by Will Durant
On September 1, 1786, Goethe wrote to Charlotte from Karlsbad:
Now a final farewell. I want to repeat to you that I love you dearly … and that your assurance that you are again taking pleasure in my love renews the joy of my life. I have borne much in silence hitherto, but I have desired nothing more intensely than that our relationship might take a form over which no circumstance could have power. If that cannot be, I would not dwell where you are, but rather be alone in that world into which I now go forth.59
IV. GOETHE IN ITALY: 1786-88
He traveled under a pseudonym, “M. Jean-Philippe Möller,” for he wished to be freed from the inconveniences of fame. He was thirty-seven years old, but he came with even more than the bright expectancy of youth, and much better prepared, knowing something of Italy’s history and art. On September 18 he wrote to Herder, “I hope to return a newborn person,” and to Karl August, “I hope to bring back a thoroughly cleansed and far better equipped human being.” To these and other friends he sent “Letters from Italy” that still have in them the allegrezza of Italian life. He prefaced them with the old motto Auch in Arkadien—ht too was now in Arcady. We have seen elsewhere how grateful he was for the sunshine; “I believe in God again!” he cried out as he entered Italy.60 But he loved the Italian people too, their open faces and hearts, the naturalness of their lives, the passion and jollity of their speech. Being a scientist as well as a poet, he made note of meteorological peculiarities, geological formations, mineral specimens, varieties of animals and plants; he liked even the lizards that darted over the rocks.
He was so eager to reach Rome that he passed hurriedly through Venezia, Lombardy, and Tuscany. But he stopped long enough in Vicenza to feel the classic simplicity and power of Palladio’s architecture. He strongly reaffirmed his antipathy to Gothic: “from all taste for those … tobacco-pipe shafts, our little steeple-crowned towers and foliated terminals, … I am now, thank God, set free forever! … Palladio has opened the road for me to every … art.”61 Through that road he went back to Vitruvius, whom he studied in an edition by Galiani, our witty friend from Naples and Paris. The classical style now became a passion with him, coloring his works and thought, re-forming some past productions, like Iphigenie and Tasso, into classic mold and line. In Venice the baroque palaces seemed immodestly garish, too femininely elegant; and even from the Renaissance façades he turned to the relics of classic architecture and statuary in the museums. But his warm blood responded to the color and pride of Veronese and Titian.
In Ferrara he sought in vain the palace where Tasso had been confined. After three days in Bologna and only three hours in Florence, he rushed on through Perugia and Terni and Città di Castello, and on October 29, 1786, he rode through the Porta del Popolo into Rome. Now he felt a passing moment of modesty. “All roads are open to me, because I walk in a spirit of humility.”62
Not yet master of spoken Italian, he sought out the German colony, and especially the artists, for he aspired to learn at least the elements of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Angelica Kauffmann admired his enthusiasm and good looks; she painted a portrait of him, stressing his black hair, lofty forehead, and clear eyes. He formed an intimate friendship with Johann Hein-rich Wilhelm Tischbein, who handed him down to us, in the famous Goethe in der Campagna,63 reclining at ease as if he had conquered Arcady. Long before coming to Italy Goethe had corresponded with this painter; they met for the first time on November 3, when they converged in the Piazza San Pietro; the poet recognized the artist, and introduced himself simply: “I am Goethe.”64 Tischbein described him in a letter to Lavater:
I found him to be quite what I had expected. The only thing that surprised me was the gravity and tranquillity of one of such vivid sensibility, and also that he is able to be at ease and at home in all circumstances. What pleases me still more is the simplicity of his life. All he asked me to provide for him was a little room where he could sleep and work without interruption; and the very simplest fare. … Now he sits in that little room and works at his Iphigenie from early in the morning till nine o’clock. Then he goes out to study the great works of art.65
Tischbein often guided him in these explorations, had drawings made for him, and secured for him copies of the more famous paintings; Goethe himself made sketches of what he especially wished to recall. He tried his hand at sculpture, and modeled a head of Hercules. He admitted that he had no talent for the plastic arts, but he felt that these experiments gave him a better sense of form, and helped him to visualize what he wished to describe.66 He pored over Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art; “Here on the spot I find it highly valuable. … Now at last my mind can rise to the greatest and purest creations of art with calm consideration.”67 “The history of the whole world attaches itself to this spot, and I reckon a … true new birth since the day I entered Rome.... I think I am changed to the very marrow.”68 Meanwhile he seems to have enjoyed the living art provided by the “dainty” models who posed in the studios.69 His stay in Rome completed that de-romantification which had begun with the responsibilities of office. Now the lawlessness of Götz and the tears of Werther seemed to the maturing Goethe signs of an unbalanced mind; “romanticism is a disease,” he said; “classicism is health.”70 There was something romantic in his new enthusiasm for classic marbles, columns, capitals, and pediments, and the pure lines of Greek statuary. “If we really want a pattern, we must always return to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented.”71 Like Winckelmann, Goethe saw only the “Apollonian” side of Greek civilization and art—the exaltation of form and restraint; he now almost ignored that “Dionysian” ecstasy which so warmly colored Greek character, religion, and life, and which, in Goethe himself, had spoken through his “daimon” and his loves.
