by Will Durant
Twenty-three years old, the only son of a very wealthy father. According to his father’s intention he was to practice law at the court here; according to his own he was to study Homer and Pindar and whatever else his genius, his taste, and his heart should inspire. … Indeed, he has true genius, and is a man of character. He possesses an imagination of extraordinary vividness, and expresses himself in images and similes … His feelings are violent, but he is usually master of them. His convictions are noble. He is quite free from prejudice, and acts as he likes without caring whether it pleases others, or is the fashion, or is permissible. All compulsion is hateful to him. He loves children, and can play with them for hours. … He is a quite remarkable man.40
On June 9, 1772, at a country dance, Goethe met Kestner’s betrothed, Charlotte Buff. The next day he visited her, and found a new charm in womanhood. “Lotte,” then twenty, was the eldest sister in a family of eleven. The mother was dead, the father was busy earning a living; Lotte served as mother to the brood. She not only had the bright gaiety of a healthy girl, she had also the attractiveness of a young woman who, simply but neatly dressed, performed the duties of her place with competence, affection, and good cheer. Goethe soon fell in love with her, for he could not remain long without some feminine image warming his imagination. Kestner saw the situation, but, sure of his possession, showed an amiable tolerance. Goethe allowed himself almost the privileges of a rival wooer, but Lotte always checked him, and reminded him that she was engaged. Finally he asked her to choose between them; she did, and Goethe, his pride only momentarily shaken, left Wetzlar the next day (September 11). Kestner remained his loyal friend till death.
Before returning to Frankfurt Goethe stopped at Ehrenbreitstein on the Rhine, the home of Georg and Sophie von La Roche. Sophie had two daughters, “of whom the eldest,” Maximiliane, “soon particularly attracted me.... It is a very pleasant sensation when a new passion begins to stir in us before the old one is quite extinct. Thus, when the sun is setting, one likes to see the moon rise on the opposite side.”41 Maximiliane, however, married Peter Brentano, and bore a lively daughter Bettina, who fell in love with Goethe thirty-five years later. Goethe resigned himself to Frankfurt and law. Not quite, for at times he thought of suicide.
Among a considerable collection of weapons I possessed a handsome, well-polished dagger. This I laid every night by my bed, and before extinguishing the candle I tried whether I could succeed in plunging the sharp point a couple of inches deep into my heart. Since I could never succeed in this, I at last laughed myself out of the notion, threw off all hypochondriacal fancies, and resolved to live.
To be able to do this with cheerfulness I was obliged to solve a literary problem, by which all that I had felt … should be reduced to words. For this purpose I collected the elements which had been at work in me for a few years; I rendered present to my mind the cases which had most affected and tormented me; but nothing would come to a definite form. I lacked an event, a fable, in which they could be seen as a whole.42
A fellow advocate at Wetzlar provided the amalgamating event. On October 30, 1772, Wilhelm Jerusalem, having borrowed a pistol from Kestner, killed himself in despair over his love for the wife of a friend. “All at once, [when] I heard the news of Jerusalem’s death,” Goethe recalled, “. . . the plan of Werther was formed, and the whole ran together from all sides.”43 Perhaps so, but it was not until fifteen months later that he began to write the book. Meanwhile he carried on with Maximiliane Brentano—who had moved with her husband to Frankfurt—a flirtation so persistent that the husband protested, and Goethe withdrew.
A variety of abortive literary projects distracted him. He dallied with the idea of retelling the story of the Wandering Jew; he planned to have him visit Spinoza, and to show that Satan, to all appearances, was triumphing over Christ in Christendom;44 but he wrote only ten pages of Der ewige Jude. He composed some satires on Jacobi, Wieland, Herder, Lenz, and Lavater, but managed to win their friendship nevertheless. He contributed to Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente, and allowed him to physiognomize his head, with flattering results: “Intelligence is here, with sensibility to kindle it,” judged the Swiss. “Observe the energetic brow, … the eye so swiftly penetrating, searching, enamored, … and the nose, in itself enough to proclaim the poet. … With the virile chin, the well-opened vigorous ear—who could question the genius in this head?”45—and who could live up to such a cephalogram? Jacobi thought it could be done, for, after visiting Goethe in July, 1773, he described him in a letter to Wieland as “from head to toe all genius; a man possessed, who is destined to act according to the dictates of the individual spirit.”46
At last, in February, 1774, Goethe wrote the book that gave him a European renown—Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. He had thought of it so long, had so long rehearsed it in brooding and fancy, that now he dashed it off, he tells us, “in four weeks.... I isolated myself completely, I forbade the visits of my friends.”47 Fifty years later he said to Eckermann, “That was a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart.”48 He killed Werther to give himself peace.
