The Youth of Goethe Part 11

and the impression must have been abiding, since in no pa.s.sage of his Autobiography does he recall more vividly the emotions of a vanished time.

[Footnote 184: Biedermann, _op. cit._ i. 45.]

The evening of the day they spent in Cologne is noted both by Goethe and Fritz Jacobi as marking a point in their intellectual development.

The inn in which they were quartered overlooked the Rhine, the murmur of whose moonlit waters was attuned to the sentiments that had been evoked in the course of the day. In the prospect of their near parting all three were disposed to confidential self-revelations, and the conversation ran on themes regarding which they had all thought and felt much--on poetry, religion, and philosophy. As usual with him when he was in congenial company, Goethe freely declaimed such pieces of verse as happened at the time to be interesting him--the verses on this occasion being Scottish ballads and two poems of his own, _Der Konig von Thule_, and _Der untreue Knabe_. In philosophy the talk turned mainly on Spinoza, of whom Goethe spoke "unforgettably."[185]

"What hours! what days," wrote Fritz immediately after their parting, "thou soughtest me about midnight in the darkness; it was as if a new soul were born within me. From that moment I could not let thee go."[186] Neither, in the ecstasy of these moments, dreamt that at a later day Spinoza, who was now their strongest bond of union, was to be the main cause of their estrangement. For Jacobi Spinoza became the "atheist," to be reprobated as one of the world's false prophets; while for Goethe he remained to the end the man to whom G.o.d had been nearest and to whom He had been most fully revealed.

[Footnote 185: As Goethe at this time knew little of Spinoza's philosophy, it was probably on Spinoza's personal character that he enlarged. On this theme, we have seen, he had discoursed with Lavater.]

[Footnote 186: Biedermann, _op. cit._ i. 45.]

Shortly after parting with Goethe, Fritz Jacobi communicated his impression of him to Wieland in the following words: "The more I think of it, the more intensely I realise the impossibility of conveying to one who has not seen or heard Goethe any intelligible notion of this extraordinary creation of G.o.d. As Heinse[187] expressed it, 'Goethe is a genius from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,' one possessed, I may add, for whom it is impossible to act from mere caprice. One has only to be with him for an hour to feel the utter absurdity of desiring him to think and act otherwise than he thinks and acts. By this I don't mean to suggest that he cannot grow in beauty and goodness, but that in his case such growth must be that of the unfolding flower, of the ripening seed, of the tree soaring aloft and crowning itself with foliage."[188]

[Footnote 187: Johann J.W. Heinse, a minor poet of the time, and one of Goethe's most fervent admirers.]

[Footnote 188: Biedermann, _op. cit._ i. 45-6.]

On leaving the Jacobis Goethe proceeded to Ems, where he again met Lavater and Basedow. On the day following Lavater went home, and Goethe and Basedow remained till the second week of August. On the 13th Goethe was in his father's house, and in a state of exaltation after his late experiences, to which he gives lively expression in a letter to Fritz Jacobi. "I dream of the moment, dear Fritz, I have your letter and hover around you. You have felt what a rapture it is to me to be the object of your love. Oh! the joy of believing that one receives more from others than one gives. Oh, Love, Love! The poverty of riches--what force works in me when I embrace in him all that is wanting in myself, and yet give to him what I have.... Believe me, we might henceforth be dumb to each other, and, meeting again after many a day, we should feel as if we had all along been walking hand in hand."[189]

[Footnote 189: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 182.]

In the first weeks of October Goethe made personal acquaintance with a more distinguished personage than either Lavater or Basedow or Jacobi--"the patriarch of German poetry," Klopstock, the author of the _Messias_.[190] Since his childhood, the name of Klopstock had been familiar to Goethe. To his conservative father, the _Messias_, as written in unrhymed verse, was a monstrosity in German literature, and he refused to give it a place in his library. Surrept.i.tiously introduced into the house, however, Goethe had read it with enthusiasm and committed its most striking pa.s.sages to memory. And he had retained his admiration throughout all the successive changes in his own literary ideals. Like all the youth of his generation, he saw in Klopstock a great original genius to whom German poetry owed emanc.i.p.ation from conventional forms and new elements of thought, feeling, and imagination. Klopstock, on his part, had been interested in the rising genius whose _Gotz von Berlichingen_ had taken the world by storm, and had signified through a common friend that he would be gratified to see other works from his hand. Goethe had responded in the spirit of a youthful adorer, conscious of the honour which the request implied. "And why should I not write to Klopstock," he wrote, "and send him anything of mine, anything in which he can take an interest? May I not address the living, to whose grave I would make a pilgrimage?"[191]

