and ask one's self what there was in Goethe's career and genius to justify the extraordinary interest which centers in him. The minor conditions in Goethe's life were unusually fortunate, for the poet was well born in every sense; his childhood had surroundings picturesque to the eye and full of suggestion to the imagination; he had exceptional educational opportunities, the best and most fruitful of them being his mother's genius for story-telling; he had perfect health and an impressive and winning personality; he never knew care in the ordinary sense of the word, for he was all his life shielded from material uncertainty and anxiety, with work enough of the methodical kind to give him occupation and position, but not enough to diminish the energy of his intelligence or to destroy the freshness of his spirit. He had rank, station, friends, fame, and long life-all great and helpful aids to the unfolding and maturing of a great nature and free flow outward of a great inward force. These prosperous conditions were important, but they were, nevertheless, minor conditions; for they did not bear directly upon the impulse which a creative nature receives from rich material, from a stirring atmosphere, and from that searching appeal to the heart and the imagination made by a great people si'ent but full of spiritual eagerness and restless with unexpressed thought and emotion. Homer spoke to a homogeneous race; Dante to a divided country but to an Italian nature, alert, energétic, and proudly conscious of the possession of great qualities; Shakespeare to an England turbulent, ill-conditioned, and untrained in the higher arts, but overflowing with unspent vitality, with a dawning national consciousness full of insolence but full also of splendid possibilities of growth and achievement. In Goethe's youth there was not only no Germany, but there was, in the deepest sense of the phrase, no German people. There was a multitude of petty States, but there was no Nation; there were Prussians, Hanoverians, Saxons, Bavarians, Swabians, but there was, for the purposes of art, no German race. There was a country held together by geographical conditions, but split into fragments by political boundary lines; there was a race of common origin, but broken asunder by differences of religion, of history, temperament, and ideal; there was a language common to a large community, but still to be enriched by the loving genius of great artists, who are constantly adding to the resources of speech no less than to those of thought. There had been true poets in Germany centuries before Goethe, and the literature was rich in legend and tradition, in epic and song, but it is nevertheless true that there had been no great German literature. Goethe was the contemporary in his old age of Scott and Carlyle, but there was no Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, or Dryden behind him; there were in place of these the old epic poets; there were Hans Sachs, Klopstock, and Wieland. The significance of this statement lies in the fact that, although the German language was as old as the English, it had no great poets. It is true that Homer and Dante had no great predecessors, but each stood at the beginning of the real history of his race; Goethe, on the other hand, appeared at a late hour in that history, and found the literature still to be created and the language still to be modulated to the finer uses of expression. Youth was past, both for the race and the people, but the works of youth were still to be accomplished and the fruits of youth were still to be borne. There were great figures in Germany while Goethe was a student at Leipsic and at Strasbourg; but Lessing, Herder, and Winkelmann were thinkers and critics of the creative temper rather than writers of the creative order and quality. The names of Bodmer and Gottsched, those wooden gods of a Germany in artistic and intellectual tutelage to France, bring before the mind by concrete illustration the aridity of spirit, the shallowness of insight, and the deadness of thought which reigned in Germany in the early years of Goethe's life. Never has a poet of the first rank fallen upon times more uninspiring and come to maturity among a people more divided. Both race and language were old, but they lacked the trained intelligence, the solidarity of experience, the unity of emotion and ideal, which are the finest fruits of maturity. From the very start Goethe was driven back upon himself and forced to undertake consciously and of set purpose the work which, under more inspiring conditions, would have been almost instinctive. For to speak simply and naturally, in good German speech out of a sound German heart, was, at the time "Götz" appeared, to be a reformer and to lead a movement. Not only was the French influence to be destroyed and the French standards, methods, and tastes to be driven out, but a native taste was to be educated, and true racial forms of expression were to be fashioned. Goethe was too selfcentered, even in his youth, and of an intellectual fiber too vigorous, to come under the spell of the shallow foreign influence so widely prevalent. The French classicism, which drew its inspiration, not from the originative literature of the Greeks, but from the derivative literature of the Romans, had no charms for a nature so rich in original instincts and so strongly swayed by the free and living forces of the time. It was to the past of his own people