But Goethe was about to pay more serious homage to the Master, as he then understood him. On November 28th, he informed Salzmann that he was engaged on a work which was absorbing him to the forgetfulness of Homer, Shakespeare, and everything else. He was dramatising the history of "one of the n.o.blest of Germans," rescuing from oblivion the memory of "an honest man." The "n.o.blest of Germans" was Gottfried von Berlichingen (1482-1562), one of those "knights of the cows," whose predatory propensities were the terror of Germany throughout the Middle Ages, and who appears to have been neither better nor worse than the rest of his cla.s.s. While still in Stra.s.sburg, Goethe had noted Gottfried as an appropriate subject for dramatic treatment, but, as he records in his Autobiography, it was immediately after his return to Frankfort that he first put his hand to the work. Stimulated to his task by his sister Cornelia, in the course of six weeks he had completed the play which, on its publication two years later, was to make him the most famous author in Germany.

Goethe's choice of Gotz as a theme on which to try his powers is a revelation of the motives that were now compelling him. Of the nature of these motives he has himself given somewhat conflicting accounts.

He tells his contemporary correspondents that the play was written to relieve his own bosom of its perilous stuff; to enable him "to forget the sun, moon, and dear stars," and, again, that its primary object was to do justice to the memory of a great man. Writing in old age, he a.s.signs still another motive as mainly prompting him to the production of the play: it was written, he says, with the express object of improving the German stage, of rescuing it from the pitiful condition into which it had fallen during the first half of the eighteenth century. What is entirely obvious, however, is that Shakespeare is the beginning and end of the inspiration of the _Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand_, as the play in its original form was ent.i.tled. In its conception and in its details Shakespeare is everywhere suggested, though it may be noted that the comic element with which Shakespeare flavours his tragedies is absent from _Gotz_.

But for Shakespeare the play could not have taken the shape in which we have it. Given the model, however, Goethe had to infuse it with motives which would have a living interest for his own time. One of these motives was the admiration of great men which Goethe shared with the generation to which he belonged. During this Frankfort period he was successively attracted by such contrasted types of heroes as Julius Caesar, Socrates, and Mahomet as appropriate central figures for dramatic representation. "It is a pleasure to behold a great man," one of the characters in _Gotz_ is made to say; and, if Goethe had any determinate aim when he took his theme in hand, it was to present the spectacle of a hero for admiration and inspiration. As it was, deeper instincts of his nature a.s.serted themselves as he proceeded with his work, and Gotz is overshadowed by other characters in the drama in whom the poet himself, by his own admission, came to find a more congenial interest.

The play exists in three forms--the first draft being recast for publication in 1773, which second version was adapted for the Weimar theatre in collaboration with Schiller in 1804. It is generally admitted that in its first form we have the fullest manifestation of its author's genius, and equally the fullest expression of the original inspiration that led to its production. Like Shakespeare he had a book for his text--the Memoirs of Gottfried, written by himself; and like Shakespeare he took large liberties with his original--no fewer than six characters in the play, two of whom are of the first importance, being of Goethe's own invention. The plot may be briefly told. Adelbert von Weislingen, a Knight of the Empire, had been the early friend of Gottfried, but under the influence of the Bishop of Bamberg and others he had taken a line which led him into direct conflict with Gottfried. While the latter, identifying himself with the lesser German n.o.bles, was for supporting the power of the Emperor, Weislingen had identified himself with the princes whose object was to cripple it. Gottfried seizes Weislingen while on his way to the Bishop of Bamberg, and bears him off to his castle at Jaxthausen. The contrasted characters of the two chief personages in the play are now brought before us--Gottfried the rough soldier, honest, resolute, and Weislingen, more of a courtier than a soldier, weak and unstable.

