Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Birth and education.JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749-1832)was born in Frankfort on August 28, 1749. His parentswere citizens of that imperial town, and Wolfgang was theironly son and their eldest child. His father was born onJuly 31, 1710, and in 1742 received the title of imperialcouncillor. He married on August 20, 1748, at the age ofthirty-eight, Catherine Elizabeth Textor, a girl of seventeen.Her family was better than his own, and held a higher positionin the town. Her father was imperial councillor, andhad been schultheiss or chief magistrate. In December1750 was born a daughter, Cornelia, who remained until herdeath, at the age of twenty-seven, her brother's most intimatefriend. She was married in 1773 to John GeorgeSchlosser. The house in which Goethe was born is still tobe seen in the Hirschgraben. Goethe has described to ushow it was rebuilt, and it has since been much altered.His education was irregular; he went to no school, and hisfather rather stimulated than instructed him. But theatmosphere by which he was surrounded gave him, perhaps,the best education he could have received. Frankfort, afree town of the empire, still preserved the appearance ofthe Middle Ages. It had lost the reality of power, butits citizens naturally grew up with a strong sense ofindependence, and a power of realizing the unity ofGermany which was wanting in a small state. The boyfrom his earliest youth was accustomed to the companionshipof his elders. His father was strict and formal, hismother quick and lively, inspired with no small share of thegenius of her son. Goethe lived in the freest intercoursewith every kind of society in the town, in which he mightexpect some day to be an important personage. Therewas no capital like London or Paris to call him away;Berlin was poor and distant, Vienna half Italian and halfSpanish. Goethe must have been brought up with theambition to take his degree at the university as doctor,to return home and become an advocate, to make arich marriage, to go through the regular course of civiloffices, to inherit his father's house, and perhaps oneday to be burgomaster. His home was a cultivated one.The father was fond of art and of the German poetrythen in fashion. The influence of Leasing had scarcelymade itself felt; Herder was only five years older thanGoethe himself. Gellert and Gottsched were the twooracles of poetry, — Gottsched a pedantic product of theearlier French culture, Gellert old and immovable, andunable to comprehend the new spirit. The chief debt thatGoethe owed to him was the improvement in his handwriting, on which Gellert laid great stress, and which hecoupled with moral excellence. Goethe's father had agreat respect for these rhyming poets, and he so stronglyobjected to the new German hexameters that Wolfgangcould only read Klopstock's Messiah with his sister in thegreatest secrecy and in terror of discovery. He did,however, read it, and learned much of it by heart. Frenchculture gave at this time the prevailing tone to Europe.Goethe could not have escaped its influence, and he wasdestined to fall under it in a special manner. In theSeven Years' War, which was now raging, France tookthe side of the empire against Frederick the Great.Frankfort was full of French soldiers, and a certain ComteThorane, who was quartered in Goethe's house, had animportant influence on the boy. Still more strongly washe affected by the French company of actors, whom hecame to know both on and off the stage. He learned todeclaim in this manner passages of Racine withoutunderstanding a word of them. At a later period he knewFrench thoroughly well, and composed both prose andpoetry in that language. His first writings were imitationsof the French manner; his earliest play was the imitationof a French after-piece. We can understand how thesedifferent forces were to work upon his future life. Fromhis father he derived the steadfastness of character whichenabled him to pursue an independent career of self-cultureand devotion to art in the midst of every kind of distractinginfluence; from his mother he inherited the joyousnature and lively sympathy, the flow of language and loveof narration, without which he could not have been a poet.Before the age of sixteen he had seen every kind of life in acity particularly favourable to a richness of individualcharacter; he was entirely free from the prejudices of a smallstate; and as far as he cared for Germany he cared for it as awhole. He was tinged at an early age with the influence ofthe clearest and most finished language in Europe, and thisinfluence, uniting with the natural clearness of Goethe'smind, made his prose a new phenomenon in the literatureof his country, unlike anything which had been seen before.Lastly, with the most passionate aspirations for freedom andindependence of life, he was born into the slavery of amechanical career of prosaic prosperity, the pressure ofwhich was not strong enough to confine him, but was strongenough to stimulate all his efforts to break the bonds.

First love.First Goethe, if we may believe his autobiography, experiencedlove, his first love about the age of fifteen in the person ofGretchen, whom some have supposed to be the daughter ofan innkeeper at Offenbach. He worshipped her as Danteworshipped Beatrice. She treated him as a child, much asMiss Chaworth treated Byron. But there is no otherevidence of this first love, and it would be quite in accordancewith Goethe's manner to enlarge on a very small foundation,or to concentrate on one person the feelings whichwere devoted to several individuals. His letters speak of aboyish love for one Charitas Meixner, a friend of his sister,two years younger than himself, the daughter of a richmerchant at Worms. He expresses his affection for her with allthe fervour of French phraseology, and the passion did notleave him when he had removed to Leipsic. But Charitaswas able to console herself with another engagement.She married in February 1773 a merchant of her nativetown, and died at the end of the following year.

In the autumn of 1765 Goethe, who had just completedhis sixteenth year, travelled to Leipsic in the company ofa bookseller, Fleischer, and his wife, who were on their wayto attend the fair. On the 19th of October he wasadmitted as a student of the Bavarian nation, one of thefour into which the university was divided. For hislodging he had two neat little rooms in the Feuerkugel,the Fire Ball, looking into the long court-yard which leadsfrom the old market to the new. When we rememberthat his three years at Leipsic, about which so muchhas been written, correspond with the last three yearsof an English boy at a public school, we can form someidea of the singular individuality of his character andthe maturity and ripeness of his genius. He was sentto Leipsic to study law, in order that he might returnto Frankfort fitted for the regular course of municipaldistinction. For this purpose he carried with him a letter toProfessor Böhme, who taught history and imperial law inthe university, but had no other distinction to recommendhim. He told Professor Böhme that he intended to devotehimself not to law but to belles lettres, or, to use theword which F. A. Wolf had invented, philology. Böhmedid his best to dissuade him, and in this was assisted byhis wife. The effect of their advice was rather to disgustGoethe with modern German literature, to make him despisewhat he had already written, and to drive him into thedistractions of society, which wasted both his time andhis money. He did, however, attend some lectures. Heheard Ernesti on Cicero's Orator, but he dealt rather withquestions of grammar than of taste. He attended Gellert'slectures on literature, and even joined his private class.Gellert held a high position among German men of letters,which was due quite as much to his character as to hisgenius. He advised Goethe to desert poetry for prose, andto take to authorship only as an employment subordinateto the serious occupations of his life. Goethe tells us thatin his lectures upon taste he never heard Gellert mentionthe names of Klopstock, Kleist, Wieland, Gessner, Gleim,or Lessing. He also attended the lectures of anotherliterary professor, Clodius, a young man about ten yearsolder than himself. Clodius corrected Goethe's writingswith red ink, and pointed out the faults without showingthe way to mend them, Goethe had written a poemof congratulation for the marriage of his uncle Textor(February 17, 1766), which, according to the fashion ofthe time, was full of gods and goddesses and othermythological apparatus. Clodius was unsparingly hard uponthis production, and Goethe then perceived that his criticwas just as faulty as himself in the use of abstractions andstrange outlandish words to give weight and authority tohis verse. He satirized Clodius in a poem in praise of thecakes of the confectioner Händel, and by a parody of hisdrama Medon. His position towards the professors of hisuniversity was not an enviable one. His real universityeducation was derived from intercourse with his friends.First among these was J. G. Schlosser, who afterwardsmarried his sister. Goethe used to dine with him at atable d'hôte kept by a wine-dealer, Schönkopf, in theBruhl (No. 79), in a house which still exists. Schlosser,who was at this time private secretary to the duke ofWürtemberg and tutor to his children, was ten years olderthan Goethe. He had a great influence upon him, chieflyin introducing him to a wider circle of German, French,English, and Italian poetry. At the table of ProfessorLudwig, where Goethe had previously dined, the conversationhad generally turned on medical and scientificsubjects. Another friend of Goethe's was Behrisch, tutor tothe young Count Lindenau. He was a man in middle life,and he combined originality of character and clearness ofliterary judgment with a dry and caustic wit, and anever-abiding sense of humour; much in the same proportions aswere found in Merck, who exercised at a later period animportant influence over Goethe's career. His friendshipwith Goethe was not at first of advantage to him. He wasdeprived of his tutorship from a suspicion that he did notalways keep the most select society, and his successor wasforbidden to allow his charge to associate with the young poet.This is supposed to have been caused by Goethe's disrespectfulbehaviour to Professor Clodius. Gellert obtained forBehrisch an educational post at the court of Dessau, andGoethe kept up a constant correspondence with him tillhis death in 1809. Behrisch would not allow Goethe toprint his poems, but copied them out instead in a beautifulhand. He probably had a considerable effect in producingthe simplicity and naturalness of Goethe's early style.

Oeser.But the person who had the strongest effect on Goethe'smental development was Adam Frederick Oeser, at this timedirector of the academy of arts in Leipsic. Goethe tooklessons from him in drawing, and, not content with this, triedhis hand at etching. A little device of his for a book-plateor a bill-head is extant, in which a slab with the name C. G.Schönkopf is represented with three bottles above and awreath of flowers below. Oeser had been a friend of Winckelmann's,and exercised great influence over his views of art.This was a source of considerable reputation to him, andWinckelmann's tragic death, the news of which reachedLeipsic whilst Goethe was there, must have brought therelation between them into stronger relief. Goethe alwaysspoke of Oeser's influence with the greatest affection andrespect. He writes — “Oeser's discoveries have given me afresh opportunity of blessing myself that I had him for myinstructor. He entered into our very souls, and we mustindeed have been without souls not to have derived benefitfrom him. His lessons will produce their effects throughall the rest of my existence. He taught me that the idealof beauty is simplicity and repose.” We find Goethe atWeimar continually consulting Oeser for designs for furnitureand for theatrical entertainments.

Aennchen Schönkopf.Goethe from his earliest years was never without a passion,and at Leipsic his passion was Kitty Schönkopf, the Aennchenof the autobiography, the daughter of the host at whosehouse he dined. She often teased him with her inconstantways, and to this experience is due his first drama Die Launedes Verliebten, “Lovers' Quarrels,” as it may be styled. It isa mere trifle, a pastoral in one act, written in alexandrines inthe French style. Two happy and two unhappy lovers arecontrasted. The only interest of the piece is that it is afragment from Goethe's own life. A deeper chord is struck inDie Mitschuldigen (The Fellow Sinners), which forms a dismaland forbidding picture both of the time and of theexperiences of the youth who wrote it. The daughter of aninnkeeper has made an unhappy marriage, and is visited bya former lover who is in good circumstances. An assignationis arranged, and the interview is witnessed by the husband,who has come to steal the stranger's purse. The fathercomes in to read one of the stranger's letters. He issurprised, and is with his daughter suspected of the theft.The real culprit is discovered, but defends himself by accusingthe stranger of his conduct to his wife. So they areall guilty. This play was first written in one act. It wasafterwards enlarged to three acts, and published in 1787.The manuscript, which still exists, was given to FrederikeBrion of Sesenheim. Besides these plays Goethe wrote atLeipsic twenty little songs of an erotic chararacter, whichwere set to music by his young friend Breitkopf. Hedescribes them as moral-sensuous, but they are more sensuousthan moral. They have the merit of a musical easy flowof expression, various moods of passion, with a happy readinessand elegance. Only a few of them were includedin his collected works, and those very much altered.They show the influence of Wieland, but by one side ofWieland Goethe was never affected. He was never led tomingle classical ideas and emblems with the unrestrainedand sensual frivolity which was disseminated from France.He never imitated Agathon or Musarion. Whatever mayhave been the bitterness of his experience of life, or thewaywardness of his excited fancy, he conceived a trueidea of the real nature of classical art. In thisWinckelmann and Lessing were his teachers, and he was neveruntrue to the lessons which they inculcated. This was themost valuable possession he brought back from Leipsic.He had an opportunity of establishing his principles of tasteduring a short visit to Dresden, in which he devotedhimself to the pictures and the antiques. The end of Goethe'sstay at Leipsic was saddened by illness. One morning atthe beginning of the summer he was awakened by a violenthemorrhage. For several days he hung between life anddeath, and after that his recovery was slow, although hewas tended with the greatest anxiety by his friends. Hefinally left Leipsic far from well on August 28, 1768, hisnineteenth birthday.

