Autobiography by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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THE WORKS OF JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

TRANSLATORS

THOMAS CARLYLE
HENRY W. LONGFELLOW
SIR WALTER SCOTT
BAYARD TAYLOR

EDWARD CHAWNER
CHAS. J. SPRAGUE
LEOPOLD NOA
HENRY DALE

JOHN OXENFORD
THEODORE MARTIN
W. E. AYTOUN
E. A. BOWRING

A. J. W. MORRISON
G. H. LEWES
J. S. DWIGHT
ANNA SWANWICK

THE GOTTINGEN EDITION OF JOHANN WOLFGANG VON
GOETHE'S WORKS IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND COPIES,
OF WHICH THIS IS NUMBER 976

[Illustration: PICTURE OF GOETHE]

GOTTINGEN EDITION

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

TRUTH AND FICTION RELATING TO MY LIFE

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

TRANSLATED BY
JOHN OXENFORD

VOLUME I.

PHILADELPHIA AND CHICAGO
J. H. MOORE AND COMPANY

INTRODUCTION.

BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

It would appear that for inquirers into Foreign Literature, for all men
anxious to see and understand the European world as it lies around them,
a great problem is presented in this Goethe; a singular, highly
significant phenomenon, and now also means more or less complete for
ascertaining its significance. A man of wonderful, nay, unexampled
reputation and intellectual influence among forty millions of
reflective, serious and cultivated men, invites us to study him; and to
determine for ourselves, whether and how far such influence has been
salutary, such reputation merited. That this call will one day be
answered, that Goethe will be seen and judged of in his real character
among us, appears certain enough. His name, long familiar everywhere,
has now awakened the attention of critics in all European countries to
his works: he is studied wherever true study exists: eagerly studied
even in France; nay, some considerable knowledge of his nature and
spiritual importance seems already to prevail there. [Footnote: Witness
/Le Tasse, Drame par Duval,/ and the Criticisms on it. See also the
Essays in the /Globe,/ Nos. 55, 64 (1826).]

For ourselves, meanwhile, in giving all due weight to so curious an
exhibition of opinion, it is doubtless our part, at the same time, to
beware that we do not give it too much. This universal sentiment of
admiration is wonderful, is interesting enough; but it must not lead us
astray. We English stand as yet without the sphere of it; neither will
we plunge blindly in, but enter considerately, or, if we see good, keep
aloof from it altogether. Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of
merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a
property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at
most may show what is given; often it is but a false glare, dazzling the
eyes of the vulgar, lending by casual extrinsic splendour the brightness
and manifold glance of the diamond to pebbles of no value. A man is in
all cases simply the man, of the same intrinsic worth and weakness,
whether his worth and weakness lie hidden in the depths of his own
consciousness, or be betrumpeted and beshouted from end to end of the
habitable globe. These are plain truths, which no one should lose sight
of; though, whether in love or in anger, for praise or for condemnation,
most of us are too apt to forget them. But least of all can it become
the critic to 'follow a multitude to do evil' even when that evil is
excess of admiration; on the contrary, it will behoove him to lift up
his voice, how feeble soever, how unheeded soever, against the common
delusion; from which, if he can save, or help to save any mortal, his
endeavours will have been repaid.

With these things in some measure before us, we must remind our readers
of another influence at work in this affair, and one acting, as we
think, in the contrary direction. That pitiful enough desire for
'originality' which lurks and acts in all minds, will rather, we
imagine, lead the critic of Foreign Literature to adopt the negative
than the affirmative with regard to Goethe. If a writer indeed feel that
he is writing for England alone, invisibly and inaudibly to the rest of
the Earth, the temptations may be pretty equally balanced; if he write
for some small conclave, which he mistakenly thinks the representative
of England, they may sway this way or that, as it chances. But writing
in such isolated spirit is no longer possible. Traffic, with its swift
ships, is uniting all nations into one; Europe at large is becoming more
and more one public; and in this public, the voices for Goethe, compared
with those against him, are in the proportion, as we reckon them, both
as to the number and value, of perhaps a hundred to one. We take in, not
Germany alone, but France and Italy; not the Schlegels and Schellings,
but the Manzonis and De Staels. The bias of originality, therefore, may
lie to the side of censure; and whoever among us shall step forward,
with such knowledge as our common critics have of Goethe, to enlighten
the European public, by contradiction in this matter, displays a
heroism, which, in estimating his other merits, ought nowise to be
forgotten.

