, has counted and an- 
 notated "more than eight hundred " such 
 poems. To these rhymed aphorisms are to be 
 added the ' ' Sayings in Prose, ' ' of which more 
 than a thousand have been published, maxims 
 and reflections on Art, Nature, Ethics. They 
 show the material of his works as yet unor- 
 ganized, and give us many a peep into the 
 author's work shop, with fleeting glimpses of 
 his world-view reflected in multitudinous 
 
532 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 facets. Really they reveal to us the proto- 
 plasmic Goethe, yeasting from his own 
 sources and gathering from all quarters, 
 quite unformed yet getting ready to shoot 
 into crystals. Let us mark that they are not 
 fragments of great works left unfinished, 
 such as we find in his Frankfort Epoch; they 
 reach below all the drifting torsos of his life- 
 poem, and show us the rudimentary germs of 
 his creation, the very embryology of his 
 Genius. 
 
 The most extensive as well as the most im- 
 portant part of these aphoristic treasures is 
 embraced under the rubric of Tame Xenia 
 contrasting evidently with the Xenia of the 
 Goethe-Schiller Epoch which must have been 
 untamed in comparison, more bitter and per- 
 sonal. Chiefly, however, there is a striking 
 difference of form; the antique measure is 
 dropped and the Teutonic rhymed epigram 
 takes its place, wherein is indicated that the 
 poet's classic Period is definitely transcend- 
 ed. Twenty years ago he would have writ- 
 ten these epigrams in the hexametral elegiac 
 meter, for he was then in the full poetic over- 
 flow of his Greek mood. But now he epi- 
 grammatizes himself and the world in the 
 native verse of his folk, to which he has re- 
 turned. In our judgment no part of Goe- 
 the's works is subtler, more self -revealing, 
 
THE APHORISTIC GOETHE. 533 
 
 or contains so many gold nuggets, but you 
 have to dig. 
 
 Though Goethe has evolved beyond his 
 classicism, he is still tempted to write a dra- 
 ma in the antique form and measure, yet with 
 a modern content. This is known in his 
 works as the Awakening of Epimenides. In 
 spite of striking passages, it was a failure 
 since it ran counter to the sweep of his 
 Genius, and he undertook to concoct some- 
 thing which he had not experienced. Still as 
 a failure it has an interest in the life-poem 
 of Goethe ; it is suggestive as a warning, and 
 may be looked at as a sign-board pointing 
 out whither he was not to go. So the great 
 poet who here turns down his former hero 
 Napoleon, suffers his Moscow defeat in the 
 act. 
 
 But hardly is this aberration over when 
 Goethe by way of reaction, leaps into his na- 
 tive element, and our Phileros, the lover of 
 Love breaks forth with a new sunburst of his 
 primordial poetic Self. It is recorded that 
 in July, 1814, he concluded after several 
 months of travail his awakening of the aged, 
 hoary Epimenides, who never did get really 
 awake in spite of the desperate proddings of 
 the poet's pen-point. Then he hurried away 
 on a trip to Ehineland where he first saw 
 Marianne Jung soon to become Marianne 
 
534 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 Willemer by marriage. The date of this first 
 sight of a woman who again started the 
 whirlpool of his elemental love is duly doc- 
 umented as August 5, 1814. So we are 
 whelmed into another passionate Epoch of 
 his life-poem, with its round of volcanic emo- 
 tion, poetic utterance and confession, which 
 bring alleviation and final quiescence, but 
 only after a time of throeful renunciation. 
 For both the man and the woman are mar- 
 ried already, and thus re-enact the tragic 
 conflict of Elective Affinities, but without the 
 tragedy, let the Lord be thanked. For we 
 are getting interested to see if the old man 
 can have still another upburst of his youthful 
 passion, with its accompanying pyrotechnics 
 of love poetry. Just hear him sing a line to 
 his gray hair: 
 Dock wirst du lieben. 
 
MARIANNE WILLEMER. 535 
 
 CHAPTER EIGHTH. 
 
 MARIANNE WILLEMER. 
 
 She was already in her thirtieth year when 
 she suddenly entered this epochal moment of 
 all her days, and Goethe was just rounding 
 his sixty-fifth year. Thus she was not ex- 
 actly young, nor without some experience of 
 life, for she had passed her early teens as an 
 actress, who could also dance and sing on the 
 stage with much applause, The Frankfort 
 banker Willemer had become interested in 
 her, and when she was sixteen had removed 
 her from her uncertain theatrical environ- 
 ment to his home, where she was reared along 
 with his own daughters. Now the curious 
 fact peeps out mid surmises that a few days 
 after Goethe first saw her, Willemer mar- 
 ries her, though she had been an inmate of 
 his household some fourteen years, and he 
 had reached the age of fifty-four. Goe- 
 the was invited to the wedding; he found, 
 however, a good excuse for keeping away. 
 But the obstacle of marriage, if it was de- 
 signed to be such, never stopped the untamed 
 cyclone of love when it once got under way; 
 it had to whirl out its course to a finish. 
 
536 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 It should not be omitted that Willemer had 
 a widowed daughter, Rosette by name, who 
 was living with him at this time, and who also 
 appears to have been fascinated by the poet. 
 She has left a description of him: "What a 
 man, and what feelings move me ! ' 9 He is a 
 "unique nature, one cannot help loving him, 
 and entirely confiding in him." Indeed Ro- 
 sette seems to rival Marianne at times in her 
 attentions to the poet, but any outbreak of 
 jealousy between the daughter and her step- 
 mother must be left to each reader's view of 
 human nature under the circumstances. Still 
 there was quite a little cross-fire of the Love- 
 God in that country residence of Willemer 
 called not without some hidden adaptation 
 the Tannery (Gerbermuhle) where Goe- 
 the was staying. Such an environment, how- 
 ever, our Phileros, when obsessed by his ele- 
 mental mood, was apt to call up about him 
 any where. 
 
 There is no doubt that the two souls who 
 had found each other out in the rapture of 
 creative love, which at once had to seek utter- 
 ance in poetry from both the man and woman 
 they were Goethe and Marianne. Herein 
 she differs from all the others of her sex 
 listed in Goethe 's calendar of love : she pos- 
 sessed the poetic gift in a high degree, and 
 she was capable of being so inoculated with 
 
MARIANNE WILLEMER. 537 
 
 his Genius that she could equal if not sur- 
 pass him in his own sovereign line of soulful 
 song. Very different was she in this respect 
 from her predecessor, the tender, slender 
 Minna, who had no pecular spiritual dower 
 except the unconscious magic of her maid- 
 enly personality. But Marianne we cannot 
 conceive without a certain self-assertion and 
 self-awareness of her power ; she dared enter 
 the lists with the world-famous poet and en- 
 gage him in a tournament of verse on his own 
 ground; but what is most remarkable, she 
 carried off the prize. Thus Phileros has 
 found a new woman, perchance just the new 
 woman who keeps step with him in his own 
 passion, and at the same time challenges him 
 to the highest expression of his art. She 
 shrank not in awe at the presence of the 
 great man, but she faced him as an equal, be- 
 ing able to requite not only his love, but his 
 Genius at its topmost creative bent. No won- 
 der that Goethe called her "the little Blii- 
 che-r" in admiration of her heroic daring 
 against himself. 
 
 But it is time to designate the chief poetic 
 fruit of this Epoch in whose heart we have 
 not only to see the form but to hear the voice 
 of Marianne Willemer. 
 
538 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 I. 
 
 The West-Eastern Divan. 
 
 Not to our mind a happy title for such a 
 poetic product, though we feel no call to se- 
 lect another in its stead. Still its doubleness 
 has its purport for the present Period, as has 
 been already noted of Truth and Fiction. 
 Goethe is here seen orientalizing himself, or 
 trying to do so, for the contribution of the 
 East runs not very deep or strong in his 
 work. It is German in its meter except a 
 few desultory imitations, German in its 
 spirit, in its love, in its scenery, despite some 
 pencil strokes from the land of the desert and 
 of camels. The poet in this case never saw 
 the poet's land, never looked on the real Sul- 
 leika of the harem or her folk ; never had the 
 Oriental experience except through books. 
 Hence his present poetic transformation was 
 very superficial compared to that which he 
 got from Italy and the classic world. Really 
 there was no second birth of the spirit here, 
 no Oriental palingenesis in this Epoch. To 
 be sure he sings somewhat of the Prophet 
 and the Koran, but their religion is rather 
 his poetic plaything than his serious world- 
 view. His style is not that of Oriental poetry, 
 with its metaphorical rainbows and tortuous 
 arabesques of fantastic forms; rather it is 
 
THE WEST-EASTERN DIVAN. 539 
 
 classic in its simplicity and directness. Joy- 
 ously the poet is at home in his native Rhine- 
 land, which he is now visiting and in whose 
 environment he is composing most of these 
 poems. Its wine he is drinking in disregard 
 of the Mohammedan law, even if Persian 
 Hafiz set the example. The scrupulous Occi- 
 dental reader may think that his love is the 
 most Oriental thing about him, showing a 
 streak of polygamy in the fact that he has a 
 wife sitting at home during all this poetic 
 effervescence over Marianne. 
 
 With many a keen thrust does our Jesuit 
 Pater Baumgartner plunge the dagger of his 
 Mephistophelean sarcasm into this new love- 
 book of our Phileros. He says that "from 
 an old man, husband, father, statesman, sa- 
 vant, the first genius of all Germany, we had 
 a right to expect something better than that 
 he should sit down under the tree of his 
 youth and start to piping again seductive 
 love-ditties. " A very undignified business 
 at least it is for such a lofty dignitary, with 
 his ever-recurring refrain about wine, women 
 and song, which grates infernal discord on 
 the monastic ear of Anti-Phileros. Cer- 
 tainly the latter has good ground for com- 
 plaint. But listen to a sharper swis.h of his 
 daggered words: "The poet (Goethe) here 
 affirms amatory song to be his supreme call- 
 
540 GOETHE' 'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 ing, in which his sensual glow flames up into 
 lust-drunk images, while the strains ad- 
 dressed to his cup-bearer are companioned 
 with Oriental harem-love, and show a nuance 
 of pederasty, till at last in Paradise the 
 houris float around the poet with their fe- 
 licity." Thus the wire-edged tongue of the 
 priest slashes this Divan for its voluptuous 
 Orientalism, not without justice. But how 
 can the celibate love any love, even the mon- 
 ogamous, which he has holily abjured, not 
 to speak of the polygamous? Still less can 
 he love our Phileros, the lover of love, poet- 
 izing his master-passion in thousandfold 
 witchery, both bidden and forbidden. 
 