Frankfort.Goethe made an enforced stay of a year and ahalf in his native town. It was perhaps the least happypart of his life. He was in bad health. His cureproceeded slowly, and he had several relapses, and the weaknessof the lungs, which was his first complaint, wassucceeded by a weakness of the digestion, which was yet moretroublesome and painful. The society of Frankfort seemedto him far less agreeable than that of Leipsic; hecontrasted the cold, stiff, formal, old-fashioned life of theimperial city with the freshness, geniality, and intellectualactivity of the Saxon university. His family relations werenot pleasant. His grandfather Textor was struck withparalysis; his father showed but little sympathy with hisaspirations for universal culture, and could imagine nocareer for him but that of a successful jurist. His sisterhad grown somewhat harsh and cold during his absence,and was possessed by a morbid self-consciousness, which shecommitted to the confidential pages of a secret diary. Thetone of this diary, partly the result of family temperament,partly of the character of the age, throws an interestinglight on the despair of Werther. Goethe's mother wasalways the same to him, a bright, genial, sympatheticfriend. But her love could not ward off the pressure ofcircumstances, or supply a substitute for a wider and moreunfettered life. Goethe, during his illness, received greatattention from Fräulein von Klettenberg, a friend of hismother's, a pietist of the Moravian school. She initiatedhim into the mystical writings of those abstracted saints,and she engaged him in the study of alchemy, whichserved at once to prepare him for the conception of Faustand for the scientific researches of his later days. Duringhis stay at Frankfort he wrote very little. It may be thatthe two Leipsic dramas received here their completed form.A farce in memory of his Leipsic life, a poetical letter toFrederike Oeser, the daughter of his teacher, a few songs,some of them religious, make up the tale of his productions,as far as we know them.

He arrived at Strasburg April 2, 1770. It was intendedthat after a sojourn in the university of that place he shouldvisit Paris, the centre of refinement. Goethe stayed in Strasburgtill August 28, 1771, his twenty-second birthday, andthese sixteen months are perhaps the most important of hislife. During them he came into active contact with most ofthose impulses of which his after life was a development. Ifwe would understand his mental growth, we must ask whowere his friends. He took his meals at the house of theFräulein Lauth in the Krämergasse. The table was mainlyfilled with medical students. At the head of it satSalzmann, a grave man of fifty years of age. His experienceand his refined taste were very attractive to Goethe, whomade him his intimate friend. Goethe was soon drawn bythe studies of his companions to desert his own. A notebookof this date is preserved, which gives us a full accountof his studies and employments. He attended lectures onanatomy, on midwifery, and on chemistry. His own studieswere chiefly devoted to the last science; and he did notforget his favourite alchemy. He had brought with him toStrasburg introductions to pietistic circles, and this madehim at first somewhat staid and retired in his pleasures, anddisinclined for general society. This soon wore off, and thenatural cheerfulness of his genial nature returned to him.Two songs, Blinde Kuh and Stirbt der Fuchs so gilt der Balg,refer to the social life of this period. He went on picnics,he wrote French poetry, he took dancing lessons, he learntthe violoncello. The table of the Fräulein Lauth receivedsome new guests. Among these was Jung-Stilling, theself-educated charcoal-burner, who in his memoir has left agraphic account of Goethe's striking appearance, his broadbrow, his flashing eye, his mastery of the company, and hisgenerosity of character. Another was Lerse, a frank opencharacter who became Goethe's favourite, and whose nameis immortalized in Götz von Berlichingen. Goethe didnot desert his studies in art. He learnt from the constantstudy of the cathedral of Strasburg the effect of Gothicarchitecture, and he shuddered when he saw the reception-roomsof the youthful Marie Antoinette hung with tapestrieswhich represented the marriage of Jason and Medea, andseemed to forebode the coming doom. His diary also showsthat he spent much time in philosophical speculation. Butthe most important event of his Strasburg sojourn was hisacquaintance with Herder. He was five years older thanGoethe. Herder was then travelling as tutor to the youngprince of Holstein-Eutin, but was obliged to spend thewhole winter of 1770-71 in Strasburg on account of anaffection of his eyes. Goethe was with him every day,often all day. Herder, who was a pupil of a more originalgenius, Hamann, taught him the true value of nature in art,and the principles of what we should now call the romanticschool. He made Ossian known to him, and the wealth ofpopular poetry in all nations which the publication of Ossianrevealed; he enchanted him with the idyllic simplicity ofthe Vicar of Wakefield; but, above all, he shook his sensibilityto the roots by revealing to him the power of themighty Shakespeare. He now saw how far superior Homerwas to his Latin imitators, and how false were the canonsof French art. Goethe's spirit was liberated from itstrammels, and Götz and Faust and Wilhelm Meister becamepossible to his mind. At a later period he forged forhimself fetters of a different kind.

Goethe's stay at Strasburg is generally connected stillmore closely with another circumstance, — his passion forSesenheim.Frederike Brion of Sesenheim. The village lies abouttwenty miles from Strasburg, and her father was pastorthere. Goethe was introduced by his friend Weyland, anAlsatian, as a poor theological student. Fresh from his studyof Goldsmith, he found the Vicar of Wakefield realized.The father was a simple worthy man, the eldest of thethree daughters was married, the two younger remained, —Maria Salome, whom Goethe calls Olivia, and Frederike,to whom the poet principally devoted himself. She wastall and slight, with fair hair and blue eyes, and just sixteenyears of age. Goethe gave himself up to the passion of themoment; what he felt and suffered is known to us by hissongs. At least ten songs are addressed to her, and severalothers were written for her. During the winter of 1770,in the intervals of his conversations with Herder, Goetheoften rode over to Sesenheim. Neither storm, nor cold, nordarkness kept him back. He should have been busy withhis dissertation for the degree of doctor. The subject he hadchosen was the duty of providing an established church.But the attractions of Frederike were a great interruptionto his labours. In the spring Herder went away. Thefine weather drew him still more strongly to Sesenheim.Picnics, water parties, games, dances, illuminated byenthusiasm for literature, filled up the weeks. As his timefor leaving Strasburg came nearer, he felt that this love wasmerely a dream, and could have no serious termination.Frederike felt the same on her side. A visit of the motherand daughters to Strasburg in July made this appear moreclearly. On August 6 Goethe took his degree as doctor oflaw. Shortly afterwards he bade adieu to Sesenheim, andthe tears stood in Frederike's eyes as he reached out hishand from horseback. From Frankfort he wrote his finalfarewell, and it was then, as he tells us, that he found fromher answer for the first time how deeply she had loved him.The account of this love episode in the autobiography doesGoethe injustice. There is nothing in the letters or thepoems of the time to show that he had wantonly trifledwith her affections. Eight years afterwards, on his way toSwitzerland, he spent a night with the Brions at Sesenheim,and was received with the utmost kindness. He wasshown the arbour where he had sat, the songs he hadwritten, the carriage he had painted. He left them in themorning with content. Frederike lived till 1813, wellknown for her works of charity. She never married; theheart that Goethe had loved, she said, should never loveanother.

Return to Frankfort.Goethe's return to Frankfort is marked by a number ofsongs, of which the “Wanderer's Sturmlied” is the mostremarkable. He found his Frankfort existence more intolerablethan before. He had outgrown many of the friendsof his youth. Those with whom he felt most sympathywere the two Schlossers and his sister Cornelia. He foundin her one who sympathized with all his aspirations. Hecared nothing for his profession; he was more determinedthan ever to devote himself to letters, and not to law. Hefound in the neighbouring town of Darmstadt a literarycircle which Frankfort did not supply. The landgravineCaroline set a good example, and had collected round hera number of kindred spirits, men and women. Amongthem were Wenck, and Petersen, and Caroline Flachsland,who was afterwards to marry Herder. But the soul of theliterary circle was Merck, now thirty years of age, attached tothe war office. Goethe has represented him in the autobiographyas a cold and unfeeling cynic, a spirit who alwayssaid no, a prototype of Mephistopheles. History representshim otherwise as a man of cultivated and chastened judgment,a represser of enthusiasm, a respecter of the rules ofart, anxious to hold the balance between the old school andthe new. Goethe had dominated over all his other friends;Merck dominated over him. He has left but little of hisown writings. He was one of those who inspire genius inothers, and whose truest picture lives in the recollections oftheir friends. These months were full of literary activity.To them belong an oration on Shakespeare, delivered atFrankfort, an essay on Erwin von Steinbach, the builderof the Strasburg cathedral, two theological treatises of aneologistic character on the commandments of Moses andthe miraculous tongues of Pentecost, and a number ofreviews written for the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeiger,which had been founded by Merck. But the work intowhich he threw all his genius was the dramatization ofthe history of the imperial knight of the Middle Ages,Götz von Berlichingen.Gottfried or Götz von Berlichingen. The immediatecause of this enterprise was his enthusiasm for Shakespeare.After reading him he felt, he said, like a blind man whosuddenly receives his sight. The unities of time and placevanished into nothing. The true form of art was seen tobe that which holds the wayward impulses together by aninvisible bond, just as in the life of man necessity is weddedto free will. The study of a dry and dull biography of Götz,published in 1731, supplied the subject for his awakenedpowers. From this miserable sketch he conceived withinhis mind a complete picture of Germany in the 16th century.The chief characters of his play are creatures of his imaginationrepresenting the principal types which made up thehistory of the time. Every personage is made to live; theyspeak in short sharp sentences like the powerful lines of agreat master's drawing. The first sketch of Götz was finishedin six weeks, in the autumn of 1771. Cornelia wasconsulted at every stage in the work. Herder saw it, and gavehis approval. On his return from Wetzlar in 1773 Goethewrote the piece over again, and published it, with the helpof Merck, in the form in which we now possess it. It ranlike wild-fire through the whole of Germany. It was theprogenitor, not only of the “Sturm und Drang” period towhich it gave the tone, but of the romantic knightlyliterature which teemed from the German press. At alater period, in 1804, Goethe prepared another edition forthe stage, which took five hours in acting. It has neverbeen represented since.

With the manuscript of Götz in his pocket, Goethe leftWetzlar.Frankfort in the spring of 1772 for Wetzlar, a quiet countrytown on the Lahn, one of the seats of government of theHoly Roman Empire. The emperors lived at Vienna; theywere crowned at Frankfort; they held their parliaments atRatisbon, and at Wetzlar their courts of justice. Itwas the custom for young lawyers to attend the sittingsof these courts for a certain time before they couldbe admitted to practise on their own account. Thecompany of these students, of the embassies from thecomponent parts of the empire, and of various imperial officials,made the society a pleasant and lively one. Goethe soonfound friends. The secretary of the Brunswick legation,Goué, formed a round table of knights, — a Ritter-tafel. Themembers adopted names from the age of chivalry, andapportioned among themselves the neighbouring villages ascommanderies and fiefs. Goethe took the name of Götz.Deeds of prowess were performed in friendly rivalry, chieflyof eating and drinking. This masquerade at least servedto keep the idea of Götz constantly before his mind. Butthe place has sadder associations. It is impossible todissociate the name of Wetzlar from that of Werther. TheDeutsches Haus, then the property of the knights of theTeutonic order, exists still in the main street of Wetzlar. It wasoccupied by one of the officials of the order, by name Buff,an honest man with a large family of children. The secondLotte Buff.daughter, Lotte, blue-eyed, fair, and just twenty years of age,was first met by Goethe shortly after his arrival at a ball atWolpertshausen. She strongly attracted him; he became aconstant visitor at the house. He found that Lotte was asecond mother to her brothers and sisters, and he delightedto play games with them and tell them stories. Lotte wasreally though not formally engaged to Kestner, a man oftwo-and-thirty, secretary to the Hanoverian legation.The discovery of this relation made no difference to Goethe;he remained the devoted friend to both. He visited Lotteand her children; he walked with Kestner about the streetstill midnight; they kept their common birthday together inthe German house on the 28th of August; Kestner felt nojealousy; Goethe was content with Lotte's friendship;her heart was large enough for both. But the positionwas too critical to last. On September 10 they met in theGerman house for the last time. Lotte spoke of the otherworld, and of the possibility of returning from it. It wasarranged between them that whoever died first shouldappear to the others. This conversation confirmed Goethe'spurpose; he determined to go away. He made no adieu, butwrote a line to Kestner to say that he could not have borneto stay a moment longer. Merck had probably persuadedhim to this step. To divert his mind he took him toEhrenbreitstein and introduced him to Sophie la Roche, the friendof Wieland's youth, and to her daughter Maximiliane,with whom Goethe was charmed. The places in theneighbourhood of Coblentz were visited. Goethe returned toFrankfort by the river in a yacht. Here he was possessedwith the memory of Lotte. He fastened her silhouetteover his bed. Kestner came to Frankfort in September;Goethe and Schlosser went together to Wetzlar in November.Here he heard of the death of Jerusalem, a youngman attached to the Brunswick legation. He had beenwith Goethe at the university of Leipsic, but he had seenlittle of him at Wetzlar. Of a moody temperament,disheartened by failure in his profession, and soured by ahopeless passion for the wife of another, he had borroweda pair of pistols from Kestner under pretence of a journey,and had shot himself on the night of October 29.