Our own view of the case coincides, we confess, in some degree with that
of the majority. We reckon that Goethe's fame has, to a considerable
extent, been deserved; that his influence has been of high benefit to
his own country; nay more, that it promises to be of benefit to us, and
to all other nations. The essential grounds of this opinion, which to
explain minutely were a long, indeed boundless task, we may state
without many words. We find, then, in Goethe, an Artist, in the high and
ancient meaning of that term; in the meaning which it may have borne
long ago among the masters of Italian painting, and the fathers of
Poetry in England; we say that we trace in the creations of this man,
belonging in every sense to our own time, some touches of that old,
divine spirit, which had long passed away from among us, nay which, as
has often been laboriously demonstrated, was not to return to this world
any more.

Or perhaps we come nearer our meaning, if we say that in Goethe we
discover by far the most striking instance, in our time, of a writer who
is, in strict speech, what Philosophy can call a Man. He is neither
noble nor plebeian, neither liberal nor servile, nor infidel nor
devotee; but the best excellence of all these, joined in pure union; 'a
clear and universal Man.' Goethe's poetry is no separate faculty, no
mental handicraft; but the voice of the whole harmonious manhood: nay it
is the very harmony, the living and life-giving harmony of that rich
manhood which forms his poetry. All good men may be called poets in act,
or in word; all good poets are so in both. But Goethe besides appears to
us as a person of that deep endowment, and gifted vision, of that
experience also and sympathy in the ways of all men, which qualify him
to stand forth, not only as the literary ornament, but in many respects
too as the Teacher and exemplar of his age. For, to say nothing of his
natural gifts, he has cultivated himself and his art, he has studied how
to live and to write, with a fidelity, an unwearied earnestness, of
which there is no other living instance; of which, among British poets
especially, Wordsworth alone offers any resemblance. And this in our
view is the result. To our minds, in these soft, melodious imaginations
of his, there is embodied the Wisdom which is proper to this time; the
beautiful, the religious Wisdom, which may still, with something of its
old impressiveness, speak to the whole soul; still, in these hard,
unbelieving utilitarian days, reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but
not unreal World, that so the Actual and the Ideal may again meet
together, and clear Knowledge be again wedded to Religion, in the life
and business of men.

Such is our conviction or persuasion with regard to the poetry of
Goethe. Could we demonstrate this opinion to be true, could we even
exhibit it with that degree of clearness and consistency which it has
attained in our own thoughts, Goethe were, on our part, sufficiently
recommended to the best attention of all thinking men. But, unhappily,
it is not a subject susceptible of demonstration: the merits and
characteristics of a Poet are not to be set forth by logic; but to be
gathered by personal, and as in this case it must be, by deep and
careful inspection of his works. Nay Goethe's world is everyway so
different from ours; it costs us such effort, we have so much to
remember, and so much to forget, before we can transfer ourselves in any
measure into his peculiar point of vision, that a right study of him,
for an Englishman, even of ingenuous, open, inquisitive mind, becomes
unusually difficult; for a fixed, decided, contemptuous Englishman, next
to impossible. To a reader of the first class, helps may be given,
explanations will remove many a difficulty; beauties that lay hidden may
be made apparent; and directions, adapted to his actual position, will
at length guide him into the proper tract for such an inquiry. All this,
however, must be a work of progression and detail. To do our part in it,
from time to time, must rank among the best duties of an English Foreign
Review. Meanwhile, our present endeavour limits itself within far
narrower bounds. We cannot aim to make Goethe known, but only to prove
that he is worthy of being known; at most, to point out, as it were afar
off, the path by which some knowledge of him may be obtained. A slight
glance at his general literary character and procedure, and one or two
of his chief productions which throw light on these, must for the
present suffice. A French diplomatic personage, contemplating Goethe's
physiognomy, is said to have observed: /Voila un homme qui a eu
beaucoup de chagrins./ A truer version of the matter, Goethe himself
seems to think, would have been: Here is a man who has struggled
toughly; who has /es sich recht sauer werden lassen./ Goethe's
life, whether as a writer and thinker, or as a living active man, has
indeed been a life of effort, of earnest toilsome endeavour after all
excellence. Accordingly, his intellectual progress, his spiritual and
moral history, as it may be gathered from his successive Works,
furnishes, with us, no small portion of the pleasure and profit we
derive from perusing them. Participating deeply in all the influences of
his age, he has from the first, at every new epoch, stood forth to
elucidate the new circumstances of the time; to offer the instruction,
the solace, which that time required. His literary life divides itself
into two portions widely different in character: the products of the
first, once so new and original, have long either directly or through
the thousand thousand imitations of them, been familiar to us; with the
products of the second, equally original, and in our day far more
precious, we are yet little acquainted. These two classes of works stand
curiously related with each other; at first view, in strong
contradiction, yet, in truth, connected together by the strictest
sequence. For Goethe has not only suffered and mourned in bitter agony
under the spiritual perplexities of his time; but he has also mastered
these, he is above them, and has shown others how to rise above them. At
one time, we found him in darkness, and now he is in light; he was once
an Unbeliever, and now he is a Believer; and he believes, moreover, not
by denying his unbelief, but by following it out; not by stopping short,
still less turning back, in his inquiries, but by resolutely prosecuting
them. This, it appears to us, is a case of singular interest, and rarely
exemplified, if at all elsewhere, in these our days. How has this man,
to whom the world once offered nothing but blackness, denial and
despair, attained to that better vision which now shows it to him, not
tolerable only, but full of solemnity and loveliness? How has the belief
of a Saint been united in this high and true mind with the clearness of
a Sceptic; the devout spirit of a Fenelon made to blend in soft harmony
with the gaiety, the sarcasm, the shrewdness of a Voltaire?

