The Youth of Goethe Part 2

In October, 1767, Goethe resumed his correspondence with Behrisch, and it is in this part of it that we have the fullest revelation of his state of mind during the last year of his residence in Leipzig. With the exception of occasional digressions these letters are solely concerned with his relations to Kathchen, and their outpourings afterwards received their faithful echo in the incoherences of Werther. Here is the beginning of a letter to Behrisch (October 13th), in which he described his feelings as evoked by the appearance of two rivals for the favours of Kathchen. "Another night like this, Behrisch, and, in spite of all my sins, I shan't have to go to h.e.l.l.

You may have slept peacefully, but a jealous lover, who has drunk as much champagne as is necessary to put his blood in a pleasant heat and to inflame his imagination to the highest point! At first I could not sleep, I tossed about in my bed, sprang up, raved; then I grew weary and fell asleep." And he proceeds to relate a wild dream in which Kathchen was the distracting image; and he concludes: "There you have Annette. She is a cursed la.s.s!"[29] Yet on the same day or the day following he could thus describe his mode of life in a letter to his sister: "It is very philosophical," he writes; "I have given up concerts, comedies, riding and driving, and have abandoned all societies of young folks who might lead me into more company. This will be of great advantage to my purse."[30] Very different is the picture of his mode of life in his subsequent letters to Behrisch at the same period. If we are to take him literally, it was the life of a veritable Don Juan who had learned all the lessons of his instructor.

"Do you recognise me in this tone, Behrisch?" he writes; "it is the tone of a conquering young lord.... It is comic. Aber ohne zu schworen ich unterstehe mich schon ein Madgen zu verf--wie Teufel soll ich's nennen. Enough, Monsieur, all this is but what you might have expected from the aptest and most diligent of your scholars."[31] That all this was not mere bravado is distinctly suggested even in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, where the wild doings of Leipzig are so decorously draped.

[Footnote 29: _Ib._ p. 105.]

[Footnote 30: _Ib._ p. 116.]

[Footnote 31: _Ib._ p. 133.]

Goethe knew from the first that he could never make Kathchen his wife, and that sooner or later his lovemaking must come to an end. The end came in the spring of 1768 after two years' philandering which had not been all happiness. In a letter to Behrisch he thus relates the _denouement_: "Oh, Behrisch," he writes, "I have begun to live! Could I but tell you the whole story! I cannot; it would cost me too much.

Enough--we have separated, we are happy.... Behrisch, we are living in the pleasantest, friendliest intercourse.... We began with love and we end with friends.h.i.+p."[32] Goethe makes one of his characters say that estranged lovers, if they only manage things well, may still remain friends, and the remark was prompted by more than one experience of his own.

[Footnote 32: _Ib._ pp. 158-9.]

When he was past his seventieth year, Goethe made a remark to his friend, Chancellor von Muller, which is applicable to every period of his life: "In the hundred things which interest me," he said, "there is always one which, as chief planet, holds the central place, and meanwhile the remaining Quodlibet of my life circles round it in many-changing phases, till each and all succeed in reaching the centre." Even in these distracted Leipzig years the mental process thus described is clearly visible. Neither Goethe's loves nor his other dissipations ever permanently dulled the intellectual side of his nature. While he was writing morbid letters to Behrisch, he was directing the studies of his sister with all the seriousness of a youthful pedagogue. Though he neglected the lectures of his professors, he was a.s.similating knowledge on every subject that appealed to his natural instincts. In truth, all the manifold activities of his later years were foreshadowed during his sojourn in Leipzig, as, indeed, they had already been foreshadowed during his boyhood in Frankfort.

As in Frankfort, he took in knowledge equally from men, books, and things.[33] In the house of a Leipzig citizen, a physician and botanist, he met a society of medical men, and he records how his attention was directed to an entirely new field through listening to their conversation. Now, apparently for the first time, he heard the names of Haller, Buffon, and Linnaeus, the last of whom he, in later years, named with Spinoza and Shakespeare as one of the chief moulding forces of his life. Through the influence and example of other men he intermittently practised etching, drawing, and engraving--all arts in which he retained a lifelong interest. But among all the persons in Leipzig who influenced him Goethe gave the first place to Friedrich Oeser, director of the academy of drawing in the city. Oeser was about fifty years of age, jovial in disposition, and an experienced man of the world. Though as an artist he is now held in little regard, his reputation was great in his own day,[34] and he had a reflected glory in being the friend of Winckelmann, who was reputed to have profited by his teaching in art. Under the inspiration of Oeser Goethe's interest in the plastic arts in general, which had received its first impulse at home, became a permanent preoccupation for the remainder of his life. He took regular lessons in drawing from Oeser, made acquaintance with all the collections, public and private, to be found in Leipzig, and even made a secret visit to the galleries in Dresden, where, he tells us, he gave his exclusive attention to the works of the great Dutch masters. As was always his habit, Goethe generously acknowledged his obligations to Oeser. "Who among all my teachers, except yourself," he afterwards wrote on his return to Frankfort, "ever thought me worthy of encouragement? They either heaped all blame or all praise upon me, and nothing can be so destructive of talent....

