Autobiography: Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Frederick the Second still stood at the head of all the distinguished men of the century in my thoughts; and it must therefore have appeared very surprising to me, that I could praise him as little before the inhabitants of Leipzig as formerly in my grandfather's house. They had felt the hand of war heavily, it is true; and therefore they were not to blame for not thinking the best of him who had begun and continued it. They, therefore, were willing to let him pass as a distinguished, but by no means as a great, man. "There was no art," they said, "in performing something with great means; and, if one spares neither lands nor money nor blood, one may well accomplish one's purpose at last. Frederick had shown himself great in none of his plans, and in nothing that he had, properly speaking, undertaken. So long as it depended on himself, he had only gone on making blunders, and what was extraordinary in him had only come to light when he was compelled to make these blunders good again. It was purely from this that he had obtained his great reputation; since every man wishes for himself that same talent of making good, in a clever way, the blunders which he frequently commits. If one goes through the Seven Years' War, step by step, it will be found that the king quite uselessly sacrificed his fine army, and that it was his own fault that this ruinous feud had been protracted to so great a length. A truly great man and general would have got the better of his enemies much sooner." In support of these opinions they could cite infinite details, which I did not know how to deny; and I felt the unbounded reverence which I had devoted to this remarkable prince, from my youth upwards, gradually cooling away.

As the inhabitants of Leipzig had now destroyed for me the pleasant feeling of revering a great man; so did a new friend, whom I gained at the time, very much diminish the respect which I entertained for my present fellow-citizens. This friend was one of the strangest fellows in the world. He was named Behrisch, and was tutor to the young Count Lindenau. Even his exterior was singular enough. Lean and well-built, far advanced in the thirties, a very large nose, and altogether marked features: he wore from morning till night a scratch which might well have been called a peruke, but dressed himself very neatly, and never went out but with his sword by his side, and his hat under his arm. He was one of those men who have quite a peculiar gift of killing time, or, rather, who know how to make something out of nothing, in order to pass time away. Every thing he did had to be done with slowness, and with a certain deportment which might have been called affected if Behrisch had not even by nature had something affected in his manner. He resembled an old Frenchman, and also spoke and wrote French very well and easily. His greatest delight was to busy himself seriously about drolleries, and to follow up without end any silly notion. Thus he was constantly dressed in gray; and as the different parts of his attire were of different material, and also of different shades, he could reflect for whole days as to how he should procure one gray more for his body, and was happy when he had succeeded in this, and could put to shame us who had doubted it, or had pronounced it impossible. He then gave us long, severe lectures about our lack of inventive power, and our want of faith in his talents.

For the rest, he had studied well, was particularly versed in the modern languages and their literature, and wrote an excellent hand. He was very well disposed towards me; and I, having been always accustomed and inclined to the society of older persons, soon attached myself to him. My intercourse served him, too, for a special amusement; since he took pleasure in taming my restlessness and impatience, with which, on the other hand, I gave him enough to do. In the art of poetry he had what is called taste,—a certain general opinion about the good and bad, the mediocre and tolerable: but his judgment was rather censorious; and he destroyed even the little faith in contemporary writers which I cherished within me, by unfeeling remarks, which he knew how to advance with wit and humor, about the writings and poems of this man and that. He received my productions with indulgence, and let me have my own way, but only on the condition that I should have nothing printed. He promised me, on the other hand, that he himself would copy those pieces which he thought good, and would present me with them in a handsome volume. This undertaking now afforded an opportunity for the greatest possible waste of time. For before he could find the right paper, before he could make up his mind as to the size, before he had settled the breadth of the margin and the form of handwriting, before the crow- quills were provided and cut into pens, and Indian ink was rubbed, whole weeks passed, without the least bit having been done. With just as much ado he always set about his writing, and really, by degrees, put together a most charming manuscript. The title of the poems was in German text; the verses themselves in a perpendicular Saxon hand; and at the end of every poem was an analogous vignette, which he had either selected somewhere or other, or had invented himself, and in which he contrived to imitate very neatly the hatching of the wood-cuts and tail- pieces which are used for such purposes. To show me these things as he went on, to celebrate beforehand in a comico-pathetical manner my good fortune in seeing myself immortalized in such exquisite handwriting, and that in a style which no printing-press could attain, gave another occasion for passing the most agreeable hours. In the mean time, his intercourse was always secretly instructive, by reason of his liberal acquirements, and, as he knew how to subdue my restless, impetuous disposition, was also quite wholesome for me in a moral sense. He had, too, quite a peculiar abhorrence of roughness; and his jests were always quaint without ever falling into the coarse or the trivial. He indulged himself in a distorted aversion from his countrymen, and described with ludicrous touches even what they were able to undertake. He was particularly inexhaustible in a comical representation of individual persons, as he found something to find fault with in the exterior of every one. Thus, when we lay together at the window, he could occupy himself for hours criticising the passers-by, and, when he had censured them long enough, in showing exactly and circumstantially how they ought to have dressed themselves, ought to have walked, and ought to have behaved, to look like orderly people. Such attempts, for the most part, ended in something improper and absurd; so that we did not so much laugh at how the man looked, but at how, perchance, he might have looked had he been mad enough to caricature himself. In all such matters. Behrisch went quite unmercifully to work, without being in the slightest degree malicious. On the other hand, we knew how to tease him, on our side, by assuring him, that, to judge from his exterior, he must be taken, if not for a French dancing-master, at least for the academical teacher of the language. This reproval was usually the signal for dissertations an hour long, in which he used to set forth the difference, wide as the heavens, which there was between him and an old Frenchman. At the same time he commonly imputed to us all sorts of awkward attempts, that we might possibly have made for the alteration and modification of his wardrobe.