Overborne by the stronger nature of Gottfried, Weislingen agrees to break his alliance with the Bishop, and, as a pledge for his future conduct, betroths himself to Gottfried's sister Marie, who, weakly devout, is a counterpart to Gottfried's wife Elizabeth, who is depicted as a Spartan mother.[104] To square accounts with the Bishop, Weislingen finds it necessary to proceed to Bamberg, and the second act tells the tale of his second apostacy. At Bamberg he comes under the spell of an enchantress in the shape of a beautiful woman, Adelheid von Walldorf, a widow, whose physical charms are represented as irresistible. Weislingen becomes her creature, forswears his bond with Gottfried, and rejoins the ranks of his enemies--news which Gottfried is reluctantly brought to credit. In the third act we find Gottfried in a coil of troubles. He has robbed a band of merchants on their way from the Frankfort Fair, and, at the prompting of Weislingen, the Emperor puts him under the ban of the Empire, and dispatches an armed force against him. Beaten in the field and besieged in his own castle, he is at length forced to surrender. In the fourth act he is a prisoner in Heilbronn, but is rescued by Franz von Sickingen, a knight of the same stamp and with the same political sympathies as himself. Sickingen, who is on friendly terms with the Emperor, does him the still further service of securing his relief from the ban, whereupon Gottfried settles down to a peaceful life in his own castle, and to relieve its monotony betakes himself to the uncongenial task of writing his own memoirs. In the fifth act we sup with horrors. The peasants rise in rebellion and wreak frightful vengeance on their oppressors. In the hope of controlling them, Gottfried, at their own request, puts himself at their head, but finds himself powerless to check their excesses, and on their defeat he is again taken prisoner. But the main interest of the last act is concentrated in Adelheid, who now reveals all the depths of her sensual nature and her unscrupulous ambition. Weislingen she has discovered to be a despicable creature, and she attaches herself to Sickingen, in whom she finds a man after her own heart, able to satisfy all the cravings of her nature. She poisons Weislingen, who dies as he has lived, the victim of weakness rather than of wickedness. Her crimes are known to the judges of the Vehmgericht, who in their mysterious tribunal adjudge her to death, which is effected in a curious scene by one of their agents. The drama closes with the death of Gottfried in prison, baffled in his dearest schemes, blasted in reputation, and with gloomy forebodings for the future of his country.

[Footnote 104: In the characters of Marie and Elizabeth we have traits of Friederike and of Goethe's mother.]

Such is an outline of the production in which Goethe made his first appeal to his countrymen at large,[105] and which is in such singular contrast to the ideals of his maturity. That it was not the inevitable birth of his whole heart and mind is proved by the fact that he never repeated the experiment. Neither the incidents nor the hero of the piece, indeed, were of a nature to elicit the full play of his genius.

Goethe had not, like Scott, an inborn interest in the scenes of the camp and the field, and could not, like Scott, take a special delight in describing them for their own sake. To the portrayal of a character like Gottfried Scott could give his whole heart, but Goethe required characters of a subtler type to enlist his full sympathies and to give scope to his full powers. Goethe himself has told us how, as he proceeded in the writing of the play, his interest in his hero gradually flagged. In depicting the charms of Adelheid, he says, he fell in love with her himself, and his interest in her fate gradually overmastered him. In truth, it is in scenes where Gottfried is not the princ.i.p.al actor that any originality in the play is to be found, for in these scenes Goethe was drawing from his own experience and recording emotions that had distracted himself. In the unstable Weislingen he represents a weakness of his own nature of which he was himself well aware. "You are a chameleon," Adelheid tells Weislingen; and, as we have seen, Goethe so described himself. It is, therefore, in the relations of Weislingen to Marie and Adelheid that we must look for the spontaneous expression of the poet's genius, working on material drawn from self-introspection. In Weislingen's hasty wooing and equally hasty desertion of Marie we have an exaggerated presentment of Goethe's own conduct to Friederike, to which objection may be taken on the score of delicacy, though he himself suggests that it is to be regarded as a public confession of his self-reproach. In depicting Marie and Weislingen he had Friederike and himself before him to restrain his imagination within the limits of nature and truth.

In the case of Adelheid he had no model before him, and the result is that, with youthful exaggeration, he has made her a beautiful monster with no redeeming touch, and, therefore, of little human interest.

Such a character was essentially alien to Goethe's own nature, and so are the melodramatic scenes which depict her desperate attempts to escape from her toils and the proceedings of the avenging tribunal that had marked her for judgment.