Goethe's two earliest works are /Goetz von Berlichingen/ and the
/Sorrows of Werter/. The boundless influence and popularity they
gained, both at home and abroad, is well known. It was they that
established almost at once his literary fame in his own country; and
even determined his subsequent private history, for they brought him
into contact with the Duke of Weimar; in connection with whom, the Poet,
engaged in manifold duties, political as well as literary, has lived for
fifty-four years. Their effects over Europe at large were not less
striking than in Germany.

'It would be difficult,' observes a writer on this subject, 'to name two
books which have exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent
literature of Europe, than these two performances of a young author; his
first-fruits, the produce of his twenty-fourth year. /Werter/
appeared to seize the hearts of men in all quarters of the world, and to
utter for them the word which they had long been waiting to hear. As
usually happens, too, this same word, once uttered, was soon abundantly
repeated; spoken in all dialects, and chaunted through all notes of the
gamut, till the sound of it had grown a weariness rather than a
pleasure. Sceptical sentimentality, view-hunting, love, friendship,
suicide, and desperation, became the staple of literary ware; and though
the epidemic, after a long course of years, subsided in Germany, it
reappeared with various modifications in other countries, and everywhere
abundant traces of its good and bad effects are still to be discerned.
The fortune of /Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,/ though less
sudden, was by no means less exalted. In his own county, /Goetz,/
though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an
innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-
antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made noise
enough in their day and generation: and with ourselves, his influence
has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's first
literary enterprise was a translation of /Goetz von Berlichingen/;
and, if genius could be communicated like instruction, we might call
this work of Goethe's the prime cause of /Marmion/ and the /Lady
of the Lake/, with all that has followed from the same creative hand.
Truly, a grain of seed that has lighted on the right soil! For if not
firmer and fairer, it has grown to be taller and broader than any other
tree; and all the nations of the earth are still yearly gathering of its
fruit.

'But overlooking these spiritual genealogies, which bring little
certainty and little profit, it may be sufficient to observe of
/Berlichingen/ and /Werter/, that they stand prominent among
the causes, or, at the very least, among the signals of a great change
in modern literature. The former directed men's attention with a new
force to the picturesque effects of the Past; and the latter, for the
first time, attempted the more accurate delineation of a class of
feelings deeply important to modern minds, but for which our elder
poetry offered no exponent, and perhaps could offer none, because they
are feelings that arise from Passion incapable of being converted into
Action, and belong chiefly to an age as indolent, cultivated and
unbelieving as our own. This, notwithstanding the dash of falsehood
which may exist in /Werter/ itself, and the boundless delirium of
extravagance which it called forth in others, is a high praise which
cannot justly be denied it.'

To the same dark wayward mood, which, in /Werter/, pours itself
forth in bitter wailings over human life; and, in /Berlichingen/,
appears as a fond and sad looking back into the Past, belong various
other productions of Goethe's; for example, the /Mitschuldigen/,
and the first idea of Faust, which, however, was not realized in actual
composition till a calmer period of his history. Of this early harsh and
crude, yet fervid and genial period, /Werter/ may stand here as the
representative; and, viewed in its external and internal relation, will
help to illustrate both the writer and the public he was writing for.

