Biographical Essays

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Such is the outline of Goethe's life, traced through its principal
events. But as these events, after all, borrow their interest
mainly from the consideration allowed to Goethe as an author, and
as a model in the German literature,--_that_ being the centre
about which all secondary feelings of interest in the man must
finally revolve,--it thus becomes a duty to throw a glance over his
principal works. Dismissing his songs, to which has been ascribed
by some critics a very high value for their variety and their
lyrical enthusiasm; dismissing also a large body of short
miscellaneous poems, suited to the occasional circumstances in
which they arose; we may throw the capital works of Goethe into two
classes, philosophic novels, and dramas. The novels, which we call
_philosophic_ by way of expressing their main characteristic
in being written to serve a preconceived purpose, or to embody some
peculiar views of life, or some aspects of philosophic truth, are
three, viz., the _Werther's Leiden_; secondly, the _Wilhelm
Meister_; and, lastly, the _Wahloer-wand-schaften_. The
first two exist in English translations; and though the
_Werther_ had the disadvantage of coming to us through a
French version, already, perhaps, somewhat colored and distorted to
meet the Parisian standards of sentiment, yet, as respects Goethe
and his reputation amongst us, this wrong has been redressed, or
compensated at least, by the good fortune of his _Wilhelm
Meister_, in falling into the hands of a translator whose
original genius qualified him for sympathizing even to excess with
any real merits in that work. This novel is in its own nature and
purpose sufficiently obscure; and the commentaries which have been
written upon it by the Hurnboldts, Schlegels, &c., make the enigma
still more enigmatical. We shall not venture abroad upon an ocean
of discussion so truly dark, and at the same time so illimitable.
Whether it be qualified to excite any deep and _sincere_
feeling of one kind or another in the German mind,--in a mind
trained under German discipline,--this we will consent to waive as
a question not immediately interesting to ourselves. Enough that it
has not gained, and will not gain, any attention in this country;
and this not only because it is thoroughly deficient in all points
of attraction to readers formed upon our English literature, but
because in some capital circumstances it is absolutely repulsive.
We do not wish to offend the admirers of Goethe; but the simplicity
of truth will not allow us to conceal, that in various points of
description or illustration, and sometimes in the very outline of
the story, the _Wilhelm Meister_ is at open war, not with
decorum and good taste merely, but with moral purity and the
dignity of human nature. As a novelist, Goethe and his reputation
are problems, and likely to continue such, to the countrymen of
Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Harriet Lee, Miss Edgeworth, and Sir Walter
Scott. To the dramatic works of Goethe we are disposed to pay more
homage; but neither in the absolute amount of our homage at all
professing to approach his public admirers, nor to distribute the
proportions of this homage amongst his several performances
according to the graduations of _their_ scale. The
_Iphigenie_ is built upon the old subject of Iphigenia in
Tauris, as treated by Euripides and other Grecian dramatists; and,
if we are to believe a Schlegel, it is in beauty and effect a mere
echo or reverberation from the finest strains of the old Grecian
music. That it is somewhat nearer to the Greek model than a play
after the fashion of Racine, we grant. Setting aside such faithful
transcripts from the antique as the Samson Agonistes, we might
consent to view Goethe as that one amongst the moderns who had made
the closest approximation to the Greek stage. _Proximus_, we
might say, with Quintilian, but with him we must add," _sed lango
intervallo_; "and if in the second rank, yet nearer to the third
than to the first. Two other dramas, the _Clavigo_ and the
_Egmont_, fall below the _Iphigenie_ by the very
character of their pretensions; the first as too openly renouncing
the grandeurs of the ideal; the second as confessedly violating the
historic truth of character, without temptation to do so, and
without any consequent indemnification. The _Tasso_ has been
supposed to realize an Italian beauty of genial warmth and of sunny
repose; but from the common defect of German criticism--the absence
of all sufficient illustrations--it is as difficult to understand
the true nature and constituents of the supposed Italian standard
set up for the regulation of our judgments, as it is to measure the
degree of approach made to that standard in this particular work.
_Eugenie_ is celebrated for the artificial burnish of the
style, but otherwise has been little relished. It has the beauty of
marble sculpture, say the critics of Goethe, but also the coldness.
We are not often disposed to quarrel with these critics as
_below_ the truth in their praises; in this instance we are.
The _Eugenie_ is a fragment, or (as Goethe himself called it
in conversation) a _torso_, being only the first drama in a
trilogy or series of three dramas, each having a separate plot,
whilst all are parts of a more general and comprehensive plan. It
may be charged with languor in the movement of the action, and with
excess of illustration. Thus, _e. g_. the grief of the prince
for the supposed death of his daughter, is the monotonous topic
which occupies one entire act. But the situations, though not those
of _scenical_ distress, are so far from being unexciting,
that, on the contrary, they are too powerfully afflicting.