[Footnote 190: Klopstock came from Gottingen, where he was the idol of a band of youthful poets.]

[Footnote 191: _Werke, Briefe_, ii. 182.]

These communications took place in May, and in the beginning of October Goethe received an invitation from Klopstock to meet him at Friedberg. Owing to some delay on his journey, however, Klopstock did not appear at the time appointed, but, gratified by Goethe's eagerness to meet him, he shortly afterwards came to Frankfort and was for a few days a guest in the Goethe household. From Goethe's account of their intercourse we gather that their intercourse was not wholly satisfactory to either. Klopstock was in his fiftieth year, and his somewhat self-conscious and pedantic manner did not encourage effusion.[192] Like certain other poets he affected the tone of a man of the world and deliberately avoided topics relative to his own art.

The two themes on which he expanded were riding and skating--of which latter pastime he had indeed made himself the laureate. Goethe himself was pa.s.sionately fond of both exercises, but from "the patriarch of German poetry" he might have expected discourse on higher themes.

Apparently, however, their relations remained sufficiently cordial, as, when Klopstock took his departure, Goethe accompanied him to Mannheim. On his way home in the post-carriage Goethe gave utterance to his feelings in some rhapsodical lines--_An Schwager Kronos_--(To Time the Postillion)--which may be regarded as a commentary on his impressions of the great man. Written in the unrhymed, irregular measure which Klopstock had been the first to employ, and containing phrases directly borrowed from Klopstock, they give pa.s.sionate expression to his desire for a life, brief it might be, but a life alive to the end with the zest of living. It was the sentiment of the youth of the _Sturm und Drang_, which the chilling impression he had received from Klopstock doubtless evoked with rebounding force during his solitary drive home in the post-carriage.[193]

[Footnote 192: Merck found in Klopstock "viel Weltkunde und Weltkalte."]

[Footnote 193: Writing to Sophie von la Roche on November 20th, Goethe calls Klopstock "a n.o.ble, great man, on whom the peace of G.o.d rests,"

_Werke, Briefe_ ii. 206.]

In the same month of October Goethe had other visitors less distinguished, youths of his own age, who came to pay homage to him as their acknowledged leader in the literary revolution of which _Gotz_ had been the manifesto. We have seen the impressions Goethe made upon his seniors like Lavater and Fritz Jacobi; how he struck his more youthful acquaintances is recorded by two of them--both poets of some promise who had attracted attention by their contempt of conventionalities. It will be seen that their language shows that Goethe's own exuberant style in his correspondence of the period was not peculiar to himself. The first to come was H.C. Boie, an ardent worshipper of Klopstock, and one of the heroes of the _Sturm und Drang_. "I have had a superlative, delightful day," Boie records, "a whole day spent alone and uninterrupted with Goethe--Goethe whose heart is as great and n.o.ble as his mind! The day pa.s.ses my description." The other visitor, F.A. Werthes, who comprehensively worshipped both Klopstock and Wieland, leaves Boie behind in the exuberance of his impressions. "This Goethe," he wrote to Fritz Jacobi, "of whom from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof and from the going down thereof to its rising I should like to speak and stammer and rhapsodise with you ... this Goethe has, as it were, transcended all the ideals I had ever conceived of the direct feeling and observation of a great genius. Never could I have so well explained and sympathised with the feelings of the disciples on the way to Emmaus when they said: 'Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us by the way?' Let us make of him our Lord Christ for evermore, and let me be the least of His disciples. He has spoken so much and so excellently with me; words of eternal life which, so long as I live, shall be my articles of faith."[194] Apart from its relation to Goethe, it will be seen that Werthes' letter is a doc.u.ment of the time, bringing before us, as it does, the strained and distorted sentiment, sufficiently apparent in Goethe himself, but which he, almost alone of the youths of his generation, was strong enough to hold in check.

