John Wolfgang Goethe was born at Frankfort on the Maine in 1749, ten years before Schiller. "Selectest influences" leagued with nature to produce this wonderful man. To give its complete development to a mighty inward power, outward circumstances were most happily propitious. Upon faculties of the quickest sensibility, and yet of infinitely elastic power, wide convulsions and world-disturbing incidents bore with tempestuous force, dilating the congenial energies of the young genius, who suddenly threw out his fiery voice to swell the tumult round him, and announce the master spirit of the age. For a while, the thrilling melody of that voice mingled in concert with the deep tones of the passionate period whence it drew so much of its power. Soon, however, was it heard, uttering with calmer inspiration the words of wisdom, drawn from a source deeper than passion—passion subdued by the will, and tempered by culture. "It is not the ocean ruffled," says Jean Paul, "that can mirror the heavens, but the ocean becalmed."
Goethe's father was a prosperous honored citizen of Frankfort, improved by travel and study—a man of sound heart and sharp temper; his mother, a woman of superior mind and of genial character, to whom in her old age Madam de Stael paid a visit of homage, and who enjoyed the pleasure of introducing herself to her distinguished visiter with the words,—"I am the mother of Goethe." Under the guidance of such parents was Goethe's boyhood passed in the old free city of Frankfort, ever a place of various activity, where he witnessed when a child the coronation of an emperor of Germany, and the stir of a battle, fought in the neighborhood between Frederick the Great and the French—events of rare interest to any boy, and of deep import to one in whose unfolding a great poet was to become manifest. In due season he was sent to the university of Leipsic, famous then by the lectures of Gottsched, Gellert, Ernesti, and others. To the young Frankfort student the admired discourses of these sages of the time were but lessons in skepticism; their magisterial dicta and hollow dogmas being quickly dissolved in the fire of a mind, already in its youth competent to self-defence against error, though with vision too untried yet to pierce to the truth. From Leipsic he went to Strasburg, to complete his studies in the law, his father having destined him for a lawyer. A more imperious parent, however, had laid other commands on him, and while the words of law-professors were falling upon his outward ear, the inward mind was revolving the deeds of Goetz von Berlichingen, and shaping the vast fragments of which in after years was built the wondrous world of Faust.
In his twenty-third year appeared Goetz von Berlichingen, the firstling of a pen, which, in the following sixty years, filled as many volumes with works of almost every form wherein literature embodies itself, a series of boundless wealth and unequalled excellence, to gain access to which, a year were well spent in daily labor to master the fine language it enriches. Two years later, appeared Werter, an agonizing picture of passion, which, like the first crude outburst of Schiller's genius, shot a thrill through the then agitated mind of Germany, and which Goethe afterwards, in the tranquillity of his purified faculties, looked back upon as a curious literary phenomenon. This work has never been directly translated into English (and a good translation of it were no easy achievement,) the book called "The Sorrows of Werter" being a translation of a French version, that does not give even the title of the original, which is, "The Sufferings of the Young Werther." And yet, by this doubly distorted image of a youthful ebullition, was the Protean giant for a long while measured in England, and through England, in America.
Soon after the publication of Werter, Goethe was invited to Weimar, where, honored and conferring honor, he lived the rest of his long and fruitful life. Appointed at once a member, he in a few years became president of the Council of State; and finally, after his return from Italy, at about the age of forty he was made one of the Grand Duke's Ministers, a post he for many years held. Directing the establishment and arrangement of museums, libraries, art-exhibitions, and theatrical representations, he contributed directly by practical labors, as well as by the brilliancy which the products of his pen shed upon his place of abode, to the fame and prosperity of Weimar.
