Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe

by James Sime

In “Werther,” Goethe’s first romance, he deals only with one great crisis in the history of his hero. “Wilhelm Meister,” on the contrary, is a picture of the entire course of a young man’s life. Meister is the son of a merchant, and at the point where the tale begins he is associated with his father in business. He has a touch of poetry, and longs for a freer, more exciting, more interesting career, in which he may find scope for the development of his individuality. He is profoundly interested in the drama, and this feeling is deepened by his relation with Marianne, a beautiful actress whom he passionately loves. At last he decides to escape with Marianne from his commonplace surroundings, and to become an actor; and all his arrangements are made, when he is led, by some incidents which he misinterprets, to believe that the girl to whom he has been devoted is unfaithful to him. Shocked by this supposed discovery, he abandons her, and in a dejected mood continues to go through his ordinary duties. But by and by, when travelling to execute some business commissions, he meets several actors and actresses, and his old love for the stage is revived. A theatrical company is formed; the director receives from Meister enough money for the necessary expenses; and the players are invited by a count to give performances at his country house. Here Meister becomes acquainted with the works of Shakespeare, and his ideas about the drama are transformed. He is excited, too, by a romantic relation with the young and beautiful countess. When the players, after the fulfilment of their engagement, are leaving the castle, he is attacked by bandits, and, as he lies wounded and apparently dying, help is brought to him by “the Amazon,” a woman who makes a deep impression upon him. She suddenly appears, and as suddenly disappears, and he hardly knows, when he thinks of her, whether she is real or only a figure in a dream.

He forms a connection with a regular theatre, and, when acting the part of Hamlet, is so startled by the Ghost (the mystery of whose appearance is explained in the course of the story) that he produces a powerful effect by the truth of his representation. He has not, however, the capacity of becoming a great player, the reason being—as one of the characters tells him—that, no matter what part he assumes, it is always his own personality that he represents. He does not possess the faculty of giving living form to the thoughts and feelings of a type of mind different from his own. One of the actresses of the company, Aurelia, excites his sympathy by her settled melancholy, which is due to the fact that she has been deserted by Lothario, a lover, of high station, whom she is unable to forget. Before her death she intrusts a letter to Meister, asking him to place it, when all is over, in Lothario’s hands.

In fulfilment of this mission, Meister quits the stage; and by Lothario, who has many great qualities, he is introduced to a circle widely different from anything he has yet seen. He finds that there is a secret society by which, unknown to himself, he has been closely watched and in some measure guided. This society, of which Lothario is one of the leading members, has been formed for the cultivation of all that is highest and noblest in humanity; and Meister, his “Lehrjahre” over, is admitted into it with much pomp and ceremony. He learns the truth about his first love, Marianne, and at the same time hears that she is dead. He then wins the affections of a woman who appeals rather to his intellect than to his feeling; but he is afterwards brought into contact with “The Amazon,” who had passed before him so strangely and beneficently, and the tale ends with the description of the somewhat complicated circumstances which lead to their betrothal.

Meister does not convey the impression of having profited very largely by his “Lehrjahre.” About this, Goethe appears to have given himself little trouble. His object was to present a series of striking pictures of life, and this purpose he accomplished with brilliant power. The execution is, however, very unequal. The last part lacks the life, vigour, and movement of the earlier scenes, and all that relates to the secret society is strained and unnatural. In this part Goethe appears to have been misled by Schiller, who insisted that the problems suggested in the course of the narrative should be worked out and solved. The elements of the original conception were not knit together closely enough for this rigorous treatment.

In the books dealing with Meister’s connection with the drama Goethe displays to perfection his matchless power of giving charm, through sheer force of style, even to scenes and incidents that are not in themselves very impressive. The characters, too, have astonishing vitality. We are told little about them, and their motives are never elaborately analysed. They are simply made to act before us, and we thus learn to know them, each in his and her own clearly marked individuality, as if we had met them in real life. Meister himself, with his wavering impulses and vague strivings after an ideal existence, is revealed with absolute truth to nature, and, although he never wins (nor is intended to win) our full respect, we are compelled, almost in spite of ourselves, to follow him with interest from stage to stage of his career. The most important character, however, is not Meister, but Mignon, one of the strangest, most pathetic figures in the world’s literature. Transported in childhood from “the land where the citrons blossom” to the cold North, she is never at home in the scenes in which we find her. Calm, gentle, self-possessed, she conceals a burning passion that in the end consumes her life; yet she is of so ethereal a nature that she seems to glide through the world as one who in no way belongs to it. A more truly poetic conception never took form in a romance; and Mignon alone, even if “Wilhelm Meister” had contained no other element of interest, would have sufficed to make the book immortal. In relation to her the hero is seen at his best, and it is she who gives the work such unity as it possesses—a unity of spirit rather than of form. The songs sung by Mignon and by the Harper (another highly poetic figure, marked out from the beginning, like Mignon, for a tragic doom) are among Goethe’s lyrical masterpieces, remarkable equally for the depth of their meaning and the purity, sweetness, and grace of their expression. In almost startling contrast to Mignon is the gay, bright, coquettish Philline—the type of feminine Bohemianism; a character thoroughly self-consistent and full of bounding life until we hear about her in the unfortunate concluding scenes, when things are told of her that tend to make her utterly unintelligible.

