Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  At this moment the side-door flew open; and her sister, in a light but becoming night-dress, rushed out and cried, “You shall not be the only one to take leave of him!” Emilia let me go; and Lucinda seized me, clung close to my heart, pressed her black locks upon my cheeks, and remained in this position for some time. And thus I found myself between the two sisters, in the dilemma Emilia had prophesied to me a moment before. Lucinda let me loose, and looked earnestly into my face. I was about to grasp her hand and say something friendly to her; but she turned herself away, walked with violent steps up and down the room for some time, and then threw herself into a corner of the sofa. Emilia went to her, but was immediately repulsed; and here began a scene which is yet painful to me in the recollection, and which, although really it had nothing theatrical about it, but was quite suitable to a lively young Frenchwoman, could only be properly repeated in the theatre by a good and feeling actress.

  Lucinda overwhelmed her sister with a thousand reproaches. “This is not the first heart,” she cried, “that was inclining itself to me, and that you have turned away. Was it not just so with him who is absent, and who at last betrothed himself to you under my very eyes? I was compelled to look on; I endured it; but I know how many thousand tears it has cost me. This one, too, you have now taken away from me, without letting the other go; and how many do you not manage to keep at once? I am frank and good natured; and every one thinks he knows me soon, and may neglect me. You are secret and quiet, and people think wonders of what may be concealed behind you. Yet there is nothing behind but a cold, selfish heart that can sacrifice every thing to itself; this nobody learns so easily, because it lies deeply hidden in your breast: and just as little do they know of my warm, true heart, which I carry about with me as open as my face.”

  Emilia was silent, and had sat down by her sister, who became constantly more and more excited in her discourse, and let certain private matters slip out, which it was not exactly proper for me to know. Emilia, on the other hand, who was trying to pacify her sister, made me a sign from behind that I should withdraw; but, as jealousy and suspicion see with a thousand eyes, Lucinda seemed to have noticed this also. She sprang up and advanced to me, but not with vehemence. She stood before me, and seemed to be thinking of something. Then she said, “I know that I have lost you: I make no further pretensions to you. But neither shall you have him, sister!” So saying, she took a thorough hold of my head, thrusting both her hands into my locks and pressing my face to hers, and kissed me repeatedly on the mouth. “Now,” cried she, “fear my curse! Woe upon woe, for ever and ever, to her who kisses these lips for the first time after me! Dare to have any thing more to do with him! I know Heaven hears me this time. And you, sir, hasten now, hasten away as fast as you can!”

  I flew down the stairs, with the firm determination never again to enter the house.

  The Biography

  The Goethe-Schiller Monument, Weimar; first erected in 1857

  THE LIFE OF GOETHE by Calvin Thomas

  Calvin Thomas (1854–1919) was an American scholar and professor of Germanic languages and literature at Columbia University. Born near Lapeer, Michigan, Thomas graduated from the University of Michigan in 1874, opting to study at the University of Leipzig in Germany. From 1886 to 1896 he was professor of Germanic languages at the University of Michigan, before taking the same post at Columbia University. Thomas edited several works by Goethe, including both parts of Faust, as well as writing this short biography on the German’s poet’s life in 1886.

  Calvin Thomas

  THE LIFE OF GOETHE

  Goethe, the illustrious poet-sage whom Matthew Arnold called the “clearest, largest, and most helpful thinker of modern times,” was born August 28, 1749, at Frankfurt on the Main. He was christened Johann Wolfgang. In his early years his familiar name was Wolfgang, or simply Wolf, never Johann. His family was of the middle class, the aristocratic von which sometimes appears in his name, in accordance with German custom, having come to him with a patent of nobility which he received in the year 1782.