He was inspired in making the book brief. He used the letter form, partly in imitation of Richardson’s Clarissa and Rousseau’s Julie, partly because it lent itself to the expression and analysis of emotion, and perhaps because in that form he could use some of the letters he had written from Wetzlar to his sister Cornelia or to his friend Merck. He shocked Charlotte and Kestner by giving her actual name, Lotte, to the object of a love obviously describing Goethe’s passion for Kestner’s bride. Kestner became “Albert,” and was favorably portrayed. Even the meeting at the dance, and the morrow’s visit, were in the story as they had been in fact. “Since that day sun, moon, and stars can go calmly about their business, but I am conscious neither of day nor of night, and the whole world around me is fading away.... I have no more prayers to say except to her.”49 Werther is not quite Goethe: he is more sentimental, more given to tears and gushing words and self-commiseration. In order to lead the narrative to its tragic denouement, Werther had to be changed from Goethe to Wilhelm Jerusalem. The final touches echo history: Werther, like Jerusalem, borrows Albert’s pistol for his suicide, and Lessing’s Emilia Galotti lies on his desk as he dies. “No clergyman escorted him” to his grave.
The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774) was an event in the history of literature and of Germany. It expressed and promoted the romantic element in Sturm und Drang, as Götz von Berlichingen had expressed the heroic. Rebellious youth acclaimed it with praise and imitation; some dressed in blue coat and buff vest like Werther, some wept like Werther; some committed suicide as the only fashionable thing to do. Kestner protested at the invasion of his privacy, but was soon appeased, and we are not told that Charlotte complained when Goethe told her, “Your name is uttered in reverence by thousands of adoring lips.”50 The German clergy did not join in the applause. A Hamburg preacher denounced Werther as an apology for suicide; Pastor Goeze, Lessing’s enemy, blasted the book, and Lessing condemned it for its sentimentality and lack of classic restraint.51 At a public dinner the Reverend J. C. Hasenkampf censured Goethe to his face for “that wicked piece of writing,” and added, “May God improve your perverse heart!” Goethe deflated him with a soft answer: “Remember me in your prayers.”52 Meanwhile the little book swept through Europe in a dozen translations, three in France in three years; now for the first time France admitted that Germany had a literature.
3. The Young Atheist
The clergy had some excuse for worrying about Goethe, for he was in this stage openly hostile to the Christian Church. “He reveres the Christian religion,” Kestner wrote in 1772, “but not in the form our theologians give it. … He does not go to church, nor to Communion, and he rarely prays.”53 Goethe was especially averse to the Christian emphasis on sin and contrition;54 he preferred to sin without remorse. He wrote to Herder (about 1774): “If only the whole teaching of Christ were not such bilge th
at I, as a human being, a poor limited creature of desires and needs, am infuriated by it!”55 He planned a drama on Prometheus as a symbol of man defying the gods; he wrote little more than a prologue, which shocked Jacobi and pleased Lessing. What remains of it is the most radical of Goethe’s antireligious outbursts. Prometheus speaks:
Cover thy heaven, Zeus, with cloudy mist,
And disport yourself—like a child who cuts off thistle heads—
On oaks and mountain peaks!
My earth you must still let stand,
And my cottage, which you did not build,
And my hearth, whose glow you envy me.
I know nothing poorer under the sun than you, O gods!
You nourish your majesty with difficulty
From sacrifices and votive prayers,
And it would starve,
Were not children and beggars such hopeful fools.