 Now there is no denying that the poet by 
 the magic of his art has overspread his work 
 with an Oriental atmosphere, very hazy in- 
 deed and intangible, but subtly poetic and 
 entrancing. To be sure his muse does not 
 embrace the whole Orient; India and China 
 are left out though he has touched both else- 
 where ; Judea, too, is eschewed in spite of his 
 early biblical associations. Persia is the 
 land of the Divan, and to a less extent Arabia 
 with its religious consciousness. Chiefly the 
 reading (in 1813-14) of the Persian poet 
 Hafiz in Von Hammer's translation furnished 
 his dominant Oriental motive. He became 
 absorbed in that -far-off poetic world, so re- 
 
THE WEST-EASTERN DIVAN. 541 
 
 mote in place, time and social order, and 
 sought to reproduce and relive it in his 
 spirit. Moreover he was driven to take flight 
 to the distant Orient through the fresh tur- 
 moil produced by the Napoleonic wars in 
 Europe during 1814-15; then the increasing 
 wretchedness of his own household made him 
 flee from home to wineland and loveland for 
 the rescue of his supreme vocation. Thus he 
 was scourged in imagination out of Europe 
 by political and domestic demons, and be- 
 came ideally a fugitive to the Orient though 
 really his flight turned westward to the 
 near-by Rhine valley with its wonderful care- 
 drowning grapevines full of poetic fluidity, to 
 which was added the miraculous epiphany of 
 the Love-God. 
 
 -The Divan as a whole is a phasis of the 
 aphoristic Goethe, whose general character 
 has already been considered. The book is 
 made up of several hundred short poems 
 which are mostly constructed and tempered 
 like the Tame Xenia, being brief aphorisms, 
 the peculiar art-form dominating the old-age 
 of the poet. Moreover this art-form harmo- 
 nizes well with the sentential wisdom which 
 we couple with the Oriental sages, and easily 
 takes the hazy atmosphere of Goethe's East. 
 This somewhat protoplasmic mass of aphor- 
 isms is divided into twelve Books rather ex- 
 
542 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 ternally by the author, since some of their 
 rubrics may mean quite the same thing or 
 indeed anything. The question has arisen: 
 does Goethe orientalize Germany or german- 
 ize the Orient? The process is somewhat of 
 both ways ; still the inner is essentially Teu- 
 tonic, while the outer is partly but by no 
 means exclusively Oriental (or Persian). The 
 whole is a collection of atomic versicles, 
 showing sometimes a brief connection, but 
 without any pervasive structural organism. 
 Now out of this poetical conglomerate rises 
 up a group of lyrics, which bears a distinc- 
 tive character in contrast with the rest of the 
 Divan. It is called the Book of Suleika 
 (VIII) and is the joint product of the two 
 lovers, Goethe and Marianne (Persianized in 
 names as Hatem and Suleika). It is the re^al 
 Book of Love recording the mutual passion 
 of the man and woman, and written right in 
 the fire of their white-hot experience. Now 
 the surprising fact is that the poems of the 
 woman are the better, more deeply and sin- 
 cerely intoned, than those of the man, more 
 love-lorn and heart-broken, though she never 
 thought of dying of a broken heart. Her 
 love trickles into tender words more spon- 
 taneous and self -giving, as if it was her very 
 first ; while we feel that Goethe is an old and 
 somewhat hardened lover who has made 
 
THE WEST-EASTERN DIVAN. 543 
 
 many a campaign before this, so that he 
 knows all about it, and cannot let himself go 
 so naively and unbosomingly. In the orig- 
 inal edition her poems were published under 
 his name, and the secret of her authorship 
 was not revealed till after her death in 1860, 
 and then but partially. To this day their 
 respective portions cannot be fully distin- 
 guished, especially in the Book Suleika, which 
 she not only inspired but helped create. It 
 would seem that the mated songsters often 
 sang in rivalry, each contributing a verse to 
 the same poem or even a line, somewhat as 
 Goethe and Schiller once did in composing 
 the Xenia. Still the most heartfelt genuine 
 lyric in the Divan is wholly the work of Mari- 
 anne (VIII, 42). But she, though a gifted 
 versifier, never reached the same height be- 
 fore or afterward; Goethe's love made her a 
 genius not only beyond herself but even be- 
 yond himself at her one supreme moment. 
 That was indeed among the poet's peculiar 
 gifts ; he often inoculated the lesser brain 
 with his own creative power, as if he could 
 tap the eternal sources not solely for him- 
 self but also for others, especially by his 
 spoken word and his presence. 
 
 But the time comes for the final bitter 
 word: renunciation. Goethe knows that he 
 has reached the jumping-off edge of the 
 
544 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART THIRD. 
 
 abyss; he looks over, then turns and flees 
 back toward dull prosaic Weimar and Chris- 
 tiane, from bright poetic Khineland and 
 Marianne, after sending to her a dark hint- 
 ful letter in which he speaks of "a chasm 
 which he must now close. " His traveling 
 companion has left on record that "he was 
 terribly broken up and could not sleep. ' ' He 
 had two love-seasons at the Willemers, in 
 1814 and 1815 ; yet in July 1816 his longing 
 drove him irresistibly to make a start for yet 
 another, but a few miles outside of Weimar 
 his carriage upset, and he turned back, obey- 
 ing his strong premonition that he had re- 
 ceived a providential warning. He never 
 saw Marianne again, yet her complacent hus- 
 band visited Goethe at Weimar, but without 
 his peerless, though perilous spouse. 
 
 A new shift of destiny took place when in 
 June, 1816, Christiane passed beyond, and the 
 widowed Goethe at the age of 67 was thrown 
 back into the unmarried freedom of youth. 
 
 II. 
 
 The New House of Tantalus. 
 
 Meanwhile into this bright exuberant love- 
 life of our Phileros was spinning that other 
 dark tragic thread of destiny of which we 
 
THE NEW HOUSE OF TANTALUS. 545 
 
 have already sighted ominous appearances. 
 The two strands, indeed, have the strange 
 propulsion to wind alongside of each other 
 through the poet's whole career as spring- 
 ing from the same elemental source of his 
 deepest being; the violation of Tantalus is 
 still at work and is slowly marching toward 
 the doomed retribution. 
 
 The years 1816-17 constitute a pivotal era 
 in the family of Goethe. Christiane was the 
 first to vanish, perchance more sinned against 
 than sinning; but her sinning was not mea- 
 ger as she flung herself over to drink, dance 
 and death. Goethe had evidently given her 
 up, and ran off from a hopeless problem, 
 seeking love, the prime need of his existence, 
 away from home, for we have to remember 
 that Christiane was dying of a slow but mor- 
 tal malady while his affair with Marianne 
 was going on. Still his diary shows that he 
 was near her during her closing hours. But 
 report has handed down that August could 
 not be induced to go to the bedside of his de- 
 parting mother. In her final illness "she 
 was unable to speak, having bitten her tongue 
 through" (letter of Madam Schopenhauer 
 who gives other horrible details of Christi- 
 ane 's last moments, possibly exaggerated). 
 Warmly defended, hotly censured, the hum- 
 ble folk-girl is destined to be for all time, 
 
546 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART THIRD. 
 
 having become a world-known character 
 through her wifehood with a Genius and es- 
 pecially through her motherhood of the 
 House of Tantalus. Who wishes to judge 
 her! We do not, though we have to put her 
 into her place in the doomful evolution of 
 Goethe's life-poem. At least so much may 
 he said of her : she was no Fate-compeller, her 
 lot was too much for her, and down she went 
 in the sweep of her own deed, which she pos- 
 sessed not the power to meet and undo. 
 
 After her death there was a reconstruction 
 of Goethe's household, since Christiane 
 seems to have been regarded as the curse- 
 laden, doom-bringing member upon whom the 
 first stroke of the avenging Parcas fell. There 
 can be little doubt that Goethe, forefeeling 
 the nemesis in his family as it had gone hith- 
 erto, resolved to raise a bulwark against the 
 lowering menace. The central difficulty lay 
 in his son, now some twenty-six years old, in 
 whom he must have already noticed the fatal 
 birth-marks of the House of Tantalus. All 
 Weimar knew, and the father must have 
 known, too, that the son for years had been 
 addicted to intemperance and incontinence, 
 a double inheritance from both parents, in- 
 tensified by his spotted social position. The 
 anxious father must have asked, looking 
 backwards and forwards : Can I forestall the 
 
THE NEW HOUSE OF TANTALUS. 547 
 
 consequences of my deed, and ward off the 
 clutch of Fate from mine own! At any rate 
 the old Goethe resolves to re-constitute his 
 family by the legal marriage of his son to a 
 woman who might be able to rescue his blood 
 from the lot of a Tantalid. Thus his descend- 
 ants would be born in an institutional order, 
 and restored to their legitimate social sta- 
 tion. So he thought to counteract his primal 
 violation and save his House from its over- 
 hanging doom. 
 
 Can he thus reverse the rushing wheels of 
 Time! Much depends upon the woman se- 
 lected for this task. Ottilia Von Pogwish was 
 of noble stock, her mother had been divorced 
 from her husband, a Prussian officer, and the 
 daughter had enjoyed little domestic train- 
 ing. She, at the age of 21, was married to 
 August Goethe, June 17, 1817, who was then 
 reported to have been deeply in love with a 
 folk-girl, but of such a union his father would 
 not hear, possibly because it was too much 
 like his own. Still the young pair seem to 
 have shown attachment for each other at 
 first, but in time the emphatic uncongeniality 
 of their dispositions began to show itself. 
 Three children were born to the couple ever 
 growing more unhappy and estranged. The 
 young husband never gave up his undomestic 
 habits, and the young wife was totally unable 
 
548 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 to reclaim him, but rather showed a special 
 ability in driving him, through her temper 
 and conduct, to take refuge in his inherited 
 fatalities. 
 
 Such was the second family in the tragic 
 line of Tantalus. But the plan of Goethe to 
 reconstruct his House on an aristocratic 
 basis and to thwart the consequences of 
 his primordial transgression failed totally. 
 Where lies the blame? Again the woman has 
 received no little censure, and left behind her 
 a long line of mal-odorous scandal, not with- 
 out a good deal of provocation. She was a 
 person of decided talent in her way, which, 
 however, turned not in the direction of wife- 
 hood and home-making, and of rightly moth- 
 ering her own children and thus rescuing 
 them from their blood's curse. Instead of 
 averting Fate from the House of Tantalus, 
 her unhappy bent seemed to further it, so 
 that she too became a Tantalid quite as much 
 as her husband. The old poet had often to 
 flee from this second household with its awful 
 domestic dissonance, in spite of strong at- 
 tachment to his grandchildren. Otherwise 
 he too would have been whelmed into that 
 family maelstrom of nemesis, which often 
 prevented him from using his weapon of sal- 
 vation, his pen, with which he could stab back 
 all his stabbing demons. 
 
.* 
 THE NEW HOUSE OF TANTALUS. 549 
 
 Thus the two women, Christiane and Ot- 
 tilia, placed by fortune at two different turn- 
 ing-points in the destiny of their families, 
 show themselves not only unequal to their 
 task, but they aggravate by their lives the 
 transmitted malady. Frail mortals, objects 
 of tragic pity rather than of bitter reproach 
 they appear in this life-poem of Goethe sink- 
 ing under the burden of a curse, which it was 
 their supreme call to mitigate or even to make 
 undone, but they could not. They were not 
 Iphigenias, lofty mediatorial characters of 
 women able to lift the doom of evil from the 
 House of Tantalus. Rather they begot it 
 anew and sent it on down time through their 
 progeny, such a baleful maternity was theirs, 
 yet sprung of their deeds. It should be noted 
 (to avoid confusion) that this real living 
 Ottilia, the Tantalid of Goethe's own house- 
 hold, is a very different character from his 
 ideal Ottilia, the saint of his Elective Affini- 
 ties. 
 