It was in this classic rapture that he rewrote Iphigenie auf Tauris in verse (1787), resolved to rival Racine, even Euripides himself. Still cherishing the embers of the fire that Charlotte von Stein had ignited in him, he poured into the speeches of the Greek princess something of the tenderness and self-control of the German baroness. He told the old story well, with all its complications of mythology and genealogy; he intensified the drama by portraying the Scythian king favorably; and he dared to change the ending to accord with the idea—rare among the Greeks—that one has moral obligations even to “barbarians.” Only those who can read German fluently can appreciate Goethe’s performance; yet Hippolyte Taine, a Frenchman, a supreme critic, and presumably familiar with Racine’s dramas, said: “I place no modern work above Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris”72
The memories of Charlotte in this play, and still more in Torquato Tasso, which he rewrote in Rome, revived his feeling for her. She had been deeply wounded by his sudden flight to Italy, and by his leaving her boy in charge of a servant; she at once took Fritz back, and demanded the return of all the letters she had written to Goethe. He wrote apologetically from Rome (December 8, 13, and 20, 1786); she sent him (December 18) a note of “bittersweet” reproof; he answered (December 23): “I cannot express to you how it pierces my heart that you are ill, and ill through my fault. Forgive me. I myself fought with death and life, and no tongue can speak the things that went on within me.” Finally she relented. “Now,” he wrote on February 1, 1787, “I can go to work in a happier mood, since I have a letter from you in which you say that you love and take delight in my letters.”
In that month he and Tischbein went to Naples. He ascended Vesuvius twice; on his second attempt a minor eruption covered his head and shoulders with ashes. He reveled in the classic ruins at Pompeii, and marveled at the simple majesty of the Greek temples at Paestum. Returning to Rome, he took ship to Palermo, went on to study the classic temples at Segeste and Girgenti (Agrigento), stood in the Greek theater at Taormina, and was back in Rome in June. More and more in love with “the most remarkable city in the whole world,”73 he persuaded Duke Karl August to continue his salary to the end of 1787. When that extension expired,
he slowly reconciled himself to the North. He left Rome on April 25, 1788, traveled leisurely through Florence, Milan, and Como, and reached Weimar on June 18. Every day he wondered how the Duke, the court, and Charlotte would receive a Goethe who felt himself transformed.
V. GOETHE WAITING: 1788-94
With the absent poet’s consent the Duke had appointed a new president of the Council; now, at his own request, Goethe was relieved of all official duties except as minister of education, and henceforth he served the Council only in an advisory capacity. The Duke was kind, but he had taken other intimates, and he did not like the semirepublican sentiments of the rewritten Egmont. The reading public had almost forgotten Goethe; it had taken up a new poet called Schiller, and had enthusiastically applauded a play, The Robbers, full of that Sturm-und-Drang rebelliousness and violence which now seemed absurd and immature to a poet ready to preach classic order and restraint. Charlotte von Stein received him coldly; she resented his long absence, his leisurely return, his persistent rapture about Italy; and perhaps she had heard of those models in Rome. Their first meeting after his arrival was “utterly false in tone,” she wrote, “and nothing but boredom was exchanged between us.”74 She left for a stay in Kochberg, and Goethe was free to think of Christiane Vulpius.