When I was but a child, and knew not what to think,
My erring eyes turned to the sun,
As if there might be an ear to hear my plaint,
A heart like mine
To pity a troubled soul.
Who helped me against the Titans’ insolence?
Who rescued me from death, from slavery?
Has not my own holy, glowing heart
Accomplished all this by itself, but, young and good,
And deceived, gives thanks to that Sleeping One up there?
Honor thee? Why?
Have you ever lightened the sorrows of the heavy-laden?
Have you ever dried the tears of the anguish-stricken?
Have I not been molded into a man
By almighty Time and everlasting Fate—
My masters and yours? . . .
Here sit I, forming men after my image,
A race that may be like me,
To grieve and weep, to enjoy and be glad,
And to disdain you, as I do.
From this nadir of proud atheism Goethe moved slowly to the gentler pantheism of Spinoza. Lavater reported that “Goethe told us many things about Spinoza and his writings. … He had been an extremely just, upright, poor man. … All modern deists had drawn primarily from him. … His correspondence, Goethe added, was the most interesting in the whole world as concerned uprightness and love of humanity.”56 Forty-two years later Goethe told Karl Zelter that the writers who had most influenced him were Shakespeare, Spinoza, and Linnaeus.57 On June 9, 1785, he acknowledged the receipt of Jacobi’s book On the Teachings of Spinoza; his discussion of Jacobi’s interpretation reveals considerable study of the Jewish philosopher-saint. “Spinoza,” he wrote, “does not demonstrate the existence of God; he demonstrates that existence [the matter-mind reality] is God. Let others call him an atheist on this account; I am inclined to call him and praise him as most godly, and even most Christian.... I receive from him the most wholesome influences upon my thinking and acting.”58 In his autobiography Goethe remarked on his reply to Jacobi:
Happily I had already prepared myself, … having in some degree appropriated the thoughts and mind of an extraordinary man. … This mind, which had worked upon me so decisively, and was destined to affect so deeply my whole mode of thought, was Spinoza. After looking through the world in vain to find a means of development for my strange nature, I at last fell upon the Ethics of this philosopher.... I found in it a sedative for my passions; and a free, wide view over the sensible and moral world seemed to open before me.... I was never so presumptuous as to think that I understood perfectly a man who … raised himself, through mathematical and rabbinical studies, to the highest reach of thought, and whose name, even at this day, seems to mark the limit of all speculative efforts.59
He gave added warmth to his Spinozistic pantheism by the intensity with which he loved nature. It was not merely that he found delight in bright fields, or mystic woods, or plants and flowers multiplying with such exuberant diversity; he also loved nature’s sterner moods, and liked to fight his way through wind or rain or snow, and up to perilous mountaintops. He spoke of nature as a mother from whose breast he sucked the sap and zest of life. In a prose-poem rhapsody, Die Natur (1780), he expressed with religious feeling his humble surrender to, his happy absorption in, the generative and destructive forces that envelop man.
Nature! By her we are surrounded and encompassed—unable to step out of her, and unable to enter deeper into her. She receives us, unsolicited and unwarned, into the circle of her dance, and hurries along with us, till we are exhausted, and drop out of her arms. . . .
She creates ever new forms; what now is, was never before; what was, comes not again; all is new, and yet always the old. . . .
She seems to have contrived everything for individuality, but cares nothing for individuals. She is ever building, ever destroying, and her workshop is inaccessible . . .
She has thought, and is constantly meditating; not as a man, but as nature. She has an all-embracing mind of her own; no one can penetrate it. . . .
She lets every child tinker with her, every fool pass judgment on her; thousands stumble over her and see nothing; she has her joy in all. . . .
She is kindly. I praise her with all her works. She is wise and quiet. One can tear no explanation from her, extort from her no gift which she gives not of her own free will. . . .
She has placed me here, she will lead me away. I trust myself to her. She may do as she likes with me. She will not hate her work.60
In December, 1774, Duke Karl August stopped at Frankfurt en route to seek a bride at Karlsruhe. He had read and admired Gotz von Berlichingen; he invited the author to meet him. Goethe came and made a favorable impression; the Duke wondered might not this handsome and mannerly genius be an ornament of the Weimar court. He had to hurry on, but asked Goethe to meet him again on his return from Karlsruhe.