Goethe obtained a full narrative of the circumstancesfrom Kestner, and immediately afterwards began hisWerther.Werther, in which the circumstances above related are allinterwoven. Goethe tells us that it was written in fourweeks, but this can hardly have been the case. We havenotices of its slow progress during the whole of the summerof 1773. In 1774 it is far advanced enough to be shown tosome intimate friends. It is not till the middle of September1774 that two copies of the book are sent in thegreatest secrecy to Sophie la Roche and Lotte Buff. InOctober it spread over the whole of Germany. It wasenthusiastically beloved or sternly condemned. It wasprinted, imitated, translated into every language of Europe,criticized in every periodical, with the fullest meed of praiseor scorn. It made the round of the world, and penetratedeven to China. The Werther fever wrung the hearts ofmen and women with imaginary sorrows; floods of tearswere shed; young men dressed in blue coats and yellowbreeches shot themselves with Werther in their hands. Itopened the floodgates of pent-up sentimeutalism which hadbeen stirred by the philosophy of the time, and which thecalamities of the next generation were sternly to suppress.It may be imagined that Kestner and Lotte were not wellsatisfied with the liberty which Goethe had taken withthem. They were married on April 4, 1773, and Goetheprovided the wedding ring. Notwithstanding the coolnesswhich the publication of Werther produced between them,the correspondence between Goethe and Kestner continuedto the end of the century. Lotte saw Goethe in Weimar in1816, when she was 63 years old; she was still beautiful, buther head shook with palsy. She died in 1828. The secondpart of Werther represents the agony of a jealous husband.This was inspired by Brentano, an Italian merchant residentin Leipsic, a widower with five children, who had marriedMaximiliane, the daughter of Sophie la Roche. Goethe lovedher as an elder brother, but her husband scarcely approved ofthe intimacy. Merck tells us that his ideas went very littlebeyond his business, and that it was dispiriting to have tolook for his young girl friend among barrels of herrings andpiles of cheeses. “Goethe,” he says, “much consoles her forthe smell of oil and cheese, and for her husband's manners.”Götz and Werther formed the solid foundation of Goethe'sfame. They were read from one end of Germany to theother. It is difficult to imagine that the same man canhave produced both works, so different are they in matterand in style. Werther represents the languid sentimentalism,the passionate despair, which possessed an age vexed byevils which nothing but the knife could cure, and torturedby the presence of a high ideal which revealed to it at oncethe depth of its misery and the hopelessness of a better lot.Götz was the first manly appeal to the chivalry of Germanspirit, which, caught up by other voices, sounded throughout the fatherland like the call of a warder's trumpet, tillit produced a national courage founded on the recollectionof an illustrious past, which overthrew the might of theconqueror at the moment when he seemed about to dominate theworld. Werther is the echo of Rousseau, the lamentationof a suffering world; Götz is the prototype of Stein, thecornerstone of a renovated empire. Götz, in its short, sharpdialogue, recalls the pregnant terseness of mediaeval Germanbefore it was spoilt by the imitators of Ciceronian Latinity.Werther, as soft and melodious as Plato, was the first revelationto the world of that marvellous style which, in thehands of a master, compels a language which is as rich asGreek to be also as musical.

Satires.These two great works were not the only occupations ofGoethe at this time. In Wetzlar he had translatedGoldsmith's Deserted Village, and had written a number of smallpoems addressed to Lotte. The spring of 1773, whichwitnessed the publication of Götz, saw him actively employed asan advocate. His relations with his father became easier. Hisliterary success brought him a number of friends, the youngCounts Stolberg, and Von Schönborn, a friend of Klopstock's.He also began to correspond with Lavater the physiognomistand with Klopstock himself. To the latter half of this yearare to be referred a number of satirical poems, aimed atprevailing follies of the time, clever and amusing, but of littlepermanent value. In Peter Brey he satirized the meddlerLeuchsenring, who, with soft tread and lamblike manners,interfered with the family relations of Herder. Satyros isdirected against the prophets of the school of nature, who bidus return to nature without remembering how coarse andrepellent some aspects of nature are. Bahrdt had translatedthe Bible into modern cultivated German; Goethewrote a prologue to this newest of divine revelations, inwhich the four evangelists appear each with his attendantanimal. Of yet another kind is the Fair of Plundersweilern,in which the hucksters and booth-keepers represent themotley variety of human life and the characteristics ofmodern litterateurs. It is a foretaste of the secondpart of Faust. Harlequin's Marriage is only preservedin fragments; it was perhaps too coarse and personal tobe published. The most important of these writings isGods, Heroes, and Wieland, a dialogue in the style of Lucianwritten at a sitting over a bottle of Burgundy, in whichAlcestis, Mercury, Hercules, Euripides, and other ancientworthies appear to Wieland in all their original greatness,and upbraid him with the mean and paltry representationof them which he had given to the world. Wieland wasthe apostle of an emasculated antiquity. Goethe wouldmake the gods speak in their own, large utterance if theyspoke at all. Wieland revenged himself by recommendingthe satire in his paper, the Deutsche Merkur, as a delicatepiece of persiflage worthy of the study of his readers. InNovember Goethe's sister Cornelia was married to Schlosserand left Strasburg. Goethe felt the loss deeply. Shelived but a short time. Her married life was tortured withperpetual suffering, and she died in 1777.

The beginning of 1774 is marked by a new passion anda new work. Crespel had invented a plan for enliveningtheir social meetings; each man was to draw lots for apartner, and for the time to consider her as his wife.Three times Goethe drew the name of Anna Sibylla Münch,a pleasant girl of sixteen, daughter of a merchant. One ofthe favourite topics of the day was the trial of Beaumarchais,which ended on February 16, 1774. Immediatelyafterwards his Memoires or pleadings were published, andClavigo.from the fourth of these the play of Clavigo was arranged.It represents a young writer of ambition deserting thewoman to whom he is engaged and breaking her heart.The fifth act, in which Clavigo kills himself, is Goethe'sown. The real Clavigo died, a distinguished man of letters,in 1806. The piece was written in eight days, and publishedon June 1. It had a great success, and still keeps the stage.But Goethe's best friends were disappointed with it. Mercktold him not to write such trash, as others could do that aswell. In reality there is no period of Goethe's life in whichhis literary activity was so prodigious, or when he was morefully occupied with literary plans which had reference to thedeepest problems of human nature. To this time belongthe conceptions of Cæsar, Faust, Mahomet, the WanderingJew, and Prometheus. The first was soon given up; of thesecond the first monologue, the dialogue between Faust andMephistophcles, and part of the scenes with Gretchen, werenow written. He has told us in his Autobiography whathe intended to make of Mahomet. In five acts he was toshow us how the purity of prophetic zeal is recognized bylove, rejected by envy, sullied by human weakness, spiritualizedby death. To write this drama he had studied theKoran through and through; only a few fragments werecompleted. Of the Wandering Jew very little remains tous. The design, conceived in Italy, of making a great workon the subject was never carried out. The Prometheus wascompleted in two acts. The monologue of Prometheusincluded in the Lyrical Poems, was written at the same time;but it is doubtful whether it was intended to form part ofthe drama. These works are to be referred to the studyof the ethics of Spinoza, for whom he now began to feel adeep reverence, which continued throughout his life. Thecalm repose of Spinoza's mind spread over his own like abreath of peace; his systematic and well-ordered reasoningwas the best antidote to Goethe's passionate waywardness.Goethe now acquired a wider view of all the relations of themoral and natural world; he felt that he had never seen theworld so clearly. His time at Frankfurt was also largelyoccupied with art. His room was covered with the worksof his pencil, and a number of poems on the subject of theartist's life arose from the same influence.

Rhine journey.The summer of 1774 was spent in a journey to the Rhine.On July 12 Basedow, the educational reformer, came toFrankfort; three days afterwards Goethe went with him toEms, where he found Lavater, who had been with him in theprevious month. The three went down the Lahn together,and reached Coblentz on July 18. Here the famous dinnertook place at which Lavater explained the secrets of theApocalypse to a clergyman, Basedow demonstrated the uselessnessof baptism to a dancing master, while Goethe, theworldling between the two prophets, made the best of histime with the fish and the chicken. They then went downthe Rhine to Elberfeld, where Goethe found his old Strasburgfriend Jung-Stilling, and back to Pempelfort, nearDüsseldorf, the house of Fritz Jacobi, where Goethe alsomet Jacobi's wife Betty, his sister Charlotte, his aunt JohannaFahlmer, and his friend W. Heinse. Their letters are fullof the effect which he produced upon them. Heinse says —“I know of no man in the whole history of learning who,at such an age, was so completely full of original genius.”Jacobi writes — “Goethe is the man whom my heartrequired; my character will now gain its proper stability;the man is complete from head to foot.” Again he says thatyou could not be an hour with him, without seeing that itwould be ridiculous to suppose that he could think or actotherwise than he really thinks and acts. No change couldmake him fairer or better; his nature has followed its owndevelopment, as the growth of a seed, or of a flower on a tree.Nor were these impressions evanescent. Forty years afterwardshe writes of these times — “ What hours! what days!I seemed to have a new soul. From that moment forth Iwould never leave you.”

Frankfort.Goethe returned to Frankfort at the beginning ofAugust. The autumn brought new friends, drawn tohim by the fame of the newly published Werther. Amongthese was Klopstock, twenty-five years older than Goethe,and author of the Messiah, the acknowledged head ofGerman poets. On December 11 Goethe was surprisedby the visit of a stranger, whom he at first took for Fr.Jacobi. It was Karl Ludwig von Knebel, who was travellingwith the two young princes of Saxe-Weimar, the reigningduke Karl August, then just seventeen, and his youngerbrother Constantine. They were on their way to Francewith their tutor, Count Görz, and they could not passthrough Frankfort without making the acquaintance of thenew genius who had risen upon their country. Goethewent to see them, was warmly received, and talked withthem about the condition and prospects of Germany. Thismeeting decided the future course of Goethe's life. Knebelthought Goethe “the best of men, the most lovable ofmankind.” The princes invited him to visit them at Mainz,where they would stay longer than at Frankfort. Thevisit lasted from December 13 to 15, when they went on toCarlsruhe, where the duke was to meet his intended bride.Goethe took the opportunity of reconciling himself withWieland, who lived in Weimar. On his return he foundFräulein von Klettenberg dead. “My Klettenberg is dead,”he writes, “before I had an idea that she was dangerouslyill. Dead and buried in my absence! She who was sodear, so much to me.” Frederike was lost to him,Charlotte, Maximiliane, and his sister married. Someattachment was a necessity of his nature. He now cameLili.under the influence of Lili Schönemann, the daughter of arich banker, whose father was dead, but whose motherconducted the business, and held one of the most brilliantsalons in Frankfort. This passion seemed to be of a morelasting nature than the others. Goethe was drawn intothe whirl of society. He is described as moving inbrilliantly-lighted rooms, in a gold-laced coat, passing fromparty to concert, from concert to ball, held captive by afair-haired girl with a pair of bright eyes. Such was Goethe inthe carnival time. To Lili's influence we owe several ofhis smaller poems, Neue Liebe neues Leben, Herz mein Herzwas soll das geben, Heidenröslein, and two little vaudevilles,Erwin und Elmire and Claudine von Villa Bella. Thefirst contains some pretty songs, notably “Das Veilchen,”set to music by Mozart. It is founded on the ballad of“Edwin and Angelina” in the Vicar of Wakefield. Thelatter half belongs to an earlier period, and is complete initself. Claudine von Villa Bella has one good character,the prodigal son Crugantino; and the ballad which is sungat the crisis of the plot was written during the RhineStella.journey with Jacobi. To this period also belongs Stella, acomedy for lovers, a strange, wild play, full of extravagantpassion. The weak-minded hero Fernando marries twowives one after the other. They meet together in an inn,and he is reduced to extremity of misery. He loves themboth, and they both love him. Finally, the first wife Stellasurrenders her rights, and they agree all to live together. Theplay in this form suggested to Canning the parody of theRovers, or the Double Arrangement. In 1806 Goethe alteredthe close by making Fernando shoot himself and Stellatake poison. It is seldom performed, but Stella is a finecharacter for a great actress. It is said to be founded onan occurrence in the Jacobi family.

Swiss journey.Neither family approved of the engagement betweenthe youthful couple. Goethe's parents thought Lili toomuch of a fine lady; they had a suspicion, which waswell founded, that her wealth had no very sure foundation.Frau Schönemann did not think that Goethe, withall his genius, would make a good husband for herchild. Cornelia Schlosser was strongly opposed to thematch. Goethe tore himself away, and went for a tour inSwitzerland. His companions were the brothers Stolberg,noisy, wild young noblemen, who in May had stayed atGoethe's house. They gave Goethe's mother the name ofFrau Aya, which she ever afterwards retained. On hisjourney Goethe visited the duke of Saxe-Weimar and hisbetrothed at Carlsruhe, his sister at Emmendingen, Lavaterat Zurich. He bore with him the constant memory ofLili; he wore a golden heart which she had given himround his neck. He climbed the St Gotthard on her birthday,and looked with longing eyes to the promised land ofItaly. But a stronger power drew him home again, and hereturned. At Strasburg he met his old friends, and sawZimmermann, the writer on solitude. He showed him aprofile of Frau von Stein who lived at Weimar, with whichGoethe was enchanted.