that Goethe turned when he wrote, with a strong, vigorous hand, the virile and genuinely German drama of "Götz he came, however, to the question of other and ampler forms of expression, he was confronted by the fact that he must create or introduce them. Neither the German language nor the German literature furnished them ready to his hand. Style in the true sense of the word was almost unknown in Germany. It was not until the publication of "Tasso" that Goethe's own style in its distinction and perfection was discerned; not until the appearance of "Hermann and Dorothea" that the rhythmic possibilities of the German language were revealed. Klopstock, Hermann Grimm tells us, was the creator of modern German prosody; he wrote the first true German odes, the first real German hexameters; but he became a mannerist, and he never was, at any period, a great writer. When "Hermann and Dorothea" appeared, Gleim declared that the lovely pastoral was a "sin against his holy Voss." The famous translation of Homer was a masterpiece, indeed, and delivered the German hexameter from its academic precision and artificiality, and gave it the freedom and movement of living speech. It was Goethe, however, who first touched this verse, so readily made sluggish and prosaic, with complete ease and skill, and made it so completely at home in German that it seems the native form of one of the most charming pastorals in any mod ern speech. von Berlichingen;" it was the diseased a repetition of his earlier successes. When and disordered fancy among his own Teutonic kin that he portrayed with such searching insight and power in the "Sorrows of Werther." And the storm of acclamation which swept Germany showed how powerfully the chords of racial feeling had been struck and how clear was Goethe's insight into the German nature. It seemed as if a straight and easy road to fame and popularity lay before him; for he had only to hold to Germanic subjects and to the broad, free, Romantic manner to deepen and confirm his hold upon a people who, although become both prosaic and sentimental, had not lost the German 'feeling, and understood a note struck out of chords long silent, but which had not lost the power of vibration. To Goethe, however, with his extraordinary breadth of view and his steadily deepening insight into the nature and functions of art, the situation was not so simple; it was, indeed, highly complex. He felt the loneliness of a man superior in gift and vision, not only to his contemporaries, but to his predecessors in his own field. Lessing had much to teach him in the way of clarification of sight; Herder opened up life on all sides by those luminous glances of his into the heart of things; and without the education which he had from Winkelmann he could never have understood Italy and discerned the secret of antique art as he did in the impressionable years of his famous visit. Nevertheless, to a man of Goethe's power, there was the consciousness of creative possibilities as yet unrealized in the native literature, either past or present. If he had been a dramatist by the structure of his mind, there would have been successors to to "Götz" and "Egmont;" but Goethe was a dramatist by intention rather than by nature. He was drawn away, by the immense range of his mind, from the definiteness and concreteness of the dramatic representation of life. He used the dramatic form many times, and with very great success; but, except in the portrayal of two or three women, he does not convey the impression of being compelled to use that form; and in this connection we must recall his own words: "Talent may do what it will; genius does what it must." He could not find expression for the ideas that thronged about in All this and much more Goethe had to do to free his own mind and to effect that enlargement of German literature which lay within his power. "Egmont," "Tasso," "Iphigenia," "Faust," were thronging about him in the early Weimar days; they filled his imagination, but he seemed incapable of working them out. A richer atmosphere was necessary; another stage in his development was inevitable. Out of the Germany of 1786, with its poverty of literary art and its defective artistic instinct, Goethe passed into Italy, and came under the full power of that great art to which he had long been drawn and with which he had so much in common. Then came what has so often been regarded as the break with his past; as if the continuity of a life were to be sought in its works rather than in itself! Whether wisely or unwisely it is unnecessary to discuss here, the writer of the romantic temper and methods became a writer of classical temper and methods. To" Götz" and "Werther" succeeded "Iphigenia," "Tasso," and the "Roman Elegies;" and to the storm of applause which greeted the earlier pieces succeeded the silence of indifference or the murmurs of criticism. Goethe lost his audience, and did not completely regain it until the publication of the first part of "Faust" in 1808. He had not only discarded old forms and employed new ones, but he had wholly changed his attitude towards his work; he not only modeled his work freely on classical models, but he attempted to detach himself from it and remove it as definitely from all relation to his life as the works of Sophocles were freed from all trace of connection, except the inevita THE GARDEN OF GOETHE'S HOUSE ble local color and individual touch, with From any point of view the |