Goethe spoke often of destiny, too little of chance. He might have answered that it was destiny, not chance, that brought him to the Duke, and that it turned him from the loveliness of Lili Schonemann to Weimar’s unknown perils and opportunities. Lili was the only daughter of a rich merchant in Frankfurt. Goethe, now a social lion, was invited to a reception in her home. She performed brilliantly at the piano; Goethe leaned over a corner of it and drank in her sixteen-year-old charms as she played. “I was sensible of feeling an attractive power of the gentlest kind. … We grew into the habit of seeing each other. … We were now necessary to each other. … An irresistible longing dominated me”61—so rapidly can that famous fever rise, blown up by a poet’s sensitivity. Before he quite realized what it meant, he was officially engaged (April, 1775). Then Lili, thinking him securely captured, coquetted with others. Goethe saw and fumed.
Just at this time two friends, Counts Christian and Friedrich zu Stolberg, came to Frankfurt on their way to Switzerland. They suggested that Goethe join them. His father urged him to go, and to continue on into Italy. “With some intimation, but without leavetaking, I separated myself from Lili.”62 He started out in May, 1775; at Karlsruhe he met the Duke again, and was definitely invited to Weimar. He went on to Zurich, where he met Lavater and Bodmer. He climbed St. Gotthard, and looked longingly at Italy. Then the image of Lili regained ascendancy; he left his companions, turned homeward, and in September had Lili in his arms. But, back in his room, he felt again his old dread of marriage as imprisonment and stagnation. Lili resented his vacillation; they agreed to break off their betrothal; in 1776 she married Bernhard von Türckheim.
The Duke, briefly at Frankfurt on his way back from Karlsruhe, offered to send a coach to take Goethe to Weimar. Goethe consented, made his arrangements, and waited for the appointed day. The coach did not come. Had he been played with and deceived? After some days of fretful delay, he started out for Italy. But at Heidelberg the promised coach caught up with him; the Duke’s emissary made explanations and apologies; Goethe accepted them. On November 7, 1775, he reached Weimar, aged twenty-six, torn as always between Eros and Destiny, longing for woman, but resolved to be gr
eat.
IV. HERDER: 1744-76
Hardly a month after Goethe’s arrival at Weimar he passed on to the Duke, with warm approval, Wieland’s suggestion that the vacant post of Generalsuperintendent of the clergy and the schools of the duchy be offered to Johann Gottfried Herder. The Duke agreed.
Born at Mohrungen in East Prussia (August 25, 1744), Herder was, by geography and Baltic mists, akin to Immanuel Kant. His father was a poor schoolmaster and Pietist cantor, so that the boy had all the uses of adversity. From the age of five he suffered from a fistula in the right eye. Soon required to add to the family income, he left school to become secretary and servant to Sebastian Trescho, who made ¿ good living by writing handbooks of piety. Trescho had a library, which johann consumed. At eighteen he was sent to Königsberg to have the fistula removed, and to study medicine at the university. The operation failed, and the dissection classes so upset the youth’s stomach that he turned from medicine to theology.
He formed a friendship with Hamann, who taught him English, using Hamlet as a text; Herder learned almost all the play by heart. He attended Kant’s lectures on geography, astronomy, and Wolff’s philosophy; Kant liked him so much that he excused him from the fees charged for the courses. Herder supported himself by translating and tutoring, and from the age of twenty to twenty-five he taught in the cathedral school at Riga. At twenty-one he was ordained a Lutheran minister; at twenty-two he became a Freemason;63 at twenty-three he was appointed adjutant pastor in two churches near Riga. He broke into print at twenty-two with a volume Über die neuere deutsche Litteratur; he added a second and third tome to it a year later; Kant, Lessing, Nikolai, and Lavater were impressed by the young author’s learning, and they commended his appeal for a national literature liberated from foreign tutelage.