We come now to one of the great intellects of modern times, a genius who made the culture of Germany known to the rest of the world. He is cited, along with Shakespeare, as an illustration of how great art holds itself aloof from propaganda; so it will be worth our while to study him carefully, and see how he lived and voiced the aristocratic ideals of his age.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in Frankfort, his father being a wealthy lawyer. Through his eighty-three years of life he never knew a moment’s inconvenience or waste of time from poverty. He was sent to the university, but was not interested in the study of law, which his father tried to force upon him; he studied the things he cared for, and incidentally gave himself to a life of pleasure, so that he came home at the age of nineteen with a severe hemorrhage.
It was the period of “Storm and Stress” in German literature; Rousseau and his wicked “Romanticism” had crossed the Rhine, and here was all the youth of Germany revolting against writing poetry in French; they insisted upon dealing with German heroes and experiencing unrestrained German emotions. Goethe was reading Shakespeare; and, spurning the classical forms, he wrote a drama about Goetz von Berlichingen, a medieval German knight who was big and bold and turbulent. This made Goethe a hero of the new insurgency. Also he wrote a story entitled “The Sorrows of Werther,” about a young man who yearned agonizingly for the wife of his friend, and finally committed suicide. Goethe himself did not commit suicide, but lived to regret these youthful extravagances.
He fell in love more than once in these tumultuous days, his experience being exactly the opposite to that of Beethoven; it was the poet who was aristocratic and prudent, and it was the girl who suffered. Goethe had a fear of marriage, because it would interfere with his genius; but it is worth noting that the course he adopted brought him a great deal of unhappiness and waste of time.
At the age of twenty-six his destiny was decided by a meeting with the young Duke of Weimar. The duke was twenty, and conceived an intense admiration for the poet, and besought him to come and live at his court. To tempt him, and to keep him there, he gave him a beautiful home, together with some acres of land for a garden, and made him a state councilor with a salary, and before long gave him a title, enabling him to put the magic word “von” before his name. Thus Goethe became a court writer and a court man. You may call him the greatest of court writers and the most dignified of court men; nevertheless, there is a whole universe of difference between such a life, and that of an outsider and rebel like Beethoven.
The only trace of his youthful revolt which Goethe kept was in matters having to do with himself. He saved part of his time for his work, he took to traveling to get away from court functions, and in his later years, secure in his fame and power, he withdrew into his own home, and the court had to come to him. Thus he maintained the dignity of the intellectual man; but in his art ideals he became a strong conservative; and as for political and social ideals, he solved the problem by having nothing to do with them.
It would be easy to make Goethe less attractive, by mentioning that the court lady who became his mistress for the next ten years had a husband somewhere in the background. But that would not be fair, because it was the custom of the time, and nobody in court saw anything wrong with adultery. But when Goethe, somewhere around the age of forty, fell very much in love with a daughter of the people and made her his mistress, court circles were shocked; they were still more shocked, when, after she had borne him a son, he brought her to his home; they were speechless, when in the end he married her. She justified their worst expectations by turning into a drunkard; and that was hard for a very dignified and reserved man of letters.
Goethe traveled to Italy, and fell in love with the classical ideal of art, and wrote an imitation Greek play. Coming back to Weimar, he took up court duties, including the organizing of a fire brigade and going to war. The French revolution had come, and King Louis of France was a prisoner, together with his beautiful Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, who had asked why the people did not eat cake if they could not get bread. The sovereigns of Europe hastened to rescue this brilliant wit, and to overthrow the monster of revolution. Goethe’s duke went along, with Goethe in his train. The poet showed his attitude toward the whole matter by writing a musical comedy while at the training camp, and gathering botanical specimens during the fighting.
This attitude he explained by saying that he had to shut his eyes to the events of his time, because otherwise he would have been driven mad. And I admit that it was painful to see the movement for freedom run wild in the Terror, and to see it betrayed by Napoleon, and to see the French people lured into a war of conquest, so that Voltaire’s “l’Infame” was able to pose as a champion of national freedom, and thus to rivet its power upon the peoples once again. But why did these things happen? It was because men of genius and intellect had been indifferent to the misery of the French people, their degradation and enslavement. It was because when the people did rise and throw off their tyrants, there were so few voices to explain the meaning of this event, and to defend the revolution’s right to be. When Goethe went out with his duke, and lent the sanction of his name to the counter revolution, it was he who was making inevitable the Terror, it was he who was delivering the revolution to Napoleon. Bloodshed and misery overwhelmed Europe for twenty-five years; and Goethe, by withdrawing to his study and occupying himself with poetry and scientific research, encouraged the worst weakness of German philosophy and letters—the tendency to lull itself with high-sounding, abstract words, while the real life of the nation goes to the devil.
Reality broke in harshly enough upon this poet. Sixteen years after his military foray into France, the tables were turned, and Napoleon’s cannon-balls came tumbling through the beautiful gardens at Weimar. Here were French troopers, flushed with the victory of Jena, pillaging the town, robbing the poet of both his wine and his money, and threatening to kill him in his bed. Two years later came the peace negotiations, and the poet lent his presence to balls and fetes, and was summoned to an audience with the master of Europe. He was then fifty-nine years old, a world genius, and Napoleon was thirty-nine years old, a world conqueror; the older man went, and permitted himself to be inspected by the younger. Goethe had a handsome presence, and Napoleon was pleased. “You are a man!” he exclaimed. “How old are you?” he demanded; and then: “You are very well preserved”—as if this were a Grecian scholar being purchased as a slave by a Roman proconsul!