The Youth of Goethe

by P. Hume Brown

Goethe himself was well aware of a congenital morbid strain in him which all through his life demanded careful control if he were to avert bodily and mental collapse. And at no period of his life did external conditions and inward experiences combine to put his self-control to a severer test than during these last years in Frankfort. Frankfort itself, as we shall see, had become more distasteful to him than ever, and his abiding feeling towards it, now as subsequently, was that he could not breathe freely in its atmosphere. On his return from Strassburg his father received him with greater cordiality than on his return from Leipzig, but the lack of real sympathy between them remained, and was undoubtedly one of the permanent sources of Goethe's discontent with his native town. With no interest in his nominal profession, he had at the same time no clear conception of the function to which his genius called him. Throughout these years in Frankfort he continued uncertain whether Nature meant him for a poet or an artist, and we receive the impression that his ambition was to be artist rather than poet. From the varied literary forms in which he expressed himself, also, we are led to infer that in the domain of literature he was still only feeling his way.

If the diversity of his gifts thus distracted him, his emotional experiences, it will appear, were not more favourable to a settled aim and purpose. One paroxysm of passion succeeded another, with the result that he was eventually, in self-preservation, driven to make a complete breach with his past, and to seek deliverance in a new set of conditions under which he might attain the self-control after which he had hitherto vainly striven. This prolonged conflict with himself was doubtless primarily due to his own inherited temperament, but it was also in large measure owing to the character of the society and of the time in which the period of his youth was passed. Had he been born half a century earlier—that is to say, in a time when the current speculation was bound up with a mechanical philosophy, and when the limits of emotion were conditioned by strict conventional standards—he might have been a youth of eccentric humours, but the morbid fancies and wandering affections that consumed him could not have come within his experience. But by the time when he began to think and feel, Rousseau had written and opened the flood-gates of the emotions, and Sterne had shown how accepted conventions might appear in the light of a capricious wit and fancy which probed the surface of things. In Goethe's letters, which are the most direct revelation of his mental and moral condition during the period, the influence of Rousseau and Sterne is visible on every page, and the fact has to be remembered in drawing any conclusions as to the real state of his mind from his language to his various correspondents. The fashion of giving exaggerated expression to every emotion was, in fact, the convention of the day, and we find it in all the correspondence, both of the men and women of the time. That it was in large degree forced and artificial and must be interpreted with due reserves, will appear in the case of Goethe himself.

There are three critical epochs during these Frankfort years, each marked by a central event which resulted in new developments of Goethe's character and genius. In the period between his return to Frankfort in August, 1771, and May, 1772, was written the first draft of Götz von Berlichingen, the eventual publication of which made him the most famous author in Germany. During these months the memories of Strassburg are fresh in his mind, and the recollection of Friederike and the teaching of Herder are his chief sources of inspiration. In May, 1772, he went to Wetzlar, where, during a residence of three months, he passed through another emotional experience which, two years later, found expression in Werther, of still more resounding notoriety than Götz. The opening of 1775 saw him entangled in a new affair of the heart of another nature than those which had preceded it, and resulting in a mental turmoil that drove him to seek deliverance in a new field of life and action. There were other incidents and other experiences that moved him less or more during this period of his career, but it is in connection with these three central events that his character and his genius are presented in their fullest light, and are best known to the world.