[Footnote 194: Biedermann, _op. cit._ i. 46.]

In the following month (December) Goethe received still another visit--a visit which was directly to lead to the most decisive event in his life. As he was sitting one evening in his own room, a stranger was ushered in, whom in the dusk he mistook for Fritz Jacobi. The stranger was Major von Knebel, who had served in the Prussian army, but was now on a tour with the young princes of Weimar, Carl August and Constantin, to the latter of whom he was acting as tutor. Knebel was keenly interested in literature, was a poet himself, and an ardent admirer of Goethe. There followed congenial talk which was to be the beginning of a friendship that, unlike most of Goethe's youthful friendships, was to endure into the old age of both. But Knebel had come on a special errand; the young princes had expressed the desire to become acquainted with the man who had made merry with their instructor Wieland, and whose name was in all men's mouths as the author of the recently published _Werther_. Nothing loth, Goethe accompanied Knebel to the princes, and in the interviews that followed he displayed all the tact that characterised his subsequent intercourse with the great. Studiously avoiding all reference to his own productions, he turned the conversation on subjects of public interest, on which he spoke with a fulness of knowledge that convinced his hearers that the author of _Werther_ was not an effeminate sentimentalist. So favourable was the impression he made on the princes that they expressed a wish that he would follow them to Mainz and spend a few days with them there. The proposal was highly acceptable to Goethe, but there was a difficulty in the way. The Herr Rath was a st.u.r.dy republican, and had an ingrained aversion to the n.o.bility as a cla.s.s. In his opinion, for a commoner to seek intercourse with that cla.s.s was to compromise his self-respect and to invite humiliation, and he roundly maintained that in seeking his son's acquaintance the princes were only laying a train to pay him back for his treatment of Wieland. When the Goethe household was divided on important questions, it was their custom to refer to the Fraulein von Klettenberg as arbiter. That sainted lady was now on a sick-bed, but through the Frau Rath she conveyed her opinion that the invitation of the princes should be accepted. To Mainz, therefore, Goethe went in company with Knebel, who had remained behind to see more of him, and his second meeting with the two boys completed his conquest of them. Any resentment they may have entertained for his attack on Wieland was removed by his explanation of its origin, and it was with mutual attraction that both parties separated after a few days' cordial intercourse. Thus were established the relations which within a year were to result in Goethe's departure from "accursed Frankfort," and his permanent settlement at the Court of Weimar.

As it happens, we have a record of Knebel's impression of Goethe during their few days' intercourse, which as a characterisation comes next in interest to that of Kestner already quoted. "From Wieland," he writes, "you will have been able to learn that I have made the acquaintance of Goethe, and that I think somewhat enthusiastically of him. I cannot help myself, but I swear to you that all of you, all who have heads and hearts, would think of him as I do if you came to know him. He will always remain to me one of the most extraordinary apparitions of my life. Perhaps the novelty of the impression has struck me overmuch, but how can I help it if natural causes produce natural workings in me?... Goethe lives in a state of constant inward war and tumult, since on every subject he feels with the extreme of vehemence. It is a need of his spirit to make enemies with whom he can contend; moreover, it is not the most contemptible adversaries he will single out. He has spoken to me of all those whom he has attacked with special and genuinely felt esteem. But the fellow delights in battle; he has the spirit of an athlete. As he is probably the most singular being who ever existed, he began as follows one evening in Mainz in quite melancholy tones: 'I am now good friends again with everybody--with the Jacobis, with Wieland; and this is not as it should be with me. It is the condition of my being that, as I must have something which for the time being is for me the ideal of the excellent, so also I must have an ideal against which I can direct my wrath.'"[195]

[Footnote 195: Max Morris, _op. cit._ iv. 370-1. About the same date as Knebel's letter, Goethe wrote to Sophie von la Roche: "Das ist was Verfluchtes da.s.s ich anfange mich mit niemand mehr misszuverstehen."

