GOETHE THE POET OF PANTHEISM WHO is the greatest German? There are two, and only two, who can compete for the honor-Luther and Goethe. In native genius as well as in influence upon the national life we can find points of similarity between them. Both were richly endowed with vigor and emotion; both shaped the faith and the literature of Ger many. But their nature and work were more unlike than like each other. Luther's moral and religious instincts mastered him; he freed his people from the tyranny of ecclesiasticism, and led them back to Scripture and to God. Goethe was a man without conscience; he was the instrument of a merely literary emancipation, while he re-established, so far as he could, the reign of pagan self-dependence and of moral indifference. Luther's whole being was pervaded with faith in a personal and living God, and his songs were half-battles for truth and righteousness. Goethe believed only in a God who was identical with nature; who consecrated the lower impulses of man as well as the higher; who could be approached without confession or repentance of sin; and his writings effected only an æsthetic, never an ethical, reformation. So long, then, as we judge greatness by moral and spiritual standards, we must regard Luther, and not Goethe, as the greatest of the Germans. And yet, since he is the type of a remarkable literary development, Goethe is worthy of profound study. He has been called the supreme literary artist. I propose to speak of him as the poet of pantheism. "Wilt thou the poet understand? Dwell thou in the poet's land!" No one can comprehend Goethe without knowing something of Germany and its previous literary history, of Frankfort, where the poet was born, and of Weimar, the scene of his greatest productive activity. Until Goethe appeared, Germany could hardly be said to have had a literature of its own. Frederick the Great, while he made Prussia independent in politics, had enslaved his country to French standards of composition. The traditions of the French Academy, with its dramatic unities and its magniloquent proprieties, had exerted a benumbing influence upon German authors, until freedom and life had almost departed. Pride in their own rich and sonorous language gave place to contempt. Their national history seemed hardly worth the chronicling. The land of the Niebelungenlied, the land of the Reformers, seemed to furnish no subjects for poetry or for art. German writers set themselves to copying the classics, or rather to copying French copies of the classics. But a new breath of life was stirring. A spirit of revolt was in the air. Rousseau and the French Revolution began to have their analogues, if not their effects, in Germany. Shakespeare was read, and brought his readers back to nature. Herder and Lessing and Klopstock showed independent powers of criticism and creation. But it was chiefly Goethe who, like FRANKFORT, AND GOETHE'S PARENTS 283 a literary Moses, led his people out from bondage into liberty. It was his masterful originality that first convinced his countrymen that there could be a native growth of German literature, and that they need no longer be in subjection to foreign powers. Frankfort was a fit city from which the movement might begin. It was not only a free city of the Holy Roman Empire, but it was the city where for centuries the emperors had been crowned. Its annual fair brought together the fabrics of the East and the West, and gave a sort of cosmopolitan atmosphere to the place. The burgher class was wealthy and enterprising, pervious to modern ideas, while at the same time proud of the mediæval traditions of the town. From this burgher class Goethe sprang. His father was a retired government official, with the title of Counsellor. He was a man of education, and he had traveled in Italy. Methodical in his habits, and with little of business to occupy him, he devoted himself mainly to the training of his wife, and his two children, John and Cornelia. His wife, a bright, airy, pleasure-loving creature of seventeen, found, when she married the wise Counsellor of thirty-eight, that she had put herself under severe discipline. She had to spend most of the honeymoon in learning the piano, and in writing out Italian exercises. She conceived an unwholesome fear of her husband, and she encouraged her children in all sorts of deceptions in order to escape from the rigid rule and scrutiny of their father. She declared that she had no gift for bringing up a family. She coaxed her offspring to be good, and whipped them if they cried, without inquiry into the causes either of their goodness or of their grief. In short, she was a child with them. Her one strong point was her endless story-telling. The evenings were beguiled with all manner of extempore dramas and fairy tales. The tales were continuous, like those of Queen Scheherezade When the interest was at its height and the hero or the villain was at the crisis of his fate, the story was suspended for twentyfour hours and young Goethe and his sister were put to bed. His imagination, however, could not rest, and before he went to sleep he had devised an exit from the dramatic difficulty. Next morning he confided his invention to his grandmother. She was in collusion with the mother, and when evening came again Goethe would be delighted to find that the story came out just as he had expected. So the child lived in a world of poetry and romance, wonderfully adapted to stimulate his gifts to precocious development. The elements derived from father and from mother were each in their way admirable, yet each had its drawbacks and limitations. The father furnished to the son a love of order, a persistent industry, an omnivorous appetite for knowledge. Yet with this there was a calm and severe self-dependence, and a disregard of the feelings of others when they crossed the plans of the party of the first part. The boy was held to work by the father, as few boys have been. In his eighth year he wrote Latin with ease, and had made considerable progress in Greek and in French. But the mother furnished the bonhomie, the fresh insight into nature, the charm of fancy, the warmth of feeling, the impulse to ATTRACTIVENESS OF YOUNG GOETHE 285 expression, which made common things glow with life and clamor to be described. But with these gifts of imagination and of utterance, there were great deficiencies. There was no reverence and no conscience. The moral idea was almost wholly lacking in Goethe's mother. She hated pain, and she taught the forgetting of sin instead of repentance for it. An emotional religion she had, but no prostration of the sinful soul before the holiness of God. There was an easy-going confidence in the future that at times amounted to flippancy and even sacrilege. On her deathbed she was particularly anxious that the raisins should not be skimped in the cake for the funeral, and she replied to an invitation, that Frau Goethe was sorry to be compelled to decline it, for the reason that just at that time she was engaged in dying. Goethe himself has described what he supposed to be his inheritance from his parents, in the well-known lines: My goodly frame and earnest soul I from my sire inherit; My happy heart and glib discourse That goodly frame was indeed goodly. Though not great in stature, the poet was in point of physical beauty one of the noblest men that the world has ever seen. Jung Stilling speaks of his broad brow, his flashing eye, and his mastery of every company of which he formed a part. When he was young, he never entered a place of public entertainment or passed through a crowded street without finding that all eyes turned toward him and followed him with a sort of fascination. "Voilà |