would become a great hospital in which | and prosaic side was emphasized by every one would be engaged in nursing public duties which often choked the his neighbors.1 He warmed the re- true poetic spirit. Hence, it may be former against the stimulating illusion said, come those dreary lengths of that the world had been waiting for him" privy councillor language," as Gerto save it. He was not carried along man critics themselves call it, in which by that rush of confident and energetic emotion which now and again has transformed a philanthropist into an almost poetic figure. In the midst of the Revolutionary outcries about universal rights and brotherhood, he was one of the very few to remain unmoved. Evidently he was not of the stuff of which active reformers are made; nor was he possessed by Dante's passion for his country. It seems hard for a modern critic to avoid the inference that all this public energy was but another instance of the deadliest of artistic sins, the sin against the individual spirit. the sudden jewels of thought are set at such wide intervals. Worse than all. it might be maintained that his position in Weimar tempted him to sink to the level of an amateur in literature, and to write, as in fact he confesses that he wrote, not for a great public, nor even for audience fit, but for a narrow circle of three or four intimate friends. A starving poet, struggling in the spume and surge of our cities, has obviously, in spite of drink and journalism, a better chance of poetry than the prime minister of a German State. And this may be what Tieck meant when he said that And, indeed, to some mistake of this Goethe's best work was done before he kind the obvious inequality of his works left Frankfurt. Perhaps this is what may, no doubt, be partly attributed. the French critic means in calling No great poet requires a more rigid Goethe "the sublime Philistine." selection. In many of his works only the literary scavenger can find a fair and useful field of labor. Inequality was, it is true, part of his nature, for there are strange instances of it before he entered public life at all, and in his old age his secretary thus describes the outward evidence of a deep-lying division of spirit : "At times he would be occupied with some great idea, and his speech would be rich and inexhaustible in its flow. Then again he would be taciturn and laconic, as though a cloud lay upon his soul. 66 And yet there is to all this another side, which seems to escape the notice of the critics. Action," said that Secret Society which watched Meister's career, and often irritated him with its wisdom ; "action animates, but narrows." The sentence is weighty, and English history is a commentary on it. But in Germany, during Goethe's youth, it was exactly animation that was needed, and not breadth. Germany was still, for the most part, peacefully submerged in what Goethe called the There were days Watery Period. Only professors now when he seemed to be filled with icy know or care about the writers of that coldness, as if a keen wind were sweep- dreary time. But to the humorist ing over plains of ice and snow; and a pathos hangs around their fading next day he would be like a smiling names, like the weeping cherubs on summer morning.” 8 It must also be monuments of emblazoned and forgotremembered that, after all, he came of ten glory. Poor stepsons of the Muses, a race which endures tedium with pa- creeping through life in slippers and thetic meekness, and that he inherited dressing-gown, they were still the sole from his father a certain stiffness and representatives of the higher literature pedantry of mind. But even when to a prosaic nation on its way through allowance has been made for the double its most prosaic age. Destitute of nature remaining in him so strangely nationality, members of an impotent unfused, it may be argued that the cold collection of paltry States, inactive, 1 Italienische Reise, May 27, 1787. 2 Sprüche in Prosa. 3 Conversations with Eckermann. Preface. 4 Letters to Frau von Stein, Aug. 13, 1784. Paul Bourget: Mensonges, p. 328. • Meisters Lehrjahre, bk. viii., chap. 5. 4 isolated, unvisited by universal emo- | had even the milk-mild Klopstock ; The No wholesome for their pent-up emotions. But, as is well known, by the time Goethe reached early manhood, a new epoch had already arrived. It had its origin in the activity and enthusiasm of the Seven Years' War, in the keen words of Lessing, in many subordinate causes. 3 Conversations with Eckermann, Feb. 15, 1824. of 1 age. A few went more regularly mad, the ordinary German, that valorous like Lenz, at one time Goethe's rival social defiance in which discretion had and best imitator. A few turned to no part, that spontaneous and inexRoman Catholicism, not from convic- haustible fertility of brain, all combined tion, but from despair. By the end of with strength and beauty of person to the century, the whole country was compose a figure of rare attraction. As strewn with their wrecks. And yet the years went by, the early charm necesmovement was worth the pains. Ger-sarily diminished. If life is to be effecmany rose above her usual sober level. It was an effort for expansion, for freedom; and, to quote the wise poet again, "There is so sweet a sound in that word Freedom, that we could not do without it, even if it always implied error." 