  Johann Caspar Goethe, the poet’s father, was the son of a prosperous tailor, who was also a tailor’s son. Having abundant means and being of an ambitious turn, Johann Caspar prepared himself for the profession of law, spent some time in Italy, and then settled in Frankfurt in the hope of rising to distinction in the public service. Disappointed in this hope, he procured the imperial title of Councilor, which gave him a dignified social status but nothing in particular to do. He thus became virtually a gentleman of leisure, since his law practise was quite insignificant. In 1748 he married Katharina Elisabeth Textor, whose father, Johann Wolfgang Textor, was the town’s chief magistrate and most eminent citizen. She was eighteen years old at the time of her marriage — twenty years younger than her husband — and well fitted to become a poet’s mother. The gift on which she especially prided herself was her story-telling. Wolfgang was the first child of these parents.

  The paternal strain in Goethe’s blood made for level-headedness, precise and methodical ways, a serious view of life, and a desire to make the most of it. By his mother he was a poet who liked nothing else so well as to invent dream-worlds and commune with the spirits of his imagination. He also ascribes to his mother his Frohnatur, his joyous nature. And certain it is that his temperament was on the whole sunny. As he grew to manhood men and women alike were charmed by him. He became a virtuoso in love and had a genius for friendship. But he was not always cheerful. In his youth, particularly, he was often moody and given to brooding over indefinable woes. He suffered acutely at times from what is now called the melancholia of adolescence. This was a phase of that emotional sensitiveness and nervous instability which are nearly always a part of the poet’s dower.

  Wolfgang grew up in a wholesome atmosphere of comfort and refinement. He never knew the tonic bitterness of poverty. On the other hand, he was never spoiled by his advantages; to his dying day he disliked luxury. At home under private tutors the boy studied Latin, French, and English, and picked up a little Italian by overhearing his sister’s lessons. In 1758 Frankfurt was occupied by a French army, and a French playhouse was set going for the diversion of the officers. In the interest of his French Wolfgang was allowed to go to the theatre, and he made such rapid progress that he was soon studying the dramatic unities as expounded by Corneille and actually trying to write a French play. Withal he was left much to himself, so that he had time to explore Frankfurt to his heart’s content.

  He was much in contact with people of the humbler sort and learned to like their racy dialect. He penetrated into the ghetto and learned the jargon of the Jews. He even attacked biblical Hebrew, being led thereto by his great love of the Old Testament.

  It was his boyish ambition to become a great poet. His favorite amusement was a puppet-show, for which he invented elaborate plays. From his tenth year on he wrote a great deal of verse, early acquiring technical facility and local renown and coming to regard himself as a “thunderer.” He attempted a polyglot novel, also a biblical tale on the subject of Joseph, which he destroyed on observing that the hero did nothing but pray and weep. When he was ready for the university he wished to go to Göttingen to study the old humanities, but his father was bent on making a lawyer of him. So it came about that some ten years of his early life were devoted, first as a student and then as a practitioner, to a reluctant and half-hearted grapple with the intricacies of Holy Roman law.

  At the age of sixteen Goethe entered the University of Leipzig, where he remained about three years. The law lectures bored him and he soon ceased to attend them. The other studies that he took up, especially logic and philosophy, seemed to him arid and unprofitable — mere conventional verbiage without any bed-rock of real knowledge. So he presently fell into that mood of disgust with academic learning which was afterwards to form the keynote of Faust. Outside the university he found congenial work in Oeser’s drawing-school. Oeser was an artist of no great power with the brush, but a genial man, a frien
d of Winckelmann, and an enthusiast for Greek art. Goethe learned to admire and love him, and from this time on, for some twenty years, his constant need of artistic expression found hardly less satisfaction in drawing from nature than in poetry.

