Natur! du ewig keimende,
Schaffst jeden zum Genuss des Lebens,
Hast deine Kinder alle mütterlich
Mit Erbteil ausgestattet, einer Hütte.
Nature! eternal engenderer,
Thou bring'st forth thy children for the joy of living,
With care all maternal thou providest
Each with his portion, with his cottage.

In reading this poem we feel the force of the words of the younger Schlosser in which he records his impression of Goethe at the moment when both first made the acquaintance of the Darmstadt society. "I shall be accompanied (to Darmstadt)," he wrote, "by a young friend of the highest promise who, through his strenuous endeavours to purify his soul, without unnerving it, is to me worthy of special honour."[115] The purification had indeed begun, but Goethe had to pass through many fires before the purification was complete. One such fire was immediately awaiting him.

CHAPTER VII

WETZLAR AND CHARLOTTE BUFF

MAY—SEPTEMBER, 1772

During the summer and autumn of 1772 Goethe found himself in a society and surroundings which were in curious contrast to those of Darmstadt; and the next four months were to supply him with an experience which, wrought into one book of transcendent literary effect, was to make his name known, literally, to the ends of the earth,[116] and which may be regarded as the most remarkable episode in his long life. It was as "the author of Werther" that he was known to the reading world, until after his death the publication of the completed Faust gradually effaced the conception of Goethe as the master-sentimentalist of European literature.

It was mainly as a temporary escape from the tedium of Frankfort that, towards the end of May, 1772, Goethe proceeded to Wetzlar, a little town on the Lahn, a confluent of the Rhine. His settlement in Wetzlar had the semblance of a serious professional purpose, since Wetzlar was the historic legal capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the seat of the Imperial Court of Justice. If he had any such serious purpose, his experience of the place speedily dispelled it. The place itself he found distasteful; a "little, ill-built town," he calls it, though the modern visitor finds it not unattractive, with its climbing, tortuous streets, reminiscent of the Middle Age, and with its impressive cathedral, one of the most interesting specimens of mediæval architecture to be found in Germany, and still unfinished in Goethe's day. Instead of the spectacle of an august tribunal administering prompt and even justice, what he saw was a multitude of corrupt officials, deluded litigants, and endless delays of law. Wetzlar, in fact, he gives us to understand, destroyed any respect he may ever have had alike for judges and the law they professed to administer. He duly enrolled himself as a "Praktikant,"[117] but, as was the case with the majority of that class who haunted the town, his legal activity was confined to this step. "Solitary, depressed, aimless," so he described himself to his friends during his first weeks in Wetzlar.[118] Disgusted with law, he found refuge in the study of literature. In a long and rhapsodical letter to Herder he depicts the intellectual and spiritual experiences through which he was now passing. The Greeks were his one preoccupation. Homer, Xenophon, Plato, Theocritus, and Anacreon he had read in turn, but it was in Pindar he was now revelling, and from Pindar he was learning the lesson that only in laying firm hold of one's subject is the essence of all mastery. A sentence of Herder to the effect that "thought and feeling create the expression" had rejoiced his heart as expressing his own deepest experience. Herder had said of Götz that its author had been spoilt by Shakespeare, and he modestly accepted the censure. Götz, he admits, had been thought, not felt, and he would be depressed by his failure, were he not occasionally conscious that some day he would do better things.[119]

As in Strassburg, it was at a table d'hôte[120] that Goethe made the acquaintance of the youths who, like himself, were idling away their time in Wetzlar. To relieve the tedium of the place[121] they had formed a fantastic society on a feudal model, with a Grand-master, Chancellor, and all the other subordinate officials—the point of the jest being that each associate bore the name and played the part of his office and title. For frolic of all kinds Goethe was ever ready; his taste for practical joking, indeed, as we shall see, occasionally led him to play questionable pranks. Under the name of Götz von Berlichingen he became a member of the brotherhood, and, according to his own account, he contributed to the gaiety of the proceedings. Among the company, however, there were a few serious persons with tastes kindred to his own, and he specially names F.W. Gotter, Secretary of the Gotha Legation at Wetzlar, as one who, like Salzmann and Schlosser, impressed him by his character and talent. In English literature they had a common interest, and, as a poem which both admired, they each made a translation of Goldsmith's Deserted Village—Gotter, according to Goethe, being the more successful in the attempt. Gotter was thus still another of those grave counsellors whom Goethe had the good fortune to discover and attach to himself amid the distracting frivolities of every society he frequented.[122]