The Youth of Goethe

by P. Hume Brown

Neither in Frankfort, nor in Leipzig, nor in Strassburg had Goethe as yet met the man in whom he could recognise his intellectual peer. In the beginning of September, 1770, however, there came to Strassburg one who, for the first time, impressed him with a sense of inferiority. This was Johann Gottfried Herder, who, some five years Goethe's senior, had a career behind him widely different from that of the fortunate son of the Imperial Councillor of Frankfort. Born of poor parents, he had had to fight his way at every step to the distinction which he had already attained. He had studied under Kant at Königsberg, had been successively assistant teacher, assistant pastor, and private tutor. In this last capacity he had travelled in France, and visited Paris, where he had made the acquaintance, among others, of Diderot and D'Alembert. In Hamburg he had for several weeks been in intercourse with Lessing, whom Goethe in a moment of caprice had neglected to visit in Leipzig. Already, moreover, he had produced work in literary criticism which by its suggestiveness and originality had attracted much attention, and notably among the youth of Germany. In hard-won experience, in extent of knowledge and range of ideas, therefore, Herder, as Goethe himself speedily saw and acknowledged, was far ahead of him along those very paths where he himself was ambitious of distinction.

The association of Herder and Goethe in these Strassburg days is one of the interesting chapters in European literary history. Goethe himself bears emphatic testimony to Herder's determining influence at once on his mind and character. "The most significant event of that time, he tells us, "and one which was to have the weightiest consequences for me, was my acquaintance with Herder and the closer bond that resulted from it." Bond there was between them, but it was not the bond of genuine friendship. No two men, indeed, could be more essentially antipathetic by nature than Herder and Goethe. Their antagonism was clearly apparent during their intercourse in Strassburg, and in the end, after many years of uneasy relations, their alienation became complete. Be it said that the traits in Herder which estranged Goethe from him were equally recognised and felt by others. Naturally querulous, splenetic, and inconsiderate of others' feelings, the adverse circumstances of his early life had made him something of a Timon among his fellows.[74] His favourite author was Swift, and from this preference and from the peculiarities of his own temper he was known among his acquaintances as the "Dean." But there were sides to his nature which certainly did not exist in the "terrible" Dean. Herder was an enthusiast for his own ideas, and these ideas were of a quality and range that marked him as one of the pioneers of his time. Religion as a primary instinct in man and the principal factor in his development was Herder's lifelong and predominant interest. He identified himself with Christianity, but it was a Christianity understood by him in the most liberal sense, a Christianity free from dogma, a spirit rather than a creed. As kindred to religion, poetry in his conception was inseparable from it in the essential being of man—poetry not as expressed in conventional forms but as the breath of the human spirit, and one of the most precious gifts for the purifying and elevation of humanity. These conceptions he owed, not to Kant, to whom he had listened in Königsberg, but to a less systematic teacher, J.G. Hamann, whose eccentric character and visionary speculations had gained for him the designation of the "Magus of the North." Goethe came to be acquainted with the writings of Hamann, and had a genuine admiration of him as a seer struggling with visions to which he was unable to give adequate utterance.[75] It was in his conversations with Herder, however, that he was introduced to those deeper conceptions of man and his possibilities which implied a complete emancipation from the mechanical philosophy which he had hitherto been endeavouring to find in a mystical religion.

During the six months that Herder resided in Strassburg he was under treatment for a serious ailment of his eyes, and Goethe was assiduous in his attendance on him, often remaining with him for whole days. Their intercourse was not an unmixed pleasure for either. Herder's mordant humour and spirit of contradiction were a daily trial to Goethe's temper, and he describes his feelings of alternating attraction and repulsion as a wholly new experience in his life. Herder, who had known Diderot and D'Alembert and Lessing, appears, indeed, to have treated Goethe as an undisciplined boy, spoilt by flattery, with no serious purpose in life, inconsequent and irresponsible.[76] Nor does he seem to have been specially impressed by any promise in the youth who was so completely to eclipse him in the eyes of the world. In his letters from Strassburg he does not even mention Goethe's name; and, when he subsequently referred to him, it was in terms he might have applied to any clever and confident youth. "Goethe," he wrote, "is at bottom a good fellow, only somewhat superficial and sparrow-like,[77] faults with which I constantly taxed him." If Herder's moods frequently jarred on Goethe, it is evident that the experience was mutual. The physical and mental restlessness, which is suggested by the epithet "sparrow-like," and which was noted by others as characteristic of Goethe at this period, could not fail to irritate one like Herder, naturally grave, sobered by hard experience, and then suffering from a painful and serious ailment. Equally distasteful to Herder were Goethe's explosive outbursts in general conversation and his liking for practical jokes at the expense of his friends. To Herder as to everyone else Goethe aired his opinions with the "frank confidingness" which he notes as a trait of his own character, and which gave Herder frequent opportunities for scathing criticism. Herder gibed at his youthful tastes—at his collection of seals, at his elegantly-bound volumes which stood unread on his shelves, at his enthusiasms for Italian art, for the writings of the Cabbalists, for the poetry of Ovid.[78]

