His mechanical official duties as the chief of the chancery robbed him, it is true, of time, though they could not deprive him of joy and courage; and that his spirit might not be dwarfed amid such narrow surroundings, he fortunately became acquainted with Count Stadion, whose estates lay in the vicinity, and who was a minister of the Prince Elector of Mainz. In this illustrious and well-appointed house the atmosphere of the world and of the court was for the first time wafted to him; he became no stranger to domestic and foreign affairs of state; and in the count he gained a patron for all his life. In consequence, he did not remain unknown to the Prince Elector of Mainz, and since the University of Erfurt was to be revived under Emmerich Joseph, our friend was summoned thither, thus exemplifying the tolerant sentiments which, from the beginning of the century, have spread among men who are akin through the Christian faith, and have even permeated humanity as a whole.
He could not labor long at Erfurt without becoming known to the Duchess Regent of Weimar, at whose court Count von Dalberg, so active in every form of good work, did not fail to introduce him. An adequate education of her princely sons was the chief object of a tender mother, herself highly cultured, and thus he was called thither to employ his literary talents and his moral endowments for the best interests of the princely house, for our weal, and for the weal of all.
The retirement promised him after the completion of his educational duties was given him at once, and since he received a more than promised alleviation of his domestic circumstances, he led, for nearly forty years, a life of complete conformity to his disposition and to his wishes.
The influence of Wieland on the public was uninterrupted and permanent. He educated his generation up to himself, giving to the taste and to the judgment of his contemporaries a decided trend, so that his merits have already been sufficiently recognized, appraised, and even portrayed. In many a work on German literature he is discussed as honorably as judiciously; I need only recall the laudations which Küttner, Eschenburg, Manso, and Eichhorn have bestowed upon him.
And whence came the profound influence which he exercised on the Germans? It was a result of the excellence and of the openness of his nature. In him man and author had completely interpenetrated; he wrote poetry as a living soul, and lived the poet's life. In verse and prose he never hid what was at the instant in his mind and what each time he felt, so that judging he wrote and writing he judged. From the fertility of his mind sprang the fertility of his pen.
I do not employ the term "pen" as a rhetorical phrase; here it is valid in the strictest sense, and if a pious reverence pays homage to many an author by seeking to gain possession of the quill with which he formed his works, the quill of which Wieland availed himself, would surely be worthy of this distinction above many another. For the fact that he wrote everything with his own hand and most beautifully, and, at the same time, with freedom and with thoughtfulness; that he ever had before him what he had written, carefully examining, changing, improving, indefatigably fashioning and refashioning, never weary even of repeatedly transcribing voluminous works—this gave to his productions the delicacy, the gracefulness, the clearness, the natural elegance which can be bestowed on a work already completed, not by effort, but by unruffled, inspired attention.
This careful preparation of his writings had its origin in a happy conviction which apparently came to him toward the end of his residence in Switzerland, when impatience at production had in some measure subsided, and when the desire to present a perfected result to the public had become more decidedly and more obviously active.
Since, then, in him the man and the poet were a single individuality, we shall also portray the latter when we speak of the former. Irritability and versatility, the accompaniments of poetical and of rhetorical talents, dominated him to a high degree, but an acquired rather than an innate moderation kept them in equilibrium. Our friend was capable of enthusiasm in highest measure, and in youth he surrendered himself wholly to it, the more actively and assiduously since, in his case, for several years that happy period was prolonged when within himself the youth feels the worth and the dignity of the most excellent, be it attainable or not.
In that pure and happy field of the golden age, in that paradise of innocence, he dwelt longer than others. The house where he was born, in which a cultivated clergyman ruled as father; the ancient, linden-embowered monastery of Bergen on the Elbe, where a pious teacher kept up his patriarchal activity; Tübingen, still monastic in its essential form; those simple Swiss dwellings about which the brooks murmured, which the lakes laved, and which the cliffs surrounded—everywhere he found another Delphi, everywhere the groves in which as a mature and cultivated youth he continued to revel even yet. There he was powerfully attracted by the monuments of the manly innocence of the Greeks which have been left us. Cyrus, Araspes, Panthea, and forms of equal loftiness revived in him; he felt the spirit of Plato weaving within him; he felt that he needed that spirit to reproduce those pictures for himself and for others—so much the more since he desired not so keenly to evoke poetic phantoms as, rather, to create a moral influence for actual beings.
Yet the very fact that he had the good fortune to dwell so protractedly in these loftier realms, and that he could long regard as the most perfect verity all that he thought, felt, imagined, dreamed, and fancied—this very fact embittered for him the fruit which he was obliged at last to pluck from the tree of knowledge.