 Still our interest somehow will turn back 
 to the son, August Goethe and query: How 
 can he, surely fated in this environment, es- 
 cape from the outstretching clutch of Neme- 
 sis which he has given more than one evi- 
 dence of having forefelt and even foreseen! 
 Has he the inner strength to reconstruct his 
 own world and live in that, having freed him- 
 
550 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 self from the ever-pursuing Furies of his fa- 
 ther's transgression? Again the sympa- 
 thetic spectator of his lowering lot cannot 
 help crying out to him through all space and 
 time: "Flee, flee, young man, leave Ger- 
 many, leave Europe, get out of the all-encom- 
 passing soul-crushing shadow of thy great 
 parent; go to the future, to America whither 
 the tide of Europe-transcending migration is 
 now setting in, even to the Mississippi. 
 There thou canst build thy life over in free- 
 dom and make it thine, unoppressed by the 
 hugest fame in thine old Fatherland. Take 
 thy heart's choice, thy folk-girl along; change 
 thy name to hers if need be, too much papa 
 thou hast here in Weimar and always wilt 
 have; get rid of pedigree, aristocracy, kin- 
 ship, with its damnation ; cut down thy genea- 
 logical tree to the last root, be a self-sufiV 
 cient man on the free prairies of Illinois 
 whither many of thy countrymen have gone 
 and more will yet 'go; there thou canst dare 
 the Fates of thy Tantalian family to the ut- 
 termost." 
 
 Will he hearken to the urgent whisper of 
 the Upper Powers ! For he must have heard 
 it, since it was rife in Germany at the time. 
 Goethe himself has noted it already in his 
 Meister. And it is some forty years since 
 that the poet's daring sweetheart, little Lili, 
 
 i? 
 
THE NEW HOUSE OF TANTALUS. 551 
 
 challenged him to flee with her to America 
 away from domestic and social obstacles to 
 their union, but he backed down. And so now 
 August Goethe lets his father practically 
 select his uncongenial but aristocratic bride, 
 and thus determine his destiny as a Tantalid. 
 Hapless son! once it was too much mother 
 till her death removed the ever-present re- 
 minder of his birth's stigma; now it is too 
 much father driving him to the renascence of 
 the House of Tantalus, and the second more 
 terrible enactment of its tragic doom. Alas ! 
 he too was no Fate-compeller, and so at the 
 most important node of his life he gave up 
 his man-renewing will, drooping down into a 
 wretched second Tantalus. 
 
 Let us now picture the hero of this life- 
 poem, our Goethe for he is a hero in an al- 
 together new line of heroism standing erect 
 amid his unheroic family, Tantalus overtow- 
 ering his four Tantalids, whose doom he had 
 already forefelt and even foretold what can 
 he do? Like a poor fated mortal will he 
 cower down a coward before the nemesis of 
 his own deed, and slink away silently into his 
 grave? Not at all; on the contrary he will 
 love again, and be rejuvenated and recreated 
 to a fresh masterful productivity, the new 
 hero of his own new Iliad. So behold once 
 more the grand regenerating metamorphosis 
 
552 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 of his poetic soul; the old bowed-down Fate- 
 spent Tantalus leaps up at the push of his 
 elemental passion, and is re-born as youthful 
 Phileros, the lover of Love singing and en- 
 acting his own renewed creation. 
 
ULRIKE VON LEVETZOW. 553 
 
 CHAPTER NINTH. 
 
 ULRIKE VON LEVETZOW. 
 
 ' ' What ! another crisis of love ! And more 
 desperate than ever ! and the poet in his 75th 
 year!" So exclaims the appalled reader at 
 the upburst of this new turn in Goethe's pas- 
 sion-tossed career. Indeed it would almost 
 seem as if this was the hardest wrench of his 
 life in downright agony of heart. Dare we 
 suppose that his emotional nature, being 
 somewhat crystallized by old-age, when the 
 inner earthquake heaved it up to the sur- 
 face, was shivered to poetical fragments of 
 which he succeeded in putting together a few 
 choice gems in his famous Trilogy of Pas- 
 sion? Certainly no occurrence in the sur- 
 prise-freighted story of his days has caused 
 so much gossipy wonder, varying from scorn 
 to sympathy. It has undoubtedly a comic 
 side, almost grotesque, especially to those not 
 so old as he was. Goethe was then unmar- 
 ried, a free ranger in love's demesnes; but 
 look at his silvered hair, his corrugated face, 
 his senile stoop ! Then consider his colossal 
 fame upreared in massive deeds of Genius 
 what a unique node of his personality! 
 For Goethe was, in this act, still true to him- 
 
554 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 self; he was still Phileros, even if the gray 
 Phileros, enacting the last real love-drama 
 of his life with his primordial demonic power. 
 We shall see that he connects this experience 
 with his Werther, as if interlinking last and 
 first in one great cycle of his heart's deepest 
 utterances. 
 
 The fair maiden who was the cause of such 
 a mighty overflow of his soul's inner reser- 
 voir of passion, was Ulrike Von Levetzow, 
 whom the poet in his double superlative mood 
 declared "the loveliest of the loveliest 
 shapes." At the watering-place Marienbad 
 lay the scene; the hidden emotion had been 
 intensifying for several summers till at last 
 in 1823 it broke forth with a volcanic energy, 
 and all the idle tongues in such a resort went 
 to wagging upon the future marriage. The 
 young lady was still prattling in her teens; 
 Goethe was hurrying dangerously upward in 
 the seventies. Faithful Eckermann has left 
 us this haunting picture evidently drawn 
 after the lover's own sketch: whenever he 
 would hear her girlish voice outside, but not 
 far from his window, ' ' he would at once seize 
 his hat and hasten to her presence ; he never 
 missed an hour which, he could pass at her 
 side, and thus he lived happy days, till the 
 painful parting came upon which he made a 
 very beautiful poem. ' ' 
 
ULRIKE VON LEVETZOW. 555 
 
 One report is that Goethe himself asked 
 the mother for the daughter's hand in mar- 
 riage; others say that this ticklish duty was 
 undertaken for him by the ever-friendly 
 Duke of Weimar in person who happened to 
 be on the spot at the right moment. The out- 
 come, however, was that the mother in the 
 very nick of the crisis, bundled up her 
 daughter, and secretly took to flight from the 
 watering-place which was all agog at the 
 spectacle. And that mother, now a widow 
 with three daughters, had been known to 
 Goethe in her younger days and had been se- 
 lected by him as the best representative of 
 his Pandora. This was back in 1806. Pos- 
 terity will always wonder why he did not take 
 to the mother who was still young enough to 
 be easily his child, and was a favorite of his 
 during many years. Too old, thinks the ever- 
 youthful poet, and passes her by so that it 
 seems possible that her resentment may have 
 had a part in the drama. But Phileros has 
 dropped back some fifty years to Werther's 
 time and is completely rejuvenescent through 
 love ; indeed Phileros properly knows no age. 
 So he must have youth as his right counter- 
 part, whatever the grumbling years may 
 say. 
 
 At any rate Goethe had again to be re- 
 signed at the defeat of his dearest hope. The 
 
556 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 result was another journey through the dark 
 valley of renunciation, in which he was al- 
 most torn to pieces by his eagle-clawed re- 
 surgences of emotion. But he emerges once 
 more with a fresh vitality; indeed after pass- 
 ing through the crushing discipline of love 
 he appears to be endowed with a young 
 creative energy. We have repeatedly no- 
 ticed the fact : at certain intervals of life he 
 is dipped by the Powers' into the original 
 fountain of regenerating love, whereby he 
 comes forth new-born with a fresh lease of 
 elemental creativity, out of which spring new 
 forms of his genius. So it happens that after 
 this fiery ordeal which seems to reach down 
 to primal creation, and to recreate his age- 
 ing energy, he starts with youthful vigor to 
 complete the greatest and most elaborate 
 works of his life, among which are his Faust, 
 his Meister, and his Autobiography, not to 
 speak of many minor activities. It is, how- 
 ever, the last Epoch of his long career, he is 
 now on the home-stretch of his final Period, 
 which will yet continue nearly another decen- 
 nium. 
 
 If we carefully compare and weigh the 
 three or four years before the Epoch of Ul- 
 rike, we shall find that the poet appears on 
 the wane, he seems to be settling into the 
 natural quiescence of age, as if he were get- 
 
ULRIKE VON LEVETZOW. 557 
 
 ting ready for the close. He is putting his 
 literary house in order, that he may perma- 
 nently depart. He began (1819) his Annals, 
 some brief jottings of his past days; he hur- 
 riedly patched together his novel The Jour- 
 neymanship , and published it, though incom- 
 plete; with the new lease of years which he 
 did not then foresee, he will take it up again, 
 renovate it and finish it. Poetically he flung 
 off an occasional lyric, not his best by any 
 means, and spat out many a pungent little 
 epigram, often very keen and suggestive, 
 which we may track down through many 
 moods and times under the title of his Tame 
 Xenia. He still flees to Natural Science, his 
 Achillean tent in which he sulks over his 
 lack of appreciation, and damns with unction 
 the regulars of the scientific guild, the. Pro- 
 fessors. 
 
 Also during these ominous years the do- 
 mestic tragedy threading through his life 
 grows deeper and more lowering; the mar- 
 riage of his son which he hoped might avert 
 Fate, threatens to hasten it and to make it 
 more terrible. Husband and wife have found 
 themselves totally unfitted for each other, 
 and uncongeniality reaches down to the In- 
 ferno of a mutual curse. August Goethe 
 helps himself out through drink and strange 
 women and the wife takes her way of getting 
 
558 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 even. The unhappy father has often to run 
 from his own house in order to find some 
 peace and to gain a little composure to do 
 his work in the world which was his way of 
 saying his prayers. No wonder he felt the 
 end of himself drawing near in his family's 
 cataclysm. It was in 1819 that he published 
 his Divan, and snuffed out in printer's ink 
 the last flickerings of his last love for Mari- 
 anne Willemer. Now what is he going to do ? 
 For Goethe's genius stumbled and writhed 
 in outer darkness without the love of woman. 
 He once exclaimed in humorous despair: 
 "Nobody in love with me, I with nobody in 
 love:" which may sound comic to you and 
 me, but to Phileros it meant the extinction of 
 his creative soul, if not of life itself. 
 