[Footnote 105: As we have seen, the Leipzig book of verses did not attract general attention.]

As in the case of all Goethe's longer productions, critical opinion has been divided from the beginning regarding the intrinsic merits of _Gotz_. In the opinion of critics like Edmond Scherer it is a crude imitation of Shakespeare with little promise of its author's future achievement, while other critics, like Lewes, regard it as a "work of daring power, of vigour, of originality." On one point Goethe himself and all his critics are agreed: the play as a whole is only a succession of scenes, loosely strung together, with no inner development leading up to a determinate end. In his later life Goethe characterised Shakespeare's plays as "highly interesting tales, only told by more persons than one." Whatever truth there may be in this judgment in the case of Shakespeare, it exactly describes _Gotz_. It is as a tale, a narrative, and not as a drama, that it is to be read if it is to be enjoyed without the sense of artistic failure. The anachronisms with which the piece abounds, and which Hegel caustically noted, have been a further stumbling-block to the critics.[106] In the second scene of the first Act, Luther is introduced for no other purpose than to expound ideas which come strangely from his mouth, but which were effervescing in the minds of Goethe and his contemporaries--the ideas which they had learned from Rousseau regarding the excellence of the natural man. Similarly, in the scene following, educational problems are discussed which sound oddly in the castle of a mediaeval baron, but which were awakening interest in Goethe's own day. In the supreme moments of his career--on the occasion of the surrender of his castle and in his last hour--Gottfried is made to utter the word _freedom_ as the watchword of his aspirations, but in so doing he is expressing Goethe's own pa.s.sionate protest against the conventions of his age in religion, in philosophy, and art, and not a sentiment in keeping with the cla.s.s of which he is a type.

[Footnote 106: Lessing strongly disapproved of _Gotz_ as flouting the doctrines laid down in his _Dramaturgie_. When his brother announced to him that _Gotz_ had been played with great applause in Berlin, his cold comment was that no doubt the chief credit was due to the decorator.]

These blemishes in the play as a work of art are apparent, yet it may be said that it was mainly owing to these very blemishes that the "beautiful monster," as Wieland called it, took contemporaries by storm and retains its freshness of interest after the lapse of a century and a half. The successive scenes are, indeed, without organic connection, but each scene by itself has the vivacity and directness of improvisation. Nor do the anachronisms to which criticism may object really mar the interest of the work. Rather they const.i.tute its most characteristic elements, proceeding as they do from the poet's own deepest intellectual interests, and, therefore, from his most spontaneous inspiration.

But the most conclusive testimony to the essential power of the play is the effect it produced not only in German but in European literature. Its publication in its altered form in 1773 had the effect of a bomb on the literary public of Germany. It sent a shudder of horror through the sticklers for the rules of the cla.s.sical drama which it ignored with such contemptuous indifference; a shudder of delight through the band of effervescing youths who shared Goethe's revolutionary ideals, and to whom _Gotz_ was a manifesto and a challenge to all traditional conventions in literature and life. It was the immediate parent of that truly German growth--the literature of _Sturm und Drang_, whose exponents, says Kant, thought that they could not more effectively show that they were budding geniuses than by flinging all rules to the winds, and that one appears to better advantage on a spavined hack than on a trained steed. The literature of _Sturm und Drang_ was a pa.s.sing phenomenon, but the influence of _Gotz_ did not end with its abortive life. But for _Gotz_ Schiller's early productions would have been differently inspired; and to _Gotz_ also was due much of the inspiration of the subsequent German Romantic School, though many of its developments were abhorrent to Goethe's nature both in youth and maturity. It emanc.i.p.ated the drama from conventional shackles, but it did more: it extended the range of national thought, sentiment, and emotion, and for good and evil introduced new elements into German literature which have maintained their place there since its first portentous appearance. And German critics are unanimous in a.s.signing another result to the publication of _Gotz_: in its style as in its form it set convention at naught, and thus marks an epoch in the development of German literary language. Not since Luther, "whose words were battles," had German been written so direct from the heart and with such elemental force as makes words living things.