Return.He returned to Frankfort on July 20. August wasspent delightfully with Lili at Offenbach; his lettersspeak of nothing but her. September and the fair-timeat Frankfort brought back his troubles. His position isdescribed in the poem Lili's Park. He is the half-tamedbear who is held by magic bands amongst the birds and thefish, and yet sees a door left a little open for escape, andswears that he has the power to pass it. During this lastperiod of his passion he translated part of the Song ofSolomon. He wrote some scenes in Faust — the walk inthe garden, the first conversation with Mephistopheles, theinterview with the scholar, the scene in Auerbach's cellar.Egmont was also begun under the stimulus of the AmericanRebellion. A way of escaping from his embarrassmentswas unexpectedly opened to him. The duke of Weimarpassed through Frankfort both before and after his marriage,which took place on October 3. He invited Goethe to stayat Weimar, and it was arranged that one of the duke'shousehold, who was expected every day with a new carriage,should bring him with him. He took leave of everyone,including Lili. But the carriage did not come; a secondleave-taking was impossible. He remained all day in thehouse working at Egmont, going out only at night. Oncehe stood by Lili's window, heard her sing his songs, andsaw her shadow on the curtain. He could not linger longerin the town. He started for Heidelberg hoping to meet thecarriage, determined if it did not come to go on to Italy.He was summoned hastily back by a messenger, found thecarriage at Frankfort, and entered Weimar in the earlymorning of November 7, 1775. It was not for his happinessor for Lili's that they should have married. Sheafterwards thanked him deeply for the firmness with whichhe overcame a temptation to which she would have yielded.

Weimar.At this time the smaller German courts were beginningto take an interest in German literature. Before the SevenYears' War the whole of German culture had been French.Even now German writers found but scant acceptance atBerlin or Vienna. The princes of the smaller states, shutout from the great world of politics, surrounded themselveswith literature and art, and with men who would belikely to give an interest to their lives. The duke ofBrunswick had made Lessing his librarian at Wolfenbüttel,and had not objected to the publication of EmiliaGalotti. Emmerich Joseph, the worldly elector andarchbishop of Mainz, was devoted to Munich and the theatre,and made his stage one of the best in Europe. Themargrave of Baden had invited Klopstock to his court, anddulighted to associate with himself the author of theMessiah, the “poet of religion and of his country.” Theduke of Würtemberg paid special attention to education;he promoted the views of Schubart, and founded the schoolin which Schiller was educated. Hanover offered a home toZimmermann, and encouraged the development of Schlegel.Darmstadt was specially fortunate. Caroline, the wife ofthe landgrave, had surrounded herself with a literary circle,of which Merck was the moving spirit. She had collectedand privately printed the odes of Klopstock, and her deathin 1774 seemed to leave Darmstadt a desert. Her daughterLouise, the youngest of eight children, seemed to haveinherited something of her mothers qualities, veiled by aserious and retiring temper. She married on October 3,1775, the young duke of Weimar, who was just of age.She reigned over that illustrious court respected and admired,but repelled rather than attracted by its brilliancy andeccentricity. The place which she would naturally haveoccupied was taken by the duchess Amalia, mother of thegrand-duke. She was of the house of Brunswick, and aftertwo years of marriage had been left a widow at nineteenwith two sons. She committed their education to CountGörz, a prominent character in the history of the time. Sheafterwards summoned Wieland to instruct the elder, andKnebel to instruct the younger. The Deutsche Merkur,founded in 1773 to diminish the influence of the school ofKlopstock, gave Weimar importance in the literary world.The duchess was a great lover of the stage, and the bestplay writers of Germany worked for Weimar. The palaceand the theatre were burnt down in 1774, and the duchesshad to content herself with amateurs. After her son'smarriage she lived in the simple country houses whichsurround the capital, the lofty Ettersburg, the low-lyingTiefurt, the far-seeing height of Belvedere. Each of thesewas awakened to new life by the genius of Goethe. Theduke, eighteen years of age, was simple in his tastes, a haterof etiquette and constraint, true, honest, and steadfast, fondof novelty and excitement, of great courage and activity;his impulses, rarely checked, led him rather to chivalrousenterprise than to undesirable excess. His brother, PrinceConstantine, had perhaps more talent but less character thanthe grand-duke. He took but little part in the Weimarlife, and died in 1793.

Goethe in Weimar.Upon this society Goethe, in the strength and beautyof youth, rose like a star. From the moment of hisarrival he became the inseparable and indispensablecompanion of the grand-duke. He subdued the affections ofall he met with. Wieland said that his soul was as fullof him as a dewdrop of the morning sun. He was, takehim all in all, the greatest, best, most noble human beingthat God had ever created. The first months at Weimarwere spent in a wild round of pleasure. Goethe was treatedas a guest. In the autumn, journeys, rides, shooting parties,in the winter, balls, masquerades, skating parties by torch-light,dancing at peasants feasts, filled up their time. Evilreports flew about Germany; the court of Weimar had abad name; Klopstock wrote letters of solemn advice, andforbade his young friend Stolberg to accept an appointmentwhich the duke had offered to him. We do not know, andwe need not examine, how much of these reports was true.Goethe wrote to Klopstock that if Stolberg came he wouldfind them no worse, and perhaps even better, than he hadknown them before. We may believe that no decencieswere disregarded except the artificial restrictions of courtlyetiquette. Goethe and the duke dined together and bathedtogether; the duke addressed his friend by the familiar thou.Goethe slept in his chamber, and tended him when he wasill. In the spring he had to decide whether he would goor stay. In April the duke gave him the little garden by theside of the Ilm, with its lofty roof, in which he lived for thenext eight years. In June he invested him with the title, soimportant to Germans, of geheim-legationsrath, with a seatand voice in the privy council, and an income of £180 ayear. By accepting this he was bound to Weimar for ever.We may here mention the different grades of service throughwhich Goethe passed. In January 1779 he undertook thecommission of war; on September 5, 1779, he becamegeheim-rath; in September 1781 he received an additionto his salary of £30. This was afterwards raised by £60more, and in 1816 he received £450, with an additionalallowance for the expense of a carriage. In April 1782 hewas ennobled by the emperor, and took for his arms a silverstar in an azure field; in June of the same year he becamepresident of the chamber ad interim. We know thatGoethe devoted himself with industry and enthusiasm to thepublic business; he made himself acquainted with everypart of his master's territory; he did his best to develop itsresources; he opened mines and disseminated education;he threw himself with vigour into the reconstruction of thetiny army. A complete account of his labours in this fieldcannot be known until the secrets of the Goethe houseat Weimar, now hermetically closed, are opened to thecurious. We shall then probably find that Goethe cannotbe fairly charged with want of patriotism, or coldness to thenational interest, and that his apparent indifference to therising of 1813 must be considered in connexion with hisresistance to the encroachments of Austria at an earliertime.

Frau von Stein.Goethe's life was at no time complete without theinfluence of a noble-hearted woman. This he found inCharlotte von Stein, a lady of the court, wife of the masterof the horse. She was thirty-three years of age, mother ofseven children. His letters to her extend over a periodof fifty years. Until his journey to Italy he made heracquainted with every action, every thought of his mind,all the working of his brain. He calls her by every endearingepithet — the sweet entertainment of his inmost heart,the dear unconquerable source of his happiness, the sweetdream of his life, the anodyne of his sorrows, his happiness,his gold, his magnet, whom he loves in presence and absence,sleeping and waking, from whom he can never bear to beparted. Many of Goethe's writings were from this timeinspired by the necessities of the court. One group ofthem is formed by the succession of masks or ballets whichwere performed to celebrate the birthday of thegrand-duchess Louise. The Four Seasons, The Procession ofLaplanders, the Nine Female Virtues, The Dance of thePlanets, are sufficiently explained by their names. Otherswere called for by the amateur theatre, which now was forcedto supply the place of the regular drama. The stage wasoften set in the open air, the seats cut out of turf; the sidescenes, of trimmed box, still exist at Belvedere and Ettersburg.The actors were the duchess-mother and her sons,the civil servants and the officers, the ladies in waiting andthe pages. Goethe was very good in comic parts; in solemntragedy, as in his own Orestes, he could best interpret thedignity of the ancient stage. Musæus, head-master of thepublic school, was set to play low comedy; Knebelrepresented the dignified hero. The chief professional supportof the stage was Corona Scliroter, whom the duke andGoethe personally carried off from Leipsic. On thisvisit he saw, after a long absence, Catherine Schönkopf,Oeser, and other friends of his youth. Goethe representedmost of his earlier pieces on the Weimar stage. Hewrote nothing of great importance for it till the firstsketch of his Iphigenie. But several smaller piecesowe their origin to this cause. Proserpina, and DieGeschwister are melodramas; Jery und Bätely and DieFischerin are little operas composed to suit the Weimartaste. Scherz, List, und Rache is an imitation of theItalian style. .

Journeys.Besides numerous visits to the court of the Thuringianprinces, sojournings at Dornberg and at Ilmenau, that retirednook of the Weimar fatherland which still attracts many apilgrim lover of Goethe, the first ten years at Weimar wereinterrupted by longer journeys. One of these was thewinter Harz journey in December 1777, undertaken suddenlyto make the acquaintance of Plessing, a self-torturinghypochondriac, who had written to the poet for advice. WithGoethe's help Plessing recovered from his melancholy,visited him at Weimar, and entertained him as professor atDuisburg on his return from the campaign in France. Avisit to Dessau inspired the improvements of the parkand grounds at Weimar, which now make it so attractive.The close of 1779 was occupied by a winter journey toSwitzerland, undertaken with the duke and a small retinue.Two days were spent at Frankfort with Goethe's parents.Sesenheim was visited, and left with satisfaction andcontentment. At Strasburg they found Lili happily married,with a new-born child. At Emmendingen Goethe stood byhis sister's grave, and saw her successor Johanna Fahlmer,Jacobi's aunt. The Swiss journey began at Basel. Thechief object of it was to forward the health and educationof the young duke. It was a bold plan to execute inOctober and November. From Bern they made the tourof the Bernese Oberland. From Geneva, by the advice ofDe Saussure, they visited Mont Blanc and the valley ofChamouni; they crossed the Furka, not without danger, inthe middle of November, descended the St Gotthard toLucerne, and visited Lavater at Zurich, the seal and summitof their tour. From this time Lavater lost his influenceover Goethe, and in 1786 he would gladly have runaway from Weimar to avoid him. In December they wentby the Lake of Constance and the falls of the Rhine toStuttgart, where, on December 14, Goethe saw Schiller forthe first time. He was a student at the Academy, and inGoethe's presence received the prize.

The return to Weimar, on January 13, was the beginningof a new era. The period of genius and eccentricity was atan end; that of order and regularity succeeded. As anoutward sign of the change, the duke cut off his pigtail, anexample which was long without imitators. Wieland saidthat the Swiss winter journey was the greatest of Goethe'sdramas. In the same serious mood Goethe began to writehistory. He chose for his subject Duke Bernhard ofSaxe-Weimar, the knight-errant of the Reformation. He spentmuch time and trouble in collecting materials, but at lengthreasonably concluded that his strength lay elsewhere. Atthis time also he began to write Tasso, and adapted the Birdsof Aristophanes to modern circumstances. His deeperthoughts were concentrated in Wilhelm Meister. CountessWerther, the sister of the great minister Baron von Stein,whom he visited at Neuuheiligen, was transferred in livingportraiture to its pages. His efforts for the development ofthe duke's dominion naturally led him to the study of science.The opening and direction of mines induced him to studygeology; the classification of ancient forms of life led himto osteology and anatomy. Goethe was always fond ofchildren. The young Herders and Wielands spent muchtime in his garden, sometimes digging for Easter eggs whichhad been carefully concealed. In the spring of 1783 Fritz,the son of Charlotte von Stein, then ten years old, came tolive with him in his garden house. In the autumn theytook a journey together in the Harz. At Ilmenau waswritten the touching poem of that name on the duke's birthday.Goethe reviews in it their common friendship andactivity as far as it has yet gone, and a few days afterwards,as he slept in the hut on the Gickelhahn, he wrote in pencilthe world-known lines in which he anticipates for himselfthat rest and silence which then held enchained the summitsof the hills and the birds of the wood. In the followingyear another journey was undertaken in the Harz for thestudy of mineralogy. But this was only a relaxation frommore serious affairs. In 1785 the Fürstenbund or leagueof princes was formed, under the supremacy of Frederickthe Great, to resist the ambition of Austria under JosephII. The duke of Saxe-Weimar took an important part informing this league, and in the negotiations which precededit. Goethe was his indispensable adviser, and must on thisoccasion, if not on others, have taken a keen interest inpolitics and in the independence of Germany.

