THE GLORIFICATION OF GOETHE.*

THIS encyclopaedic and very attractive book is a worthy companion of the late Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar's monumental hundred-and-seven-volume edition of Goethe's works. The learned author was not a scholar of the old German type who married, perhaps, his cook or housemaid, and had no dress-clothes. He was tinged with the citizenship of the world essential to a biographer of the myriad. minded Frankfurter with the many vicissitudes of his long life,—advocate, lover, poet, novelist, anatomist, botanist, Minister of State, military campaigner. Announcing that the classical work of G. H. Lewes has now lost its long unchallenged supremacy, the perfervid American translator states that in reading its substitute "one feels almost as if. Goethe had sat at Bielschowsky's elbow and dictated to him." Although a ukase of the New York "Knickerbocker Press" printed on the cover of the book lays it down -that the style of the book is "of the highest artistic value," we venture to hint that some of the author's dithyrambic gushes as The Life of Goethe. By Albert Bielsehowsky, Ph.D. Authorised Transla- tion from the German by William H. Cooper, A.M., Assistant Professor of German, Stanford University. 3 vols. Vol. I., "1749.1788: From Birth to the Return from Italy." Illustrated. New York and London The Knicker- bocker Press. [15s. net.]

translated from the original Pindaric German into " high- falutin' " English have a curious effect.

When Juliet in the ballroom "makes the torches to burn bright" we do not suspect the poet of " documenting " an incident in his relation to Mrs. Many Fitton : Sardanapalus and Byron are incommensurables, and "her frolic Grace Fitz- Fulke " is not one of his flames. Goethe's practice was different. To say nothing of Lotte Buff and Werther, his Friederike Brion is in touch with Goetz and Clavigo, the victimised Lili Schonemann is inseparable from Stella, in the character of Mephistopheles the mirror is held up to the sardonic paymaster Merck. Goethe's ntilisations of his personal experiences in his poetical creations are carefully explained by the biographer in his pictures of the poet's sixteen above-ground loves.

Prince Billow at a public banquet lately illustrated the position of the German Government on certain fiscal questions by a reference to The Sorrows of Weigher, in which, as Thackeray wrote, Charlotte, "having seen her lover borne before her on a shutter, like a well-conducted person, went on cutting bread.

and-butter." The Reichskanzler did not add that Werther is "next to Hamlet the most peculiar figure in the literature of the world," and that the "biblical simplicity" and "exalted pathos" of the story still strike with overwhelming force on "us, the corroded sons of the twentieth century." Neither did his Excellency say that the soft, elegiac, yet "rebellious" harmony of the letter in which Werther describes the minutiae of the bread-and-butter operation in question affected him as follows :—

" We think we are reading now a psalm, now a hymn, now a bit of Homer, now the fragment of a drama. This wonderful novel in letters glistens and gleams with all the forms and colours of style, and weariness is wholly a stranger to it. From the great periods rushing as in splendid cascades, at the beginning of Werther (second letter) to the last terse, lapidary sentences which roll over the grave like the rumbling salutes of cannon, this style capti- vates and agitates our hearts."

The Werther craze may be compared with the Waverley mania, and in each case China was one of the .countries affected; but Goethe surpassed Sir Walter, for porcelain figures of Charlotte and her worshippers were made for the Chinese market, an honour not accorded by the Celestials to Meg Merrilies. The author's statistics of the popularity of the novel omit the criticism of the Czar Nicholas I., as well as the confession of G. H. Lewes that Weigher filled him "with astonishment and contempt" until he read it in a Spanish translation, and the remark of Hazlitt that be preferred it to the rest of Goethe's works. Let us add that a special note in Mr. Bryce's classical Holy Roman Empire concerned with the Tribunal of Wetzlar reminds the reader of Charlotte and her bread-and-butter.

Fascinated by Charlotte and her bread-and-butter, the young ruler of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, invited the poet to visit him and his newly married consort, Luise of Baden, a proposal accepted by Goethe when suffering from an attack of Weltschmerz, due to his abandonment of Lill Schonemann,—the old story of requited passion, betrothal, and unjustifiable abandonment. Our author tells how Goethe on his arrival in the dingy little capital called by Madame de Stael "not a town but a château," feeling himself to be "a part of Nature," was attacked by a species of mental influenza locally called the "earth-sap," and also "earth- spirit," or preferably, according to the poet himself, the "earthy smell " :—

" Karl August thirsted for such a life. His vigorous tempera- ment had heretofore, as it were, been confined in a strait- waistcoat! Governors and privy councillors had laboured with him day after day, and shut him off from life as if by a barricade. He had been legally and actually under tutelage. At the moment when he reached his majority he had become a reigning prince and a husband, and instead of gaining his liberty seemed to be weighed down by heavier and tighter chains. His whole being revolted, and, even if Goethe had not come, he would have used his princely sovereignty to satisfy his repressed longing for the free enjoyment of life. Contact with Goethe's fiery spirit only hastened his natural development. Life began to be gay, excited, unrestrained. Drinking bouts, cards and dice, balls in palaces and village inns, stag-chases, mountain hunts, sleighing and skating, masquerades, picnics, theatres, and love-making furnished the desired excitement. Besides, there were many extra pleasures, and one may well believe that Goethe and the Duke occasionally stood in the market-place and vied with each other in cracking the whip, or that they disturbed the night's rest of a young married couple, or had the door of Friiulein von Gochensen's room secretly walled up, and the like."

