The Autobiography of Goethe / Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In my efforts to free myself from the pressure of the too-gloomy and powerful, which continued to rule within me, and seemed to me sometimes as strength, sometimes as weakness, I was thoroughly assisted by that open, social, stirring manner of life, which attracted me more and more, to which I accustomed myself, and which I at last learned to enjoy with perfect freedom. It is not difficult to remark in the world, that man feels himself most freely and most perfectly rid of his own failings, when he represents to himself the faults of others, and expatiates upon them with complacent censoriousness. It is a tolerably pleasant sensation even to set ourselves above our equals by disapprobation and misrepresentation, for which reason good society, whether it consists of few or many, is most delighted with it. But nothing equals the comfortable self-complacency, when we erect ourselves into judges of our superiors, and of those who are set over us,—of princes and statesmen, when we find public institutions unfit and injudicious, only consider the possible and actual obstacles, and recognise neither the greatness of the invention, nor the co-operation which is to be expected from time and circumstances in every undertaking.

Whoever remembers the condition of the French kingdom, and is accurately and circumstantially acquainted with it from later writings, will easily figure to himself how, at that time, in the Alsatian semi-France, people used to talk about the king and his ministers, about the court and court-favourites. These were new subjects for my love of instructing myself, and very welcome ones to my pertness and youthful conceit. I observed everything accurately, noted it down industriously, and I now see, from the little that is left, that such accounts, although only put together on the moment, out of fables and uncertain general rumours, always have a certain value in after-times, because they serve to confront and compare the secret made known at last with what was then already discovered and public, and the judgments of contemporaries, true or false, with the convictions of posterity.

Striking, and daily before the eyes of us street-loungers, was the project for beautifying the city; the execution of which, according to draughts and plans, began in the strangest fashion to pass from sketches and plans into reality. Intendant Gayot had undertaken to new-model the angular and uneven lanes of Strasburg, and to lay the foundations of a respectable, handsome city, regulated by line and level. Upon this, Blondel, a Parisian architect, drew a plan, by which an hundred and forty householders gained in room, eighty lost, and the rest remained in their former condition. This plan accepted, but not to be put into execution at once, now, should in course of time have been approaching completion, and, meanwhile, the city oddly enough wavered between form and formlessness. If, for instance, a crooked side of a street was to be straightened, the first man who felt disposed to build moved forward to the appointed line perhaps, too, his next neighbour; but perhaps, also, the third or fourth resident from him, by which projections the most awkward recesses were left, like front court-yards, before the houses in the background. They would not use force, yet without compulsion they would never have got on; on which account no man, when his house was once condemned, ventured to improve or replace anything that related to the street. All these strange accidental inconveniences gave to us rambling idlers the most welcome opportunity of practising our ridicule, of making proposals, in the manner of Behrisch, for accelerating the completion, and of constantly doubting the possibility of it, although many a newly-erected handsome, building should have brought us to other thoughts. How far that project was advanced by the length of time, I cannot say.

Expulsion of the Jesuits.

Another subject on which the Protestant Strasburgers liked to converse was the expulsion of the Jesuits. These fathers, as soon as the city had fallen to the share of the French, had made their appearance and sought a domicilium. But they soon extended themselves and built a magnificent college, which bordered so closely on the minster that the back of the church covered a third part of its front. It was to be a complete quadrangle, and have a garden in the middle; three sides of it were finished. It is of stone, and solid, like all the buildings of these fathers. That the Protestants were pushed hard, if not oppressed by them, lay in the plan of the society which made it a duty to restore the old religion in its whole compass. Their fall, therefore, awakened the greatest satisfaction in the opposite party, and people saw, not without pleasure, how they sold their wines, carried away their books, and the building was assigned to another, perhaps less active order. How glad are men when they get rid of an opponent, or only of a guardian; and the herd does not reflect that where there is no dog, it is exposed to wolves.

Now, since every city must have its tragedy, at which children and children's children shudder, so in Strasburg frequent mention was made of the unfortunate Prætor Klingling, who, after he had mounted the highest step of earthly felicity, ruled city and country with almost absolute power, and enjoyed all that wealth, rank, and influence could afford, had at last lost the favour of the court, and was dragged up to answer for all in which he had been indulged hitherto; nay, was even thrown into prison, where, more than seventy years old, he died an ambiguous death.

The Knight of St. Louis.

This and other tales, that knight of St. Louis, our fellow-boarder, knew how to tell with passion and animation, for which reason I was fond of accompanying him in his walks, unlike the others, who avoided such invitations, and left me alone with him. As with new acquaintances I generally suffered myself to go on for a long time without thinking much about them or the effect which they were exercising upon me, so I only remarked gradually that his stories and opinions rather unsettled and confused, than instructed and enlightened me. I never knew what to make of him, although the riddle might easily have been solved. He belonged to the many to whom life offers no results, and who therefore, from first to last, exert themselves on individual objects. Unfortunately he had, with this, a decided desire, nay, even passion for meditating, without having any capacity for thinking; and in such men a particular notion easily fixes itself fast, which may be regarded as a mental disease. To such a fixed view he always came back again, and was thus in the long-run excessively tiresome. He used bitterly to complain of the decline of his memory, especially with regard to the latest events, and maintained by a logic of his own, that all virtue springs from a good memory, and all vice, on the contrary, from forgetfulness. This doctrine he contrived to carry out with much acuteness; as, indeed, everything can be maintained when one permits oneself to use words altogether vaguely, and to employ and apply them in a sense now wider, now narrower, now closer, now more remote.

At first it was amusing to hear him; nay, his persuasiveness even astonished us. We fancied we were standing before a rhetorical sophist, who for jest and practice knew how to give a fair appearance to the strangest things. Unfortunately this first impression blunted itself but too soon; for at the end of every discourse, manage the thing as I would, the man came back again to the same theme. He was not to be held fast to older events, although they interested him,—-although he had them present to his mind with their minutest circumstances. Indeed he was often, by a small circumstance, snatched out of the middle of a wild historical narrative, and thrust into his detestable favourite thought.