The lustre of all these performances, however, is eclipsed by the
unrivalled celebrity amongst German critics of the _Faust_.
Upon this it is better to say nothing than too little. How trifling
an advance has been made towards clearing the ground for any sane
criticism, may be understood from this fact, that as yet no two
people have agreed about the meaning of any separate scene, or
about the drift of the whole. Neither is this explained by saying,
that until lately the _Faust_ was a fragment; for no
additional light has dawned upon the main question since the
publication of the latter part.

One work there is of Goethe's which falls into neither of the
classes here noticed; we mean the _Hermann and Dorothea_, a
narrative poem, in hexameter verse. This appears to have given more
pleasure to readers not critical, than any other work of its
author; and it is remarkable that it traverses humbler ground, as
respects both its subject, its characters, and its scenery. From
this, and other indications of the same kind, we are disposed to
infer that Goethe mistook his destination; that his aspiring nature
misled him; and that his success would have been greater had he
confined himself to the _real_ in domestic life, without
raising his eyes to the _ideal_.

We must also mention, that Goethe threw out some novel speculations
in physical science, and particularly in physiology, in the
doctrine of colors, and in comparative anatomy, which have divided
the opinions of critics even more than any of those questions which
have arisen upon points more directly connected with his avowed
character of poet.

It now remains to say a few words by way of summing up his
pretensions as a man, and his intellectual power in the age to
which he belonged. His rank and value as a moral being are so plain
as to be legible to him who runs. Everybody must feel that his
temperament and constitutional tendency was of that happy quality,
the animal so nicely balanced with the intellectual, that with any
ordinary measure of prosperity he could not be otherwise than a
good man. He speaks himself of his own "virtue," _sans
phrase_; and we tax him with no vanity in doing so. As a young
man even at the universities, which at that time were barbarously
sensual in Germany, he was (for so much we collect from his own
Memoirs) eminently capable of self-restraint. He preserves a tone
of gravity, of sincerity, of respect for female dignity, which we
never find associated with the levity and recklessness of vice. We
feel throughout, the presence of one who, in respecting others,
respects himself; and the cheerfulness of the presiding tone
persuades us at once that the narrator is in a healthy moral
condition, fears no ill, and is conscious of having meditated none.
Yet at the same time we cannot disguise from ourselves, that the
moral temperament of Goethe was one which demanded prosperity. Had
he been called to face great afflictions, singular temptations, or
a billowy and agitated course of life, our belief is that his
nature would have been found unequal to the strife; he would have
repeated the mixed and moody character of his father. Sunny
prosperity was essential to his nature; his virtues were adapted to
that condition. And happily that was his fate. He had no personal
misfortunes; his path was joyous in this life; and even the reflex
sorrow from the calamities of his friends did not press too heavily
on his sympathies; none of these were in excess either as to degree
or duration.

In this estimate of Goethe as a moral being, few people will differ
with us, unless it were the religious bigot. And to him we must
concede thus much, that Goethe was not that religious creature
which by nature he was intended to become. This is to be regretted.
Goethe was naturally pious, and reverential towards higher natures;
and it was in the mere levity or wantonness of youthful power,
partly also through that early false bias growing out of the Lisbon
earthquake, that he falsified his original destination. Do we mean,
then, that a childish error could permanently master his
understanding? Not so; _that_ would have been corrected with
his growing strength. But having once arisen, it must for a long
time have moulded his feelings; _until_ corrected, it must
have impressed a corresponding false bias upon his practical way of
viewing things; and that sort of false bias, once established,
might long survive a mere error of the understanding. One thing is
undeniable,--Goethe had so far corrupted and clouded his natural
mind, that he did not look up to God, or the system of things
beyond the grave, with the interest of reverence and awe, but with
the interest of curiosity.