  His poetic ambition received little encouragement in university circles. Those to whom he read his ambitious verses made light of them. The venerated Gellert, himself a poet of repute, advised the lad to cultivate a good prose style and look to his handwriting. No wonder that he despaired of his talent, concluded that he could never be a poet, and burnt his effusions. A maddening love-affair with his landlady’s daughter, Anna Katharina Schönkopf, revived the dying lyric flame, and he began to write verses in the gallant erotic vein then and there fashionable — verses that tell of love-lorn shepherds and shepherdesses, give sage advice to girls about keeping their innocence, and moralize on the ways of this wicked world. They show no signs of lyric genius. His short-lived passion for Annette, as he called her, whom he tormented with his jealousy until she lost patience and broke off the intimacy, was also responsible for his first play, Die Laune des Verliebten, or The Lover’s Wayward Humor. It is a pretty one-act pastoral in alexandrine verse, the theme being the punishment of an over-jealous lover. What is mainly significant in these Leipzig poetizings is the fact that they grew out of genuine experience. Goethe had resolved to drop his ambitious projects, such as Belshazzar, and coin his own real thoughts and feelings into verse. Thus early he was led into the way of poetic “confession.”

  In the summer of 1768 he was suddenly prostrated by a grave illness — an internal hemorrhage which was at first thought to portend consumption. Pale and languid he returned to his father’s house, and for several months it was uncertain whether he was to live or die. During this period of seclusion he became deeply interested in magic, alchemy, astrology, cabalism, and all that sort of thing. He even set up a kind of alchemist’s laboratory to search experimentally for the panacea. Out of these abstruse studies grew Faust’s wonderful dream of an ecstatic spirit-life to be attained by natural magic. Of course the menace of impending death drew his thoughts in the direction of religion. Among the intimate friends of the family was the devout Susanna von Klettenberg, one of the leading spirits in a local conventicle of the Moravian Brethren. This lady — afterwards immortalized as the “beautiful soul” of Wilhelm Meister — tried to have the sick youth make his peace with God in her way, that is, by accepting Christ as an ever-present personal saviour. While he never would admit a conviction of sin he envied the calm of the saintly maiden and was so far converted that he attended the meetings of the Brethren, took part in their communion service, and for a while spoke the language of a devout pietist.

  This religious experience of his youth bit deep into Goethe’s character. He soon drifted away from the pietists and their ways, he came to have a poor opinion of priests and priestcraft, and in time men called him a heathen. Nevertheless his nature had been so deeply stirred in his youth by religion’s mystic appeal that he never afterwards lost his reverence for genuine religious feeling. To the end of his days the aspiration of the human soul for communion with God found in him a delicate and sympathetic interpreter.

  During his convalescence Goethe retouched a score of his Leipzig songs and published them anonymously, with music by his friend Breitkopf, under the title of New Songs. He regarded them at the time as trifles that had come into being without art or effort. “Young, in love, and full of feeling,” he had sung them so, while “playing the old game of youth.” To-day they seem to convey little forewarning of the matchless lyric gift that was soon to awaken, being a shade too intellectual and sententious. One hears more of the critic’s comment than of the poet’s cry. It was at this time also that he rewrote an earlier Leipzig play, expanding it from one act to three and giving it the title Die Mitschuldigen, or The Fellow-culprits. It is a sort of rogue’s comedy in middle-class life, written in the alexandrine verse, which was soon to be discarded along with other French fashions. We have a quartet consisting of an inquisitive inn-keeper, his mismated sentimental daughter, her worthless husband, and her former lover. They tangle themselves up in a series of low intrigues and are finally unmasked as one and all poor miserable sinners. Technically it is a good play — lively, diverting, well put together. But one can not call it very edifying.

  In the spring of 1770 Goethe entered the University of Strassburg, which was at that time in French territory. It was a part of his general purpose to better his French, but the actual effect of his sojourn in Alsatia was to put him out of humor with all French standards, especially with the classic French drama, and to excite in him a fervid enthusiasm for the things of the fatherland. This was due partly to the influence of Herder, with whom he now came into close personal relations. From Herder, who was six years his senior and already known by his Fragments and Critical Forests as a trenchant and original critic, he heard the gospel of a literary revolution. Rules and conventions were to be thrown overboard; the new watchwords were nature, power, originality, genius, fulness of expression. He conceived a boundless admiration for Homer, Ossian, and Shakespeare, in each of whom he saw the mirror of an epoch and a national life. He became an enthusiastic collector of Alsatian folksongs and was fascinated by the Strassburg minster — at a time when “Gothic” was generally regarded as a synonym of barbarous. Withal his gift for song-making came to a new stage of perfection under the inspiration of his love for the village maid Friederike Brion. From this time forth he was the prince of German lyrists.