 But now upon the aged poet thus descend- 
 ing life's declivity into the gloom of Erebus, 
 suddenly darts the shining shape of UJrike, 
 "the loveliest of loveliest shapes." The 
 dawn of another youthful passion drives 
 away the clouds, at once senescence begins to 
 transmute itself into juvenescence, and a re- 
 newed genetic energy starts to recall his 
 eclipsed if not dying spirit from its depths. 
 Love, the creative might of the Cosmos, has 
 tapped afresh the sources of his Genius and 
 set them to flowing once more in sun-lit ebul- 
 lience of poetry. For his love possesses the 
 
.* 
 
 ULRIKE VON LEVETZOW. 559 
 
 original power of recreating the old man 
 both mentally and physically, so that he sets 
 forth again to grapple with his colossal task 
 of working out fully his total life-poem, since 
 it is not yet complete. But the transition 
 cannot be made without shaking up the old 
 framework and re-incarnating it with fresh 
 life responsive to the new birth of his Genius. 
 He almost went to pieces in the process of 
 renewal. One is reminded of the fabled 
 daughters of Pelias who cut up their aged 
 father's body, and throwing the slices into 
 a cauldron of hot water, sought to boil the 
 years out of his tottering flesh and thus re- 
 store him to youth. Maiden Ulrike, uncon- 
 scious of her dower, put the old poet through 
 some such seething process, painful within 
 an inch of death, but the result followed that 
 he survived and was made over into a new 
 Epoch of his Genius, even if the last. 
 
 Thus it comes that our Phileros, the lover 
 of Love, has again to renounce that which 
 constitutes the very essence of his individu- 
 ality and to recover himself for his grand pos- 
 itive achievement which is to wind up to a 
 full finish his long and varied career. We 
 may recollect that this Period the third 
 opened with the preluding passion of the poet 
 for Minna Herzlieb, who also stirred his 
 production to a many-sided utterance, and 
 
560 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 whom he likewise had to renounce after suf- 
 fering for years from a bleeding heart 
 ' 'which is afraid to get well." He at that 
 time hovered about the age of sixty years, 
 and was bonded legally to a wife, who, how- 
 ever, in her physical and mental decadence, 
 possessed not the least power of rousing his 
 Genius from its torpid emotional sources to 
 creative activity. Goethe was husband to 
 Christiane, Phileros was not, and never 
 could be. That was the fatal dualism rend- 
 ing his life atwain, and making him a living 
 Tantalus, and dooming even his children's 
 children to be Tantalids shent with tragic 
 destiny. 
 
 Another reflection concerning our Phileros 
 rises in the present connection: this is the 
 last of his elemental or cosmic loves which 
 had the power of penetrating to the very 
 center of his being, perchance of all being, 
 and from thence making him over, renewing 
 if not re-creating his original personality. 
 He is still Goethe, yet different from any pre- 
 vious form of his selfhood. Undoubtedly he 
 now harks back to his past, recalling himself 
 and even repeating himself; still the repeti- 
 tion undergoes a unique change of signifi- 
 cance when shifted from life 's prelude to the 
 finale. According to our view he renounces 
 many other things in this last Epoch besides 
 
ULRIKE VON LEVETZOW. 561 
 
 the love of Ulrike. His literary form is not 
 the same, his poetical creed undergoes a 
 transmutation, his world-view takes a new 
 tinge, if not a new article of faith*, his atti- 
 tude toward man and the universe shows a 
 fresh evolution. The renunciation of that 
 last love overwrought his whole existence. 
 Still he is Goethe, but Goethe reviewing Goe- 
 the, making his life whole, and universaliz- 
 ing all his multitudinous work into a total 
 life-poem ere he quits the terrestrial scene. 
 
 Renunciation as immediate, taken simply 
 hy itself is a negative act which is to get out 
 of itself and rise to a positive doing. * ' Sep- 
 aration is death, " cries the poet in his first 
 agony; still he separates from Ulrike and 
 lives; he renounces her and then renounces 
 his renunciation, and mounts higher. That 
 love for just the one here and now he has to 
 give up, but he transfigures it into an univer- 
 sal love, which is a consecrated service to 
 man. Such a deep undertone we can hear 
 throbbing through his later labors, even if 
 there be relapses. This we may well deem 
 the final discipline of Phileros, after a very 
 chequered career, which we have followed 
 from its first sensuous outburst to its uni- 
 versal human service. 
 
 It remains to take a few brief glimpses of 
 the leading works which are strown along 
 
562 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEMPART THIRD. 
 
 this final turn of the poet's life-cycle. Some 
 ten years we may reckon its duration, from 
 the first tick on the horologe of love at Mari- 
 enbad to the expiring breath of the aged lover 
 in his Weimar home. An Epoch of rejuve- 
 nant activity and unique productive great- 
 ness it is for us, though often decried as a 
 time of mental decay and poetic senility, es- 
 pecially by younger biographers and critics. 
 But we shall treat it as a right integral part 
 of the one great poem which, we hold, Goe- 
 the not only wrote but lived. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Trilogy of Passion. 
 
 The immediate utterance of the poet's 
 heart-break in the affair of Ulrike bears the 
 foregoing title. The poem designs to give 
 the primal round of his intense experience in 
 all its concentration of passion. A very fa- 
 mous piece of work it is ; it flows molten from 
 the heart at white heat, as if forged in the 
 central fires of existence. It is worthy of 
 earnest notice not only for its intrinsic merit, 
 but also as being germinal of the present Ep- 
 och, the brief yet volcanic overture of the 
 coming poetical Decennium. 
 
 From what has been said, the poem will 
 
THE TRILOGY OF PASSION. 563 
 
 not let itself be read easily ; its purport can- 
 not be picked up from the surface and lightly 
 filliped off by the average newspaper glance. 
 You have to fling yourself into its fiery fur- 
 nace and glow with its passion a thing not 
 to be done off-hand at any minute. The poem 
 is not a long one, yet quite long enough for 
 such a trying ordeal; otherwise the reader 
 would not hold out. But so much he must 
 stand if he would understand Goethe. As 
 the name indicates, the poem has three parts, 
 each of which may be touched upon briefly. 
 
 I. The superscription of the first part is 
 addressed To Werther. Thus the old poet 
 connects himself with his first love-hero, 
 reaching back some fifty years or more. He 
 conjures up the ghost of tragic Werther and 
 makes it walk the earth again in company 
 with himself who has just had another such 
 experience. Moreover it should be noted 
 that the same recurrence of Werther 's spirit 
 has taken place several times within the in- 
 tervening half century. But Phileros here 
 interlinks his earliest and his latest epochal 
 loves, and in a pensive vein forebodes this to 
 be the final round-up of his love-life. 
 
 Tell what is the central fact of this long 
 discipline as soon as possible. Here it is: 
 "The fascination of woman's form seizes us 
 with violence, " and this violence like the 
 
564 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 earthquake is elemental, original in Nature 
 herself, and may destroy the man as in Wer- 
 ther's case. But not in Goethe's case, for he 
 has the mediatorial gift of expressing his 
 pain and thus getting rid of it ere Fate 
 whelms him under. Such is his God-given 
 mastery of utterance which rescues him from 
 the tragic backstroke of his own overpower- 
 ing love. Just that was what saved him from 
 Werther's lot long ago and is to save him 
 now. 
 
 The poet gives a brief review of his stormy 
 and stressful youth, and his escape from the 
 crushing blow of love 's last farewell, whereat 
 the phantom indulges in a ghostly smile, 
 seemingly the smile of a superior des- 
 tiny.' Then we hear the agonizing out- 
 cry: "Separation is death !" No, it is 
 not death for Goethe and never has been 
 in youth, middle life, or. old age : listen to his 
 strain which sings the deepest discord of his 
 nature out of his days, which can again be- 
 come free and creative and thus mediatorial 
 for those smitten by a like blow of destiny. 
 At last we may hear the preluding note of 
 triumph in the distich: 
 
 How touching is it when the poet sings, 
 
 That he may shun the death which parting 
 brings. 
 
 II. The second part is entitled simply 
 
THE TRILOGY OF PASSION. 565 
 
 Elegy, but it is very different in mood and 
 poetic form from the sensuous exuberance of 
 the Roman Elegies already considered. We 
 hear now the rhymed music of a deep inter- 
 nality, and see no longer the outer plastic im- 
 age moving to classical measures. The clear 
 Greek world has sunk into modern subjectiv- 
 ity, which paints itself in all the colors of the 
 rainbow, yet with a glowing intensity which 
 burns. Let the prefixed motto be first pon- 
 dered, in which Goethe cites himself, express- 
 ing a thought which he evidently deemed the 
 key of his whole literary career : his poetical 
 gift of utterance is God-sent, and is his re- 
 demption from his deepest sorrows, even 
 from what might be otherwise for him the 
 tragedy of life. 
 
 This Elegy is the longest part of the Tril- 
 ogy (23 stanzas of six lines each) and gives 
 in general the sweetest yet fiercest discipline 
 of love which he, now looking backward in 
 reminiscence, has passed through with Ul- 
 rike. Here appears the double wrench which 
 makes him cry out at the start in the first 
 verse : "Paradise, Hell gape open for thee," 
 that is, for himself. But soon love trans- 
 lated him to its Heaven: "No wish, no hope, 
 no longing remained unfulfilled, " he had 
 reached the stage of absolute triumph over 
 finite existence in communion with this in- 
 
566 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 carnation of ' l eternal beauty. ' ' Then his ec- 
 stacy throbs into particular memories, espe- 
 cially recalling the kisses, of which "the last 
 one, brutally sweet " snipped atwain "the 
 glorious network of intertwined loves. ' ' Now 
 what! Our poor Adam looks back helpless 
 "as if driven from his Paradise by a Cherub 
 flaming," and the gates are locked, while his 
 heart smites enthralled to the following list 
 of demonic companions: "Melancholy, re- 
 morse, self-reproach and crushing anxiety*; " 
 so he names the infernal pack of hell-hounds 
 that are snapping at his soul. Such is the 
 sharp counterstroke which the old man feels 
 for his indulgence in a young love, which 
 surely will not be without its penalty. Thus 
 the poet gives a peep into his inner reaction 
 after the raptures of his intoxication. Still 
 he recovers at the memory of "that last 
 kiss;" nay, it seems that there was still an- 
 other kiss after the very last one, "which she 
 pressed upon my lips." In general, what an 
 everlasting kisser was Goethe, certainly all 
 through his poetry, and doubtless in reality ! 
 Happy man ! he was not troubled by the mod- 
 ern compunction about the kiss that it is un- 
 hygienic. Thus Phileros portrays his dip in- 
 to the fountain of love to the very bottom, 
 and his resignation to its honeyed parox- 
 ysms. 
 
THE TRILOGY OF PASSION. 567 
 
 But now for the other side he rises out 
 of this baptismal ordeal to a renovation of 
 his will, to the quick deed, to new reso- 
 lutions and fresh enterprises "when love 
 spiritualizes the lover. " Moreover, "hope 
 dawns again " and he is ready to face life with 
 a renewed youthful energy. So Goethe was 
 conscious of this reproductive power of an 
 elemental love over his spirit. He could not 
 control its coming, it was upon him ere he 
 fully knew it ; something transcendent it was 
 which he had to accept and to pass through 
 as a supernal visitation. Blame him if you 
 will, we have seen that he blamed himself, 
 for what else mean those throes of "remorse 
 and self -reproach 1" Still he refused to sink 
 back resignedly into a deedless self-tritura- 
 tion even of conscience, which is simply de- 
 structive, but rose to a higher constructive 
 energy till the very going-down of his octo- 
 genarian sun. Therein verily lies his evangel 
 and his prophecy unto the future. 
 