At bottom, as Herder said, Goethe was a "good fellow," slow to take offence, and as little vindictive as is possible to human nature. This easy temper doubtless stood him in good stead under the fire of Herder's sarcasms, but he himself specifies another reason for his docility which is equally characteristic: he endured all Herder's satirical spleen because he had learned to attach a high value to everything that contributed to his own culture. According to his own account, he owed a double debt to Herder—a determining influence on his character, and an equally determining influence on his intellectual development. Till he met Herder he had been treated as a youthful genius, as a "conquering lord," whose eccentricities were only a proof of his originality. Very different was the measure he received from Herder, who showed no mercy for "whatever of self-complacency, egotism, vanity, pride and presumption was latent or active" in him. Herder, he says elsewhere, "exercised such a blighting influence on me that I began to doubt my own powers." Whether or not Goethe learned from Herder the lesson of modesty regarding his own gifts, it is the truth that of all the sons of genius none has been freer than Goethe was in his maturer years from every form of vanity and self-consciousness.

It is on his intellectual debt to Herder, however, that Goethe dwells most emphatically in his account of their personal intercourse. Daily and even hourly, he says, Herder's conversation was a summons to new points of view. Poetry was the subject in which both had a common interest, and from Herder Goethe learned to regard poetry "in another sense" from that in which he had hitherto regarded it. He had hitherto regarded poetry as an accomplishment; Herder taught him that it was a gift of nature, of the essence of humanity, "the mother-speech of the human race." This expression was Hamann's, who had been inspired to utter it out of his revulsion against French literature and his study of the literature of England. From England, indeed, came those conceptions of the nature and function of poetry which, as expounded and exemplified in the writings of Hamann, Herder, Goethe, and others, were to effect a revolution in German literature. In a literary manifesto, written by an Englishman, but apparently better known in Germany than in England, German historians of their own literature have found the main impulse that gave occasion to this revolution. This manifesto was a pamphlet written by Edward Young, the author of Night Thoughts, entitled Conjectures on Original Composition, in a Letter addressed to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison. The dithyrambic style of the Letter manifestly exercised a powerful influence on the prose of Herder and Goethe—prose charged with perfervid feeling, and hitherto unknown in German literature. Young's main contention is that in literature genius must make rules for itself, and that imitation is suicidal. "Genius," he says, "can set us right in composition, without the rules of the learned; as conscience sets us right in life, without the laws of the land." He lays it down as a maxim that "the less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more." The two golden rules in composition as in ethics are: know thyself and reverence thyself. Such were the "conjectures on original composition," expounded to him by Herder which led Goethe to regard poetry in "another sense" from that in which he had hitherto understood it. And in confirmation of his views Herder directed him to the exemplars where he would find their illustration—to the Bible, to Homer and Pindar, to Shakespeare and Ossian, and, above all, to the primitive poetry of all peoples.

As we shall see, Goethe laid these counsels even too faithfully to heart; the first composition[79] in which he attempted to realise them drew upon him Herder's characteristic censure. And it is in this connection that we have to note the reserves which Goethe makes in the acknowledgment of his debt to Herder, "Had Herder been more methodical in his mental habit," he says, "he would have afforded the most valuable guidance for the permanent direction of my culture; but he was more disposed to probe and to stimulate than to give guidance and leading." So it was, as Goethe adds elsewhere, that the result of Herder's influence on him was a mental confusion and tumult, plainly visible in another of his early writings,[80] where "quite simple thoughts and observations are veiled in a dust-cloud of unusual words and phrases."

