Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe

by James Sime

Weimar had now become a place of pilgrimage for young poets, who looked to Goethe as the supreme master of their craft. Among those who came to him was the poet who was destined to take, after Goethe’s death, the first place in the imaginative literature of Germany—Heinrich Heine. Heine visited Weimar when he was twenty-five years of age, and had already taken rank among the most powerful writers of his day. Long afterwards, in “Ueber Deutschland,” he said that in talking with Goethe he involuntarily looked at his side for the eagle of Zeus. “I was nearly,” he says, “addressing him in Greek.” Many a time, when he had thought of visiting Goethe, he had reflected on all sorts of sublime things he would like to say. When he found himself actually in the great man’s presence, he remarked that the plums by the wayside between Jena and Weimar were uncommonly good! So, at least, we are assured by Heine, whose reminiscences were seldom intended to be taken quite seriously. Goethe appreciated Heine’s rare gifts, but said to Eckermann that with all his brilliance one thing was wanting to him—love. He predicted, however, that Heine would be greatly feared.

From abroad, as well as from all parts of Germany, testimonies of admiration were from time to time sent to Goethe. On his last birthday he received from fifteen (or perhaps nineteen) Englishmen, among whom were Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and Carlyle, a seal bearing the motto from one of his poems, “Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast” (“Without haste, but without rest”). The suggestion that this tribute of respect and gratitude should be offered to Goethe had been made by Carlyle, with whose translation of “Wilhelm Meister” he had been greatly delighted. Goethe, although he never saw Carlyle, recognized his genius, and foretold his future greatness.

During his last years Goethe took little interest in the public affairs of Europe. Least of all did he interest himself in the proceedings of Liberal politicians. On the day when the tidings of the French Revolution of 1830 reached Weimar, his friend Soret went to see him. When Soret entered his room Goethe was in a state of intense excitement, and began to talk of the mighty volcanic eruption at Paris. Soret replied that nothing else was to be expected from such a Ministry. Goethe looked at him in astonishment. What had the Ministry to do with the matter? He had not been speaking of “those people,” but of the contest in the French Academy between Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire!—a contest in which St. Hilaire had supported Goethe’s ideas as to the true way of conceiving organic Nature.

The essential aim of the Liberal party all over Europe in those days was to secure a political system in which the functions of the Government should be restricted within the narrowest possible limits. Every interest of life was to be submitted to the operation of the principle of free competition. Goethe could have no sympathy with a movement of which this was the ultimate object, for it was one of his deepest convictions that strong government is an enduring necessity of society, and that the path of free competition is a path that leads to ruin. And have events proved that in this opinion he was utterly mistaken? So far as industry and trade are concerned, the Western world has had ample experience of free competition, and can we take much pride in such of its results as are seen in the foul and pestilent dens in which, in every great city, multitudes of men, women, and children are compelled to lead degraded and unhappy lives? Goethe did not mean by strong government a system which should crush thought and true individuality. On the contrary, to him thought and true individuality seemed the vital conditions of human progress. But he wished, too, that the weak should be protected against the tyranny of the strong; that the State should be the supreme organ of practical reason for the establishment and maintenance of wholesome relations between man and man, and for the execution of measures designed to promote the free development, not of this class or of that only, but of the community as a whole.

Many Liberal politicians were never tired of talking of Goethe as one who cared nothing for the practical interests of the world. They mistook indifference to their party for indifference to humanity. The truth is, he was in one sense far ahead of those who virulently assailed him as a reactionary. As we know from many passages in “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,” he saw that the real problems of the future were not merely political but social; that communities could never hope to solve these problems by simply giving free scope to the forces contending for mastery; and that for the new conditions of the world new forms of co-operative industrial organization would become inevitable. He devoted much earnest attention to the principles expounded during this period by St. Simon, and his ideas about social progress have a close affinity to some of those with which the English-speaking world has been made familiar by the most illustrious of its modern spiritual teachers, Carlyle and Ruskin.

Even in old age Goethe never paused in his labours as a man of letters. One of the works now issued by him was “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre” (“Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel”). It was published in its earliest form in 1821, but afterwards it was recast, the work as we now have it being finished in 1829. This book has little real connection with the “Lehrjahre,” and ought not to be read as a complete work of art, for Goethe hardly even attempts to give unity to the various elements of which it is made up. Much of it is rather tiresome, but it also contains tales and passages as remarkable for nobility of style as for depth of thought. Especially valuable are those parts of the book in which he develops his mature convictions with regard to education, and the conditions of the high and enduring welfare of industrial societies. Here he anticipates much of what is most deeply characteristic of the thought of our own day.

In all directions Goethe continued to exercise his widely varied powers. He edited a periodical called for some time “Kunst und Alterthum in den Rhein und Maingegenden” (“Art and Antiquity in the districts of the Rhine and the Main”). Afterwards he called it simply “Kunst und Alterthum,” and included in it, besides papers on art and archæology, some of his poems and essays in literary criticism. He also published, between 1817 and 1824, a scientific periodical, in which he printed his treatise on the intermaxillary bone, and communicated his discovery as to the constitution of the bones of the skull. This discovery had in the interval been independently made by Oken, but to Goethe the question of priority appeared to be one of absolutely no importance.

During this time, too, he went on writing lyrical and other poems, as he had done during all the earlier periods of his career; and he devoted great attention to the preparation of a complete edition of his works, the first volume of which was published in 1827. He also found time to write or dictate an extraordinary number of letters. Goethe had always been a model correspondent, and the various collections of his letters are of inestimable value for the light they throw upon his character. He himself issued, in 1828-29, his correspondence with Schiller; and he prepared for publication his correspondence with Zelter, the genial and eccentric Berlin musical composer, to whom he was warmly attached. We now possess a vast series of Goethe’s letters, some dating from early youth, others written immediately before his death. They reflect accurately many different moods, corresponding to the different stages of his development; but in the letters of all the periods of his life the mind which unconsciously discloses itself is one dominated by a passion for truth, by a lofty sense of honour, and by manly, humane, and generous impulses.

The most important work of his old age is the Second Part of “Faust.” Some portions of it had been written even before the appearance of the First Part; but the work belongs in the main to his latest period. He finished it before his last birthday, and told Eckermann that, this task being done, he would regard the rest of his life as “a pure gift.”

“Faust,” therefore, had accompanied him during the entire course of his literary career. In it he had represented all the various phases of evolution through which his thought and character had passed.