 To a still loftier height does the poet bear 
 upward his experience of this love : it brought 
 him the peace of God, which he felt "in the 
 presence of the all-loved being," the sense 
 of union with her, "of belonging to her," 
 lay deepest in his heart and joined him with 
 divinity; "in a higher, purer, unknown, un- 
 named One, I am a participant when I stand 
 
568 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM PART THIRD. 
 
 before her." So the loved Ulrike becomes a 
 mediator of the old poet with his God, and he 
 actually turns pious he uses the very word 
 while "all Egoism melts away;" and our 
 Mephistopheles renounces "selfishness and 
 willfulness" in the glance of this regenerat- 
 ing love. Such is the topmost height of the 
 poem which preludes the key-note of his last 
 Epoch now forthcoming. Still he has an- 
 other relapse when he thinks of the separa- 
 tion ; he wilts down again to a swooning away 
 of resolution and will until "life and death 
 grapple each other in furious combat ; " he is 
 scourged hither and thither by "an irresist- 
 ible longing, there remains no counsel for 
 him but infinite tears." In this state he cries 
 out: "To me the All is lost I am lost to 
 myself I who was once the darling of the 
 Gods," who, however, have driven him 
 through this hard trial to the highest exer- 
 cise of Genius, to his self-utterance in po- 
 etry. 
 
 III. To this central poem there is an ap- 
 pendage which is called Reconciliation, and 
 which celebrates the soothing power of mu- 
 sic over the passion-torn heart, even hinting 
 the divinely mediatorial value of harmonious 
 tones as well as of tears. This is the poet's 
 homage to the piano-playing of Madam Szy- 
 manowska, a Polish lady whose musical skill 
 
THE TRILOGY OF PASSION. 569 
 
 made a deep impression upon Goethe at Ma- 
 rienbad, sensitive as he then was to the mar- 
 riage of sweet sounds. But it would seem 
 that his tender feelings afterward overflowed 
 not only to the music but to the musician ; so 
 he is understood to intimate in the last verse 
 in which "the lightened heart thankfully of- 
 fers itself in return for an oblation so rich." 
 Why not? The awful chasm caused by sepa- 
 ration must be filled or at least bridged by 
 another attachment, "and thus is felt the 
 double bliss of love and music." 
 
 The reconciling Polish pianist with her 
 sister followed Goethe to Weimar, doubt- 
 less through an invitation, but very willingly. 
 It happens that reporter Miiller has left a 
 record of that time, and fails not to let us 
 see that Goethe manifested "the double bliss 
 of music and love" in her presence repeat- 
 edly. But it was not an elemental soul- 
 searching love like that for Ulrike, rather 
 was it a reminder or a re-echoing of that, a 
 temporary relieving substitute. When the 
 last parting from the Polish ladies took place, 
 Goethe tried to be merry and humorous. But, 
 says our reporter, all his forced fun was in 
 vain, "the tears streamed forth, speechless 
 he embraced her with the sister, and his look 
 followed her a long time till she disap- 
 peared." That night he was prostrated by 
 
570 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 a severe life-storming illness, from which he 
 slowly recovered. The question will come 
 up, how about the pianist on her side, for 
 she too must have had a heart as well as lips. 
 Old Zelter herein furnishes a clew from Ber- 
 lin where Madam Szymanowska had given 
 two concerts with success, and had paid him 
 a visit. So he writes to Goethe: "She is 
 madly in love with you, and has sent to you 
 a hundred kisses upon my mouth." (Not 
 cited by any other biographer of Goethe 
 within our reach except the lynx-eyed Jesuit 
 Pater, Baumgartner, who, though a vowed 
 celibate, very dutifully and zestfully records 
 in detail Goethe's love-scenes.) 
 
 II. 
 
 Wilhelm Meister's Journey mansliip. 
 
 The title of this book in the original is 
 Wanderjahre, usually translated into Eng- 
 lish by the word Travels, which is vague and 
 not strictly pertinent, even if it has the high 
 sanction of Thomas Carlyle. The work is 
 the counterpart both in name and thought to 
 the Lehrjahre or Apprenticeship, with which 
 it is co-ordinate in a greater whole, and the 
 designation should not fail to indicate such 
 
WILHELM M BISTER'S JOURNEYMANSHIP. 571 
 
 a purport. Hence we altogether prefer the 
 corresponding English term Journeyman- 
 ship, which suggests life's workman who 
 wishes to become master in the supreme art 
 of living, and who must pass through the 
 present stage in due order. And the name 
 of the leading character which designates 
 also the book is Wilhelm Meister, in English 
 William Master, who is supposed to be in 
 pursuit of his highest self as worthily real- 
 ized, that is, in pursuit of mastery both in 
 his inner world and in his outer vocation. 
 Thus he, just through his calling, however 
 humble it may be, is to rise to the all-rounded 
 man, whose completeness is to be reflected in 
 those three stages of his artisanship the 
 apprentice, the journeyman, and the master. 
 And it should be added that these three 
 stages are interwrought into one great to- 
 tality of human development, which is ulti- 
 mately the creation of the soul's very proc- 
 ess, and hence is to be grasped finally as psy- 
 chical. 
 
 It is true that Goethe does not carry the 
 matter as far back as that. He is the poet 
 who works instinctively, and presents what is 
 immediate; still he is also profoundly re- 
 flective in this book, and throws many a 
 glance into the last depths. It is, however, 
 to be noted that Goethe never wrote the third 
 
572 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 part of the grand evolution, namely the Mas- 
 tership of William Master, in which the un- 
 heroic hero realizes himself fully in his voca- 
 tion and in his world, rounding out to com- 
 pleteness his life's whole experience, and 
 making himself an image of the All. Yet our 
 author knows of this final part and in two or 
 three passages he seems to give some prom- 
 ise that he intends such a continuation. But 
 he was 80 years old when he brought to an 
 end this second arc of Meister 's cycle, and he 
 must have forefelt that his own last arc 
 would soon close. Besides, he had still an- 
 other even more imperative task to perform 
 in the completion of his Faust. 
 
 Nevertheless we cannot forbear the reflec- 
 tion that Goethe did actually finish the Mas- 
 tership of the Master (so he was and still is 
 often called) in the total round of his career. 
 His biography should not fail to give the 
 third part of the Master which he lived out 
 if he did not fully write out. We are now 
 engaged in contemplating the final Period of 
 the poet, which is the revelation of his com- 
 pleted Mastership in which he attains the 
 serenity and wisdom of age, after the volcanic 
 upheavals of his youthful Apprenticeship, 
 and the lofty, wonder-working productivity 
 of his mid-life 's Journeymanship. In the two 
 parts of this Novel we may catch the outlines 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S JOURNEYMANSHIP. 573 
 
 of an universal Biography, even if the final 
 inter-connecting link be wanting. Possibly 
 Goethe intended to let the reader find it pre- 
 figured in several characters of the present 
 J ourneymansliip , such as Makaria the celes- 
 tial seeress, and the nameless mysterious 
 wise-man (Book I, Chap. 12). Also many 
 fragmentary incidents appear to gleam for- 
 ward to some fulfilment ; productive industry 
 and emigration flash upon us rather as proph- 
 ecies of a new order yet to be realized, while 
 the repeated outlooks upon the New World, 
 our America, which are so characteristic of 
 this novel, seem to foreshadow another stage 
 of History, and another institutional order 
 transcending the European. All of which 
 glances the poet throws upon Meister's po- 
 tential Third Part. 
 
 The dominant note of the J ourneymansliip 
 is education, and the remedial power which 
 it shows for saving both the individual and 
 society. The Novel opens with Wilhelm giv- 
 ing some very elementary instruction on Na- 
 ture to his boy Felix; then both the father 
 and son are put under training through a 
 long line of formative experiences, which 
 constitute the content of the work. Then in 
 the last chapter, Wilhelm having acquired a 
 special vocation, that of surgery, saves the 
 life of his boy an act of significant symbol- 
 
574 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 ism doubtless intended by the poet. Thus 
 the sweep of the book hovers between educa- 
 tion and salvation as prelude and epilogue. 
 And the first lesson of the first page is an 
 object-lesson on a stone picked up by the boy, 
 as if the parental teacher had just come from 
 the school of Pestalozzi. 
 
 During the composition of this Novel, and 
 indeed during Goethe's entire life, education 
 was in the air, and had become in Germany 
 an object of national striving. He had been 
 in his young manhood thrown with that 
 strange pedagogical reformer Basedow, of 
 whom he gives a humorous description, but 
 whose educational ideas struck root in his 
 career. It was, however, the Swiss educator, 
 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who developed 
 the movement for popular education which 
 makes his name the greatest in this field. 
 Goethe had met him and had been addressed 
 by him in an urgent appeal for sympathy in 
 his work. Nor must we forget the second 
 greatest influence in modern education, Fried- 
 rich Froebel, with his gospel of the little 
 child. Froebel came from near-by Thurin- 
 gia, and attended the University of Jena 
 where he must have often seen its chief pro- 
 moter, the poet from Weimar. But the in- 
 terest began to break over national bounds. 
 Pestalozzi 's school especially, the one at 
 
WILHELM MEISTER' S JOURNEYMANSHIP. 575 
 
 Yverdon, became a center where inspecting 
 visitors could be seen not only from every 
 part of Europe, but America also furnished 
 its contingent. Thus the education of the 
 people had become an universal aspiration, 
 manifesting itself in the best souls of the 
 time. Hence we may see that the universal 
 poet of the period tapped the deepest ten- 
 dency not only of his own people but of all 
 forward nations in the Novel of Wilhelm 
 Meister, which is essentially educational in 
 both parts. 
 
 Still Goethe, in order to perform his far- 
 thest-reaching world-literary achievement 
 had also to have an immediate, personal push 
 from his own environment. Everything 
 which he wrote took its rise in his direct ex- 
 perience. He had to be living what he was 
 writing. Accordingly, the fact which most 
 intimately connects the author with his 
 book is that he had, during these earlier years 
 of composing Meister, a young son to edu- 
 cate. Hence the anxious father was inces- 
 santly pondering the problem: "What am 
 I to do with this boy of mine! How can I 
 train him to perform best his part in the 
 world, and to fill his place in the social or- 
 der?" The problem starts up decisively 
 when Meister finds, in the Apprenticeship 
 that Felix is his child, and it streams all the 
 
576 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 way through the J ourneymanship from the 
 first point to the finishing. 
 
 To be sure the parent is to get his disci- 
 pline likewise in the training of his son. He 
 learns as much from his boy as the latter from 
 him. Meister himself is not yet educated, he 
 is still to acquire life's highest discipline. 
 Hence there is a double educational thread 
 spun through the Journeymanship, quite as 
 we see in the Odyssey that father Ulysses 
 and son Telemachus are each getting his 
 training in accord with his environment and 
 the needs of his years. The wandering pa- 
 rent Wilhelm, wandering so long not only 
 physically, but mentally, is brought to con- 
 centrate upon a vocation ; while the boy Felix 
 must be inducted into his spiritual heritage 
 transmitted to him by time through educa- 
 tion. A double rescue, therefore, we may 
 note at the conclusion of the novel. 
 