2 66 tual, loss of some kind must be faced. because it browses on the untimely vine-shoots, and prunes the tree to fertility. Only the outside critic, the ineffectual man, can avoid limitation and loss; and he therefore is the companion most delightful to the idle. As soon as choice is made, and deliberate energy is at work, the walls of life seem to close in. First one vista, one possible course, and then another is shut. The man becomes the servant of the deed, and is thrust forward along an evernarrowing channel. What Goethe lost was a certain wild charm of luxuriance and unconstraint. We may regret it, for all have a secret affection for the rebel and the savage. But sooner or later it must have gone in any case, unless he was to die out as one of those vagrant and fleeting meteors whose appearance is so frequent, so pathetic, and often so ludicrous in the sky of literature. Though not the creator of the movement, the author of "Werther" inevitably took his place as its leader. For supposed that Dionysus chose the goat he alone gave it artistic expression in that the most artistic of all his works. Hot with the fermentation of revolt, writing a style spasmodic and exclamatory, as in whirlwind gasps of love and hate, carried away by queer social paradoxes, untamed and astonishing in demeanor, coming upon you," as was said, "like a wolf in the night," he was recognized as the embodiment of the new spirit. As such he was invited to Weimar, and for some months the character was well maintained. Then the change began to appear; a new stage was entered upon in the long process of "makkin' himsel'," to use Scott's phrase; and it is the meaning of this change which has been the theme of so much contradictory opinion. To his contemporaries he seemed to be effaced, ruined by society, as so many a child of nature has been ruined. And something, no doubt, was inevitably lost. There is a vivid charm about the story of Goethe's youth. Mr. R. L. Stevenson tells us that, if he had been a woman, he could imagine himself marrying one of two men only, Goethe in his youth or Leonardo. That rush of tumultuous spirits, so bewildering to Within a few months of his arrival at Weimar, Goethe writes: "I don't know what Fate would have of me, that she makes me pass through all the schools." 5 It was, indeed, a new school, a change and advance in the discipline of life. So much was left behind that it seemed almost like a fresh start. It was one of those crises which justified the poet's own comparison of himself to a snake that casts its slough. For he possessed a capacity of 4 Fifine at the Fair. 5 To Auguste von Stolberg, May, 1776. self-renovation which may remind us | works were the tender pastorals and of the critic's words: "With a kind of elegies which "Werther" drove from passionate coldness such natures re- the field. 66 Götz," again, had by its joice to be away from and past their seriousness created a new and fascinatformer selves."1 And certainly, in ing ideal for men of action as leaders outward circumstances no change could of their country, champions of the seem sharper than the change from the poor, servants to nobility's obligations. large and free existence of Strassburg, Amidst much that was vague and exagFrankfurt, and Switzerland to the nar-gerated in the movement so closely row circle and petty duties of the connected with his name, Goethe had Weimar court. In many ways Goethe thus revealed the two vital principles of seems to come so near to our own time, reality in emotion and energy in action. his influence is still so widely felt, that Inspired by them, he entered upon the we are apt to forget how much of his new scenes of Weimar life, his inner life was spent in those white, pseudo- history becoming a process of developclassical palaces which stud the little ment by limitation rather than a process · German States, and are still haunted by of change. For a deep seriousness is the formal ghost of the eighteenth cen- throughout the clue to his character, tury. The one quality which enabled and seriousness is possible even in a him to pass into his new surroundings German court. without loss of individuality was a deep To despise the ordinary life of the fibre of inner seriousness, often over-man of letters, spent amidst the phanlooked. Diffused and distracted as his toms and echoes of things, was a first energies sometimes were, owing to his principle of the new school, and Goethe insatiable curiosity, he was saved from himself now turned to action with all the common fate of dilettantism by this the delight of healthy nature. He alseriousness of mind, which pursued the ways felt an almost exaggerated admivarious forms of knowledge, not for the