It has been a commonplace remark that 1773, the year of the publication of _Gotz_, corresponds in European literature to 1789 in European political history. The remark may be exaggerated, but, if a work is to be named which marks the advent of what is covered by the vague name of romanticism, _Gotz_ may fairly claim the honour. It had precursors of more or less importance in other countries, but, by the nature of its subject, by its audacious disregard of reigning models, and by its resounding notoriety, it gave the signal for a fresh reconstruction of art and life. It gave the decisive impulse to the writer who is the European representative of the romantic movement, and whose genius specifically fitted him to work the vein which was opened in _Gotz_--a task to which Goethe himself was not called. In 1799 Scott published his translation of _Gotz_,[107] and followed it up by his series of romantic poems in which the influence of Goethe's work was the main inspiration. But it was in his prose romances, dealing with the Middle Ages, that he found the appropriate form for his inspiration--a form which ensured a popular appeal, impossible in the case of the severer form of the drama. In the enchanter's sway which Scott exercised over Europe during the greater part of the nineteenth century, the memories of _Gotz_ were not the least potent of his spells.

[Footnote 107: Two of the scenes in _Gotz_ were imitated by Scott in his own work--the Vehmgericht scene in _Anne of Geierstein_ and the description of the siege of Torquilstone by Rebecca to the wounded Ivanhoe. Scott also borrowed from _Egmont_.]

CHAPTER VI

INFLUENCE OF MERCK AND THE DARMSTADT CIRCLE

1772

Specially a.s.sociated with _Gotz von Berlichingen_, but a.s.sociated also with Goethe's general development at this time, was another of those mentors whose counsel and stimulus were necessary to him at all periods of his life. This was Johann Heinrich Merck, the son of an apothecary in Darmstadt and now Paymaster of the Forces there. Of Merck Goethe says that "he had the greatest influence on my life," and he makes him the subject of one of his elaborate character sketches in his Autobiography. To men of original nature, however discordant with his own, Goethe was always attracted. We have seen him in more or less close relations with Behrisch, Jung Stilling, and Herder, from all of whom he was divided by dissonances which made a perfect mutual understanding impossible. So it was in the case of Merck, as Goethe's references to him in his Autobiography and elsewhere clearly imply. In Merck there was apparently a mixture of conflicting elements which made him a mystery to his friends, and his suicide at the age of fifty points to something morbid in his nature. Of his real goodness of heart and of his genuine admiration for what he considered worthy of it, his own reported sayings and the testimony of others leave us in no doubt. Recording his impression of Goethe after a few interviews, he wrote: "I begin to have a real affection for Goethe. He is a man after my own heart, as I have found few." On the other hand, there were traits in him which Goethe did not scruple to call Mephistophelian--an opinion shared even by Goethe's mother, whose nature it was to see the best side of men and things. His variable humour and caustic tongue made him at once a terror and an attraction in whatever society he moved, and it is evident from the tone of Goethe's reminiscences of him that his intercourse with Merck was a mixed pleasure. But, as we have seen, it was an abiding principle of Goethe to be repelled by no one who had something to give him, and Merck possessed qualities and accomplishments which were of the first importance to him in the phase through which he was now pa.s.sing. Merck was keenly interested in literature, especially in English literature, and had all Goethe's enthusiasm for Shakespeare. Though his own original productions were of mediocre quality, he had an insight into the character and genius of others which Goethe fully recognised and to which he acknowledges his special obligation. His general att.i.tude in criticism was "negative and destructive," but this att.i.tude was entirely wholesome for Goethe at a period when instinct and pa.s.sion tended to overbear his judgment. With admirable penetration he saw how Goethe during these Frankfort years occasionally wasted his powers in attempts which were unworthy of his gifts and alien to his real nature. It was in reference to these futile tendencies that Merck gave him counsel in words which subsequent critics have recognised as the most adequate definition of the essential characteristic of Goethe's genius as a poet. "Your endeavour, your unswerving aim," he wrote, "is to give poetic form to the real. Others seek to realise the so-called poetic, the imaginative; and the result is nothing but stupid nonsense." Like subsequent critics, also, Merck saw the superiority of the first draft of _Gotz_ to the second, but when the latter was completed, he played a friend's part. "It is rubbish and of no account," was his characteristic remark; "however, let the thing be printed";[108] and published it was, Merck bearing the cost of printing and Goethe supplying the paper.