In the poems of Shakspeare, is disclosed a mind, wherein capaciousness and subtlety, vigor and grace, clearness and depth, versatility and justness, combine and co-operate with such shifting ease and impressive effect, that ordinary human faculties are vainly tasked to embrace its perfectness and its immensity. Contemplating it, the keenest intelligence exhausts itself in analysis, and the most refined admiration ends in wonder. Inferior only to this consummation of human capabilities is the mind of Goethe, akin to Shakspeare's in the breadth and variety and subtlety of its powers. In comprehensiveness of grasp and ideal harmony in conceiving a poetic whole, the German approaches the mighty Englishman, and displays also in the delineation, or, more properly, the creation of characters, that instinctive insight and startling revelation of the human heart, which in Shakspeare almost at times make us think he were privy to the mystery of its structure. The same calmness and serene self-possession—a sign of supreme mental power—are characteristic of both. Like Shakspeare, Goethe never intrudes his personal individuality to mar the proportions of a work of art.
To pour out the wealth of a mind, which ranges over every province of human thought and action, Goethe adopts all the various forms in which poetry, according to its mood and object, moulds itself. In his epigrams, elegies, songs and ballads, he embodies the highest excellences of the lyrical. In Egmont, you have a bold specimen of the romantic tragedy; in Iphygenia, a beautiful reproduction of the classical Greek; while Torquato Tasso, a drama of the most exquisite grace and refinement, occupies a middle ground between the two. To pass from this to Faust, is to be suddenly borne away from a quiet scene of rural beauty to a rugged mountain peak, whence, through a tempest, you catch glimpses of the distant sunny earth, and mid the elemental strife, beautiful in its terrors, hear sounds as though a heaven-strung æolian harp snatched music from the blast. In Herman and Dorothea, executed with matchless felicity, reigns the pure epic spirit. This one poem were enough to make a reputation. But the highest exhibition of Goethe's manifold powers is Wilhelm Meister, in which a mixed assemblage of fictitious personages, each one possessing the vital individuality and yet generic breadth of Falstaff and of Juliet, bound together in a vast circle of the most natural and complex relations, presents so truthful and significant and art-beautified a picture of the struggles and attainments, the joys and griefs, the labors and recreations, the capacities and failings of mortal men, that from its study we rise with strength freshened and feelings purified, and our vision of all earthly things brightened. Unhesitatingly characterizing this work as the greatest prose fiction ever produced, I close this brief notice of its wonderful author.
The writers I have named are they who have given existence and character to modern German literature. Yet, to omit all mention of a number of others, would be not only unjust to them, but an imperfection even in so rapid a sketch as this.
By the side of Lessing, I should have placed Winkelman, born in the beginning of the last century, whose history of ancient art is esteemed the best of all works in this department of criticism. It had great influence upon German literature. Among the poets who, next to the brilliant series already described, hold high places, are, Bürger, Koerner, (both known to English readers through translations), Voss—to whom, and to their own copious, flexible language, the Germans are indebted for the most perfect translations of Homer possessed by any people—Tieck, Novalis, Grilpazer. Besides these may be mentioned the Stolbergs, Hoelty, Tidge, Leisewits, Mülner, Collin, Mathison, Uland. Among a crowd of novelists, distinguished are the names of Engel, Fouquet, Lafontaine, and Hoffman, and Thummel, whose satirical novels have a high reputation. Of miscellaneous writers there is a host, among whom should be particularized, Mendelsohn, Jacobi, Lichtenberg. In historians Germany is especially rich. Johan von Müller, Heeren, Niebuhr, Raumer, O. Müller, are writers whose merits are acknowledged throughout Europe, and acquaintance with whose works is indispensable to the scholar who would have wide views and accurate knowledge of the spirit of history. In criticism the two Schlegels have a European reputation. The "Lectures on the Drama" of Augustus William Schlegel constitute the finest critical work extant. Of the well known learning, profoundness, and acuteness of the German philologists, theologians and metaphysicians, it were superfluous here to speak. In short, to conclude, the Germans, endowed by nature with mental capabilities inferior to those of no people of the earth, and enjoying for the last half century a more general as well as a higher degree of education than any other, and thus combining talent and genius with wide learning and laborious culture, possess a vast and various accumulation of productions, wherein are to be found in every province of letters works of highest excellence, which to the literary or scientific student, whatever be his native tongue, are inexhaustible sources of mental enjoyment and improvement.