You know what I was when I came to you, and what when I left you: the difference is your work ... you have taught me to be modest without self-depreciation, and to be proud without presumption."[35] And elsewhere he declares that the great lesson he had learned from Oeser was that the ideal of beauty is to be found in "simplicity and repose." But the main interest of Goethe's intercourse with Oeser in connection with his general development is that it strengthened an illusion from which he did not succeed in freeing himself till near his fortieth year--the illusion that nature had given him equally the gifts of the painter and the poet. Many hours of the best years of his life were to be spent in laboriously practising an art in which he was doomed to mediocrity; and it must remain a riddle that one, who like Goethe was so curiously studious of his own self-development, should so long and so blindly have misunderstood his own gifts.[36]

[Footnote 33: "Das Bedurfnis meiner Natur zwingt mich zu einer vermannigfaltigten Thatigkeit," he wrote of himself in his thirty-second year.]

[Footnote 34: When, in his thirty-sixth year, Goethe renewed his acquaintance with Oeser, he wrote of him to Frau von Stein: "C'est comme si cet homme ne devroit pas mourir, tant ses talents paroissent toujours aller en s'augmentant."]

[Footnote 35: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 179.]

[Footnote 36: In later years he consoled himself with the reflection that the time he had spent on the technicalities of art was not wholly lost, as he had thus acquired powers of observation which were valuable to him both as a poet and as a man of science.]

It may partly explain his addiction to art that the poetical productions which he had brought from Frankfort, and which had been applauded by the circle of his friends there, did not meet with the approval of the critics in Leipzig. We have seen how sharply Frau Bohme commented on their shortcomings, but he was specially disheartened by the severe criticism pa.s.sed on one of his poems by Clodius, the professor of literature. "I am cured of the folly of thinking myself a poet,"[37] he wrote to his sister about a year after his arrival in Leipzig. Some six months later he writes to her in a more hopeful spirit: "Since I am wholly without pride, I may trust my inner conviction, which tells me that I possess some of the qualities required in a poet, and that by diligence I may even become one."[38]

In his Autobiography and elsewhere Goethe has spoken at length of the disadvantages under which youthful geniuses laboured at the period when he began his literary career.[39] As Germany then existed, there was no national feeling to inspire great themes, no standard of taste, and no worthy models for imitation. There was, indeed, no lack of literature on all subjects; Kant speaks sarcastically of "the deluge of books with which our part of the world is inundated every year."

But the fatal defects of the poetry then produced was triviality and the "wateriness" of its style. Yet it was during the years that Goethe spent in Leipzig that there appeared a succession of works which mark a new departure in German literature. In 1766 Herder, who was subsequently to exercise such a profound influence over Goethe, published his _Fragments on Modern German Literature_; in the same year appeared Lessing's _Laokoon_, which, in Goethe's own words, transported himself and his contemporaries "out of the region of pitifully contracted views into the domain of emanc.i.p.ated thought"; and in 1767 Lessing's _Minna von Barnhelm_, Germany's "first national drama." Greatly as Goethe was impressed by both of these works of Lessing, however, he was not mature enough to profit by them[40]; and, in point of fact, all the work, poems and plays, which he produced during his Leipzig period, is solely inspired by the French models which had so long dominated German literature.

[Footnote 37: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. 67.]

[Footnote 38: _Ib._ p. 88.]

[Footnote 39: Notably in his paper, ent.i.tled _Literarischer Sansculottismus_. See above, p. 4. Regarding Lessing he made this remark to Eckermann (February 7th, 1827): "Bedauert doch den ausserordentlichen Menschen, da.s.s er in einer so erbarmlichen Zeit leben musste, die ihm keine bessern Stoffe gab, als in seinen Stucken verarbeitet sind!"]

[Footnote 40: "Lessing war der hochste Verstand, und nur ein ebenso grosser konnte von ihm wahrhaft lernen. Dem Halbvermogen war er gefahrlich." (To Eckermann, January 18th, 1825.)]