ration for Englishmen, with their open sake of knowledge, but as revelations and energetic lives, free from theories of truth. From boyhood this serious and self-consciousness.2 His own opmood had colored his life. His boyish portunity was small; but he seized it essays and speculations had been largely with avidity, throwing himself upon theological. His earliest remaining life as upon a prey. His spirit seemed verse is a religious poem on the descent inexhaustible. No labor, no adventure, into hell. In morality his boyish sympathies were with the stoics, especially Epictetus. As a student, he submitted with reverend patience to the religious influence of his mother's friend, whose spiritual biography is narrated in "The Confessions of a Fair Soul." Even at Strassburg he endeavored to induce the pious or evangelical party to include him in their number. And it had been a similar seriousness which drew him into the revolt against formality and artificial narrowness. There was something genuine in the stir, something which reached the primitive depths of man. "Werther" is often called sentimental, but, in spite of all those tears, the passion is too real and serious for sentimentality. The truly sentimental 1 The Renaissance, by Walter Pater; Winckelmann, p. 242. not even drudgery came amiss. We 2 Conversations with Eckermann, March 12, 1828, and in several other passages. 3 Tagebuch passim. • Carlyle's Miscellaneous Essays, vol. vii.: "Shooting Niagara." etc. ence." and long endurance among the complex- | As he says in a sentence which rings ities and compromises of actual life like a slap in the face of society: "Work gave him a close sympathy with all makes the comrade." 4 As one among classes, and an intimate knowledge of comrades, he was able to discover the poor, such as the eager democrat, where it was that common humanity though much occupied with discussing failed, and so to retain unimpaired schemes for their amelioration, is often through life his delight in beauty and his too busy or too fastidious to obtain. faith in things intellectual. Whereas, "What admiration I feel," he writes in how many artists and men of letters from among the miners of the Harz, who live apart from the common plain "for that class of men which is called does the delight expire of surfeit, and the lower, but which in God's sight is the faith shrivel into a thing of dead certainly the highest. Among them we routine! Two passages from the diary, find all the virtues together-modera-written at the very time when he was tion, content, uprightness, good faith, loudest in complaint about the duties joy over the smallest blessing, harmless- of his position, may serve further to ness, patience; but I must not lose my-illustrate the poet's own views: self in exclamations." 1 "The pressure of business is of great Even more significant is the sentence, advantage to the soul; when she is also written on the same wintry journey disburdened of it, she plays with through the Harz: "My imaginative greater freedom, and enjoys existpower derives unspeakable benefit from "There is nothing so wretched sole companionship with men who are as the comfortable, idle man. He sickengaged upon some distinct, simple, ens over the finest gifts."5 enduring, and important labor."2 It is In this diary, kept between Goethe's no uncommon thing for the man of let- arrival at Weimar and his departure for ters to feel humiliated and depressed in Italy, there are other entries besides I the presence of miners, reapers, shep- which take us a step nearer still to the herds, fishermen, and others, who labor heart of the matter. In the midst of at the primitive and eternal arts, com- memoranda on the practical work of pared to which his own art of words each day we come upon such words as appears so intangible and unnecessary. these : "Peace and foretaste of wisWe remember with what self-contempt dom. A more definite feeling of limitaCarlyle would watch the Lowland peas- tion, and thereby of true expansion.' ants gathering in the harvest. But, in Or again: "Refreshed, and with enerin Goethe's case, association with the gies knit up, let me now enjoy Reinheit." working classes, so far from depressing That word Rein recurs through the him by a sense of literature's unreality, pages with increasing emphasis. Under stimulated him rather to further pro-it Goethe included cleanliness of surduction. This was partly due perhaps roundings, personal purity, and clearto the tendency to contradiction, such as makes light of learning among the learned, and acclaims it among the ignorant. But there was a deeper reason, for he knew that no one could reproach him with inactivity quite apart from literature. The daily drudgery of his practical tasks raised him to the level of his fellow-men, the level battle-field of the struggle for life, on which alone heroism and happiness are possible. 1 Letters to Frau von Stein. December, 1777. Carlyle's Life in London. By J. A. Froude. 996 ness of thought and word-qualities 5 Tagebuch, January, 1779. |