We have it on Goethe's own testimony that, on his return from Strassburg to Frankfort, he was healthier in body and more composed in mind than on his return from Leipzig two years before. Still, he adds, he was conscious of a sense of tension in his nature which implied that his mind had not completely recovered its normal balance. So he writes in his Autobiography, and his contemporary letters fully bear out his memories of the period. He certainly returned from Strassburg with a more satisfactory record than from Leipzig. He had actually completed the necessary legal studies, and was now Licentiate of Laws. His Disputation had won the approval of his father, who was even prepared to go to the expense of publishing it. In his son's purely literary efforts during his Strassburg sojourn, also, he showed an undisguised pleasure, and he would evidently have been quite content to have seen him combine eminence in his profession with distinction in literature. When Goethe, therefore, immediately on his arrival in the paternal home, took the necessary steps to qualify himself for legal practice, it seemed that the father's ambition for his wayward son was at length about to be realised.[96] But the apparent reconciliation of their respective aims was based on no cordial understanding, and the son, it is evident, made no special effort to adapt himself to his father's idiosyncrasies. An incident he himself relates curiously illustrates his careless disregard of the conventions of the family home. On his way from Strassburg he picked up a boy-harper who had interested him, and seriously thought of making him a member of the household. The reconciling mother realised the absurdity of lodging in the mansion of an Imperial Rath a strolling musician, who would have to earn his living by daily visits to the taverns of the town, and she met her son's good-humoured whim by finding a home for the boy in more fitting quarters. These noble Bohemian humours of his son, which, as we shall see, displayed themselves in other unconventional habits, were not likely to propitiate a father who, as we are told, "leading a contented life amid his ancient hobbies and pursuits, was comfortably at ease, like one who has carried out his plans in spite of all hindrances and delays." In point of fact, as during Goethe's former sojourn at home, his estrangement from his father increased from year to year, and he came to speak of him with a bitterness which proves that, for a time at least, any kindly feeling that existed between them was effaced.

Again, as after his return from Leipzig, it was his sister Cornelia who made home in any degree tolerable for the brother whom she alone of the family was sufficiently sympathetic and sufficiently instructed fully to understand. She had gathered round her a circle of attractive and educated women, of whom she was the dominating spirit, and in whose company her brother, always appreciative of feminine society, now found a congenial atmosphere. Associated with the circle were certain men with kindred interests, among whom Goethe specially names the two brothers Schlosser as esteemed counsellors.[97] Both were accomplished men of the world, the one a jurist, the other engaged in the public service; and both were keenly interested in literature. It was a peculiarity of Goethe, even into advanced life, that he seems always to have required a mentor, whose counsels, however, he might or might not choose to follow. At this time it was the elder of these two brothers who played this part, and Goethe testifies that he received from him the sagest of advice, which, however, he was prevented from following by "a thousand varying distractions, moods, and passions."

What these distractions were is vividly revealed in his correspondence of the time. First, his whole being was in disaccord with the social, religious, and intellectual atmosphere of Frankfort; he felt himself cribbed, cabined, and confined in all the aspirations of his nature; and the future seemed to offer no prospect of more favouring conditions. Two months after his return he communicates to his friend Salzmann in Strassburg his sense of oppression in his present surroundings. Arduous intellectual effort is necessary to him, he writes, "for it is dreary to live in a place where one's whole activity must simmer within itself.... For the rest, everything around me is dead.... Frankfort remains the nest it was—nidus, if you will. Good enough for hatching birds; to use another figure, spelunca, a wretched hole. God help us out of this misery. Amen."[98]

In himself, also, there was a turmoil of thoughts and emotions which, apart from depressing surroundings, was sufficient to occasion alternating moods of exaltation and despair. The upbraiding memory of Friederike pursued him, and we may take it that in his Autobiography he faithfully records his continued self-reproach for his abrupt desertion of her. "Friederike's reply to a written adieu lacerated my heart. It was the same hand, the same mind, the same feeling that had been educed in her to me and through me. For the first time I now realised the loss she suffered, and saw no way of redressing or even of alleviating it. Her whole being was before me; I continually felt the want of her; and, which is worse, I could not forgive myself my own unhappiness." We may ascribe it either to delicacy of feeling or to the consideration that their further intercourse was undesirable, that he ceased to communicate directly with her. A drawing by his own hand, which he thought would give her pleasure, he sends to her through Salzmann, who is requested to accompany it with or without a note, as he thinks best. Through the same hands he sends to her a play (Götz von Berlichingen), in which a lover plays a sorry part, and adds the comment that "Friederike will find herself to some extent consoled if the faithless one is poisoned."