  In the summer of 1771 he returned to Frankfurt once more, this time with the title of licentiate in law, and began to practise in a perfunctory way, with his heart in his literary projects. By the end of the year he had written out the first draft of a play which he afterwards revised and published anonymously (in 1773) under the title of Götz von Berlichingen. By its exuberant fulness of life, its bluff German heartiness, and the freshness and variety of its scenes, it took the public by storm, notwithstanding its disregard of the approved rules of play-writing.

  The next year he published The Sufferings of Young Werther, a tragic tale of a weak-willed sentimental youth of hyperesthetic tendencies, who commits suicide because of disappointment in love. The story was the greatest literary triumph that Germany had ever known, and in point of sheer artistic power it remains to this day the best of novels in the tragic-sentimental vein. These two works carried the name of Goethe far and wide and made him the accepted leader of the literary revolution which long afterwards came to be known, from the title of a play by Klinger, as the Storm and Stress.

  The years 1773-1775 were for Goethe a time of high emotional tension, from which he sought relief in rapid, desultory, and multifarious writing. Exquisite songs, musical comedies of a sentimental tinge, humorous and satiric skits in dramatic form, prose tragedy of passionate error, and poetic tragedy of titanic revolt — all these and more welled up from a sub-conscious spring of feeling, taking little counsel of the sober intellect. Several minor productions were left unfinished and were afterwards published in fragmentary form. Such is the case with Prometheus, a splendid fragment, in which we get a glimpse of the Titan battling, as the friend of man, against the ever-living gods. Of the works completed and published at this time, aside from Götz and Werther, the most notable were Clavigo and Stella, prose tragedies in which a fickle lover meets with condign punishment. Another prose tragedy, Egmont, with its hero conceived as a “demonic” nature borne on to his doom by his own buoyancy of spirit, was nearly finished. Most important of all, a considerable portion of Faust, which was to be its author’s great life-work, was “stormed out” during these early years at Frankfurt.

  The legendary Faust is presented as a bad man who sells his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of power and pleasure, gets what he bargained for, and in the end goes to perdition. Young Goethe conceived his hero differently: not as a bad man on the way to hell, and not — at first — as a good man on the way to heaven. He t
hought of him rather as a towering personality passionately athirst for transcendental knowledge and universal experience; as a man whose nature contained the very largest possibilities both for good and for evil. It is probable that, when he began to write, Goethe did not intend to anticipate the judgment of God upon Faust’s career. The essence of his dramatic plan was to carry his hero through a lifetime of varied experience, letting him sin and suffer grandly, and at last to give him something to do which would seem worth having lived for. After the going down of the curtain, in all probability, he was to be left in the hands of the Eternal Pardoner. Later in life, as we shall see, Goethe decided not only to save his hero, but to make his salvation a part of the dramatic action.

  The close of the year 1775 brought a momentous change in Goethe’s life and prospects. On the invitation of the young duke Karl August, who had met him and taken a liking to him, he went to visit the Weimar court, not expecting to stay more than a few weeks. But the duke was so pleased with his gifted and now famous guest that he presently decided to keep him in Weimar, if possible, by making him a member of the Council of State. Goethe was the more willing to remain, since he detested his law practise, and his income from authorship was pitifully small. Moreover, he saw in the boyish, impulsive, sport-loving prince a sterling nature that might be led in the ways of wise rulership. For the nonce this was mission enough. He took his seat in the Council in June, 1776, with the title of Councilor of Legation. At first there was not very much for him to do except to familiarize himself with the physical and economic conditions of the little duchy. This he did with a will. He set about studying mineralogy, geology, botany, and was soon observing the homologies of the vertebrate skeleton. Withal he was very attentive to routine business.