At the present day, it would be difficult for us, satisfied, nay sated
to nausea, as we have been with the doctrines of Sentimentality, to
estimate the boundless interest which /Werter/ must have excited
when first given to the world. It was then new in all senses; it was
wonderful, yet wished for, both in its own country and in every other.
The Literature of Germany had as yet but partially awakened from its
long torpor: deep learning, deep reflection, have at no time been
wanting there; but the creative spirit had for above a century been
almost extinct. Of late, however, the Ramlers, Rabeners, Gellerts, had
attained to no inconsiderable polish of style; Klopstock's
/Messias/ had called forth the admiration, and perhaps still more
the pride, of the country, as a piece of art; a high enthusiasm was
abroad; Lessing had roused the minds of men to a deeper and truer
interest in Literature, had even decidedly begun to introduce a
heartier, warmer and more expressive style. The Germans were on the
alert; in expectation, or at least in full readiness for some far bolder
impulse; waiting for the Poet that might speak to them from the heart to
the heart. It was in Goethe that such a Poet was to be given them.

Nay, the Literature of other countries, placid, self-satisfied as they
might seem, was in an equally expectant condition. Everywhere, as in
Germany, there was polish and languor, external glitter and internal
vacuity; it was not fire, but a picture of fire, at which no soul could
be warmed. Literature had sunk from its former vocation: it no longer
held the mirror up to Nature; no longer reflected, in many-coloured
expressive symbols, the actual passions, the hopes, sorrows, joys of
living men; but dwelt in a remote conventional world in /Castles of
Otranto/, in /Epigoniads/ and /Leonidases/, among clear,
metallic heroes, and white, high, stainless beauties, in whom the
drapery and elocution were nowise the least important qualities. Men
thought it right that the heart should swell into magnanimity with
Caractacus and Cato, and melt into sorrow with many an Eliza and
Adelaide; but the heart was in no haste either to swell or to melt. Some
pulses of heroical sentiment, a few /un/natural tears might, with
conscientious readers, be actually squeezed forth on such occasions: but
they came only from the surface of the mind; nay, had the conscientious
man considered the matter, he would have found that they ought not to
have come at all. Our only English poet of the period was Goldsmith; a
pure, clear, genuine spirit, had he been of depth or strength
sufficient; his /Vicar of Wakefield/ remains the best of all modern
Idyls; but it is and was nothing more. And consider our leading writers;
consider the poetry of Gray, and the prose of Johnson. The first a
laborious mosaic, through the hard stiff lineaments of which little life
or true grace could be expected to look: real feeling, and all freedom
of expressing it, are sacrificed to pomp, to cold splendour; for vigour
we have a certain mouthing vehemence, too elegant indeed to be tumid,
yet essentially foreign to the heart, and seen to extend no deeper than
the mere voice and gestures. Were it not for his /Letters/, which
are full of warm exuberant power, we might almost doubt whether Gray was
a man of genius; nay, was a living man at all, and not rather some
thousand-times more cunningly devised poetical turning-loom, than that
of Swift's Philosophers in Laputa. Johnson's prose is true, indeed, and
sound, and full of practical sense: few men have seen more clearly into
the motives, the interests, the whole walk and conversation of the
living busy world as it lay before him; but farther than this busy, and
to most of us, rather prosaic world, he seldom looked: his instruction
is for men of business, and in regard to matters of business alone.
Prudence is the highest Virtue he can inculcate; and for that finer
portion of our nature, that portion of it which belongs essentially to
Literature strictly so called, where our highest feelings, our best joys
and keenest sorrows, our Doubt, our Love, our Religion reside, he has no
word to utter; no remedy, no counsel to give us in our straits; or at
most, if, like poor Boswell, the patient is importunate, will answer:
"My dear Sir, endeavour to clear your mind of Cant."