 We must not fail to put stress upon the 
 most striking link of personal connection 
 with Goethe. Felix is the natural son of 
 Meister, whom the latter discovers by a curi- 
 ous chance when the boy is already a roister- 
 ing youngster in need of his first lessons. In- 
 evitably comes up to the reader Goethe's son 
 August, also born out of wedlock, and now 
 sorely requiring a right instruction. The lad 
 some seven or eight years old must have 
 
WILHELM MEISTER'S JOURNEYMANSHIP. 577 
 
 often intruded upon his father's study while 
 the latter was writing the last books of the 
 Apprenticeship, which already in 1796 he 
 feels must have a second part for the sake of 
 the boy as well as of himself. He makes va- 
 rious later attempts to complete it; in 1807 
 and in 1810 he works at it, but it refuses to 
 get itself done. For the growth cannot be 
 forced, it has at last to write itself from his 
 own experience which is not yet ripe. He 
 has to wait particularly for the son to evolve 
 through training into character that he may 
 see the fruit. 
 
 But we are to scan carefully the grand ob- 
 stacle. There is an established educational 
 order but the boy cannot share in that. If he 
 were sent to the Public School with other 
 lads, what would he not hear about his birth 
 and his mother in every little squabble? 
 August Goethe had to have his private 
 teacher at home, cut off from the associates 
 of his time of life. But for Felix the poet 
 creates a peculiar pedagogical institute where 
 his origin is not known, to which his father 
 brings him. He must be trained to live in an 
 institutional order outside of which he was 
 born. Such is the living contradiction which 
 the parent has brought into existence in his 
 most loved human being and which he tries 
 to solve through education. The result is 
 
578 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 that we can feel all the throbs of Goethe's 
 heart, all the anxieties for his irregular son, 
 all the turns of his educational planning in 
 Wilhelm 's love and labor with Felix. We may 
 well see in it his desperate effort to ward off 
 the tragic consequences of his deed. In the 
 Novel the son Felix is saved, but in the hard 
 reality of life the son August perishes. 
 
 In such way we have to bring before us 
 the most intimate and searching problem of 
 Goethe's entire Second Period during which 
 his only surviving child was to be educated. 
 The mother in this sphere does not count ex- 
 cept possibly as a disturber, for she had the 
 name of coddling and spoiling her boy dread- 
 fully, to which Goethe himself showed a ten- 
 dency. Christiane possessed the least edu- 
 cation, and drew a weak bridle on her im- 
 pulse. School boys are the greatest teasers 
 and even persecutors in the world; and Au- 
 gust venturing among his playmates, could 
 not help hearing that ugly word Bastard, and 
 an even more humiliating well-known Shakes- 
 pearean epithet applied to his mother. In 
 these boys we may well see the institution 
 wreaking its penalty upon the parents who 
 had violated it and persisted in their viola- 
 tion. But the wretched innocent offspring 
 has to suffer and is tragic. 
 
 Thus we may fully understand that Goe- 
 
THE PASSING OF GOETHE'S SON. 579 
 
 the writes this educational Novel from his 
 own nethermost experience. He also gets to 
 seeing that all literature, whatever be the 
 form, is in its ultimate goal, educative, and 
 belongs to the universal Institute of Educa- 
 tion, whose supreme function is to reproduce 
 in every born soul the institutional world in 
 which it has to live. But here is a child born 
 uninstitutionally; how is he to be rescued 
 from the negation involved in his very ex- 
 istence? To be sure Goethe did at last le- 
 gally marry Christiane; but the evil was 
 done, even if the son looked on, being then 
 over sixteen years old, "with great delight, " 
 it is said, for he had already felt the Hell of 
 his origin. Still he did not and could not es- 
 cape from it. In the Novel the illegitimate 
 son is called Felix who is the happy, and the 
 happy-making boy; but August was the un- 
 happy one both in relation to himself and to 
 his father, verily the Infelix. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Passing of Goethe's Son. 
 
 We have already noted that through Goe- 
 the's life-poem written out in multitudinous 
 forms runs also a life-tragedy unwritten by 
 him, but enacted during more than forty 
 
580 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 years in many a scene which rouses the tragic 
 catharsis of fear and pity. That son of his, 
 born out of wedlock, then legitimated, finally 
 married, and becoming himself the father of 
 a family, perished at Rome, on the very spot 
 where his own father broke through institu- 
 tional restraint, and lived the life of a Ti- 
 tan defiant of the world's social order. This 
 defiance he carried back with him to Weimar, 
 and one of his first actions, after his return 
 from Italy was to establish his free life of 
 Eome in his relation to the humble maiden 
 Christiane, utterly regardless of the age- 
 honored prescription of the Family. In due 
 time a son was born an outcast from the es- 
 tablished society around him without any 
 fault of his own, but assuredly with the fault 
 of the father, and to a less degree of the 
 mother. Thus the poor boy was from the 
 start the child not merely of a sudden up- 
 burst of secret passion, but of a long-con- 
 tinued deliberate open transgression against 
 man's primal institution, the domestic. He 
 was deprived of his primordial human right, 
 that of being born, not as an animal in the 
 wilds but as person in a society which would 
 recognize him as one of its own. 
 
 August Goethe started for Italy with Eck- 
 ermann in April, 1830. The environment of 
 Weimar had become unendurable, and he had 
 
THE PASSING OF GOETHE'S SON. 581 
 
 resolved to break loose, cost what it may. 
 As his father and his grandfather had gone 
 to Italy at an epochal time of their lives, so 
 he fell upon the same idea. He had not re- 
 deemed the blot on his escutcheon by worthy 
 deeds; such a manful fight with his fate lay 
 not in him. The consequence was that in a 
 kind of despair he had resigned himself to 
 inherited tendencies, coming through both 
 father and mother, chief of which were 
 drunkenness and lechery. Thus he had 
 helped to build his own Inferno in addition 
 to the transmitted one from his parents. His 
 utter decadence was whispered through all 
 Weimar, and must have been well known to 
 his father, as it was to his wife Ottilia, who 
 did not fail to let her protests be heard. A 
 most unhappy disrupted household was the 
 result from which the aged poet often fled for 
 peace and work. But in the deepest soul of 
 him he must have felt that the awful situa- 
 tion involving himself and his posterity 
 sprang from his deed, the curse was coming 
 back. Still it is remarkable how silent his 
 lip and pen, so often his confessional, kept 
 upon this theme, the tragedy of all Goethe's 
 tragedies. Perhaps, however, here and there 
 we may catch up a word pulsing uncon- 
 trolledly out of his heart. One report comes 
 down that over the death of his son he broke 
 
582 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 out in the midst of a conversation: "When 
 he went away, I gave him up as lost;" then 
 he dismissed the company. There is little 
 doubt that the poet had held that opinion for 
 years: how could help it! He had poetic- 
 ally seen and sung of the Furies who pursue 
 human guilt through generations; listen 
 again to that uncanny strain of the Parcae in 
 his Iphigenia whose power bursts up from 
 his last conviction. That was written many 
 years since, but time has furiously confirmed 
 its truth in his own life. That chorus of one 
 of his dramas prophetically chants itself 
 through his whole life-drama. 
 
 What Goethe 's own circle of acquaintances 
 thought of the son's condition and forecast 
 concerning his future doom just before his 
 Italian journey is indicated in the letter of a 
 Weimar lady which has been preserved: 
 "The saddest thing is that all who could ob- 
 serve August in the last year, including his 
 father, had to feel that his decease was the 
 mildest thing that could happen. " And that 
 son himself in his deeper moments seemed to 
 have a premonition of whither he was drift- 
 ing. Here we put that unique little poem of 
 his, gushing up from his soul's depths with 
 an intensity equal to any lines his father 
 ever wrote and flinging down his challenge 
 to Fate itself: 
 
THE PASSING OF GOETHE'S SON. 583 
 
 I shall no longer be guided 
 In leading strings as hitherto : 
 Bather I shall break my chains 
 At the edge of the abyss and go free. 
 
 In this spirit, already long cherished and 
 long suppressed, he at last set out for Italy. 
 The startled Eckermann, his companion, who 
 was not courting that sort of a destiny, 
 turned back when the two had reached Genua, 
 at the entrance of Italy, and had taken a peep 
 over the edge of the abyss. August Goethe 
 pushed on as if scourged by the Eumenides 
 to his last lot, guzzling enormous quantities 
 of drink, but sending to his father a regular 
 diary of what he saw, but not of what he im- 
 bibed. Eckermann, gentle exemplary soul, 
 sent along by the anxious old man as a model 
 and a restraint for the son, is utterly help- 
 less before a spirit who, having now gotten 
 loose, is determined to break through all his 
 restraints hitherto and dare his very exist- 
 ence. So the rather timid conductor went 
 far enough to catch a glimpse of the awful 
 hand of Fate, ready to smite the defiant 
 transgressor, and shrank back from a task 
 which neither he nor any mortal could fulfil. 
 He received Goethe's consent to give up the 
 journey. To be sure, when he appeared at 
 Weimar he told an other reason for his re- 
 turn, good enough for public use. The aged 
 
584 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 parent, having read the inevitable decree, re- 
 ceived him without reproach. 
 
 The Italian trip of August Goethe bears 
 the impress of a hurried feverish sweep to a 
 desperate end. Several times he was laid 
 up with illness chiefly from his excesses ; but 
 accident also played in to help along, when 
 his collar bone was broken by the overturn- 
 ing of his vehicle. Still he always got up 
 again and at last reached Naples. At Pom- 
 peii a lava-buried house was excavated in his 
 presence to celebrate his father's birthday. 
 It would seem that he found in this old city,- 
 overwhelmed in a mighty cataclysmic stroke 
 of destiny, a peculiar, even sympathetic de- 
 light, as if he felt at home on that fated spot. 
 So Goethe reports of him to Zelter. But soon 
 he hastens to Borne, the darling of his father. 
 There he is nobly received by the German 
 artists, and in a hectic exaltation he begins to 
 survey its treasures. But his life's structure 
 was already burned out and ready to fall in. 
 Very gently speaks the broken parent fore- 
 feeling what is about to happen: "His let- 
 ters thence failed to satisfy me ; they showed 
 haste, a sickly excitement." Enough; Au- 
 gust died at Eome October 27, 1830, of a 
 stroke of paralysis, according to the diag- 
 nosis. 
 