[Footnote 108: Eckermann, _Gesprache mit Goethe_, November 9th, 1824.]

It was towards the close of 1771 that Goethe had made Merck's acquaintance[109] on the occasion of a visit Merck had paid to Frankfort; and in March of the following year, in company with the younger Schlosser, they renewed their intercourse in Darmstadt, where Merck was settled. The visit lasted a few days, and was of some importance, as it introduced Goethe to a society of which he was to see much during the remainder of his stay in Frankfort, and which, according to his own testimony, "invigorated and widened his powers."

It was a society in which we are surprised to find the Mephistophelian Merck the leading and most admired member. It consisted of a group of men and women a.s.sociated with the Court at Darmstadt, whose bond of union was the cult of sensibility as the rising generation of Germany had learned it from Rousseau, Richardson, and Sterne. They went by the name of the _Gemeinschaft der Heiligen_, and the fervours of the community were at least those of genuine votaries. So far as Goethe is concerned, it was in three of the priestesses, one of them Caroline Flachsland, the betrothed of Herder, that he found the attraction of the society. For the youth who two years later was to give cla.s.sic expression to the cult of sensibility in his _Werther_, his intercourse with these ladies of Darmstadt was an appropriate schooling. For their sensibilities were boundless, and they did not shrink from giving them expression. Caroline relates to her future husband how one night in the woods she fell on her knees at sight of the moon and arranged some glow-worms in her hair so that their loves might not be disturbed. On one occasion when Merck and Goethe met two of the coterie, one of them embraced Merck with kisses and the other fell upon his breast. Goethe was not a youth to be indifferent to such favours, and the attentions of Caroline were such as to disquiet Herder and to occasion an estrangement between the two friends which lasted for nearly two years.

[Footnote 109: It was Schlosser who had made Goethe and Merck acquainted. Herder, to whom Merck was known, had been a previous intermediary.]

From the effusive Caroline herself we learn the impression Goethe made on the precious circle. "A few days ago" (in the beginning of March, 1772), she writes to Herder, "I made the acquaintance of your friend Goethe and Herr Schlosser.... Goethe is such a good-hearted, lively creature, without any parade of learning, and has made such a to-do with Merck's children that my heart has quite gone out to him.... The second afternoon we spent in a pleasant stroll and over a bowl of punch in our house. We were not sentimental, but very merry, and Goethe and I danced a minuette to the piano. Thereafter he recited an excellent ballad of yours [the Scottish ballad _Edward_, translated by Herder]." On the occasion of a later visit (April) of Goethe to Darmstadt, she again writes to Herder: "Our Goethe has come on foot from Frankfort[110] on a visit to Merck. We have been together every day, and once, when we had gone together into the wood, we were soaked to the skin. We took refuge under a tree, and Goethe sang a little song, 'Under the Greenwood Tree,' which you translated from Shakespeare. Our common plight made us very confidential. He read aloud to us some of the best scenes from his _Gottfried von Berlichingen_.... Goethe is choke-full of songs. One about a hut built out of the ruins of a temple is excellent.[111] ... The poor fellow told my sister and myself a day ago that he had already been once in love, but that the girl had played with him for a whole year and then deserted him.[112] He believed, however, that she really loved him, but another had appeared on the scene, and he was made a goose of."

[Footnote 110: A six hours' walk.]

[Footnote 111: The poem, ent.i.tled _Der Wanderer_, noted below.]

[Footnote 112: The girl meant was no doubt Kathchen Schonkopf.]

Under the inspiration of these caressing attentions Goethe's muse could not be silent, and in the course of the spring and autumn he threw off a succession of pieces which are the cla.s.sical expression of the sentimentalism of the period. To the three ladies-in-chief, under the pseudonyms of Urania, Lila, and Psyche (Caroline Flachsland), he successively addressed odes in which he gave them back their own emotions with interest. Their inspiration is sufficiently suggested by these lines which conclude the lines ent.i.tled _Elysium, an Uranien_:--

Seligkeit! Seligkeit!