She came into his life on July 12, 1788, bearing a message from her brother. She was twenty-three years old, and worked in a factory making artificial flowers. Goethe was struck with her fresh spirit, her simple mind, her budding womanhood. He invited her to his garden house as his housekeeper, and soon made her his mistress. She had no education, and “cannot understand poetry at all,” said Goethe,75 but she yielded herself trustfully, and gave him the physical fulfillment that Charlotte had apparently refused. In November, 1789, when she was nearing motherhood, he took her into his Weimar home, and openly made her his wife in all but name. Charlotte and the court were shocked at his crossing class lines and his failure to veil the illicit relation; this reaction caused him and Christiane much grief; but the Duke, an old hand with mistresses, served as godfather to the child that was born on Christmas Day, 1789, and Herder, stern but forgiving, christened it August.
Goethe, so often a lover but only now a father, found much happiness in “the little man” and “das kleine Weib” the little woman. She kept house for him, she listened to him lovingly even when she did not understand him, and she gave him health. “Since she first crossed this threshold,” he told a friend, “I have had nothing but joy of her.”76 Her only fault in his eyes was that she loved wine even more than he did, and that it sometimes led her to almost uncontrolled merriment. She frequented the theater, and went to many dances while Goethe stayed home and celebrated her in his Römische Elegien (1789-90), written in the manner of Propertius and with the morals of Catullus. There is nothing mournful about these “Roman elegies”; they get their names from their “elegiac” meter of alternating hexameters and pentameters; and they concern not Rome but a merry widow through whose disguise we see Christiane herself.
All that thy sacred walls, eternal Rome, hold within them
Teemeth with life; but to me all is still silent and dead.
Oh, who will whisper unto me?—when shall I see at the casement
That one beauteous form, which, while it scorcheth, revives? . . .
Do not repent, mine own love, that thou so soon didst surrender!
Trust me; I deem thee not bold; reverence only I feel. . . .
Alexander and Caesar and Henry and Frederick, the mighty,
On me would gladly bestow half of the glory they earned,
Could I but grant unto them one night on the couch where I’m lying;
But they by Orcus’ night sternly, alas, are held down.
Therefore rejoice, O thou living one, blest in thy love-lighted homestead,
Ere the dark Lethe’s sad wave wetteth thy fugitive foot.77
That pretty widow may have been a Roman memory, but the warmth of these lines came from Christiane. After all, was he not studying art?
Yet it is studious too with sensitive hand
To mark her bosom’s lovely curves, and let
Wise fingers glide down the smooth thigh, for thus
I master the antique sculptor’s craft, reflect,
Compare, and apprehend to come and see
With feeling eye, and feel with seeing hand.78
The Weimar ladies were not pleased by this cheapening exposure of their charms, and the stately Charlotte mourned the degeneration of her Galahad. Even Karl August was a bit disturbed, but was soon appeased. When the Dowager Duchess was returning from Italy he sent Goethe to Venice to escort her home. His stay there (March to June, 1790) was protracted uncomfortably; he longed for Christiane, and vented his irritation with Italian shopkeepers and hygiene in Venezianische Epigramme— the least attractive of his works.
On his return from Venice he found that the French Revolution was arousing the youth of Germany to ecstasy, and the rulers to fear. Many of his friends, including Wieland and Herder, were applauding the overthrow of monarchical absolutism in France. Goethe, perceiving that all thrones were threatened, took his stand beside the Duke, and counseled caution; so many people, he said, were “running about with bellows in their hands, when, it seems to me, they had better be looking for cold-water jugs” to control the fire.79 He obeyed the order of Karl August to accompany him in the campaign of the First Coalition against France. He was present at the battle of Valmy (September 20, 1792), stood calmly under fire, and shared in the defeat. A German officer recorded in his diary that when the poet-councilor was asked to comment on the event, he answered, “From today and from this place begins a new epoch in the history of the world”80; we have no confirmation of this “story. In any case, back in Weimar, Goethe wrote vigorously against the Revolution, which was entering the period (1792-94) of its excesses and savagery.