 One cannot help thinking of the symbolism 
 
rf- 
 THE PASSING OF GOETHE'S SON. 585 
 
 suggested by this sudden human exit on the 
 spot where the parent had, some forty years 
 before, deemed himself born again. But 
 what was life to the parent was death to the 
 son. Is there any supremely ordered connec- 
 tion between these two events! Tell us, ye 
 Powers, was August Goethe spiritually be- 
 gotten here and has only rounded out the 
 hidden cycle of his existence! Is it possible 
 to forget those Roman Elegies in which the 
 poet lets us glimpse the undercurrent of his 
 passion's life at Rome even if they are 
 inspired by Christiane at Weimar! The son 
 lies buried in the Protestant cemetery near 
 the lonely Pyramid of Cestius, a sphynx-like 
 monument stolid in its Egyptian melancholy, 
 where his father once sketched in a pensive 
 Roman mood his own grave, and later in one 
 of his Elegies sang prayerfully that the God 
 Hermes, conductor of departed souls, "gent- 
 ly lead him down to Orcus, past the tomb of 
 Cestius. " The much-enduring poet, now 
 eighty-one years, stood up valiantly against 
 the stroke of destiny, and could not be put 
 down, recovering from a dangerous hemor- 
 rhage which struck him not long afterwards. 
 In this last act of August Goethe's life it 
 is impossible not to think of the poet's Eu- 
 phorion, son of Faust and Helen, and to re- 
 call the soulful dirge sung over his early 
 
586 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 evanishment in the Second Part of Faust. 
 That youth "was born to Earth's fortune of 
 lofty ancestry, " but he was "early lost to 
 himself, and the bloom of life was torn 
 away." The strain was intended for Byron, 
 recently deceased, who passed beyond some 
 six years before August Goethe. But the lat- 
 ter, too, ran "unrestrainedly into the net of 
 impulse, " defiantly breaking "with custom 
 and law," with the realm of established or- 
 der. So it was not given "thee to perform 
 the glorious action." Prophetically the fa- 
 ther sings here a dirge over his own son, 
 whom he then forefelt to be fated, to be "lost 
 to himself, ' ' aye a scion of the God-shent race 
 of Tantalids. 
 
 The dread, ever-lowering thought of being 
 members of a doomed family broke out in a 
 letter of 1848 from one of Goethe's grand- 
 children who designated himself and his sur- 
 viving brother as "the relicts of the house 
 of Tantalus." The passage seems to imply 
 that it was a familiar conception in the fam- 
 ily; whence did it take its rise? We repeat 
 our decided belief that it came down from 
 Goethe himself, upon whom the premonition 
 must have been lastingly impressed by his 
 long and intense occupation with the legend 
 of Tantalus, who though favored of the Gods, 
 nevertheless sinned against them, and whose 
 
THE PASSING OF GOETHE'S SON. 587 
 
 posterity continued to feel the scourge of the 
 ancestor's guilt. The story of Iphigenia, 
 who was a Tantalid wrestling with the curse 
 of her blood and finally redeeming it, haunted 
 him his whole life, for he could not help feel- 
 ing that he was realizing it in himself and in 
 his own. Walther Von Goethe, from whom 
 the above citation is taken, was doubtless 
 echoing some word of his grandfather 
 dropped casually from the most veiled part 
 of the poet's soul. The aforesaid Walther 
 sighs forth another exclamation in the same 
 letter: "The realm of the Eumenides is 
 drawing to an end ! ' ' This can only mean a 
 presentiment that with the decease of him- 
 self and his brother, both of them unmarried 
 and childless, the tragedy of the German 
 Tantalids will come to a close. And that is 
 what actually happened not many years 
 afterward. 
 
 Very significant is the fact that this tragic 
 outcome was foreshadowed by Goethe the 
 poet even before he had committed the deed. 
 Forgive us if we once more repeat the song 
 echoing the deepest, most prophetic note of 
 Goethe's Genius, the song of the Fates in his 
 Iphigenia, which was composed by him be- 
 fore he had ever seen Christiane. It chants 
 that the Celestials turn away their joy- giving 
 look "from races ill-fated," and shun to 
 
588 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 gaze "on the children's once-loved features 
 still telling of their mighty parent. ' ' So the 
 poet foresings of himself and his son and his 
 son's sons, projecting out of his vision of the 
 Divine Order the consequences of the act of 
 insolence toward the Gods, which neverthe- 
 less he was on the point of doing, the fateful 
 mortal. The Hymn winds up with a predic- 
 tion suggestive of the future of Tantalus 
 of Goethe : "The soul under ban hearkens the 
 song, his children's doom he ponders and 
 bows down his head. ' ' So the poet, truly the 
 seer and foreseer, tells of himself and his off- 
 spring long before any child of his has been 
 born. 
 
 Such was the deepest strand of destiny in 
 Goethe's whole existence; still he wrestled 
 with it, he never gave up, hence he was what 
 he so often exhorted others to be the Fate- 
 compeller. He never succumbed to his own 
 failings despite their terrible backstrokes; 
 he never became the victim of his own nega- 
 tive deed, even if he had to walk through its 
 infernal fires. Though his descendants were 
 Tantalids and unheroically perished in their 
 allotted portion, Goethe was in this sense not 
 Tantalus; he was often whelmed into Tar- 
 tarus by the Gods for his offenses, but he 
 could not be kept there, he would break jail, 
 even that of the underworld. His supreme 
 
THE PASSING OF GOETHE'S SON. 589 
 
 gift of expression was able to persuade the 
 Furies to unchain him, and his life-poem is 
 Prometheus unbound by himself. Already 
 we have noted how he often saved himself 
 from the final stroke through his literary 
 confession. 
 
 At present his mediatorial word is renun- 
 ciation, whose most trying test he has just 
 passed through. The only son, so long the 
 darling of his heart and his hope, he has had 
 to renounce to Fate, indeed he has done so 
 already a good many years, for that son was 
 "early lost to himself, " already in youth a 
 Tantalid. In this final Epoch of his life- 
 poem Goethe was his own greatest renunci- 
 ant ; we have already seen him as Phileros re- 
 nouncing his last love ; he has brought before 
 us a world of renunciants, in his Meister's 
 Journey manship; then this crowning trial in 
 the death of his only son he has to meet and 
 transcend through a fresh renunciation; but 
 he, the octogenarian, does it with renewed 
 valor and starts to work that he complete the 
 final achievement of his life. ' ' Forward over 
 graves M he cries, even over the graves of his 
 own blood; he has yet to finish his world- 
 poem, whose thread has been spun through 
 his entire conscious existence. Faust must 
 be brought to an end ere his eyelids can 
 droop to their final close. 
 
590 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Faust Second Part. 
 
 Perhaps the most condemned of all Goe- 
 the 's works is this, certainly the worst under- 
 stood and the least accessible to the average 
 consciousness. Still it keeps working its way 
 in its own country and elsewhere. Though 
 it has been adjudged to death, execrated and 
 executed a thousand times by a furious army 
 of critics and maddened readers, even hung 
 in effigy by Herr Professor Vischer, it never- 
 theless stands up alive, and pushes ahead on 
 its course with a considerable increment of 
 vigor. It has quietly become a test of the 
 literary size and quality of the people who 
 fling it aside with a wry face after some in- 
 spection. It shows a decided tendency to 
 criticise the critic, to measure its measurer 
 while in the very act of measuring it and 
 marking down its limits. A dangerous sub- 
 ject to handle it must be regarded; we may 
 often notice its peculiar gift of turning the 
 weapon directed against it to a boomerang 
 which gives back to the assailant not only 
 what he has done but what he really is. 
 
 In spite of the aforesaid danger, it may 
 well be confessed that the Second Part of 
 Faust has obscurities upon which the sun re- 
 
I 
 
 FAUST SECOND PART. 591 
 
 fuses to shine, and sandy tracts in which the 
 traveler longs for some greenery and a drop 
 of water; then we come upon not a few 
 chasms over which the bridge has to be taken 
 for granted. Very much like the huge, 
 sphinx-like face of nature is the whole poem, 
 which must be explored by every reader as 
 an undiscovered country. Still we cannot 
 well fling away the earth-ball because it car- 
 ries on its surface a dreary Sahara or an in- 
 accessible Chimborazo. 
 
 Evidently Faust would not be the complete 
 ronnded-off work that it is without the Sec- 
 ond Part ; only a fragment of its own poetic 
 universe would we then possess surely a 
 lapse from its supreme worth. In fact this 
 poem could not in such case take its present 
 lofty rank in the realm of Letters as one of 
 the four greatest books which Europe has 
 produced books of such transcendent power 
 and significance that we call them Literary 
 Bibles. Just through this completed Faust, 
 Goethe has taken his place with Homer, 
 Dante, and Shakespeare. Excellent as are 
 many of his other writings, he has concen- 
 trated himself in the one sovereign achieve- 
 ment by which he is ranked in universal Lit- 
 erature. To be sure, his entire career and 
 all his works constitute one vast life-poem of 
 which his Faust is but a single strand, though 
 
592 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 the most essential and characteristic of him- 
 self and of his time. 
 
 Accordingly we put stress here upon the 
 fact that the First Part alone cannot rise to 
 the supremacy of a Literary Bible. It is in 
 itself but a half, and on several lines decid- 
 edly the lesser half of the grand poetic total- 
 ity, which crowns its maker with the ideal 
 sovereignty of his age. On the whole, .the 
 First Part is no^ only a fragment but a neg- 
 ative fragment^ its dominant note is the 
 eternal No which kills man's hope and turns 
 him into a destroying spirit of society and of 
 himself. Ji Satan is triumphant in Paradise 
 Lost; and that is the doom of Milton's book 
 as a Literary Bible for the race. The Pro- 
 metheus of Aeschylus, as it has come down to 
 us, is a negative poem, and leaves man de- 
 feated in the person of his divine protag- 
 onist. So is essentially the First Part of 
 Faust taken by itself, even if it be more cap- 
 tivating through its smiting style and Hell- 
 lit mockery. It is OIL the whole a descent to 
 the modern Inferno, (while the Second Part 
 
 | is an ascent, showing the negation overcome, 
 and the hero 's regeneration through his own 
 
 / activit^ Thus it carries with it from start 
 to finish a sense of restoration after the Fall 
 of Man in the latest phase, and on this line 
 moves parallel with all true Bibles religious 
 
FAUST SECOND PART. 593 
 
 or literary. The First Part is then truly a 
 part, the diabolic part of the poem, and may 
 be defined as its spirit Mephistopheles de- 
 fines himself, "a part of that power which 
 wills the Bad," even if in the end "it works 
 the Good. " 
 
 This leads us to note the distinctive char- 
 acter which MepMstopheles unfolds in the 
 Second Part, quite trte obverse of what he 
 has shown hitherto. (He is no longer the lord 
 of the poetic mansion but the servant ; though 
 still destructive at the first turn, he is recon- 
 structive at the last ; he is not only negative, 
 but self-negative, and as universal denier he 
 comes in the end to deny himself At the 
 opening of the Second Part he enters the 
 State as destroyer, sapping old Feudalism 
 but bringing forth modern industrial Society. 
 He violently sweeps away ancient Philemon 
 and Baucis, but therein renders possible the 
 new city of Faust and its freedom. (His sub- 
 tle doing of evil unfolds through his own self- 
 undoing unto the good. He is the very in- 
 carnation of evil done that good may come) 
 We repeat that this inner but very elusive 
 dialectic runs through his whole manifesta- 
 tion in the Second Part and constitutes the 
 deepest thread of its connection. The reader 
 who cannot penetrate to this undercurrent 
 and swim in it and with it through all the 
 
594 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 eddies and tortuosities of the poem, remains 
 but an outsider, enjoying possibly many of 
 its single beauties and gazing at its passing 
 meteors often in blank perplexity. 
 