Eines Kusses Gefuhl.

In all the three poems we have another ill.u.s.tration of Goethe's susceptibility to immediate influences. Under the inspiration of Friederike's simplicity he had written lyrics which were as pure in form as direct in feeling. Now we have him indulging in a vein of artificial sentiment, which, it might have been supposed, he had for ever left behind as the result of his schooling in Stra.s.sburg.

In two pieces belonging to the same period, however, is revealed in fullest measure the true self of the poet, with all the emotional and intellectual preoccupations which he had brought with him from Stra.s.sburg. Of the one, _Wanderers Sturmlied_, he has given in his Autobiography an account which is fully borne out by the character of the poem itself. It was composed, he tells us, in a terrific storm on one of his restless journeys between Frankfort and Darmstadt, and at a time when the memory of Friederike was still haunting him. Of Friederike, however, there is no direct suggestion in the poem; from first to last it is a paean of the _Sturm und Drang_, composed in a form directly imitated from Pindar, whom he had been ardently studying since his return to Frankfort. The theme is the glorification of genius--genius in its upwelling and original force as manifest in Pindar, not as in poets like Anacreon and Theocritus. He who is in possession of this genius is armed against all the powers of nature and fate, and his end can only be crowned with victory. Goethe himself calls the poem a _Halbunsinn_, and one of his most sympathetic critics--Viktor Hehn--admits that to follow its drift requires some labour and some creative phantasy on the part of the reader.[113] But it is not its poetical merit that gives the poem its chief interest; it is to be taken, as it was meant, as a profession of the poet's literary faith at the period when it was written, and as such it is a historic doc.u.ment of the _Sturm und Drang_--at once an ill.u.s.tration and an exposition of its motives and ideals. "All this," is Goethe's mature comment on this and other productions of the same period, "was deeply and genuinely felt, but often expressed in a one-sided and unbalanced way."

[Footnote 113: _uber Goethe's Gedichte_ (1911), p. 157.]

Of far higher poetic value is the second poem, _Der Wanderer_,[114] in which Matthew Arnold found "the power of Greek radiance" which Goethe could give to his handling of nature. The scene of the poem is in southern Italy, near c.u.mae. The Wanderer, wearied by his travel under the noonday sun, comes upon a woman by the wayside whom he asks where he may quench his thirst. She conducts him through the neighbouring thicket, when an architrave, half-buried in the moss, and bearing an effaced inscription, catches his eye. They reach the woman's hut, which he finds to have been constructed from the stones of a ruined temple. Asleep in the hut is the woman's infant son, whom she leaves in the arms of the Wanderer, while she goes to fetch water from the spring. She presses on him a piece of bread, the only food she has to offer, and invites him to remain till the return of her husband to the evening meal. He refuses her hospitality, and resumes his journey to c.u.mae, his destination. Such is the outline of the poem, which is in the form of a dialogue, in the irregular measure common to the odes above mentioned. But in the _Wanderer_ there is nothing dithyrambic; rather its characteristic is a reflective repose, which is in strange contrast to the tumultuous outpouring of the _Wanderers Sturmlied_, and which might induce us to a.s.sign its production to a later day in Goethe's life, to the period of his sojourn in Italy, when years had somewhat chastened him, and when he was under the spell of the artistic remains of cla.s.sical antiquity. Of the finest inspiration is the contrast between the remarks of the peasant woman wholly engrossed in the immediate needs of the day, and the speculations of the Wanderer as he comes upon the ruins that time has wrought upon the choicest works of man's hand. Here we are far from all vapid and artificial sentiment; we have philosophical meditation proceeding from the profoundest source of the pathos of human life, the transitoriness of man and his works. Completely in accord with the philosophy of his ripest years, however, the poet finds no ground for melancholy regrets in the spectacle of nature triumphing over man's handiwork. Even in her work of corrosion she provides for the welfare of her children; in a home reared out of a ruined temple happy human lives are spent. And it is in the spirit of the broadest humanity--a spirit that marks him off from the sentimentalists of the Darmstadt circle--that he regards the "ruins of time."