Goethe, however, in a moral estimate, will be viewed pretty
uniformly. But Goethe intellectually, Goethe as a power acting upon
the age in which he lived, that is another question. Let us put a
case; suppose that Goethe's death had occurred fifty years ago,
that is, in the year 1785, what would have been the general
impression? Would Europe have felt a shock? Would Europe have been
sensible even of the event? Not at all; it would have been
obscurely noticed in the newspapers of Germany, as the death of a
novelist who had produced some effect about ten years before. In
1832, it was announced by the post-horns of all Europe as the death
of him who had written the _Wilhelm Meister_, the
_Iphigenie_, and the _Faust_, and who had been enthroned
by some of his admirers on the same seat with Homer and Shakspeare,
as composing what they termed the _trinity of men of genius_.
And yet it is a fact, that, in the opinion of some amongst the
acknowledged leaders of our own literature for the last twenty-five
years, the _Werther_ was superior to all which followed it,
and for mere power was the paramount work of Goethe. For ourselves,
we must acknowledge our assent upon the whole to this verdict; and
at the same time we will avow our belief that the reputation of
Goethe must decline for the next generation or two, until it
reaches its just level. Three causes, we are persuaded, have
concurred to push it so far beyond the proportion of real and
genuine interest attached to his works, for in Germany his works
are little read, and in this country not at all. _First_, his
extraordinary age; for the last twenty years Goethe had been the
patriarch of the German literature. _Secondly_, the splendor
of his official rank at the court of Weimar; he was the minister
and private friend of the patriot sovereign amongst the princes of
Germany. _Thirdly_, the quantity of enigmatical and
unintelligible writing which he has designedly thrown into his
latter works, by way of keeping up a system of discussion and
strife upon his own meaning amongst the critics of his country.
These disputes, had his meaning been of any value in his own eyes,
he would naturally have settled by a few authoritative words from
himself; but it was his policy to keep alive the feud in a case
where it was of importance, that his name should continue to
agitate the world, but of none at all that he should be rightly
interpreted.

SCHILLER.

John Christopher Frederick von Schiller, was born at Marbach, a
small town in the duchy of Wurtemberg, on the 10th day of November,
1759. It will aid the reader in synchronizing the periods of this
great man's life with the corresponding events throughout
Christendom, if we direct his attention to the fact, that
Schiller's birth nearly coincided in point of time with that of
Robert Burns, and that it preceded that of Napoleon by about ten
years.

