As a student, first at Leipsic, then at Strasburg, including the years from 1766 to 1771, he seems not to have been a very diligent attendant on the lectures in either university, and to have profited little by professional instruction. In compliance with the wishes of his father, who intended him for a jurist, he gave some time to the study of the law; but on the whole the principal gain of those years was derived from intercourse with distinguished intellectual men and women, whose acquaintance he cultivated, and the large opportunities of social life.
In Strasburg occurred the famous love-passage with Friederike Brion, which terminated so unhappily at the time, and so fortunately in the end, for both.
Goethe has been blamed for not marrying Friederike. His real blame consists in the heedlessness with which, in the beginning of their acquaintance, he surrendered himself to the charm of her presence, thereby engaging her affection without a thought of the consequences to either. Besides the disillusion, which showed him, when he came fairly to face the question, that he did not love her sufficiently to justify marriage, there were circumstances--material, economical--which made it practically impossible. Her suffering in the separation, great as it was,--so great indeed as to cause a dangerous attack of bodily disease,--could not outweigh the pangs which he endured in his penitent contemplation of the consequences of his folly.
The next five years were spent partly in Frankfort and partly in Wetzlar, partly in the forced exercise of his profession, but chiefly in literary labors and the use of the pencil, which for a time disputed with the pen the devotion of the poet-artist. They may be regarded as perhaps the most fruitful, certainly the most growing, years of his life. They gave birth to "Götz von Berlichingen" and the "Sorrows of Werther," to the first inception of "Faust," and to many of his sweetest lyrics. It was during this period that he made the acquaintance of Charlotte Buff, the heroine of the "Sorrows of Werther," from whom he finally tore himself away, leaving Wetzlar when he discovered that their growing interest in each other was endangering her relation with Kestner, her betrothed. In those years, also, he formed a matrimonial engagement with Elizabeth Schönemann (Lili), the rupture of which, I must think, was a real misfortune for the poet. It came about by no fault of his. Her family had from the first opposed themselves to the match on the ground of social disparity. For even in mercantile Frankfort rank was strongly marked; and the Goethes, though respectable people, were beneath the Schönemanns in the social scale. Goethe's genius went for nothing with Madame Schönemann; she wanted for her daughter an aristocratic husband, not a literary one,--one who had wealth in possession, and not merely, as Goethe had, in prospect. How far Lili was influenced by her mother's and brother's representations it is impossible to say; however, she showed herself capricious, was sometimes cold, or seemed so to him, while favoring the advances of others. Goethe was convinced that she did not entertain for him that devoted love without which he felt that their union could not be a happy one. They separated; but on her death-bed she confessed to a friend that all she was, intellectually and morally, she owed to him.
In 1775 our poet was invited by the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August,--whose acquaintance he had made at Frankfort and at Mentz, his junior by two or three years,--to establish himself in civil service at the Grand-Ducal Court. The father, who had other views for his son, and was not much inclined to trust in princes, objected; many wondered, some blamed. Goethe himself appears to have wavered with painful indecision, and at last to have followed a mysterious impulse rather than a clear conviction or deliberate choice. His Heidelberg friend and hostess sought still to detain him, when the last express from Weimar drove up to the door. To her he replied in the words of his own Egmont:--
"Say no more! Goaded by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time run away with the light chariot of our destiny; there is nothing for it but to keep our courage, hold tight the reins, and guide the wheels now right, now left, avoiding a stone here, a fall there. Whither away? Who knows? Scarcely one remembers whence he came."
It does not appear that he ever repented this most decisive step of his life-journey, nor does there appear to have been any reason why he should. A position, an office of some kind, he needs must have. Even now, the life of a writer by profession, with no function but that of literary composition, is seldom a prosperous one; in Goethe's day, when literature was far less remunerative than it is in ours, it was seldom practicable. Unless he had chosen to be maintained by his father, some employment besides that of book-making was an imperative necessity. The alternative of that which was offered--the one his father would have chosen--was that of a plodding jurist in a country where forensic pleading was unknown, and where the lawyer's profession offered no scope for any of the higher talents with which Goethe was endowed. On the whole, it was a happy chance that called him to the little capital of the little Grand-Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. If the State was one of petty dimensions (a kind of pocket-kingdom, like so many of the principalities of Germany), it nevertheless included some of the fairest localities, and one at least of the most memorable in Europe,--the Wartburg, where Luther translated the Bible, where Saint Elizabeth dispensed the blessings of her life, where the Minnesingers are said to have held their poetic tournament,--
"Heinrich von Ofterdingen,
Wolfram von Eschenbach."
It included also the University of Jena, which at that time numbered some of the foremost men of Germany among its professors. It was a miniature State and a miniature town; one wonders that Goethe, who would have shone the foremost star in Berlin or Vienna, could content himself with so narrow a field. But Vienna and Berlin did not call him until it was too late,--until patronage was needless; and Weimar did. A miniature State,--but so much the greater his power and freedom and the opportunity of beneficent action.