Considering his other manifold preoccupations, the amount of Goethe's literary output during his three years in Leipzig is sufficient evidence that his poetic instincts remained the dominant impulses of his nature. He sprinkled his letters to his friends with poems in German, French, and English, and he composed twenty lyrics which were subsequently published in the autumn of 1769 under the t.i.tle of _Neue Lieder_[41]; and two plays, ent.i.tled _Die Laune des Verliebten_ and _Die Mitschuldigen_. The biographic interest of all these productions is the light which they throw on the transformation which Goethe had undergone during his residence in Leipzig. In the poems he had written in Frankfort religion had been the predominant theme; in his Leipzig effusions it was love, and love in a sufficiently Anacreontic sense.

Regarding the poetic merit of the _Neue Lieder_ German critics are for the most part at one. With hardly an exception the love lyrics are mere imitations of French models; their style is as artificial as their feeling; and they give little promise of the work that was to come from the same hand a few years later. As the expression of one of his lover's moods, one of them, reckoned the best in the collection, may here be given. It is ent.i.tled _Die schone Nacht_.

[Footnote 41: Nine of these _Lieder_ Goethe thought worthy of a permanent place in his collected works.]

DIE SCHoNE NACHT.

Nun verla.s.s' ich diese Hutte, Meiner Liebsten Aufenthalt; Wandle mit verhulltem Schritte Durch den oden, finstern Wald.

Luna bricht durch Busch und Eichen, Zephyr meldet ihren Lauf; Und die Birken streun mit Neigen Ihr den sussten Weihrauch auf.

Wie ergotz' ich mich im Kuhlen Dieser schonen Sommernacht!

O wie still ist hier zu fuhlen Was die Seele glucklich macht!

La.s.st sich kaum die Wonne fa.s.sen, Und doch wollt' ich, Himmel! dir Tausend solcher Nachte la.s.sen, Gab' mein Madchen Eine mir.

THE BEAUTIFUL NIGHT.

Now I leave the cot behind me Where my love hath her abode; And I wander with veiled footsteps Through the drear and darksome wood.

Luna's rays pierce oak and thicket Zephyr heraldeth her way; And for her its sweetest incense Sheddeth every birchen spray.

How I revel in the coolness Of this beauteous summer night!

Ah! how peaceful here the feeling Of what makes the soul's delight, Bliss wellnigh past comprehending!

Yet, O Heaven, I would to thee Thousand nights like this surrender, Gave my maiden one to me.

But it is in the two plays produced during this period that Goethe most fully reveals both his literary ideals and the essential traits of his own character. The first of the two, _Die Laune des Verliebten_ ("The Lover's Caprices"), is based on his own relations to Kathchen Schonkopf, and is cast in the form of a pastoral drama, written in Alexandrines after the fas.h.i.+on of the time.[42] The theme is a satire on his own wayward conduct towards Kathchen, as he has depicted it in his Autobiography. The plot is of the simplest kind. Two pairs of lovers, Egle and Lamon, and Amine and Eridon, the first pair happy in their loves, the second unhappy, make up the characters of the piece.

The leading part is taken by Egle, who is distressed at the misery of her friend Amine, occasioned by the jealous humours of her lover Eridon. Complications there are none, and the sole interest of the play consists in the vivacity of the dialogues and in the arch mischief with which Egle eventually shames Eridon out of his foolish jealousy of his maiden, who is only too fondly devoted to him. What strikes us in the whole performance is that Goethe, if he was so madly in love with Kathchen as his letters to Behrisch represent him, should have been capable of writing it. From its playful humour and entirely objective treatment it might have been written by a good-natured onlooker amused at the spectacle of two young people trifling with feelings which neither could take seriously.

[Footnote 42: This play was based on an earlier attempt made in Frankfort.]

Equally objective is Goethe's handling of the very different theme of the other play, _Die Mitschuldigen_ ("The Accomplices"),[43] and in this case the objectivity is still more remarkable in a youth who had not yet attained his twentieth year. This second piece belongs to the cla.s.s of low comedy, and is as simple in construction as its companion. The scene is laid in an inn, and the characters are four in number: the Host, whose leading trait is insatiable curiosity; his daughter Sophia, represented as of easy virtue; Soller, her husband, a graceless scamp; and Alcestes, a former lover of Sophia, and for the time a guest in the inn. In the central scene of the play there come in succession to Alcestes' room in the course of one night Soller, who steals Alcestes' gold; the Host, to possess himself of a letter with the contents of which he has a burning curiosity to become acquainted; and Sophia by appointment with Alcestes. As father and daughter have caught sight of each other on their respective errands, each suspects the other of being the thief, and in a sorry scene the father, on the condition of being permitted to read the letter, which turns out to be a trivial note, informs Alcestes that Sophia is the delinquent.