Leaves Weimar.The year 1786 marks an epoch in Goethe's life. He hadnow been ten years in Weimar, and he must have felt that hisown inward development, and the work which he was mostfitted to do in the world, were not advancing as favourablyas they should. He had written little of first-rate importance.His Lyrics were of intense beauty and of deepmeaning, but they were short and fugitive. He hadbrought with him from Frankfort the sketches of Faust andEgmont, but little had been done to them since. Hisoccasional writings for the amateur theatre, or for court festivities,were not such as to add to his solid reputation inGermany. Iphigenie was the one great work of poetrywhich belongs entirely to this period, but that had notreceived its final form. Tasso was conceived, but only twoacts were written, and these in prose. Wilhelm Meister isthe most exact expression of this portion of Goethe's life;but loftily as it now towers above the level of his dramas,it did not then satisfy the author, nor was it in a state tobe published. For the completion of these works Goetherequired leisure and repose, impossible to obtain in thedistraction and pleasures of the court. This became moreapparent to him as he set himself to collect his scatteredwritings. Four volumes were soon completed, but thepreparation of the other four convinced him how much labourmany of his poems still required for perfection. Anothercause of discontent was his relation to Frau von Stein. Itcould not have been more intimate. She was all to Goetheand more than Gretchen, Frederike, Lili, or his sisterCornelia had been. He communicated to her every thoughtand every action of his life. The relation was blameless,to a character like Goethe's it was natural; but it becameevery year more difficult and more full of danger. Theardent devotion which sat well on the impetuosity of youthwas less becoming and less possible to the man of middleage. Yet the tie could not be severed without a struggle,and the wrench could not be effected without an enforcedabsence. To these necessities, the need of quiet forcomposition, and for deliberately rearranging the circumstancesof his life, was added the stress of other impulses. Goethehad all his life been fascinated by the practice of art.Indeed it was not until he had discovered at Rome thelimitation of his powers that he definitely renounced thehope of becoming an artist. He tried almost every branchin turn. He drew in pencil and in sepia, sketched, paintedin oil, engraved on copper and wood, and etched. Forthese occupations he had but little leisure; at this time heattributed his slow improvement rather to want of labourthan to want of power. He saw infinite possibilities ofadvance in a life of freedom spent under the inspirationof sunny skies, and amidst the environment of thehighest art.

Science.Of still deeper interest and importance were his scientificresearches. In these he aspired to detect the secrets ofnature; he succeeded in seeing, as in a vision, the greatscheme of evolution applied to all phenomena of the naturaland moral world, which the labours of many workers haverevealed to us in our own day. He longed for time andleisure to perfect these ideas, to base them on solid fact.Goethe has not added much of positive value to the treasuryof scientific truth, but he deserves the credit of havingdiscerned the right method of inquiry when it was obscure tomany, and of having thrown that glow of imagination overdry and technical inquiry, without which no great discoveriescan be made. His inquiries into the nature of light belongto a later time. He began with physiognomy under theauspices of Lavater. From this he was led to the study ofanatomy, and especially to the comparison of the skeletonsof men and animals. In this department he made a realdiscovery, that the intermaxillary bone which exists in thelower animals is found in the human subject in a rudimentary state, — that it is seen distinctly in youth, but as yearsadvance is united with the body of the skull. Thediscovery that the skull itself is only a development of thevertebræ of the spine was made a little later. He was ledto this further step by picking up the head of a sheep on theshore of the Lido at Venice. The care of his garden cottagenaturally led him to the study of plants. He soon foundhimself attracted to wide and comprehensive generalizations.The Metamorphoses of Plants was not published till 1790,but the idea which had possession of his mind was a solidcontribution to the science of botany. Goethe sought todiscover an original or standard flower, from which, as from aPlatonic ideal type, all existing flowers were deflexions andaberrations. In this he followed an unscientific method,but he clearly saw that all the different parts of the plant,except the stem and the root, might be regarded as modificationsof the leaf; that leaf, calyx, corolla, bud, pistil, andstamen were all referable to the same type; and thatwhether a plant produced leaves, or flowers, or fruit,depended on the differentiation of the nutrition which itreceived. Less fortunate were his speculations in geology,to which he devoted a very large portion of his time andthoughts. It is something that he recognized the importanceand reality of that science, then in its infancy, whichhas had to undergo more than its due share of obloquy anddistrust. But he was of necessity a follower of Werner,who based his classification of rocks rather on the mineralswhich they contained than upon an examination of thefossil remains of organic life. All these causes contributedtogether to one end. His desire to complete the greatpoetical works which he had begun, to disentangle his lifefrom the complexities which had entwined themselves roundit, to give a fair trial to his impulses towards art, to affordopportunity for the careful and systematic interrogation ofnature, and, above all, a longing to possess his soul in peace,and solemnly to probe in silence the depths of his ownbeing, conspired together to drive him from Weimar to theland which he had yearned after from boyhood. The resolution,slowly formed, was boldly executed. In the summerof 1785 he had visited Carlsbad for the first time, passed apleasant month in the company of the duchess Louise,Herder, and Frau von Stein. In July 1786 he paid it asecond visit. After five weeks of brilliant society, veryfavourable to his health, spent in revising his works for thepress, he stole secretly away. The duke alone knew thathe designed an absence of some duration. In the strictestincognito, in the guise of a German merchant, he drovealone to the land of the citron and the orange.

Italy.Goethe's Italian journey, the most momentous epoch inthe development of his intellectual life, lasted from September3, 1786, to June 18, 1788. Assuming the commonGerman name of Müller, in the strictest incognito hejourneyed by way of Munich, where he studied the picturegallery and the collection of antiquities; by the Lake ofGarda, where he began his metrical version of the Iphigenie;by Verona, where he saw the first specimen of Roman buildingin Italy in the stupendous amphitheatre; by Vicenza,where he was attracted by the grace and harmony of theclassical Palladio; by Padua, where he neglected the frescosof Giotto, but rose to a clear conception of the form of theoriginal plant by the marks on the leaves of a palm in thebotanical garden; to Venice, where for the first time he wasable to taste the charm and richness of southern life. Ashe proceeded farther, Ferrara spoke to him of Tasso;Bologna showed him the great masters of the academicschool who have now grown pale and dim before thepredecessors of Raphael; Florence interested him a little; Assisidrew his attention, not to the triple church of Saint Francis,the unrivalled museum of religious art, but to the little ruinedtemple which no modern traveller would notice but for thename of Goethe; Spoleto again delighted him with theRome.remains of ancient architecture. He reached Rome on October28. His first stay was till February. The constantcompanion of his studies was the painter Tischbein, whohelped him to disentangle the many difficulties of the oldRome and the new. He lived chiefly among the Germanartists and men of letters who frequented the Caffé Greco.Among these were Angelica Kaufmann and Moritz, whodeepened his knowledge of German versification, andprepared him for the composition of Iphigenia. AlthoughGoethe occupied himself chiefly with drawing, he was ableto announce on June 6 that this work was finished. Thesecond Iphigenie, written in verse, was the first importantfruit of the Italian journey. It is in very strong contrastwith Götz von Berlichingen. It is written in the strictestclassical form. Although based on the Iphigenia in Taurisof Euripides, it has little in common with it. In EuripidesThoas is represented as a cruel barbarian, against whom it isjustifiable to employ every artifice of fraud or violence. InGoethe the characters are ennobled by a higher principle,and the struggle between truth and falsehood is made aprominent motive of the piece. When Thoas discovers that,according to the oracle of Apollo, the return of Orestes'ssister to Greece will satisfy the anger of the gods, he giveshis consent, and his last words are a friendly farewell.Towards the end of February Goethe left Rome for Naples.Here he was attracted less by the remains of antiquity, eventhe new revelations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, than bythe prospects of nature, the bay, the islands, the volcano,the thousand beauties which make the gulf unrivalled in theworld, and by the multitudinous and teeming life whichthrongs the endless quays that line the shore. SorrentoTasso.stimulated him to the revisal of Torquato Tasso, but hedid not complete the drama till his return from Italy. Itdid not appear in print till the spring of 1790. The playhad a special fascination for him as a picture of his owndistracted life. He could depict with feeling the strugglebetween the actual and the ideal, the ill-assortment of apassionate poet with the jealous and artificial environmentSicily.of a court. At the end of March Goethe sailed to Sicily;rolled up in his cloak he meditated the composition of hisTasso. Sicily struck him, as it must strike all travellers whohave studied the ancient world, as a revelation of Greece.It is, if one may say so, more Greek than Greece itself. Itsmountains, streams, trees, flowers, the form of its boats andpottery, the habits of the people, the quivering smile ofthe bright blue sea fringed with golden sand, representcompletely the Greece of the Odyssey and of the chorusesof Euripides. Goethe was overmastered by this powerfulinfluence. He sketched and began Nausicaa, the story of theOdyssey in dramatic form, which always remained a fragment.He returned to Rome in June. The rest of the year wasspent in the city and its neighbourhood, in the serious studyof drawing, for which unfortunately he had but little talent,Egmont.and in the composition of Egmont, a work begun with theapproval of his father in the early Frankfort days. It wasfinished in September 1787, and appeared in the Easter ofthe following year. Although Eymont still keeps the stage,it has very grave faults. It is an unfortunate mixture of thenatural and ideal treatment. The licence with which thescenes are transposed in modern performance shows howmuch the work lacks symmetry and cohesion. Schillercriticized it severely as being untrue to history. Hedescribed the close, where all difficulties are solved by theappearance of Clärchen, as a deus ex machina or a salto mortaleinto the world of opera. The music of Beethoven has contributedto it a charm of art which was necessary to its completeness.Besides this, Goethe rewrote for publication his earlyvaudevilles of Erwin und Elmire and Claudine von VillaBella. The carnival of 1788 was of importance to hisexperience. He wrote some scenes of Faust: especially thescene in the witches' kitchen was composed in the Borghesegardens. At the end of April he took a sad farewell ofItaly, and arrived at Weimar in the middle of June.

Return to Weimar.From this time his life takes a new colour. He hadlearned in Italy not only new principles of art, — notonly that a work of art, whatever of Gothic ornament itmay possess, must be solid, firm, and simple in itsconstruction as a Grecian temple, — but he had also learnedthat life itself should be a work of art. He was determinedhenceforth to be himself, to break the bondswhich had confined him and the distractions whichhad confused him, to possess his soul sacred and inviolablefor the purposes of his life. He was relieved of thepresidency of the chamber and of the war commission,but in a manner which did him the greatest honour. Hisrelations with Frau von Stein, which had been one reasonof his leaving Weimar, began to cool. One of their lastfriendly meetings was in a journey to Rudolstadt, whereGoethe met Schiller. Neither knew the influence whichthe other would have upon his life. Their relations werethose of shyness, and partly even of dislike. Goethe'sfriendship with Frau von Stein was to receive a final blow.In the autumn of 1788, walking aimlessly through thepark, he met Christiane Vulpius, a young girl who presentedhim with a petition in favour of her brother. She hadChristiane Vulpius.golden curling locks, round cheeks, laughing eyes, a neatlyrounded figure; she looked, as has been said, “like a youngDionysus.” Goethe took her into his house, and shebecame his wife in conscience, and the mother of his children.He did not marry her till 1806, when the terrors of theFrench occupation made him anxious for the position of hiseldest son. She had but little education, and he could nottake her into society; but she made him a good and lovingwife, and her quick mother-wit made her available as anintellectual companion. To these days of early marriedlife belong the Roman elegies, which, although Italian andpagan in form, in colour, and in sensuality, were writtenin Germany from home experiences.