In his 49th year Goethe said of himself: "Opposition ist mir immer notig."]

On Goethe's return to Frankfort sad news awaited him; during his absence the Fraulein von Klettenberg, whom he had left on her sick-bed, had died. It was the severest personal loss he had yet sustained by death. After his sister she had been the chief confidant of all his troubles, his hopes, and ambitions, and he never left her presence without feeling that for the time he had been lifted out of himself. The relations between Goethe and her, indeed, show him in his most attractive light. He had never disguised from her the fact that he could not share the faith by which she lived; he was, as we have seen, even in the habit of jesting at her most cherished beliefs; but there was never a shade of alienation between them. "Bid him adieu,"

was her last message to him through his mother; "I have held him very dear."[196] Take it as we may, it is the singular fact that by none was Goethe regarded with more affectionate esteem than by the two pious mystics, Jung Stilling and Fraulein von Klettenberg.

[Footnote 196: _Ib._ p. 370.]

CHAPTER XIII

LILI SCHoNEMANN

1775

To the year 1775 belongs the third critical period of Goethe's last years in Frankfort. The autumn of 1771 following his return from Stra.s.sburg had been the first of these periods, and was signalised by _Gotz von Berlichingen_, the product of his contrition for Friederike and of the inspiration of Shakespeare. In the summer and autumn of 1772 came the Wetzlar episode, which found expression in _Werther_; and in the opening weeks of 1775 begins the third period of crisis, the issue of which was to be his final leave-taking of Frankfort.

On an evening near the close of 1774 or at the beginning of 1775, a friend introduced Goethe to a house in Frankfort which during the next nine months was to be the centre of his thoughts and emotions. There was a crowd of guests, but Goethe's attention became fixed on a girl seated at a piano, and playing, as he informs us, with grace and facility. The house was that of Frau Schonemann, the widow of a rich banker, and the girl who had excited Goethe's interest was her only daughter, Anna Elisabeth, known by the pet name of Lili--the name by which she is designated in Goethe's own references to her. The musician having risen, Goethe exchanged a few polite compliments with her, and when he took his leave for the evening, the mother expressed the wish that he would soon repeat his visit, the daughter at the same time indicating that his presence would not be disagreeable to her.

The houses of the Goethes and the Schonemanns were only some hundred paces apart, but there had hitherto been no intercourse between the two families, and the reason for this isolation is a significant fact in the relations between Goethe and Lili that were to follow. The Schonemanns moved in a social circle which was rigidly closed to the burgher element in the city, and, when Frau Schonemann gave Goethe the _entree_ to her house, it was because he was an exceptional member of the cla.s.s to which he belonged. In making the acquaintance of the Schonemanns, therefore, he had already to a certain degree compromised himself.[197] In his own account of his relations to Lili he does not disguise the fact that her mother and the friends of the family hardly concealed their feeling that the Goethes were not of their order. In seeking further intercourse with the Schonemanns he was thus putting himself in a delicate position, and the fact that he deliberately chose to do so is proof that his first sight of Lili must have touched his inflammable heart.

[Footnote 197: In a letter written to Johanna Fahlmer from Weimar (April 10th, 1776) Goethe vehemently expresses his dislike of the Schonemann kin. "I have long hated them," he says; "from the bottom of my heart.... I pity the poor creature [Lili] that she was born into such a race."]

During the month of January Goethe became a frequent visitor at the Schonemanns, and there began those relations with Lili which, according to his own later testimony, were to give a new direction to his life, as being the immediate cause of his leaving Frankfort and settling in Weimar. If we are to accept his own averment two years before his death, Lili was the first whom he had really loved, all his other affairs of the heart being "inclinations of no importance."[198]

So he spoke in the retrospect under the influence of an immediate emotion, but his own contemporary testimony proves that his love for Lili was at least not unmingled bliss. Make what reserves we may for the artificial working up of sentiment which was the fashion of the time, that testimony presents us with the picture of a lover who has not only to contend with obstacles which circ.u.mstances put in his way, but with the haunting conviction that his pa.s.sion was leading him astray and that its gratification involved the surrender of his deepest self. As in the case of others of his love pa.s.sages, his relations with Lili evoked a series of literary productions of which they are the inspiration and the commentary, and which exhibit new developments of his genius. We have lyrics addressed to her which, though differently inspired from those addressed to Friederike, take their place with the choicest he has written; we have plays more or less directly bearing on the situation in which he found himself; and, finally, we have his letters to various correspondents in which every phase of his pa.s.sion is recorded at the moment.