Finally, Soller, under the threat of a p.r.i.c.k from Alcestes' sword, confesses to the theft, and the piece ends with a mutual agreement to condone each other's delinquencies.[44] The play is not without humour, and the different characters are vivaciously presented, but the blindest admirers of the master may well regret, as they mostly have regretted, that such a work should have come from his hands. The most charitable construction we can put on the graceless production is that Goethe, out of his abnormal impressionability, for the time being deliberately a.s.sumed the tone of cynical indifference with which he had become familiar in his intercourse with his friend Behrisch.

[Footnote 43: The exact time and place of its composition is uncertain, but Goethe's own testimony seems to indicate that it was mainly written in Leipzig, in 1769. It was first published in 1787, with some modifications, which affect only the form.]

[Footnote 44: With a fatuity into which he occasionally fell, Goethe in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ remarks that his two plays are an ill.u.s.tration of that most Christian text, "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone."]

In direct connection with the shorter poems which Goethe wrote in Leipzig, there is a pa.s.sage in his Autobiography which has perhaps been more frequently quoted than any other, and which, according as we interpret it, must materially influence our judgment at once on his character and his genius. The pa.s.sage is as follows: "And thus began that tendency of which, all my life through, I was never able to break myself; the tendency to trans.m.u.te into a picture or a poem whatever gave me either pleasure or pain, or otherwise preoccupied me, and thus to arrive at a judgment regarding it, with the object at once of rectifying my ideas of things external to me and of calming my own feelings. This gift was in truth perhaps necessary to no one more than to me, whose temperament was continually tossing him from one extreme to another. All my productions proceeding from this tendency that have become known to the world are only fragments of a great confession which it is the bold attempt of this book to complete."

From the context of this pa.s.sage it is to be inferred that the habit which Goethe describes applied only to the occasional short poems which he threw off at the different periods of his life. But are we to infer that the account here given of Goethe's occasional poems applies to the pa.s.sionate lyrics which a few years later he was to pour forth in such abundance? To a very different purport is another pa.s.sage in the Autobiography, which is at the same time a striking commentary on Wordsworth's remark that Goethe's poetry was "not inevitable enough."

"I had come," he there says, "to look upon my indwelling poetic talent altogether as a force of nature; the more so as I had always been compelled to regard outward nature as its proper object. The exercise of this poetic faculty might indeed be excited and determined by circ.u.mstances; but its most joyful and richest action was spontaneous--even involuntary. In my nightly vigils the same thing happened; so that I often wished, like one of my predecessors, to have a leathern jerkin made, and to get accustomed to writing in the dark, so as to be able to fix on paper all such unpremeditated effusions. It had so often happened to me that, after composing some s.n.a.t.c.h of poetry in my head, I could not recall it, that I would now hurry to my desk and, without once breaking off, write off the poem from beginning to end, not even taking time to straighten the paper, if it lay crosswise, so that the verses often slanted across the page. In such a mood I preferred to get hold of a lead pencil, because I could write most readily with it; whereas the scratching and spluttering of a pen would sometimes wake me from a poetic dream, confuse me, and so stifle some trifling production in its birth."[45]

[Footnote 45: The translation of this pa.s.sage is by Miss Minna Steele Smith.--_Poetry and Truth from My Own Life_ (London, 1908.)]

Poetry produced as here described may certainly be regarded as part of the poet's "confession," but in the circ.u.mstances of its origin it is a world apart from the poetry composed in the fas.h.i.+on described in the pa.s.sage preceding. The poet here does not coolly say to himself: "Go to, I will make a poem to relieve my feelings"; he sings, to quote Goethe's own expression, "as the bird sings," out of the sheer fulness of his heart, which insists on immediate expression.[46] True it is that Goethe, like all other poets, frequently wrote under no immediate pressure of inspiration, but to affirm this of the highest efforts of his genius is at once to contradict his own testimony and to misinterpret the conditions under which genius produces its results.

[Footnote 46: In a letter to W. von Rumohr (September 28th, 1807), Goethe calls "unaufhaltsame Natur, unuberwindliche Neigung, drangende Leidenschaft" the "Haupterfordernisse der wahren Poesie." In two of his _Zahme Xenien_ Goethe has expressed his opinion on the necessity of inspiration in poetic production:--

Ja das ist das rechte Gleis, Da.s.s man nicht weiss, Was man denkt, Wenn man denkt: Alles ist als wie geschenkt.

All unser redlichstes Bemuhn Gluckt nur im unbewussten Momente.

Wie mochte denn die Rose bluhn, Wenn sie der Sonne Herrlichkeit erkennte!]

CHAPTER III

AT HOME IN FRANKFORT

SEPTEMBER, 1768--APRIL, 1770