 It is not simply the old Goethe, but the 
 oldest unfolding to his final evolution and 
 making his last confession preparatory to 
 the close and evanishment beyond. He has 
 shown himself a free man, upon a free soil 
 which he has created, and in a free civic 
 world which he has built. He has trans- 
 cended in his deed the limit of Fate and then 
 dies; through death he persists, "the trace of 
 my earthly days cannot vanish in the ages." 
 He has made mortality mortal, serving it up 
 to itself, and thus rising to immortality; the 
 tragedy of existence he enacts, yet makes it 
 tragic to itself rather than to himself. It is 
 the last and deepest turn of that self-nega- 
 tion which gives the soul of this Second Part, 
 and is symbolized in Mephistopheles as the 
 /ceaseless ujidoer of himself in the final round- 
 Vp of his activity. 
 
 The Second Part sends its rootlets back 
 into Goethe's early Epoch at Frankfort, that 
 unique springtide of his whole life, when his 
 overflowing creative soul started to germi- 
 nate. In an oft-cited letter to Wilhelm Von 
 Humboldt, written only five days before his 
 death (1832) he says: "It is over sixty 
 
FAUST SECOND PART. 595 
 
 years since the first conception of Faust lay 
 before me clear, but the succession of its 
 parts less complete. " There is no doubt that 
 the appearance of Greek Helen was an ele- 
 ment of this earliest conception, for she be- 
 longs to the primal Faust legend, to the pup- 
 pet play, and to Marlow's drama. But he 
 had not then conceived of the two Parts of 
 his work; he had to grow many years into 
 such magnitude of design. Greek Helen gave 
 him great difficulty; she does not appear in 
 the Urfaust nor in the Fragment of 1790; 
 still she belongs essentially to the story and 
 keeps teasing the author off and on during 
 three decades. At last in 1800 he grapples 
 with Helen in person and by herself, he pro- 
 poses daringly to catch her fleeting shape and 
 to charm her into writ. But he cannot do it 
 yet, another three decades he has to wait; 
 not till 1827 was the Lesser Helena published, 
 being saluted in English with a subtle and 
 laudatory review by the rising Phil-Teuton 
 Thomas Carlyle. But the whole Helena of the 
 Second Part, the Greater Helena we may call 
 it for distinction (see our Commentary on 
 Part II, p. 85) taking up more than half of 
 the poem, was not finished till some four 
 years later. A little before 1800, accordingly, 
 perhaps already in 1797, the necessity of di- 
 viding his work into two Parts had dawned 
 
596 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 upon the poet. But between them raged in 
 his soul the conflict of the Classic and the 
 Teutonic elements of his work, and he could 
 not yet harmonize the contradiction. So he 
 dropped the one, the Classic, and sped on to 
 finish the other in the First Part, which he 
 did by 1806, though it was not published till 
 two years later. 
 
 Faithful Eckermann records that he was 
 assisting Goethe to look over his papers for 
 the purpose of completing the final portion 
 of his Autobiography, when the question of 
 the continuation of Faust arose. Shall the 
 plan be merely described, or shall "the fin- 
 ished fragments " of the Second Part which 
 lay there before them be supplemented and 
 worked over into a whole ? Eckermann urged 
 it, but that was not enough. The aged poet 
 was brought to turn the whole subject over 
 in his mind afresh, and to ask himself : Can 
 I finish this work now, after all these new 
 experiences of life? (He must have felt that 
 he had compassed in himself Helen's whole 
 career as representing the Classic Kenas- 
 cence of his time^ He had gone through her 
 long discipline, but had transcended her, and 
 so could portray her training and her trag- 
 edy in the universal poem. But how about 
 Faust himself? Sometime in the early years 
 of the century the new industrial world had 
 
FAUST SECOND PART. 597 
 
 risen upon the poet with a mighty energy, as 
 we see already in his Pandora and especially 
 in Meister's Journey mansliip. In that great 
 movement of the time, Faust was to share 
 and at last to end as its hero positively. But 
 what of negative Mephistopheles? Goethe 
 has in these long years of study and experi- 
 ence realized the inner nature of negation as 
 self -undoing ; thus he can handle the deepest 
 character of the age, and indeed of himself. 
 There is no doubt that he now feels, as never 
 before, that he can complete the transcendent 
 poetic task of his life. And so the old man 
 with a reborn heart, resolves to set about the 
 grand final fulfilment of himself, more heroic 
 in his life-poem than any of his heroes. 
 
 Here we should note that Goethe, though 
 especially disclaiming the title of philoso- 
 pher, studied profoundly the philosophy of 
 his time, and appropriated it in his way, and 
 of course put it into his poem. We may re- 
 peat that he flourished in the very bloom of 
 the supreme philosophical movement of 
 the modern world from Kant to Hegel, and 
 poetized it in numerous ways. But the most 
 colossal envisagement of it is just Mephis- 
 topheles in his total sweep from the first No 
 at the start of the poem till his final defeat at 
 its end. He quite parallels the cycle of Ger- 
 man Philosophy from Kant's Titanic denial 
 
598 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 to HegePs equally Titanic affirmation. It is 
 a mistake to make Faust a poetic embodiment 
 of any given system of Philosophy, a mistake 
 which not a few of HegePs ardent disciples 
 have committed. On the other hand Goethe, 
 the all-learner absorbed not a little from the 
 Philosophy of his day, especially from Hegel 
 who was professor in Goethe's university, 
 Jena, at the very time when the poet was 
 deeply engaged in his First Part of Faust, 
 jwhose innermost theme is the evolution of 
 iMephistopheles out of the age's spirit of ne- 
 gation. 
 
 Now the permanent contribution of Hegel 
 to his time and to all time is not his system 
 which has already crumbled, but the inner 
 spirit working in man and in all finitude, 
 which he caught, diagnosed and exemplified 
 thousandfold in his works, and named Dia- 
 lectic. Goethe may never have fully caught 
 this very elusive principle in its abstract 
 form, but, poet that he was, he concreted it to 
 living shape in Mephistopheles, and made it 
 pervasive throughout the whole length of his 
 living poem (not including the rather dead or 
 dying ecclesiastical appendix). Therein he 
 above all other scribes of the period made the 
 time-spirit show itself in writ. Thus we may 
 well hold that this Faust poem in the last 
 depths of its soul is one with the soul of the 
 
FAUST SECOND PART. 599 
 
 time's Philosophy, both being ultimately ut- 
 terances of the one basis consciousness of the 
 age. In this sense we can call it the most 
 philosophic of poems, with Schelling and 
 others. 
 
 Still there is one scene in the Second Part 
 in which the poet took a pre-conceived philo- 
 sophic thought, and gave to it a poetic form. 
 This scene is known to all deeper students of 
 the poem as The Mothers. A dark uncanny, 
 unearthly piece of work it is, in which Faust 
 is to descend to the primitive forms or arche- 
 Ltypes creative of all finitude; the very proc- 
 ess of abstraction is poetized or at least me- 
 tered and rhymed, until there dawns upon 
 him the ultimate insight expressed abstractly 
 with the words "In thy Nothing I hope to 
 find the All.") This may be regarded as the 
 philosophy of Mephistopheles, now to be 
 grasped by Faust, and to be realized in the 
 poem. It hints that play of the negative, 
 with its inherent contradiction and final self- 
 undoing, which brings forth the Universe as 
 positive, here the All. So much Goethe 
 picked up from the Philosophy of the time 
 and diabolized it as the destroyer turning 
 self-destroyer. (For a further discussion of 
 this pivotal scene see our Commentary Faust 
 II, p. 89, etc., new edition.) 
 
 Evidently Goethe has inhaled the quintes- 
 
600 GOETHE'S LIFE-POEM. PART THIRD. 
 
 sence of the great German philosophical 
 movement, and breathed it forth into a char- 
 acter which acts it out from start to finish. 
 And here we should not fail to note again the 
 the poet's present method: he seizes upon a 
 pure idea in advance and creates a shape for 
 it, or perchance he makes it create its own 
 shape. This is quite the opposite of the po- 
 etic procedure which he enounced so emphat- 
 ically in his early career: namely, that we 
 must first grasp the reality and idealize that. 
 But he has found in his long experience that 
 both poetic methods are valid, each in its own 
 sphere. So he in his old age breaks over his 
 early limit and gives an outlook upon the new 
 poetry. It was probably the mighty tide of 
 Philosophy rising to its culmination during 
 his life which drove him to poetize such a 
 phenomenon, and to forge the outlines of a 
 new art-form for its expressoin. So on this 
 side as on others, the Second Part of Faust 
 is prophetic, letting us glimpse a new inspira- 
 tion, and even a New Mythology, not the 
 transmitted old one in any of its many kinds, 
 but the fresh created one by the poet to peo- 
 ple his poetical cosmos. 
 
 It is recorded that in August, 1831, the 
 Second Part 6*f Faust was complete so that 
 the manuscript was stitched together and laid 
 away. He said to Eckermann: "the rest of 
 
FAUST SECOND PART. 601 
 
 my life I regard as a free gift." Still he 
 could not keep hands off ; he continued to add 
 touches to this supreme work of his life al- 
 most to the day of his death, which took place 
 March 22, 1832, 
 
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 II. Psychology, System of, in 16 vols. 
 1. Organic Psychology. 
 
 1. Intellect. 
 
 2. Will 
 
 3. Feeling . , 1.50 
 
 2. Psychology of Philosophy. 
 
 1. Ancient European Philosophy 1.50 
 
 2. Modern European Philosophy 1.50 
 
 3. Psychology of Nature. 
 
 1. Cosmos and Diacosmos 1.50 
 
 2. Biocosmos 1.50 
 
 4. Psychology of Art. 
 
 1. Architecture. . t , 1.50 
 
 2. Music and Fine Arts 1.50 
 
 5. Psychology of Institutions. 
 
 1. Social Institutions 1.50 
 
 2. The State 1.50 
 
 6. Psychology of History. 
 
 1. European History. 1.50 
 
 2. The Father of History 1.50 
 
 3. The American Ten Years' War 1.50 
 
 7. Psychology of Biography. 
 
 1. Abraham Linciln 1.50 
 
 2. Frederick Froebel. 1.25 
 
 III. Poems in 5 vols. 
 
 1. Homer in Chios 1.00 
 
 2. Delphic Days 1.00 
 
 3. Agamemnon's Daughter 1.00 
 
 4. Prorsus Retrorsus 1.00 
 
 5. Johnny Appleseed's Rhymes 1.25 
 
 IV. The Lincoln Tetralogy An Epos. 
 
 1. Lincoln in the Black Hawk War 1.50 
 
 2. Lincoln and Ann Rutledge 1.50 
 
 3. Lincoln in the White House 1.50 
 
 4. Lincoln at Richmond 1.50 
 
 V. Kindergarten. 
 
 1. Commentary on Froebel's Mother Play-Songs 1.25 
 
 2. The Psychology of Froebel's Play-Gifts 1.25 
 
 3. The Life of Frederick Froebel 1.25 
 
 VI. Miscellaneous. 
 
 1. A Walk in Hellas 1.25 
 
 2. The Freeburgers (a novel) 1.25 
 
 3. World's Fair Studies 1.25 
 
 4. A Tour in Europe 1.50 
 
 5. A Writer of Books in His Genesis 1.50 
 
 For sale by A. C. McCLURG & CO., Chicago, III. 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
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