[Footnote 198: Eckermann, March 5th, 1830. What has been said of Chateaubriand, who made use of a similar expression, may probably be said with greater truth of Goethe, "Il ment a ses propres souvenirs et a son coeur." In a letter to Frau von Stein (May 24th, 1776) Goethe describes his relation to Friederike Brion as "das reinste, schonste, wahrste, das ich ausser meiner Schwester je zu einem Weibe gehabt."]

In Lili Schonemann Goethe had a different object from any of his previous loves. Kathchen Schonkopf, Friederike, Lotte Buff had all been socially his inferiors, and he could play "the conquering lord"

with them. Lili, on the other hand, was his superior socially--a fact of which her relatives and friends seem to have made him fully conscious. Moreover, though he was in his twenty-sixth year, and she only in her sixteenth, her personal character and her upbringing had given her a maturity beyond that of any of his previous loves. She was clever and accomplished, and already, as a desirable _partie_, she had a considerable experience of masculine arts. As she is represented in her portraits, the firm poise of her head and her clear-cut features suggest the dignity, decision, and self-control of which her subsequent life was to give proof.[199]

[Footnote 199: She is described as a pretty blonde, with blue eyes and fair hair. In a letter (March 30th, 1801) addressed to Lili, then a widow, Goethe writes: "Sie haben in den vergangenen Jahren viel ausgestanden und dabei, wie ich weiss, einen entschlossenen Mut bewiesen, der Ihnen Ehre macht."]

The first two lyrics he addressed to Lili reveal all the difference between his relations to her and to Friederike. Those addressed to Friederike breathe the confidence of returned affection unalloyed by any disturbing reserves; in the case of his effusions to Lili there is always a cloud in his heaven which seems to menace a possible storm.

In the first of these two lyrics, _Neue Liebe, neues Leben_ ("New Love, New Life"), there is even a suggestion of regret to find that he is entangled in a new pa.s.sion. What is noteworthy in connection with all his poems inspired by Lili, however, is that they are completely free from the sentimentality of those he had written under the influence of the ladies of Darmstadt. Though differing in tone from the lyrics addressed to Friederike, they have all their directness, simplicity, and economy of expression. In his Autobiography he tells us that there could be no doubt that Lili ruled him, and in _Neue Liebe, neues Leben_, he acknowledges the spell she has laid upon him with a highly-wrought art without previous example in German literature.

Herz, mein Herz, was soll das geben?

Was bedranget dich so sehr?

Welch ein fremdes neues Leben!

Ich erkenne dich nicht mehr.

Weg ist alles, was du liebtest, Weg, warum du dich betrubtest, Weg dein Fleiss und deine Ruh'-- Ach, wie kamst du nur dazu!

Fesselt dich die Jugendblute, Diese liebliche Gestalt, Dieser Blick voll Treu' und Gute Mit unendlicher Gewalt?

Will ich rasch mich ihr entziehen, Mich ermannen, ihr entfliehen, Fuhret mich im Augenblick Ach, mein Weg zu ihr zuruck.

Und an diesem Zauberfadchen, Das sich nicht zerreissen la.s.st, Halt das liebe, lose Madchen Mich so wider Willen fest; Muss in ihrem Zauberkreise Leben nun auf ihre Weise.

Die Verand'rung, ach, wie gross!

Liebe! Liebe, la.s.s mich los!

Say, heart of me, what this importeth; What distresseth thee so sore?

New and strange all life and living; Thee I recognise no more.

Gone is everything thou loved'st; All for which thyself thou troubled'st; Gone thy toil, and gone thy peace; Ah! how cam'st thou in such case?