Campaigns.We must pass rapidly over the next six years, untilGoethe's genius received a new impulse and direction byhis friendship with Schiller, In the spring of 1790 hetravelled to Venice to meet the duchess Amalia. TheVenetian epigrams, still more outspoken in sensualitythan the Roman, were the fruit of this journey. In theautumn of the same year he accompanied the duke toSilesia, the first of those military journeys which strikeso discordant a note in the harmonious tenor of hisexistence. The year 1791 offered a quiet contrast to themovement of the year before. He began to take a morespecial interest in the university at Jena, in which hisyoung friend Fritz von Stein had now entered as a student,and his time was more and more occupied with the studyof colours, the least happy and successful of his scientificlabours. In the autumn of 1791 Goethe was able to devotehimself regularly to a task which had informally occupiedhis first years in Weimar. The new theatre was completed,and Goethe was made director of it. It was in this capacitythat he was best known to the citizens of Weimar. Hehad the final decision on every detail of piece, scenery, andacting; in later years his seat was in a large arm-chair inthe middle of the pit, and applause was scarcely permitteduntil he gave the signal for it. The German stage owesperhaps as much to Goethe as to Lessing. The repertoireof the Weimar theatre was stocked with pieces of solid meritwhich long held their place. Shakespeare was seriouslyperformed, and the actors were instructed in the deliveryof blank verse. Stress was laid on the excellence of theensemble as against the predominance of particular stars.The theatre was considered as a school not only of elevatingamusement but of national culture. Goethe wrote theGross Cophta for the Weimar stage, a piece founded on thehistory of Cagliostro and the diamond necklace. He wasfascinated by the story as a foreboding of the cominghorrors of the Revolution. In these events he was destinedto take a more active part than he expected. In August1792 he accompanied the duke to the campaign in theArdennes. Passing by Frankfort, where he visited hismother, he joined the allied armies at Longwy. Hebeguiled the tedious siege of Verdun by writing an accountof his theory of colours in a leaky tent; and on the disastrousday of Valmy, which he recognized as the birth of anew era, he sought the thickest of the fight that he mightexperience the dangerous rapture of the cannon-fever.He retreated with the Prussian army, spent five weekswith his friend Jacobi at Pempelfort, and on his returnto Weimar at the end of the year found that the dukehad built him a spacious house in the square where thejoint statues of Goethe and Schiller now stand, in eternalmemory of their friendship. In 1793 he went with hismaster to the siege of Mainz. He continued his opticalstudies during the bombardment, witnessed the marchingout of the garrison, and was one of the first to enter theconquered town. He received leave to withdraw, and wentto his mother at Frankfort, and persuaded her to sell the oldhouse and its contents, and to provide a more convenienthome for her old age. There was some talk of her comingto Weimar. In the autumn of this year the duke leftthe Prussian service, and Goethe could look forward toa period of peace. He was chiefly occupied with themanagement of the theatre, and for this he wrote two pieces,both of which had reference to the politics of the time. TheBürgergeneral is a satire on the Revolution, and was longa stone of offence to Goethe's friends, who thought that heshould have hailed with delight the birth of a new era.The Aufgeregten, left unfinished, sketched the outbreak ofthe Revolution in a country town, and would have declaredthe author's views with greater distinctness. But the feelingsof scorn and contempt which he felt for the cowardice,cunning, and perfidy of mankind were expressed in a workof greater magnitude. He had good reason to deplore themisery of the time. His mother's home in Frankfort wasbroken up; Schlosser, his brother-in-law, had retired toAuerbach; Jacobi was flying to Holstein. Goethe took theold German epic of Reynard the Fox, with which he hadlong been familiar, and which, under the guise of animals,represents the conflicting passions of men, and rewrote it inflowing German hexameters.

Friendship with Schiller.Thus far he had produced but little since his returnfrom Italy. He was now to undergo the most powerfulinfluence which had as yet affected his life. His friendshipwith Schiller was now to begin, an alliance which, in thecloseness of its intimacy and its deep effect on the characterof both friends, has scarcely a parallel in literary history.If Schiller was not at this time at the height of hisreputation, he had written many of the works which havemade his name famous. He was ten years younger thanGoethe. The Räuber plays the same part in his literaryhistory as Götz plays in that of Goethe. This had beenfollowed by Fiesco and Kabale und Liebe. The secondperiod of Schiller's life had begun with his friendship withKörner, and his residence in Saxony. Here he wrote theHymn of Joy, and completed Don Carlos. In 1787 he settledat Weimar. He found the place deserted, the duke in thePrussian camp, Goethe in Italy. He applied himself tohistory, wrote the Revolt of the Netherlands, and studied theliterature and art of Greece. In 1789, mainly upon Goethe'srecommendation, he was made professor of history at theuniversity of Jena, although he was afraid lest the scholarsshould discover that they knew more history than the teacher.He made a successful marriage, and worked seriously at hisHistory of the Thirty Years' War. In 1791 Schiller hadarranged with the publisher, Cotta of Augsburg, whose nameis from this time indissolubly connected with the history ofGerman literature, for the production of a new literaryjournal. It was to be called the Horen, and the mostdistinguished German writers were to contribute to it. Goetheaccepted the invitation willingly. The work was designedto mark an epoch in German taste, and it did so. It soonhad two thousand subscribers. Among those who promisedto contribute were not only Matthisson, Herder, Knebel,Fritz Jacobi, and Gleim, but the brothers Humboldt, theveteran Kant, the youthful Fichte, who had just begun tolecture in Jena, and, at a later period, the brothers Schlegel.Schiller opened the first number of the journal with hisletters on the “Æsthetic Education of the Human Race.”Goethe contributed the “Unterhaltungen deutscherAusgewanderten,” a series of stories told by a number of Germanemigrants who had been driven to cross the Rhine by theinvasion of the French. The most remarkable of thesestories is the “Märchen,” a wild and mystic tale, which hasbeen the subject of as much controversy and of as manyinterpretations as the second part of Faust. Goethe alsopublished in the Horen the “Römische Elegien,” the flavourof which even Karl August found a little too strong. Thefirst effect of Schiller's influence on Goethe was theWilhelm Meister.completion of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. He had conceivedthe plan of the work twenty years before, and the first sixbooks had been written before the Italian journey. It wasnow finished by the addition of two more books. It standsin the first rank of Goethe's writings. He has aimed in itto attain to perfect objectivity of tone, to represent men asthey are, and to pass no judgment upon them. The heropasses with weak irresolution through a number of ordinarycircumstances, apparently the sport of fortune and theplaything of chance, yet all these experiences have their definiteresult in the training of his character. Like the son ofKish, he goes forth to seek his father's asses and finds a kingdom.The unearthly charm of the child Mignon, the darkfate which shrouds the aged harper like the doom of Œdipus,the uncertain yearning after a happier home in brighterclimes, give a deeper undertone to the prevailing lightnessof the story. The style is exquisitely soft and flowing. Ithas the sweetness and simplicity of Werther, but is moremellow and more mature. The sixth book is occupied withthe Bekentnisse einer schönen Seele, a piece of theautobiography of Goethe's early friend Fräulein von Klettenberg,altered to suit its new surroundings. The MusenAlmanach for 1796, edited by Schiller, was enriched bysome of Goethe's most exquisite poems — Die Nahe desGeliebten, Meeres Stille, and Glückliche Fahrt. The stormof criticism which was aroused by the Horen, and thelittle success which, after the first numbers, it met withfrom the public, determined the two friends to retaliate upontheir aggressors. The poems of Martial contain a numberof epigrams written in two lines, describing the numberlesslittle presents or xenia, which it was customary for friendsto exchange at Rome during the time of the Saturnalia.Xenien.The name was borrowed by the two poets, and the Xenienwas a convenient vehicle for the expression of their opinionon every subject. The newspapers of the day were the firstobject of attack, but they soon went farther afield. Theepigrams were written in Schiller's rooms at Jena. It isimpossible to fix the authorship of the Xenien; oneconceived the idea, the other wrote the lines; one wrote thehexameter, the other the pentameter; they intended theauthorship as well as the ownership of the copyright to beone and indivisible. Notwithstanding this, the collectionhas been broken up. There is no guarantee that the epigramswhich appear in the separate works of either poet were reallywritten by the authors to whom they are ascribed; some arereprinted in the works of both; some have remainedunprinted altogether. They appeared in the Musen Almanachfor 1797, together with the Venetian elegies mentionedabove. It is needless to say that they roused the writerswhom they attacked to unspeakable fury, and were theoccasion of a copious literature. A more solid result of theHermann und Dorothea.friendship between the poets was the production of Hermannund Dorothea. It is a German idyll; the story is takenfrom the sufferings of Lutherans driven out in the earlypart of the 18th century from the province of Salzburg, butGoethe has given it the character of his own time. He hadseen much of the suffering produced by the French Revolution,and he wished this poem to be a reflexion in a tinymirror of the storms and convulsions of the great world.In its literary form it is a descendant of Voss's Luise. Itwas conceived at Ilmenau in August 1796, and finished inthe following spring. Schiller tells us how it was composedwith extraordinary ease and rapidity. During nine daysGoethe produced 150 lines a day. You have only to shakethe tree, as Schiller said, and ripe apples will tumble downabout you. The lines thus hastily written underwent acareful revision. Contemporaneous with Hermann undDorothea is the production of Wallensteins Lager by Schiller,which was written with the advice and assistance of hisbrother poet. The completion of this cycle of plays fallstwo years later.

Ballads.The year 1797 is the year of ballads. In his gardenhouse at Jena Schiller worked diligently at this vein, thatperhaps for which he was best suited, and in which hemost nearly rivals Goethe. Goethe wrote Die Braut vonKorinth, Gott und die Bayadere, and Der Zauberlehrling;and the whole collection was published in the MusenAlmanach for 1798. The latter half of this year wasoccupied with a tour in Switzerland. Before itscommencement he visited his mother at Frankfort for thelast time, and presented to her his wife and his son.It was a year of extraordinary activity. Besides theballads and his researches in the morphology of plants andinsects, he translated a great part of the autobiography ofBenvenuto Cellini, wrote a number of essays on the questionof æsthetics, and worked at his long neglected Faust. Ofthis he wrote the dedication, the “Prologue in Heaven,” andthe “Golden Marriage of Oberon and Titania” — so powerfulwas the effect of intellectual sympathy and stimulus.The six years which succeeded Goethe's return from histhird Swiss tour, although they embrace the period in whichhe and Schiller were in daily co-operation, have left uslittle of permanent worth from the older poet. On theother hand, they are the years of Schiller's greatest activity.The great trilogy of Wallenstein, perhaps the highest pointof Schiller's genius, was followed by Maria Stuart, theJungfrau von Orleans, the Braut von Messina, and WilhelmTell. From the end of 1799 Schiller was permanentlysettled in Weimar; a dramatic school was founded, and therepresentation of these classical dramas was the glory ofthe Weimar stage. During these years Goethe was occupiedwith Faust, with his researches into the theory of colours andof biological development, with the conduct of the theatreand the practical encouragement of art. In 1798 theHoren died a natural death, and was succeeded by thePropyläen, a journal of literature and criticism, which,although it contained many essays by Goethe, neverexceeded a circulation of 300. In the spring 1799 the studyof Homer incited Goethe to sketch a long epic poem onthe subject of Achilles. Schiller did his best to encouragethe work. The first canto was rapidly completed, butit had no successor. Goethe contented himself withtranslating the works of others, and prepared the Mahomet andTancred of Voltaire for the Leipsic stage. In the firstdays of the new century he suffered a dangerous attack ofscarlatina. His friends feared for his life. Frau von Steinrecalled her forgotten friendship, and showed kindness tohis son. After his recovery he sketched out what was themost important work of these years, a trilogy on the subjectof the French Revolution; of this only the first part, theNatürliche Tochter, was completed. The story was a trueone of a princess of the French house of Conti. Theplay is written with the full beauty of Goethe's style, andsome passages and effects are worthy of his highest genius.But as a whole it fails. It has the quality, which in adrama must be a fault, so characteristic of Goethe's laterwriting, of too great universality of treatment. Thecharacters are not living beings but abstractions, and thelanguage is vague and general rather than clear and defined.The play was performed at Weimar on April 2, 1803.Two masterpieces of Schiller — the Braut von Messina andthe Jungfrau von Orleans — preceded and followed it by aMadame de Stael.few weeks. At the end of this year Madame de Staelarrived in Weimar accompanied by Benjamin Constant.She had heard of the fame of this new Parnassus, and shewas bent on proclaiming the intellectual superiority ofGermany to the world. Goethe at first fled from her, asByron did at a later period. He hid himself in Jena, butwas recalled by order of the duke. The result of theconversations in the salons of Weimar is contained in her bookDe l'Allemagne. In March she was suddenly recalled bythe death of her father, the minister Necker. Goethe wasat this time the centre to which the most distinguished menof all kinds in Germany naturally turned. He was mostintimate with Zelter the musician, with whom hemaintained a full correspondence; with Wilhelm von Humboldt,the statesman-scholar; with F. A. Wolf, the founder of thescience of philology; with Gottfried Hermann, the bestauthority on Greek metres. But the friendship which wasSchiller's death.worth all these was soon to be severed. In the beginningof 1805 Goethe was convinced that either he or Schillerwould die in that year. In January they were both seizedwith illness; Schiller had finished his Phädra and begunto work at his Demetrius. Goethe was translating the Neveude Rameau of Diderot. Schiller was the first to recover,and visiting Goethe in his sick room, fell on his neck andkissed him with intense emotion. On April 29 they saweach other for the last time. Schiller was on his way to thetheatre whither Goethe was too ill to accompany him. Theyparted at the door of Schiller's house. Schiller died on theevening of the 9th of May. No one dared to tell Goethe thesad news, but he saw in the faces of those who surroundedhim that Schiller must be very ill. On the morrow of Schiller'sdeath, when his wife entered his room, he said, “Is it nottrue that Schiller was very ill yesterday?” She began tosob. He then cried, “He is dead!” “Thou hast spokenit thyself,” she answered. Once more he cried, “He isdead!” and turning aside covered his weeping eyes with hishands. He at first intended to have completed Demetriusas a memorial of his friend, but a happier inspiration wasto arrange a performance of Schiller's great poem of TheBell, and to crown it by an epilogue. Since that timeSchiller and Goethe have been inseparable in the minds oftheir countrymen, and have reigned as twin stars in theliterary firmament. If Schiller does not hold the firstplace, it is at least true that he is more beloved, althoughGoethe may be more admired. It would be invidious toseparate them. But it is evident that the best fruits ofSchiller's muse were produced when he was most closelyunder Goethe's influence, and the foreign student of Germanculture has ground for believing that at some future timethe glory of the lesser luminary will be absorbed in that ofthe greater, and the name of Goethe will represent aloneand unrivalled the literature of his age and country.