My poetical compositions, which I only carried on the more zealously as the transcript went on becoming more beautiful and more careful, now inclined altogether to the natural and the true: and if the subjects could not always be important, I nevertheless always endeavored to express them clearly and pointedly, the more so as my friend often gave me to understand what a great thing it was to write down a verse on Dutch paper, with the crow-quill and Indian ink; what time, talent, and exertion it required, which ought not to be squandered on any thing empty and superfluous. He would, at the same time, open a finished parcel, and circumstantially to explain what ought not to stand in this or that place, or congratulate us that it actually did not stand there. He then spoke with great contempt of the art of printing, mimicked the compositor, ridiculed his gestures and his hurried picking out of letters here and there, and derived from this manoeuvre all the calamities of literature. On the other hand, he extolled the grace and noble posture of a writer, and immediately sat down himself to exhibit it to us; while he rated us at the same time for not demeaning ourselves at the writing-table precisely after his example and model. He now reverted to the contrast with the compositor, turned a begun letter upside down, and showed how unseemly it would be to write any thing from the bottom to the top, or from the right to the left, with other things of like kind with which whole volumes might have been filled.

With such harmless fooleries we squandered our precious time; while it could have occurred to none of us, that any thing would chance to proceed out of our circle which would awaken a general sensation and bring us into not the best repute.

Gellert may have taken little pleasure in his "Practicum;" and if, perhaps, he took pleasure in giving some directions as to prose and poetical style, he did it most privately only to a few, among whom we could not number ourselves. Professor Clodius thought to fill the gap which thus arose in the public instruction. He had gained some renown in literature, criticism, and poetry, and, as a young, lively, obliging man, found many friends, both in the university and in the city. Gellert himself referred us to the lectures now commenced by him; and, as far as the principal matter was concerned, we remarked little difference. He, too, only criticised details, corrected likewise with red ink; and one found one's self in company with mere blunders, without a prospect as to where the right was to be sought. I had brought to him some of my little labors, which he did not treat harshly. But just at this time they wrote to me from home, that I must without fail furnish a poem for my uncle's wedding. I felt far removed from that light and frivolous period in which a similar thing would have given me pleasure; and, since I could get nothing out of the actual circumstance itself, I determined to trick out my work in the best manner with extraneous ornament. I therefore convened all Olympus to consult about the marriage of a Frankfort lawyer, and seriously enough, to be sure, as well became the festival of such an honorable man. Venus and Themis had quarrelled for his sake; but a roguish prank, which Amor played the latter, gained the suit for the former: and the gods decided in favor of the marriage.

My work by no means displeased me. I received from home a handsome letter in its praise, took the trouble to have another fair copy, and hoped to extort some applause from my professor also. But here I had missed my aim. He took the matter severely; and as he did not notice the tone of parody, which nevertheless lay in the notion, he declared the great expenditure of divine means for such an insignificant human end in the highest degree reprehensible; inveighed against the use and abuse of such mythological figures, as a false habit originating in pedantic times; found the expression now too high, now too low; and, in divers particulars, had indeed not spared the red ink, though he asserted that he had yet done too little.

Such pieces were read out and criticised anonymously, it is true; but we used to watch each other, and it remained no secret that this unfortunate assembly of the gods was my work: yet since his critique, when I took his point of view, seemed to be perfectly just, and those divinities more nearly inspected were in fact only hollow shadow-forms, I cursed all Olympus, flung the whole mythic Pantheon away; and from that time Amor and Luna have been the only divinities which at all appear in my little poems.

Among the persons whom Behrisch had chosen as the butts of his wit, Clodius stood just at the head; nor was it hard to find a comical side in him. Being of small stature, rather stout and thick-set, he was violent in his motions, somewhat impetuous in his utterances, and restless in his demeanor. In all this he differed from his fellow- citizens, who, nevertheless, willingly put up with him on account of his good qualities, and the fine promise which he gave.

He was usually commissioned with the poems which had become necessary on festive occasions. In the so-called "Ode," he followed the manner employed by Ramler, whom, however, it alone suited. But Clodius, as an imitator, had especially marked the foreign words by means of which the poems of Ramler come forth with a majestic pomp, which, because it is conformable to the greatness of his subject and the rest of his poetic treatment, produces a very good effect on the ear, feelings, and imagination. In Clodius, on the contrary, these expressions had a heterogeneous air; since his poetry was in other respects not calculated to elevate the mind in any manner.