The homage which Goethe pays to Herder in the retrospect of his Strassburg days is equally emphasised in his contemporary letters. "Herder, Herder," he writes in one place, "remain to me what you are. If I am destined to be your planet I will be it; be it willingly, faithfully."[81] Yet we may doubt whether Herder's influence was, in truth, so determining a factor in his life as Goethe himself represents it. Herder, he tells us, first taught him a wise self-distrust, but we have seen that one of the lessons he professes to have learned from Oeser was "to be modest without self-depreciation, and to be proud without presumption." Before he saw Herder, also, he had already divined the greatness of Shakespeare and the futility of Voltaire's criticisms of him. Herder's ideas regarding the human spirit and its possibilities were in the air, and, had the two men never met, the probability is that Goethe's development would not have been different from what it actually was. Herder's general views were already incipient in him; and what Herder did was to deepen and intensify them.[82] Nevertheless the collision for the first time with a mind that revealed to him his own immaturity was for Goethe, as for every youth, a formative influence of the highest import and an epoch in his mental history. Yet in his association with Herder one fact has to be noted: Goethe was not subjugated by him. He frankly recognised Herder's superiority to himself in knowledge and experience, but he retained his mental independence. In his letters to Herder, as in those to Salzmann, he writes in terms of equality. In such words as the following, for example, we have not the attitude of the unquestioning disciple to his master. "Pray let us try to see each other oftener. You feel how you would embrace one who could be to you what you are to me. Don't let us be frightened like weaklings because we must often disagree: should our passions collide, can we not endure the collision?"[83] Might we not infer from this passage that not Herder but Goethe was the dominating spirit in their intercourse?[84]

Goethe found another source of inspiration in Strassburg besides Herder, and one which, as he describes it both in his Autobiography and in a contemporary effusion, moved him even more powerfully. His first act on his arrival in Strassburg, he tells us, was to visit its cathedral whose towers had caught his eye long before he reached the town. He had been taught by his old master Oeser, who only represented the general opinion of the time in Germany, that Gothic architecture was the product of a barbarous age and could be regarded only with amazed disgust by every person of educated taste. But Goethe's mystical studies and religious experiences in Frankfort had not left him what he was in his Leipzig days, and had given him an insight into movements of the human spirit which did not come within the cognizance of Oeser. It was with predisposed sympathy, therefore, that he looked for the first time on a specimen of Gothic architecture in its most august form. His first impression was of "a wholly peculiar kind"; and, without seeking to analyse the impression, "he surrendered himself to its silent working." Thenceforward, during his stay in Strassburg, the cathedral exercised a fascination upon him that evoked a new world of thought and feeling. It was his delight to ascend its tower at sunset and gaze on the rich landscape of Alsace, whose beauty made him bless the fate that had placed him for a time amid such surroundings. He studied its structure with such minute care that he correctly divined the additions to the great tower which the original architect had contemplated, but which he had been unable to carry out.

Goethe has himself indicated how the impressions he received from the cathedral influenced his first literary productions which bore the stamp of his individuality. It formed a fitting background, he says, for such poetical creations as Götz von Berlichingen and Faust. To the cathedral and its suggestions, even more than to Herder, perhaps, we should trace the inspiration that produced these works—the former of which met with Herder's questioning approval. To the full force of that inspiration Goethe gave direct expression in a composition which is the most characteristic product of his Strassburg period—a short essay, entitled Of German Architecture. Probably sketched in Strassburg, it was not published till his return to Frankfort. Its rhapsodical style, as well as the conceptions of art and nature which it embodies, directly recall Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. Like Young he proclaims that genius is a law to itself, that all imitation and subservience to rule is disastrous to imaginative production. "Principles," he declares, "are even more injurious to genius than examples." The burden of the Essay is the glorification of the genius of the architect of Strassburg cathedral, and of Gothic architecture in general, which, Goethe maintained, should be correctly designated "German" architecture, as having had its origin on German soil. With this youthful sally of Goethe, time was to deal with its unkindest irony. Later research has proved that Gothic architecture is of French and not of German origin, and Goethe himself did not remain faithful to his youthful enthusiasm. On his way home from Strassburg, he relates, the sight of some specimens of ancient art in Mannheim "shook his faith in northern architecture," and the impression he thus received was to become a permanent conviction. It was in the art of classical antiquity that he was to find the expression of his maturest ideal; when in later years his attention was temporarily turned to Gothic architecture, it was with little of his youthful enthusiasm that he admitted its claim to our regard.

"I cannot go on long without a passion," Goethe wrote in his twenty-third year, and we have no difficulty in believing him. In Strassburg he lived through a passion which was to be the occasion of his giving the first clear proof to the world that he was to be among its original poets. On the 14th of October, 1770, more than five months after his arrival in Strassburg, he wrote these words to a correspondent: "I have never so vividly experienced what it is to be content with one's heart disengaged as now here in Strassburg."[85] In the same letter in which these words occur he casually mentions that he has just spent a few days in the country with some pleasant people. These pleasant people were a pastor Brion and his family living at Sesenheim, an Alsace village some twenty miles from Strassburg. These few days spent with the Brion family were to be the beginning of a history which, as Goethe relates it in his Autobiography, has the character of an idyll, but, when stripped of the poetic haze which he has thrown around it, is not far from tragedy. He himself is our sole authority for its incidents, and he chose so to tell them that the exact truth of the whole history can never be known.[86]