Napoleon.Schiller was happy in the occasion of his death. He didnot see the troubles which immediately afterwards burstupon Thuringia. On October 14, 1806, the battle of Jenawas fought. The court had fled from Weimar; only theduchess Louise remained. In the evening of the defeatWeimar was plundered by the conquering troops. Manyof Goethe's friends lost everything they possessed. Hisproperty and perhaps his life was saved by the firmnessof Christiane, and afterwards by the billeting of MarshalAugereau in his house. On the 15th Napoleon entered thetown, but Goethe did not go to see him. The duchessobtained her husband's pardon by her entreaties. It wasnot till the autumn of 1808 that Napoleon and Goethe,perhaps the two greatest men then living in Europe, metand conversed. It was at the congress of Erfurt, wherethe sovereigns and princes of Europe were assembled.Goethe's presence was commanded by the duke. He wasattracted at least as much by the prospect of seeing Talmaas of meeting Napoleon. He was invited to an audience onOctober 2; Talleyrand, Berthier, and Savary were present.The emperor sat at a large round table eating his breakfast.He beckoned Goethe to approach him, and said to him,“Vous êtes un homme!” He asked how old he was,expressed his wonder at the freshness of his appearance, saidthat he had read Werther through seven times, and madesome acute remarks on the management of the plot. Then,after an interruption, he said that tragedy ought to be theschool of kings and peoples; that there was no subjectworthier of treatment than the death of Cæsar, whichVoltaire had treated insufficiently. A great poet would havegiven prominence to Cæsar's plans for the regeneration ofthe world, and shown what a loss mankind had suffered byhis murder. He invited Goethe to Paris; that was thecentre of great movements; there he would find subjectsworthy of his skill. They parted with mutual admiration.The bust of Napoleon was a prominent ornament in Goethe'sstudy.

Faust.In the same year, 1808, an edition of Goethe's worksin thirteen volumes was published by Cotta at Tübingen.It is remarkable as containing the first part of Faust inits complete form. The principal portions of the dramahad already been published as a fragment in 1790. Ithad then attracted but little attention. Heyne wrote ofit — “There are fine passages in it, but with them there aresuch things as only he could give to the world who takesother men to be blockheads.” Wieland and Schiller wereapparently dissatisfied with it. It had perhaps the appearanceof patchwork, as it was made up of fragments whichhad been written at very different periods of his life. Theidea of writing Faust seems to have come to Goethe in hisearliest manhood. He was brooding over it at the sametime with Götz von Berlichingen, but at Strasburg he spoketo Herder of neither. He apparently began to write it downat the same time as Werther in 1774, and we find mentionof its progress in the two following years; indeed, all theimportant parts of the fragment which appeared in 1790were known to Jacobi before 1776. He took the workwith him to Italy, where he added little to it except thescene in the witches kitchen. The dedication, the “Prologuein Heaven,” which presents to the reader the idea of thewhole work, the prelude on the stage copied from the Indiandrama, the lyrical intermezzo, the scene with Wagner beforethe city gate, and the scene with Mephistopheles in thestudy were written before 1800. In that year he wasbusy with Helena for the second part, and he added nothingafterwards to the first except the “Walpurgis Night” andthe scene of Valentine's death. Faust justly stands at thehead of all Goethe's works, and it deserves a very highplace among the best works of every age. Founded ona well-known popular tale, indebted for its interest andpathos to incidents of universal experience, it deals withthe deepest problems which can engage the mind of man.In this combination of qualities it is perhaps superior toany one of Shakespeare's plays. The plot is as simpleand as well known to the audience as the plot of a Greektragedy. The innocence and the fall of Gretchen appealto every heart; the inward struggles of Faust, like thoseof Hamlet, and the antagonism of the sensual and moralprinciples, interest the reader just in proportion as his ownmind and nature have been similarly stirred. Each line ismade to stand for eternity; not a word is thrown away;the poem has entered as a whole into the mind and thoughtof modern Germany; nearly every expression has becomea household word. Characters are sketched in a singlescene; Valentine lives for us as clearly as Faust himself.Deeper meanings are opened up at every reading, and thenext age will discover much in it which is concealed fromthis. Goethe, writing of Faust in his eightieth year, sayswith truth, “The commendation which the poem hasreceived far and near may be perhaps owing to this quality,that it permanently preserves the period of development ofa human soul which is tormented by all that afflictsmankind, shaken also by all that disturbs it, repelled by all thatit finds repellent, and made happy by all that it desires.The author is at present far removed from such conditions;the world likewise has to some extent other struggles toundergo; nevertheless the state of man, in joy and sorrow,remains very much the same, and the latest born will stillfind cause to acquaint himself with what has been enjoyedand suffered before him in order to adapt himself to thatwhich awaits him.”

Die Wahlverwandtschaften.In 1809 he finished Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The ElectiveAffinities), a story which is always cited to prove theimmoral tendency of his works. A married couple, Edwardand Charlotte, are thrown into constant companionshipwith two unmarried persons, the Captain and Ottilie. Across attraction takes place similar to that which is oftenseen in chemical experiments. Edward unites himself withOttilie, Charlotte with the Captain. The psychologicalchanges by which this result is produced are portrayed witha masterly hand. The moral may be held by some to exaltthe preponderance of fatality in human affairs, and theuselessness of contending against irresistible circumstances.Others may believe that the story is intended to show thedisastrous calamities which may be wrought by a weakand self-indulgent will. Ottilie, though she cannot resisther passion, has strength enough to starve herself to death;Edward is the prototype of Arthur Donnithorne and TitoMelema. The work is replete with earnest purpose andterrible warning.

Farbenlehre.In 1810 Goethe finished the printing of his Farbenlehre(Theory of Colours), a work which had occupied hismind ever since his journey to Italy. His theorieswere rejected and disregarded by his coatemporaries,but he left them with confidence to the judgment ofposterity. Goethe's labours in this domain fall into twonatural divisions — one in which he tries to prove that thehypotheses of Newton are unsatisfactory, and another inwhich he promulgates a theory of his own. In his firstwork, published in 1791 and 1792, he describes with greataccuracy and liveliness the experiments which he has made.They consist chiefly of the appearances presented by whitediscs on a black ground, black discs on a white ground,and coloured discs on a black or white ground when seenthrough a prism. There are two points which he considersfatal to Newton's theory, — that the centre of a broad whitesurface remains white when seen through a prism, and thateven a black streak on a white ground can be entirelydecomposed into colours. The scientific friends to whom hecommunicated these observations assured him that there wasnothing in them opposed to Newton's theory, — that they wereeven confirmations of it. He would not be convinced, andtook no pains to acquire that exact knowledge of mathematicsand geometrical reasoning without which the moreabstruse problems of physical optics could not beintelligible. He went on further to formulate a theory of hisown. His views on the subject are contained in theirshortest form in a letter addressed to Jacobi from the campat Marienburg in July 1793. They are divided into sixheads, of which the following is an abstract. (1.) Light isthe simplest matter we have knowledge of, the least capableof analysis, the most homogeneous. It is not a compoundbody. (2.) Least of all is it compounded of coloured lights.Every coloured light is darker than colourless light.Brightness cannot be compounded of darkness. (3.) Inflexion,refraction, reflexion, are three conditions under whichwe often observe apparent colours, but they are ratheroccasions for their appearance than the cause of it. (4.)There are only two pure colours, blue and yellow; red maybe regarded as a property of both of them. There are twomixed colours, green and purple; the rest are gradations ofthese colours, and are not pure. (5.) Colourless light cannotbe produced out of coloured lights, nor white from colouredpigments. (6.) The colours which appear to us arise solelyout of a modification of the light. The colours are excitedin the light, not developed out of the light. These viewshe afterwards extended and explained, but very slightlymodified. In Goethe's opinion, yellow was light seenthrough a thickened medium; blue was darkness seenthrough an illuminated medium; all other colours werederived from these two. The theory of the Farbenlehre hasnot yet received the recognition which Goethe anticipatedfor it. In his own day he had some adherents, — the mostdistinguished perhaps was the philosopher Hegel, whoseviews, however, of natural philosophy have caused manyinquirers to recoil from his theory of metaphysics. Goethecomplained that no physicist believed in him, and as that isstill true in an age which has been devoted more than anyother to physical inquiries, we may conclude that the principleupon which his theories are based is radically wrong.

The year 1809, in which Die Wahlverwandtschaften waswritten, was for Goethe the beginning of a new era. Hewas then fresher and brighter than he had been for ten yearsbefore. He had lived through a troubled period of oppressivesorrow. The death of Schiller, the violation of his belovedWeimar, the deaths of the duchess Amalia and of his mother,his own bodily and mental sufferings, had given a tone ofsadness to his poetry. As if to put the finishing stroke tothe efforts of his life, he married the mother of his children,arranged and published his collected works, and completedhis theory of colours. The unfinished drama of Pandora isa symbol of this time. The part which is completed refersonly to past experiences of sadness; the continuation wasto have lifted the curtain of future hope.

It was natural at the beginning of a new course of life thatGoethe should write an account of his past existence. Thestudy of his collected poems made it apparent to him hownecessary it was to furnish a key by which they might beAutobiography.understood. These various causes led to the composition ofDichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), an autobiographicalhistory of the poet's life from his birth till his settlementat Weimar. This work is the cause of much embarrassmentto the poet's biographers. Where it ought to be themost trustworthy source of information, it is most misleading.It is probable that Goethe intended it to be an accurateand circumstantial account of his life. But the inner life ofan individual is more clear to him than the outer. Thestages of our self-development are better remembered thanthe exact circumstances which produced them, still less thanthe order of time in which they followed each other. Goethetook pains to ascertain facts which he had forgotten. Buthe was so conscious that imagination would play a largepart in the composition that in the title he gave poetry theprecedence before truth. The indefatigable industry ofGerman investigation has laid open before us every detailof the poet's life and every phase of his feeling. Dichtungund Wahrheit, if it has lost its rank as a history, still keepsits place as a classic. The simple loving delineation of thechildhood of genius is as fresh as ever, and is of moreuniversal interest from being less particular. The first fivebooks of this autobiography appeared in 1811, the nextfive in 1812, the third instalment at Easter 1814, and theThe war of liberation.conclusion after Goethe's death. The period during whichthis was his principal work witnessed the greatest politicalevent of the first half of our century, the rising of the Germanpeople against the power of Napoleon. In this Goethetook no share, and with it he apparently felt littlesympathy. He made no impassioned orations to hiscountrymen like Fichte; he wrote no inspiring lays likeKörner. The ballads which, he composed in 1813 areharmless enough, — Der wandelnde Glocke, Der getreueEckhart; Der Todtentanz. He saw Stein and Arndt at Dresdenin 1813, but disappointed them by his impassivemanner. He said to Körner's father at the same time,“Yes, shake your chains! The man is too great for you.You will not break them, but only drive them deeper intoyour flesh.” The reasons for this apparent coldness areperhaps more simple than they appear at first sight.Goethe was a man of thought rather than of action.Although a fair portion of his long life was given to thepractical business of his adopted country, his heart wasalways in speculation or artistic production. Whileinspecting mines he was spinning theories of geologicalformation; while working for the war commission he gladlyran away to the castle of Dornburg to bury himself amongsthis deserted papers. The pressure of court business atWeimar drove him to the solitude of Italy. In the defilesof the Argonne, and in the trenches before Mainz, he wasscheming and arranging his theory of colours. A bombardmentwas valued by him less as an attack upon the enemythan as a series of interesting experiments in optics.Added to this natural indifference to the details of humanaffairs was his belief in the predominance of force, and inthe necessary evolution of the history of the world.Napoleon was to him the greatest living depository of power.Nations, whether conquered or victorious, separated orunited, obeyed a common law against which individual willstrove in vain. Goethe was thus incapacitated for politics,both by his qualities and his defects. This habit of abstractcontemplation grew upon him in later life. Those whocondemn him on this ground should remember that hehailed in no grudging spirit the formation of a unitedGermany, and that his works have been the most potentagency in making all Germans feel that they are one. Fewwould wish to exchange the self-conflict of Faust, or eventhe wayward wanderings of Meister, for the hecticextravagance of Korner or the unsubstantial rhetoric of Posa.