But the profoundest source of his unrest was neither the distastefulness of Frankfort society nor his remorse for his conduct to Friederike. It was his concern with his own life and what he was to make of it. It is this concern that gives interest to his letters of the period which otherwise possess little intrinsic value, either in substance or form. What we find in them, and what is hardly to be found elsewhere, is a mirror of one of the world's greatest spirits in the process of attaining self-knowledge and self-mastery in the direction of powers which are not yet fully revealed to him. At times, it appears to him as if the task were hopeless of establishing any harmony between his own nature and the nature of things. Now he is filled with an exhilarating confidence in his own gifts and in his destiny to bring them to full fruition; now he seems to be paralysed with a sense of impotence in which we see all the perils attending his peculiar temperament. In his letters to his Strassburg friend Salzmann we have the frankest communications regarding his alternating moods of depression and hopefulness. "What I am doing," he writes immediately after his settlement in Frankfort, "is of no account. So much the worse. As usual, more planned than done, and for that very reason nothing much will come of me."[99] To a different purport are his words in a later note (November 28th) to the same correspondent: "In searching for your letter of October 5th, I came upon a multitude of others requiring answers. Dear man, my friends must pardon me, my nisus forwards is so strong that I can seldom force myself to take breath, and cast a look backwards."[100] In the opening of the year, 1772 (February 3rd), he is in the same sanguine temper: "Prospects daily widen out before me, and obstacles give way, so that I may confidently lay the blame on my own feet if I do not move on."[101]

The "nisus forwards," of which he speaks, had no connection with the worldly ambition for success in his profession. What was consuming him was the double desire of mastering himself and at the same time of giving expression to the seething ideas and emotions which rendered that self-mastery so hard of attainment. From the moment of his return to Frankfort we see all the seeds fructifying which had taken root in him during his residence in Strassburg. He sends to Herder the ballads he had collected in Alsace, and sends him, also, translations from what he considered the original of the adored Ossian. But the overmastering influence in him at this time was the genius of Shakespeare, as it had been interpreted for him by Herder. Goethe's unbounded admiration for Shakespeare had already found expression in the rhapsody composed in Strassburg to which reference has been made, and to the circle of men and women who had gathered round his sister, he communicated his enthusiasm. Their enthusiasm took a form perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the time. Shakespeare's birthday occurred on October 14th,[102] and it was resolved that, at once as a tribute to their divinity and a challenge to all his gainsayers, the auspicious day should be celebrated with due rites. At Cornelia's instance, Herder, as high-priest of the object of their worship, was invited to honour the occasion. If he could not be present in body, he was at least to be present in spirit, and he was to send his essay on Shakespeare that it might form part of the day's liturgy. So under the roof of the precise Imperial Rath, to whom Klopstock's use of unrhymed verse in his Messias was an unpardonable innovation in German literature, the memory of the "drunken barbarian," as with Voltaire he must have regarded him, was celebrated—whether in his presence or not, his son does not record.[103]

But Goethe was about to pay more serious homage to the Master, as he then understood him. On November 28th, he informed Salzmann that he was engaged on a work which was absorbing him to the forgetfulness of Homer, Shakespeare, and everything else. He was dramatising the history of "one of the noblest of Germans," rescuing from oblivion the memory of "an honest man." The "noblest of Germans" was Gottfried von Berlichingen (1482-1562), one of those "knights of the cows," whose predatory propensities were the terror of Germany throughout the Middle Ages, and who appears to have been neither better nor worse than the rest of his class. While still in Strassburg, Goethe had noted Gottfried as an appropriate subject for dramatic treatment, but, as he records in his Autobiography, it was immediately after his return to Frankfort that he first put his hand to the work. Stimulated to his task by his sister Cornelia, in the course of six weeks he had completed the play which, on its publication two years later, was to make him the most famous author in Germany.