The turn which Philosophical speculation had taken in the preceding age
corresponded with this tendency, and enhanced its narcotic influences;
or was, indeed, properly speaking, the loot they had sprung from. Locke,
himself a clear, humble-minded, patient, reverent, nay religious man,
had paved the way for banishing religion from the world. Mind, by being
modelled in men's imaginations into a Shape, a Visibility; and reasoned
of as if it had been some composite, divisible and reunitable substance,
some finer chemical salt, or curious piece of logical joinery,--began to
lose its immaterial, mysterious, divine though invisible character: it
was tacitly figured as something that might, were our organs fine
enough, be /seen/. Yet who had ever seen it? Who could ever see it?
Thus by degrees it passed into a Doubt, a Relation, some faint
Possibility; and at last into a highly-probable Nonentity. Following
Locke's footsteps, the French had discovered that 'as the stomach
secretes Chyle, so does the brain secrete Thought.' And what then was
Religion, what was Poetry, what was all high and heroic feeling? Chiefly
a delusion; often a false and pernicious one. Poetry, indeed, was still
to be preserved; because Poetry was a useful thing: men needed
amusement, and loved to amuse themselves with Poetry: the playhouse was
a pretty lounge of an evening; then there were so many precepts,
satirical, didactic, so much more impressive for the rhyme; to say
nothing of your occasional verses, birthday odes, epithalamiums,
epicediums, by which 'the dream of existence may be so highly sweetened
and embellished.' Nay, does not Poetry, acting on the imaginations of
men, excite them to daring purposes; sometimes, as in the case of
Tyrtaeus, to fight better; in which wise may it not rank as a useful
stimulant to man, along with Opium and Scotch Whisky, the manufacture of
which is allowed by law? In Heaven's name, then, let Poetry be
preserved.

With Religion, however, it fared somewhat worse. In the eyes of Voltaire
and his disciples, Religion was a superfluity, indeed a nuisance. Here,
it is true, his followers have since found that he went too far; that
Religion, being a great sanction to civil morality, is of use for
keeping society in order, at least the lower classes, who have not the
feeling of Honour in due force; and therefore, as a considerable help to
the Constable and Hangman, /ought/ decidedly to be kept up. But
such toleration is the fruit only of later days. In those times, there
was no question but how to get rid of it, root and branch, the sooner
the better. A gleam of zeal, nay we will call it, however basely
alloyed, a glow of real enthusiasm and love of truth, may have animated
the minds of these men, as they looked abroad on the pestilent jungle of
Superstition, and hoped to clear the earth of it forever. This little
glow, so alloyed, so contaminated with pride and other poor or bad
admixtures, was the last which thinking men were to experience in Europe
for a time. So it is always in regard to Religious Belief, how degraded
and defaced soever: the delight of the Destroyer and Denier is no pure
delight, and must soon pass away. With bold, with skilful hand, Voltaire
set his torch to the jungle: it blazed aloft to heaven; and the flame
exhilarated and comforted the incendiaries; but, unhappily, such comfort
could not continue. Ere long this flame, with its cheerful light and
heat, was gone: the jungle, it is true, had been consumed; but, with its
entanglements, its shelter and its spots of verdure also; and the black,
chill, ashy swamp, left in its stead, seemed for a time a greater evil
than the other.

In such a state of painful obstruction, extending itself everywhere over
Europe, and already master of Germany, lay the general mind, when Goethe
first appeared in Literature. Whatever belonged to the finer nature of
man had withered under the Harmattan breath of Doubt, or passed away in
the conflagration of open Infidelity; and now, where the Tree of Life
once bloomed and brought fruit of goodliest savour there was only
barrenness and desolation. To such as could find sufficient interest in
the day-labour and day-wages of earthly existence; in the resources of
the five bodily Senses, and of Vanity, the only mental sense which yet
flourished, which flourished indeed with gigantic vigour, matters were
still not so bad. Such men helped themselves forward, as they will
generally do; and found the world, if not an altogether proper sphere
(for every man, disguise it as he may, has a /soul/ in him), at
least a tolerable enough place; where, by one item or another, some
comfort, or show of comfort, might from time to time be got up, and
these few years, especially since they were so few, be spent without
much murdering. But to men afflicted with the 'malady of Thought,' some
devoutness of temper was an inevitable heritage; to such the noisy forum
of the world could appear but an empty, altogether insufficient concern;
and the whole scene of life had become hopeless enough. Unhappily, such
feelings are yet by no means so infrequent with ourselves, that we need
stop here to depict them. That state of Unbelief from which the Germans
do seem to be in some measure delivered, still presses with incubus
force on the greater part of Europe; and nation after nation, each in
its own way, feels that the first of all moral problems is how to cast
it off, or how to rise above it. Governments naturally attempt the first
expedient; Philosophers, in general, the second.

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