It was hardly to be expected that at the age of sixty-fiveGoethe should strike out new lines of poetical activity.West-östliche Divan.However, in the West-östliche Divan, he made the firstattempt to transplant Eastern poetry to a German soil, andset an example which has been followed by Heine and MirzaSchaffy. In 1811 he first became acquainted with theworks of Hafiz in Hammer's translation. At a time whenNorth and South and West were splitting in sunder, whenthrones were breaking up and empires trembling, he soughta willing refuge in the restoring fountain of the Eastern poet.The book Timur has an obvious reference to the expeditionof Napoleon in Russia, but the large majority of the poemsare amatory, and are addressed to an imaginary Suleika,whose name is given to one of the books. Once more in hisold age Goethe came under the sovereignty of a woman.She was Marianne von Willemer, the newly married wifeof a Frankfort banker, Jacob von Willemer, who was an oldfriend of Goethe's and of his brother-in-law Schlosser.Goethe made her acquaintance in a journey which he tookin the Rhine country with Sulpiz Boiserée, who hadsucceeded in interesting Goethe in early German art, asubject to which he was himself devoted. The correspondencebetween Goethe and Marianne was published in 1877. Itextends almost to the day of his death, and includes lettersfrom Eckermann giving an account of his last moments.Not only were most of the Divan poems addressed toSuleika, but several of those included in the collection areby Marianne herself, and will bear comparison with those ofGcethe. In these poems the Oriental form is not verystrictly observed. The fondness of the Orientals for therepetition of single rhymes is not attended to, and ifsometimes remembered is soon forgotten. Their Eastern colourdepends rather on the suggestion of Eastern scenery and theintroduction of Eastern names. This, however, gives thepoet a greater licence to levity, to fatalism, and to passionthan would have been possible in poems of a purely Germancharacter.

The closing years.The last twelve years of Goethe's life, when he hadpassed his seventieth birthday, were occupied by his criticismson the literature of foreign countries, by the Wanderjahre,and the second part of Faust. He was the literarydictator of Germany and of Europe. He took but littleinterest in the direction in which the younger Germanschool was moving, and was driven to turn his eyes abroad.He conceived an intense admiration for Byron, which wasincreased by his early death. Byron appears as Euphorionin the second part of Faust. He also recognized the greatnessof Scott, and was one of the first to send a greeting tothe Italian Mazzini. He conceived the idea of aworld-literature transcending the narrow limits of race and country,which should unite all nations in harmony of feeling andaspiration. German writers claim that his design has beenrealized, and the literature of every age and country can bestudied in a tongue which Goethe had made rich, flexible,Meister's Wanderjahre.and serviceable for the purpose. The Wanderjahre,although it contains some of Goethe's most beautiful conceptions,The Flight into Egypt, The Description of thePedagogic Province, The Parable of the Three Reverences, isyet an ill-assorted collection of all kinds of writings, old andnew. Its author never succeeded in giving it form orcoherency, and his later style, beautiful as it is, becomesin these years vague and abstract. Still without this workwe should not be acquainted with the full richness andpower of his mind.

Second part of Faust.The second part of Faust has been a battlefield ofcontroversy since its publication, and demands fullerattention. Its fate may be compared with that of thelatest works of Beethoven. For a long time it was regardedas impossible to understand, and as not worth understanding,the production of a great artist whose faculties had beenimpaired by age. By degrees it has, by careful labour,become intelligible to us, and the conviction is growing thatit is the deepest and most important work of the author'slife. Its composition cannot be called an after-thought.There is no doubt that the poet finished at the age ofeighty the plan which he had conceived sixty years before.The work in its entirety may be described as the first partof Faust “writ large.” This is a picture of the macrocosmof society as that was of the microcosm of the individual.The parallelism between the two dramas is not perfect, butit reveals itself more and more clearly to a patient study.Some points of this similarity have been well expressed byRosenkranz (quoted by Bayard Taylor): — “Both parts aresymmetrical in their structure. The first moves withdeliberate swiftness from heaven through the world to hell;the second returns therefrom through the world to heaven.Between the two lies the emancipation of Faust from thetorment of his conscious guilt, lies his Lethe, his assimilationof the past. In regard to substance, the first partbegins religiously, becomes metaphysical, and terminatesethically; the second part begins ethically, becomes aesthetic,and terminates religiously. In one, love and knowledge areconfronted with each other; in the other, practical activityand art, the ideal of the beautiful. In regard to form, thefirst part advances from the hymnal shout to monologueand dialogue ; the second part from monologue and dialogueto the dithyrambic, closing with the hymn, which hereglorifies not alone the Lord and His uncomprehended loftyworks, but the human in the process of its union with thedivine, through redemption and atonement.” The first act,with its varied scenes of country, castle, garden, galleries,and halls, answers to the two prologues of the first part; thesecond act introduces us again to Faust's study and hisfamiliar Wagner. The classical Walpurgis Night has itsprototype in the first part. The third act is devoted toHelena, who is the heroine of the second part as Gretchen isof the first. The marriage of Faust and Helena typifiesthe union of the classical and romantic schools, and theirchild is Euphorion, who is symbolical of Byron. In thefourth act Faust is raised instead of being degraded by hisunion with Helena. He wishes for a sphere of beneficentactivity, and obtains it by war. The fifth act is devoted tothe complete regeneration of the soul of Faust. Even thesight of all that he has accomplished does not satisfy him.It is not until he is blind to outward objects that onemoment of divine rapture reveals to him the continuanceof his work in coming generations, and convinces him thathe has not lived in vain. In this one moment of supremehappiness he dies. The struggle for the possession ofFaust's soul, indicated in the first part, is fully elaboratedin the second. Mephistopheles is shown to have workedout the good in spite of himself, and Margaret appearstransfigured as the revelation to man of the divine love.

With the completion of Faust, Goethe felt that the work ofhis life was accomplished. He still continued to work withregularity. He ordered and arranged his writings, helaboured at his Tages- und Jahresheften, an autobiographicaljournal of his life. He bated not one jot of heart or hope,and took the liveliest interest in every movement of literatureand science. When the news of the July Revolutionof 1830 reached Weimar, Goethe was excited beyond hiswont, not on account of the triumph of liberal principles,but because the controversy between Cuvier and Geoffrey StHilaire had been decided in favour of the latter. Still hehad much to darken his latter days. His old friends werefalling fast around him. His wife had died in 1816, aftera union of thirty years. He felt her loss bitterly. Theduchess Amalia had died eight years before, not long afterthe death of his own mother. He now had to undergobitterer experiences when he was less able to bear them.Fran von Stein, with whom he had renewed his friendshipif not his love, died in January 1827; and in June 1828he lost the companion of his youth, the grand-duke KarlAugust, who died suddenly, away from Weimar, on his returnfrom a journey. Goethe received the news with outwardcalmness, but said forebodingly, “Now it is all over,” andwent to mourn and labour at the castle of Dornburg, whereeverything reminded him of the days of their early friendship.The duchess Louise survived her husband till February1830. When Goethe died in 1832 none of the old Weimarset were left except Knebel, who lived two years longer.A greater blow than these was the death of his only son,whom, in spite of his moral weakness, his father deeply loved.He died at Rome in October 1830, and is buried close bythe pyramid of Caius Cestius, where Goethe himself oncedesired to be laid. We have a full account of the last nineyears of Goethe's life from the writings of Eckermann, whobecame his secretary in 1823, lived with him till his death,and has noted down his conversations and his habits withthe minuteness and fidelity of a Boswell.

His death.We must pass on to the closing scene. On Thursday,March 15, 1832. he spent his last cheerful and happy day.He was visited by the grand-duchess and other friends.He awoke the next morning with a chill. From this hegradually recovered, and on Monday was so much betterthat he designed to begin his regular work on the next day.But in the middle of the night he woke up with a deathlycoldness, which extended from his hands over his body, andwhich it took many hours to subdue. It then appeared thatthe lungs were attacked, and that there was no hope of hisrecovery. Goethe did not anticipate death. He sat fullyclothed in his arm-chair, made attempts to reach his study,spoke confidently of his recovery, and of the walks he wouldtake in the fine April days. His daughter-in-law Ottilietended him faithfully. On the morning of the 22d hisstrength gradually left him. He sat slumbering in his armchair holding Ottilie's hand. Her name was constantly onhis lips. His mind occasionally wandered, at one time tohis beloved Schiller, at another to a fair female head withblack curls, some passion of his youth. His last words werean order to his servant to open the second shutter to let inmore light. After this he traced with his forefinger letters inthe air. At half-past eleven in the day he drew himself, withoutany sign of pain, into the left corner of his arm-chair, andwent so peacefully to sleep that it was long before the watchersknew that his spirit was really gone. He is buried in thegrand-ducal vault, where the bones of Schiller are also laid.

Goethe differs from all other great writers, exceptperhaps Milton, in this respect, that his works cannot be understoodwithout a knowledge of his life, and that his life isin itself a work of art, greater than any work which itcreated. This renders a long and circumstantial biographya necessity to all who would study the poet seriously. Atthe same time he is so great that we are even now scarcelysufficiently removed from him to be able to form a correctjudgment of his place in literary history. He is not onlythe greatest poet of Germany; he is one of the greatestpoets of all ages. Posterity must decide his exact precedencein that small and chosen company which contains thenames of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. He was theapostle of self-culture. Always striving after objectivetruth, and sometimes attaining to it, he exhibited to theworld every phase of his plastic mind in turn, and taughtboth by precept and example the husbandry of the soul.The charge of selfishness so often brought against himcannot be maintained. His nature responded to everyinfluence of passing emotion. Like a delicate harp, it wassilent if not touched, and yet gave its music to every wooingof the wilful wind. The charge of unsympatheticcoldness roused the deep indignation of those who knewhim best. He learned by sad experience that the lessonof life is to renounce. Rather than cavil at his statuesquerepose, we should learn to admire the self-conflict andself-command which moulded the exuberance of his impulsivenature into monumental symmetry and proportion. Hisautobiography has done him wrong. It is the story not ofhis life, but of his recollections. He needs no defence,nothing but sympathetic study. As Homer concentratedin himself the spirit of antiquity, Dante of the MiddleAges, and Shakespeare of the Renaissance, so Goethe is therepresentative of the modern spirit, the prophet of mankind under new circumstances and new conditions, theappointed teacher of ages yet unborn.

Bibliography. — A complete bibliography of Goetheliterature would fill a very large space. We mustcontent ourselves with an indication of ths principal sourcesfrom which a knowledge of his life may be derived. Themost important source of all is his own works. The Dichtungund Wahrheit, the Italienische Reise, the Campagneam Rhein, and the Tages- und Jahresheften have anespecial autobiographical value. Next to these come thepoems, and lastly the letters. Many of these are lostforever, many remain unpublished. For the first period ofhis life Der Junge Goethe, in three volumes, published byHirzel, with an introduction by Michael Bernays, isindispensable. It contains his letters and poems in chronologicalorder. A commentary on this work by WilhelmScherer, entitled Aus Goethes Frühzeit was published in1879. Otto Jahn published Goethes Briefe an seiner LeipzigerFreunde. Schöll and A. Hober have collected theletters of the Strasburg period. Goethe's correspondencewith Schiller and with Zelter was published during his lifetime.Besides these we have his letters to Herder, Merck,Kestner and Lotte, Lavater, Knebel, Countess Stolberg,Jacobi, Karl August, and Frau von Stein. Lately haveappeared his letters to Marianne von Willemer, and someof those addressed to J. G. Schlosser. We are withouthis letters to Behrisch, Lerse, and Zimmermann; and wehave only a few of those addressed to Horn and Sophie LaRoche. Goethe's real letters to Bettina von Arnim are inthe main unpublished; those which bear the name havebeen largely falsified, but have a substratum of truth. Wehave also a few volumes of Goethe's scientific correspondence,published by his descendants. Help to the understandingof his poetry is given by the letters of Wieland, CarolineFlachsland, and his Weimar friends. The letters addressedto him by Frau von Stein exist, but have not been madepublic. The first life of Goethe was published by Döringin 1828, of which a second enlarged edition appeared afterthe poet's death in 1833. Then followed Viehoff in 4volumes, 1847-1853. The best life of Goethe is that ofSchäfer, which appeared first in 1851, and the third editionof which dates from 1877. It is contained in two volumesof moderate size, and is written with scarcely a superfluousword. The account of Goethe and Schiller by KarlGoedeke in his Grundriss der Deutschen Dichtung is admirable,and so is the little book Goethes Leben und Schriften,published by him in 1874. The life of Goethe has beenpopularized in England by G. H. Lewes, in a work whichis as much read in German as in English. A completebiography of Goethe cannot be written until the archivesof the Goethe Haus at Weimar are thrown open forconsultation. The knowledge of Goethe's works in Englandis due as much as anything else to the writings of ThomasCarlyle. The commentaries on Goethe's works areendless in number. The most active labourer in this field hasbeen H. Düntze, who has left no side of Goethe's activityand no period of his life unexplored. We must alsomention the brilliant lectures on Goethe by Hermann Grimm(Berlin, 1877), and the excellent sketch of his life andworks published by A. Hayward in 1878. The followingworks deserve particular mention: —