[Footnote 114: On account of his constant travels between Frankfort and Darmstadt, Goethe was known among his friends as the _Wanderer_.

The poem was written in the autumn, during Goethe's residence in Wetzlar.]

Natur! du ewig keimende, Schaffst jeden zum Genuss des Lebens, Hast deine Kinder alle mutterlich Mit Erbteil ausgestattet, einer Hutte.

Nature! eternal engenderer, Thou bring'st forth thy children for the joy of living, With care all maternal thou providest Each with his portion, with his cottage.

In reading this poem we feel the force of the words of the younger Schlosser in which he records his impression of Goethe at the moment when both first made the acquaintance of the Darmstadt society. "I shall be accompanied (to Darmstadt)," he wrote, "by a young friend of the highest promise who, through his strenuous endeavours to purify his soul, without unnerving it, is to me worthy of special honour."[115] The purification had indeed begun, but Goethe had to pa.s.s through many fires before the purification was complete. One such fire was immediately awaiting him.

[Footnote 115: Biedermann, _op. cit._ i. 19-20.]

CHAPTER VII

WETZLAR AND CHARLOTTE BUFF

MAY--SEPTEMBER, 1772

During the summer and autumn of 1772 Goethe found himself in a society and surroundings which were in curious contrast to those of Darmstadt; and the next four months were to supply him with an experience which, wrought into one book of transcendent literary effect, was to make his name known, literally, to the ends of the earth,[116] and which may be regarded as the most remarkable episode in his long life. It was as "the author of _Werther_" that he was known to the reading world, until after his death the publication of the completed _Faust_ gradually effaced the conception of Goethe as the master-sentimentalist of European literature.

[Footnote 116: Werther, as Goethe reminds us in one of his Venetian epigrams, was known in China:--

Doch was fordert es mich, da.s.s auch sogar der Chinese Malet mit angstlicher Hand Werthern und Lotten auf Glas?]

It was mainly as a temporary escape from the tedium of Frankfort that, towards the end of May, 1772, Goethe proceeded to Wetzlar, a little town on the Lahn, a confluent of the Rhine. His settlement in Wetzlar had the semblance of a serious professional purpose, since Wetzlar was the historic legal capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the seat of the Imperial Court of Justice. If he had any such serious purpose, his experience of the place speedily dispelled it. The place itself he found distasteful; a "little, ill-built town," he calls it, though the modern visitor finds it not unattractive, with its climbing, tortuous streets, reminiscent of the Middle Age, and with its impressive cathedral, one of the most interesting specimens of mediaeval architecture to be found in Germany, and still unfinished in Goethe's day. Instead of the spectacle of an august tribunal administering prompt and even justice, what he saw was a mult.i.tude of corrupt officials, deluded litigants, and endless delays of law. Wetzlar, in fact, he gives us to understand, destroyed any respect he may ever have had alike for judges and the law they professed to administer. He duly enrolled himself as a "Praktikant,"[117] but, as was the case with the majority of that cla.s.s who haunted the town, his legal activity was confined to this step. "Solitary, depressed, aimless," so he described himself to his friends during his first weeks in Wetzlar.[118] Disgusted with law, he found refuge in the study of literature. In a long and rhapsodical letter to Herder he depicts the intellectual and spiritual experiences through which he was now pa.s.sing. The Greeks were his one preoccupation. Homer, Xenophon, Plato, Theocritus, and Anacreon he had read in turn, but it was in Pindar he was now revelling, and from Pindar he was learning the lesson that only in laying firm hold of one's subject is the essence of all mastery. A sentence of Herder to the effect that "thought and feeling create the expression" had rejoiced his heart as expressing his own deepest experience. Herder had said of _Gotz_ that its author had been spoilt by Shakespeare, and he modestly accepted the censure.

_Gotz_, he admits, had been _thought_, not _felt_, and he would be depressed by his failure, were he not occasionally conscious that some day he would do better things.[119]