The position of Schiller is remarkable. In the land of his birth,
by those who undervalue him the most, he is ranked as the second
name in German literature; everywhere else he is ranked as the
first. For us, who are aliens to Germany, Schiller is the
representative of the German intellect in its highest form; and to
him, at all events, whether first or second, it is certainly due,
that the German intellect has become a known power, and a power of
growing magnitude, for the great commonwealth of Christendom.
Luther and Kepler, potent intellects as they were, did not make
themselves known as Germans. The revolutionary vigor of the one,
the starry lustre of the other, blended with the convulsions of
reformation, or with the aurora of ascending science, in too kindly
and genial a tone to call off the attention from the work which
they performed, from the service which they promoted, to the
circumstances of their personal position. Their country, their
birth, their abode, even their separate existence, was merged in
the mighty cause to which they lent their cooperation. And thus at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, thus at the beginning of
the seventeenth, did the Titan sons of Germany defeat their own
private pretensions by the very grandeur of their merits. Their
interest as patriots was lost and confounded in their paramount
interest as cosmopolites. What they did for man and for human
dignity eclipsed what they had designed for Germany. After them
there was a long interlunar period of darkness for the land of the
Rhine and the Danube. The German energy, too spasmodically excited,
suffered a collapse. Throughout the whole of the seventeenth
century, but one vigorous mind arose for permanent effects in
literature. This was Opitz, a poet who deserves even yet to be read
with attention, but who is no more worthy to be classed as the
Dryden, whom his too partial countrymen have styled him, than the
Germany of the Thirty Years' War of taking rank by the side of
civilized and cultured England during the Cromwellian era, or
Klopstock of sitting on the same throne with Milton. Leibnitz was
the one sole potentate in the fields of intellect whom the Germany
of this country produced; and he, like Luther and Kepler, impresses
us rather as a European than as a German mind, partly perhaps from
his having pursued his self-development in foreign lands, partly
from his large circle of foreign connections, but most of all from
his having written chiefly in French or in Latin. Passing onwards
to the eighteenth century, we find, through its earlier half, an
absolute wilderness, unreclaimed and without promise of natural
vegetation, as the barren arena on which the few insipid writers of
Germany paraded. The torpor of academic dulness domineered over the
length and breadth of the land. And as these academic bodies were
universally found harnessed in the equipage of petty courts, it
followed that the lethargies of pedantic dulness were uniformly
deepened by the lethargies of aulic and ceremonial dulness; so
that, if the reader represents to himself the very abstract of
birthday odes, sycophantish dedications, and court sermons, he will
have some adequate idea of the sterility and the mechanical
formality which at that era spread the sleep of death over German
literature. Literature, the very word literature, points the
laughter of scorn to what passed under that name during the period
of Gottsched. That such a man indeed as this Gottsched, equal at
the best to the composition of a Latin grammar or a school
arithmetic, should for a moment have presided over the German
muses, stands out as in itself a brief and significant memorial,
too certain for contradiction, and yet almost too gross for belief,
of the apoplectic sleep under which the mind of central Europe at
that era lay oppressed. The rust of disuse had corroded the very
principles of activity.

And, as if the double night of academic dulness, combined with the
dulness of court inanities, had not been sufficient for the
stifling of all native energies, the feebleness of French models
(and of these moreover naturalized through still feebler
imitations) had become the law and standard for all attempts at
original composition. The darkness of night, it is usually said,
grows deeper as it approaches the dawn; and the very enormity of
that prostration under which the German intellect at this time
groaned, was the most certain pledge to any observing eye of that
intense reaction soon to stir and kindle among the smouldering
activities of this spell-bound people. This re-action, however, was
not abrupt and theatrical. It moved through slow stages and by
equable gradations. It might be said to commence from the middle of
the eighteenth century, that is, about nine years before the birth
of Schiller; but a progress of forty years had not carried it so
far towards its meridian altitude, as that the sympathetic shock
from the French Revolution was by one fraction more rude and
shattering than the public torpor still demanded. There is a
memorable correspondency throughout all members of Protestant
Christendom in whatsoever relates to literature and intellectual
advance. However imperfect the organization which binds them
together, it was sufficient even in these elder times to transmit
reciprocally from one to every other, so much of that illumination
which could be gathered into books, that no Christian state could
be much in advance of another, supposing that Popery opposed no
barriers to free communication, unless only in those points which
depended upon local gifts of nature, upon the genius of a
particular people, or upon the excellence of its institutions.
These advantages were incommunicable, let the freedom of
intercourse have been what it might. England could not send off by
posts or by heralds her iron and coals; she could not send the
indomitable energy of her population; she could not send the
absolute security of property; she could not send the good faith of
her parliaments. These were gifts indigenous to herself, either
through the temperament of her people, or through the original
endowments of her soil. But her condition of moral sentiment, her
high-toned civic elevation, her atmosphere of political feeling and
popular boldness; much of these she could and did transmit, by the
radiation of the press, to the very extremities of the German
empire. Not only were our books translated, but it is notorious to
those acquainted with German novels, or other pictures of German
society, that as early as the Seven Years' War, (1756-1763,) in
fact, from the very era when Cave and Dr. Johnson first made the
parliamentary debates accessible to the English themselves, most of
the German journals repeated, and sent forward as by telegraph,
these senatorial displays to every village throughout Germany. From
the polar latitudes to the Mediterranean, from the mouths of the
Rhine to the Euxine, there was no other exhibition of free
deliberative eloquence in any popular assembly. And the
_Luise_ of Voss alone, a metrical idyl not less valued for its
truth of portraiture than our own Vicar of Wakefield, will show,
that the most sequestered clergyman of a rural parish did not think
his breakfast equipage complete without the latest report from the
great senate that sat in London. Hence we need not be astonished
that German and English literature were found by the French
Revolution in pretty nearly the same condition of semi-vigilance
and imperfect animation. That mighty event reached us both, reached
us all, we may say, (speaking of Protestant states,) at the same
moment, by the same tremendous galvanism. The snake, the
intellectual snake, that lay in ambush among all nations, roused
itself, sloughed itself, renewed its youth, in all of them at the
same period. A new world opened upon us all; new revolutions of
thought arose; new and nobler activities were born; "and other
palms were won."

