Oldalképek
PDF
ePub
[graphic][ocr errors][merged small]

should be a new expedient to gain credit to my tale. His indignation against me was great for having retained all my resentment toward him, thus, as it might be, in the last hour of his existence. It was increased when he discovered me, as he supposed, using a pretence of liberality and sentiment to give new edge to my hostility. But as I went on he could no longer resist. He saw my sincerity; he was penetrated with my grief and compunction. He rose from his seat, supported by the attendants, and to my infinite astonishment threw himself into my arms!

[ocr errors]

'Williams," said he, "you have conquered! I see too late the greatness and elevation of your mind. I confess that it is to my fault, and not yours, that it is to the excess of jealousy that was ever burning in my bosom that I owe my ruin. I could have resisted any plan of malicious accusation you might have brought against me. But I see that the artless and manly story you have told has carried conviction to every hearer. All my prospects are concluded. All that I most ardently desired is forever frustrated. I have spent a life of the basest cruelty to cover one act of momentary vice, and to protect myself against the prejudices of my species. I stand now completely detected. My name will be consecrated to infamy, while your heroism, your patience, and your virtues will be forever admired. You have inflicted on me the most fatal of all mischiefs, but I bless the hand that wounds me. And now "— turning to the magistrate-" and now do with me as you please. I am prepared to suffer all the vengeance of the law." · Caleb Williams.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

6

OETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON, a German poet and critic; born at Frankfort-on-theMain, August 28, 1749; died at Weimar, March 22, 1832. His father, the son of a prosperous

tailor, was raised to the dignity of Imperial Counsellor, and at the age of thirty-eight was married to the seventeen-year-old daughter of Johann Wolfgang Textor, the chief magistrate of the city. Their son, named after his maternal grandfather, was destined to follow in the footsteps of his father, and become in due time an official in the staid city of Frankfort; but he early marked out for himself a quite different career. At sixteen he was sent to the University of Leipsic, and two years later to that of Strasburg to complete his studies in jurisprudence. In 1772 he went to the little town of Wetzlar, then the seat of the Imperial Court of Justice, in order to enter formally into the legal profession.

Before this time he had begun that long series of "attachments," of which he gives some account in his idealized autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit aus Meinem Leben. Of these attachments nothing need here be said, except in so far as they have a direct relation to some of his writings. They appear to have come to an unromantic conclusion in his fortieth year. He had just broken off a long intimacy with Frau von Stein, when he accidentally met Christine Vulpius, a pretty, clever, but uneducated girl of sixteen. She became his nominal servant, and the mother of his son. Nearly twenty years afterward-in 1806 - he married her in order to legitimatize their son (born in 1788, died in 1830).

While at Wetzlar, in 1772, Goethe fell in love with Charlotte Buff, who was betrothed to his friend Ketzner. Her heart, as one of Goethe's biographers ambiguously phrases it, "was large enough to hold both of them;" but Goethe suddenly withdrew from the intimacy which on the part of Charlotte seems

to have been one of mere liking and friendship - and she and Ketzner were soon after married. It happened that among the students at Wetzlar was one named Jerusalem, who fell desperately in love with a married woman; and, finding his passion unreciprocated, blew out his brains with a pistol borrowed from Ketzner. Goethe combined his own love-story and that of Jerusalem into the romance Die Leiden des Jungen Werther, known in English as The Sorrows of Werther, which was published in 1774, and created an immense sensation not only in Germany but throughout Europe. Werther, however, was not the first work of Goethe. Besides a couple of dramatic pieces in which he depicted some of his own amatory experiences, he had in 1773 published the romantic drama of Götz von Berlichingen, the hero of which was a predatory baron of the sixteenth century, whose wont was to "take from the rich and give to the poor." This piece was in 1799 translated into English by Walter Scott, then a young Edinburgh lawyer. The celebrity attained by Werther brought Goethe to the notice of Charles Augustus, GrandDuke of Saxe-Weimar a man of literary and artistic proclivities who in 1775 invited Goethe to spend a few weeks at his Court. The result was that the petty Court at Weimar was thenceforward the residence of Goethe, who became the bosom friend of the Grand-Duke, and virtually Prime-Minister; his official function being mainly that of Director of Amusements, and acting Manager of the Theatre. The current of his life at Weimar was interrupted by a two years' visit to Italy (1786-87), which he describes in his Italiänische Reise. Another episode occurred in 1792, when he accompanied the Prussian army in the

« ElőzőTovább »