These developments confirmed in Goethe the natural turn of the maturing mind from a zest for liberty to a love of order. As any fool can be original, so Goethe felt that “any fool can live arbitrarily,”81 safely violating customs or laws because others observe them. He had no enthusiasm for democracy; if ever such a system should actually be practiced it would be the sovereignty of simplicity, ignorance, superstition, and barbarity. He was kindly and generous within his sphere, and spent part of his income in secret charities,82 but he shrank from the crowd. In the presence of multitudes or strangers he withdrew proudly and timidly within himself, and found his only happiness in his home. In these unsettling years (1790-94) he fell into a somber torpor from which he was aroused by the touch of Schiller’s ardent youth and the competition of his pen.
VI. SCHILLER WAITING: 1787-94
When Schiller reached Weimar Goethe was in Italy. The almost penniless poet admitted jealousy of the absent councilor. “While he is painting in Italy, the Toms, Dicks, and Harrys are sweating for him like beasts of burden. He is squandering a salary of 1,800 thalers there, and here they have to work double tides for half the money.”83 On August 12, 1787, he wrote more favorably:
Goethe is spoken of here by many with a sort of devotion, and is even more loved and admired as a man than as an author. Herder says he has a most clear judgment, great depth of feeling, and the purest sentiments. … According to Herder, Goethe is free from all spirit of intrigue; he has never done harm to anyone.... In his political transactions he acts openly and boldly. … Herder says that as a man of affairs Goethe is more deserving of admiration than as a poet, … that he has a mind large enough for anything.84
The Duke was away when Schiller came, but Anna Amalie and Charlotte von Stein received him cordially. Wieland told him that he “was wanting in polish, clearness, and taste,”85 and offered to polish him; soon the eager poet was contributing to Wieland’s Teutsche Merkur. He found more intimate entertainment with Charlotte von Kalb, who, like the other Charlotte, had a broad-minded husband. “People begin to whisper pretty loudly here about my connection with Charlot
te. … Herr von Kalb has written to me. He comes here at the end of September, and his arrival will greatly influence my arrangements. His friendship for me remains unchanged, which is astonishing, for he loves his wife, and is aware of my intimacy with her. … But he can never for one moment doubt her fidelity. … He still remains the honest, goodhearted fellow he always was.”86
On August 27, 1787, Don Carlos had its première in Hamburg. Schiller was too fond of Weimar to attend. This, his first play in verse, was both praised and condemned as a surrender to the style of French tragedy, but it lacked the dramatic unity required by Aristotelian rules. It began with the conflict between Philip II and his son for the love of Elizabeth of Valois; then, mid-play, the center of interest shifted to the struggle of the Netherlands to free themselves from Spanish suzerainty and Alva’s cruelty. Schiller tried to give an impartial portrait of Philip, and Protestant readers applauded the appeal of Marquis Posa to the King:
Your Majesty,
I lately passed through Flanders and Brabant—
So many rich and blooming provinces,
Filled with a valiant, great, and honest people!
To be the father of a race like this
I thought must be divine indeed! And then
I stumbled on a heap of burned men’s bones! . . .
Restore us all you have deprived us of,
And, generous and strong, let happiness
Flow from your horn of plenty; let man’s mind
Ripen in your vast empire, … and become
Amidst a thousand kings a king indeed! . . .
Let every subject be what once he was—
The end and object of the monarch’s care,
Bound by no duty save a brother’s love.87
Despite the success of Don Carlos, Schiller for a long time abandoned drama. In 1786 he had written to Körner: “History has with each successive day new attractions for me.... I wish I had studied nothing else for ten years together; I think I should have been another sort of being. Do you think there is yet time to make up for what I have lost?”88 He could not support himself, much less a family, on the proceeds of occasional plays that even after an applauded première might wither to an early death. Perhaps some successful work of history would give him sufficient reputation as a scholar to win a professorship in the University of Jena. There he would be only fourteen miles from Weimar, and still within the jurisdiction and bounty of the Duke.