But by and through Schiller it was, as its main organ, that this
great revolutionary impulse expressed itself. Already, as we have
said, not less than forty years before the earthquake by which
France exploded and projected the scoria of her huge crater over
all Christian lands, a stirring had commenced among the dry bones
of intellectual Germany; and symptoms arose that the breath of life
would soon disturb, by nobler agitations than by petty personal
quarrels, the deathlike repose even of the German universities.
Precisely in those bodies, however, it was, in those as connected
with tyrannical governments, each academic body being shackled to
its own petty centre of local despotism, that the old spells
remained unlinked; and to them, equally remarkable as firm trustees
of truth, and as obstinate depositories of darkness or of
superannuated prejudice, we must ascribe the slowness of the German
movement on the path of reascent. Meantime the earliest
torch-bearer to the murky literature of this great land, this
crystallization of political states, was Bodmer. This man had no
demoniac genius, such as the service required; but he had some
taste, and, what was better, he had some sensibility. He lived
among the Alps; and his reading lay among the alpine sublimities of
Milton and Shakspeare. Through his very eyes he imbibed a daily
scorn of Gottsched and his monstrous compound of German coarseness
with French sensual levity. He could not look at his native Alps,
but he saw in them, and their austere grandeurs or their dread
realities, a spiritual reproach to the hollowness and falsehood of
that dull imposture which Gottsched offered by way of substitute
for nature. He was taught by the Alps to crave for something nobler
and deeper. Bodmer, though far below such a function, rose by favor
of circumstances into an apostle or missionary of truth for
Germany. He translated passages of English literature. He
inoculated with his own sympathies the more fervent mind of the
youthful Klopstock, who visited him in Switzerland. And it soon
became evident that Germany was not dead, but sleeping; and once
again, legibly for any eye, the pulses of life began to play freely
through the vast organization of central Europe.

Klopstock, however, though a fervid, a religious, and for that
reason an anti-Gallican mind, was himself an abortion. Such at
least is our own opinion of this poet. He was the child and
creature of enthusiasm, but of enthusiasm not allied with a
masculine intellect, or any organ for that capacious vision and
meditative range which his subjects demanded. He vas essentially
thoughtless, betrays everywhere a most effeminate quality of
sensibility, and is the sport of that pseudo-enthusiasm and
baseless rapture which we see so often allied with the excitement
of strong liquors. In taste, or the sense of proportions and
congruencies, or the harmonious adaptations, he is perhaps the most
defective writer extant.

But if no patriarch of German literature, in the sense of having
shaped the moulds in which it was to flow, in the sense of having
disciplined its taste or excited its rivalship by classical models
of excellence, or raised a finished standard of style, perhaps we
must concede that, on a minor scale, Klopstock did something of
that service in every one of these departments. His works were at
least Miltonic in their choice of subjects, if ludicrously
non-Miltonic in their treatment of those subjects. And, whether due
to him or not, it is undeniable that in his time the mother-tongue
of Germany revived from the most absolute degradation on record, to
its ancient purity. In the time of Gottsched, the authors of
Germany wrote a macaronic jargon, in which French and Latin made up
a considerable proportion of every sentence: nay, it happened often
that foreign words were inflected with German forms; and the whole
result was such as to remind the reader of the medical examination
in the _Malade Imaginaire_ of Moliere,

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