[Born at Camentz, in Saxony, 1729. Died at Brunswick, 1781. Aged 52.]
A philosopher and a poet, but more of an investigator than of a creator. Nevertheless, a strong renovator. He is named by Germany of to-day with gratitude, amongst those who loosened the old chains of imitation from her literature, and summoned her to think and to write, self-conscious, from her own deep and powerful spirit. Powerlessly enough, her drama, till his time, was borrowed from that of a people, geographically divided from her by a river—intellectually, her antipodes. Lessing showed her, in place of Corneille and Racine, a foreigner, in whose kindred veins her own blood ran; and called her to Nature and to herself, in calling her to Shakspeare. Lessing was a critic in plastic art; witness his “Laocoon.” He was a fabulist of great invention, fancy, and humour: witness his “Fables,” which may take rank with those of Æsop. He was a dramatist of skill, power, and pathos: witness his “Nathan the Wise,” and his “Emilia Galotti.” Above all, he was an independent thinker; and a style clear, precise, and masterly, runs through all his writings. He is one of those now elder classics through whom the language of the country has risen into literary rank and service.
[By Ernst Rietschel. Bronze. 1849. Erected by subscription at Brunswick. For further account of this statue, see Handbook to Modern Sculpture. No. 200.]
336. Christoph Wieland. Poet.
[Born in Suabia, 1733. Died 1813. Aged 80.]
An exquisite artist in words, herein resembling though more enchanting than, Lessing, whose contemporary he was. He might seem to be a transitionist; softening the passage from the imitative French school in Germany, to the pure German. Or you may suspect that the foreign element is not French, but Italian, if modern,—or Attic, if ancient. For he was a student of classic antiquity, and a lightness of grace, and a mobile sensibility to the beautiful, which are not German, reign over his numerous writings in prose and verse. Some of his works are direct imitations from the Greek—as his Dialogues after Lucian. His elaborate philosophical romance, “Agathon,” lays the scene in old Greece. But his gift is an unrivalled ease in the flow of his narrative verse—lively or serious—made alluring by perpetual representation to the eye; and roving with predilection amidst romantic scenes and adventures. His poem of “Oberon” is a masterpiece in this kind. He seems to have prepared for it in studying Ariosto, but engrafting upon the Italian style the more picturesque of his own northern and later poetry. The qualities missed in this rich, enticing, and luxurious word-painter, are profound passion, intellectual might, and the more solemn contemplation of the universe, natural and spiritual. Wieland was a scholar: you feel the influence of his reading at every step; but the springs in his own bosom well freely.
[The original marble, by Schadow, is the property of Henry Crabbe Robinson, Esq. of London. Flaxman declared it “a perfect work, never surpassed by any artist, living or dead.” When Mr. Robinson visited Goethe at Weimar, and informed him that he possessed this bust, Goethe related the circumstances under which it had been lost to Germany, and added: “You have made me as happy as though I had recovered a lost child.” Mr. Robinson promised Goethe to bequeath the bust to the Public Library at Weimar, where Wieland had lived for many years. One cast has been allowed to be taken for the Crystal Palace; and the mould has been destroyed.]
337. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poet.
[Born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, in Germany, 1749. Died at Weimar, in Germany, 1832. Aged 83.]
For comprehensiveness and grasp of thought, for profound knowledge of human life and dealings, for intellectual prowess, for intimate acquaintance with various and opposing arts and sciences, Goethe stands alone in Europe throughout the period which he elevated by his presence and swayed by his achievements. He was a great poet, an excellent dramatist, a fine novelist, a skilled naturalist; with chemistry, botany, and anatomy he was familiar. In truth, it is not easy to limit the immense domain through which his giant mind ranged at its will, conquering and acquiring wherever it touched. His productions are voluminous, corresponding to the wealth of his overflowing brain. His “Faust” predominates far above his other works in popular impression. It is the one in which he seems the most resolutely to have committed himself to his subject. Wild, audacious, lying as this does desperately out of the Real and the Possible, he throws himself into his enterprise, doing it justice, with all his gathered might. We have a feeling persuasion of this having been his own favorite work, to which he most confided, with love, the intimacies of his genius. The recognition of Faust, as a high work of art, must, however, be restrained to the first part. In the second the poet seems as though self-bewitched. Certainly, Germany never has possessed so consummate a master, in art, of her words. His lyrics are gems of music. They have the felt charm of grace, rather than demonstrable worth. In the verse of Schiller it is the other way. Ask of his Germany what constitutes the all-extolled merit of Goethe, and you will hear for answer:—“He is the great world-sage.” But some of the elements of true wisdom he unquestionably lacked. Admit all his strength, his knowledge, his skill, his intuition, and you still miss the heart lodged by Mother Nature in the bosoms of Homer, of Shakspeare, of the compatriot and contemporary Schiller; which, warm and large, embraced with loving and devout sympathy all that is great and high in the souls of men. You desire, in many of his personages, the beating pulses of simple, natural, human affection; the exuberance of genial and generous passion;—in himself, the possessing and tyrannizing enthusiasm, proper to the vowed follower of the Muse. His judgments of the world show distinguished capacity, but his pictures are not generic representations of Man, either as reality gives him in experience to every one of us, or as poesy would select him. Goethe promulgated speculations on plants and colours that have been received into science. He made other speculations during his mighty and protracted career, which passed into the spirit of more than one generation, to influence, guide, advance, fashion, and direct it.