In “Wilhelm Meister” Goethe gives us much dramatic criticism. It has, of course, no vital relation to the story, but it is penetrating and suggestive, and the famous criticism of “Hamlet” marked an era in the modern appreciation of Shakespeare’s methods. “The Confessions of a Fair Soul,” of which the sixth book consists, have no connection whatever with the romance except that Meister is described as reading them. Yet who would wish that this exquisite study had been excluded? The original of the “Schöne Seele” was Goethe’s friend Fräulein von Klettenberg. In presenting the history of her inward life, he penetrates to the very depths of a spirit purified, calmed, and ennobled by mystic contemplation of the invisible world.

The next great work completed during this period was “Hermann und Dorothea,” an idyllic poem in hexameters. The idea of using classic forms in the treatment of a domestic theme was suggested to Goethe by Voss’s “Luise,” an idyll in hexameters, which he had read again and again with warm interest. “Hermann und Dorothea” consists of nine cantos, each of which is headed with the name of one of the Muses. The first five cantos (originally four) were written in nine days in the autumn of 1796, when Goethe spent some weeks at Jena. The work was resumed from time to time, and finished in the following year.

Nothing could be simpler than the tale told in this poem. Hermann is the son of an innkeeper in a Rhenish town. A band of emigrants, driven from their homes by stress of war in the period of the French Revolution, happen to come to the neighbourhood in the course of their wanderings, and Hermann’s good mother sends him to them with a supply of clothing and provisions. Among them he sees Dorothea, who at once wins his heart. On his return he finds his father and mother in conversation with the pastor and the druggist; and the pastor, a man of insight, perceives at a glance, from Hermann’s heightened colour and sparkling eyes, that something has happened to excite and gladden him. He relates what has happened, and his father suspects that he loves Dorothea. The old man has always wished that his son should marry a maiden of a prosperous family, and angrily declares that he will never receive as a daughter a common peasant girl. Hermann sorrowfully leaves the room, and is soon followed by his mother, who finds him seated in deep dejection under a pear-tree which, crowning vine-clad slopes behind the inn, serves as a landmark far over the country. He opens his heart to her, and she consoles him, and gives him hope that his father’s resistance may be overcome. It is finally arranged that the pastor and the druggist shall go and see Dorothea, and form an opinion of her fitness to be Hermann’s wife, and that Hermann shall drive with them to the place where the emigrants have for the time taken up their abode. The pastor and the druggist are captivated by Dorothea, and return to the inn to communicate their impressions. Hermann remains behind to woo the maiden he loves. He is, however, deterred by seeing that she wears an engagement ring, and simply asks whether she will come with him and help his mother in her housewifely duties. She supposes that he wishes to engage her as a servant, and, on this understanding, frankly accepts his offer. Then they walk back together, and by the time they reach the pear-tree the landscape is lighted by the full moon, while heavy masses of clouds, betokening the approach of a storm, gather over the sky. They enter the house together, and after an animated scene, during which Dorothea—while thunder is heard to crash—tells her history, all is brought to a satisfactory end by the happy union of the lovers.

The substance of this story is contained in an old pamphlet describing the adventures of a group of Protestant exiles who were expelled from the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1731. The tale, however, owes its charm, not to the bare facts of which it consists, but to the life breathed into them by Goethe’s art. In old age he said that “Hermann und Dorothea” was the only one of his greater poems which he could still read with pleasure, and it is certainly as near perfection as any of his creations. The central figure is Dorothea, and we readily understand her sway over Hermann, for she combines strength with tenderness, and acts nobly, not from a sense of duty merely, but because she is impelled by the instincts of a true and generous spirit. There is a striking fitness between her vigorous, handsome form and her frank and wholesome character; and we feel that of such stuff the women are made who keep a nation’s life sound and pure. Hermann, who has not, like Dorothea, been disciplined by hard experience, is less independent, but he has qualities which, when he is fully matured, will give his character the firmness of outline possessed by that of the wife he has won. Already he has courage to be true to his own choice, and he awakens our sympathy by the depth and ardour of his love. His mother’s gentleness is finely contrasted with the rough, worldly, but not essentially unkind disposition of his father; and the wise, good pastor, and the gossiping, self-important druggist help to bring out one another’s peculiarities by the differences of their modes of thought and feeling. Goethe never pauses to call our attention to this or that element of the tale; all is stir and movement, and the imagination is excited to form for itself a series of graphic pictures and to combine them into a living whole. The story advances so simply and naturally that it carries us on with growing interest to the end, and its significance is deepened by the vast world-movement of which we are continually reminded by the presence of the emigrants. The antique form of the poem is in perfect keeping with the theme as Goethe conceives it. His hexameters flow lightly and freely, and aid rather than hamper the harmonious development of his ideas.

In 1796 Goethe wrote “Alexis und Dora,” which serves as a splendid pendant to the “Roman Elegies;” and in the summer of the following year, while he was staying at Jena, he began, in friendly rivalry with Schiller, to compose a series of ballads. Goethe generously yielded the palm as a ballad-writer to Schiller; and it is true that Schiller’s ballads, which are among the finest of his works, have a dramatic force that makes them more akin than Goethe’s to the old popular poems of this class. But such ballads as “Der Erlkönig” (“The King of the Erls or Elves”), “Die Braut von Corinth” (“The Bride of Corinth”), and “Der Gott und Die Bajadere” (“The God and the Bayadere”) have a subtle charm of expression that was far beyond Schiller’s range.