Such departures from the old rut of daily existence scandalised many of the Honoratioren of the city, who whispered it about that these crazy doings had been unknown before the poet's arrival at the Ducal Court, and that he was their guilty instigator. Coming forward as advocatus diaboli, the biographer explains that Goethe's insight having given him the measure of the young ruler's talent for government, a view afterwards fully justified, he aspired to play the part of his mentor, a position unattainable for him, the scion of Frankfurt burghers, unless he showed himself a match for the members of the Ducal coterie in their vagabondages and improprieties. His physical capacity, added to his intellectual power, enabled him to gratify his ambition. Karl August, aware of the poet's legal activities at the Imperial Tribunal of Wetzlar, and of his acquaintanceship with many stars of German statesmanship, decided, in spite of bitter bureaucratic opposition, to confer on him the rank of salaried Geheim-Legationsrath, with a seat in the Ducal Council, and procured for him a patent of nobility. The author says :—

"Goethe was in these early years the soul of the Weimar Government. He occasionally calls himself the second man in the kingdom, and Seckendorff sarcastically calls him the Duke's successeur. Wieland wrote: Goethe lives and rules and storms and gives rain and sunshine, and makes us happy, no matter what he does.' Lavater's words had been fulfilled: 'Goethe would be a splendid man of authority with a Prince, that is where he belongs : he has the making of a King."

Although the author complains that Goethe's official life has not yet been properly exhibited, he tells in perfection of his activities as quasi-War Minister, Director of Highways and Canals, and Minister of Finance. But amidst these mean occupations the force of the generating station of poetic power was still alive. After detailing rules on pawn- broking, Excise-duties, the prevention of damage to farms by game, poorhouses, policeman's beat, or setting the cut of a Hussar's leather breeches, the poet would sketch a scene of Egmont, or correct his manuscript of Faust.

The attractions of the members of the Weimar Court of the Muses were viewed by the author through a strong lens, with which be also magnified the fascination of the object of the Herr Geheimrath's unflagging passion from 1775 to 1786.

Contemporary testimony proves that if the aristocratic Charlotte von Stein, with her seven children, advancing years, and souffreuse appearance, was not wanting the attributes required in a Queen of Society, a Madame Recamier plus a Madame du Deffand she was• not. The thousand letters and poulets addressed to her by the poet are hurricanes of language of the ultra-affectionate Teutonic type, which if used in an English amatory epistle might suggest the exist- ence between the correspondents of something more than Platonic synthesis, but in German are compatible with mere fruition of the inner harmony of souls. Suddenly the poet

disappeared from his Paradise, quitting his beloved with a "Farewell, sweetheart, I am thine," and departed, without

leaving word of his plans, for Innsbruck, where a few days later one Johann Philip Moller took: a seat in a diligence across the Brenner for Verona.

That traveller's Italienische Reise shows that be mainly viewed buildings, statues, and pictures through the spectacles of dogma ; as things of artistic beauty he seldom feels their power. In Verona, when visiting the ruined Arena, or study- ing the relics of Roman antiquity, he talks of a breeze "laden with a fragrance as if it crossed a bed of roses." But the churches of the city do not touch him, and he passes by sicco pede the noble tombs of the Scaligers, their Gothic trickery clashing with his deductions from the code of Winckelmann. Passing by the noble equestrian statue of Gattamelata as an " ungreek " creation of Christian plastic art, he boycotts when in Venice the Colleone sitting on his charger on the quay before the Arsenal. Yet the companions of the incomparable Condottiere, the upright marble lions, take the poet's fancy,—they came from Athens. His remarks on buildings remind one of Byron's "the Parthenon is very like the Mansion House." Gems of architectural perfection like the New Library and the Mint of Sansovino are beneath his notice. St. Mark's

and the Doge's Palace, likewise, "could find no mercy before the severity of his great spirit." Reading more than seeing had made Goethe a worshipper of Palladio, but his cult of that great architect, which began in Vicenza, now ran riot, so that he raves about relative failures like the Bedentore, drawing from the author the remark that one cannot rise to such enthusiasm "unless one possesses the architectural eye of a Goethe" ! On Titian, Tintoretto, and the Venetian painters as a body the poet is silent.

During Goethe's residence in Rome, hoping to realise a favourite juvenile dream, he endeavoured to make himself a painter. But his daily modelling, drawing, and colouring, under the guidance of competent German artists, failed to raise him above a decent dilettante level, and he was finally driven to recognise the grievous truth that painting was not his vocation. Lucky humanity ! After "living a new youth," to use his own words, in the artistic and natural glories of Italy, he abandoned the paint-brush for the pen which after- wards gave us Wilhelm Meister and Faust. Explaining in dithyrambic sentences that "sunny Italy" made the poet for the first time a master of "style," the author names Egmont among the works completed and corrected at Rome. Yet a separate chapter on that play says : "We are unable to detect any Italian influence in it." Goethe himself reports that the "witches' kitchen" of Faust was written in the gardens of the Villa Borghese.

As to Goethe's Southern flames, the biographer contends that the woman glorified in the Romische Elegien is not the poet's subsequent plebeian wife, Christiane Vulpius, but his Roman love, Faustina. His reasons, however, are not apparent, for his commentary on the crux of the situation, the eighteenth Elegy, is bowdlerised by the translator. This first volume brings Goethe back to Weimar. No. II. will show the poet cured, as he himself said, of the evils which had tortured his soul and body, and transformed him into "the reposeful Olympian whom posterity admired, while many of his contemporaries missed in him the devoted, com- municative friend of former years."