CHAPTER IV.

VARIOUS STUDIES.

AT length, June, 1761, the French quitted Frankfort; and studies were seriously resumed. Mathematics, music, and drawing were commenced under paternal superintendence. For mathematics Wolfgang had no aptitude; for music little; he learned to play on the harpsichord, and subsequently on the violoncello, but he never attained any proficiency. Drawing continued through life a pleasant exercise.

Left now to the calm of uninterrupted studies, he made gigantic strides. Even the hours of recreation were filled with some useful occupation. He added English to his polyglot store; and to keep up his several languages, he invented a Romance, wherein six or seven brothers and sisters scattered over the world corresponded with each other. The eldest describes in good German all the incidents of his travels; his sister answers in womanly style with short sharp sentences, and nothing but full stops, much as " Siegwart" was afterward written. Another brother studies theology, and therefore writes in Latin, with postcripts in Greek. third and a fourth, clerks at Hamburg and Marseilles, take English and French; Italian is given to a musician; while the youngest, who remains at home, writes in Jew-German. This romance led him to a more accurate study of geography. Having placed his characters in various parts of the globe, he was not satisfied till he had a distinct idea of these localities, so that the objects and events should be consonant with

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probability. While trying to master the strange dialect Jew-German he was led to the study of Hebrew. As the original language of the Old Testament this seemed to him an indispensable acquisition. His father consented to give him a Hebrew master; and although he attained no scholarship in that difficult language, yet the reading, translating, and committing to memory of various parts of the Bible brought out the meaning more vividly before him; as every one will understand who compares the lasting effect produced by the laborious school reading of Sallust and Livy with the facile reading of Robertson and Hume. The Bible made a profound impression upon him. To a boy of his constitutional reflectiveness, the severe study of this book could not fail to exercise a deep and permeating influence; nor, at the same time, in one so accustomed to think for himself, could it fail to awaken certain doubts. "The contradiction," he says, "between the actual or possible, and tradition, forcibly arrested me. I often posed my tutors with the sun standing still on Gideon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon; not to mention other incongruities and impossibilities. All my doubts were now awakened, as in order to master the Hebrew I studied the literal version by Schmidt, printed under the text."

One result of these Hebrew studies was a Biblical poem on Joseph and his brethren; which he dictated to a poor half idiot who lived in his father's house, and who had a mania for copying or writing under dictation. Goethe soon found the process of dictation of great service; and through life it continued to be his favourite mode of composition. All his best thoughts and expressions, he says, came to him while walking; he could do nothing seated.

To these multifarious studies in Literature must be added multifarious studies of Life. The old Frankfort city with its busy crowds, its fairs, its mixed population,

and its many sources of excitement, offered great temptations, and great pasture to so desultory a genius. This is perhaps a case wherein Circumstance may be seen influencing the direction of Character. A boy of less impressionable nature, of less many-sided curiosity, would have lived in such a city undisturbed ; some eyes would see little of the variety, some minds would be unsolicited by the exciting objects. But Goethe's desultory, because impulsive, nature found continual excitement in fresh objects; and he was thus led to study many things, to grasp at many forms of life, instead of concentrating himself upon a few. A large continuity of thought and effort was perhaps radically uncongenial to such a temperament; yet one cannot help speculating whether under other circumstances he might not have achieved it. Had he been reared in a quiet little old German town, where he would have daily seen the same faces in the silent streets, and come in contact with the same characters, his culture might have been less various, but it might perhaps have been deeper. Had he been reared in the country, with only the changing seasons and the sweet serenities of Nature to occupy his attention when released from study, he would certainly have been a different poet. The long summer afternoons spent in lonely rambles, the deepening twilights filled with shadowy visions, the slow uniformity of his external life necessarily throwing him more and more upon the subtle diversities of inward experience, would inevitably have influenced his genius in quite different directions, would have animated his works with a very different spirit. Yet who shall say that to him this would have been all gain? Who shall say that it would not have been a loss? For such an organisation as his the life he led was perhaps the very best. He was desultory, and the varieties of objects which solicited his attention, while they helped to encourage that tendency, also

helped to nourish his mind with images such as afterward became the richest material for his art.

At any rate, it is idle to speculate on what would have been; we must concern ourselves with what was. The boy saw much of life, in the lower as in the upper classes. He passed from the society of the Count de Thorane, and of the artists whom the count assembled round him (from whom the boy learnt something of the technical details of painting), to the society of the Jews in the strange, old, filthy, but deeply interesting Judengasse; or to that of various artisans, in whose shops his curiosity found perpetual food. The Jews were doubly interesting to him: as social pariahs, over whom there hovered a mingled mystery of terror and contempt, and as descendants of the Chosen People, who preserved the language, the opinions, and many of the customs of the old Biblical race. He was impressed by their adherence to old customs; by their steadfastness and courageous activity; by their strange features and accents, by their bright cleverness and good nature. The pretty Jewish maidens, also, smiled agreeably upon him. He began to mingle with them; managed to get permission to attend some of their ceremonies; and attended their schools. As to artisans, he was all his life curious about their handicrafts, and fond of being admitted into their family circles. Scott himself was not fonder of talking to one; nor did Scott make better use of such manifold experience. Frederika's sister told a visitor that Goethe knew several handicrafts, and had even learned basket-making from a lame man in Sesenheim. Here in Frankfort the boy was welcome in many a shop. The jeweller, Lautensack, gladly admitted him to witness the mysteries of his art, while he made the bouquet of jewels for the Kaiser, or a diamond snuff-box which Rath Goethe had ordered as a present for his wife; the boy eagerly questioning him respecting precious stones, and the engrav

ings which the jeweller possessed.

Nothnagel, the painter, had established an oilcloth manufactory; and the boy not only learned all the processes, but lent a helping hand.

Besides these forms of life, there were others whose influence must not be overlooked; one of these brings before us the Fräulein von Klettenberg, of whom we first get a glimpse in connection with his confirmation, which took place at this period, 1763. The readers of "Wilhelm Meister" are familiar with this gentle and exquisite character, where she is represented in the "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," In the " Confessions we see that the "piety" and retirement are represented less as the consequences of evangelical illumination than of moral serenity and purity shrinking from contact with a world of which it has been her fate to see the coarsest features. The real Fräulein von Klettenberg it is perhaps now impossible to separate from the ideal so beautifully painted by Goethe. On him her influence was avowedly very great, both at this period and subsequently. It was not so much the effect of religious discussion, as the experience it gave him of a deeply religious nature. She was neither bigot nor prude. Her faith was an inner light which shed mild radiance around her. Moved by her influence, he wrote a series of "Religious Odes," after the fashion of that day, and greatly pleased his father by presenting them copied neatly in a quarto volume. His father begged that every year he would present him with such a volume.

1 Or as we in England, following Carlyle, have been misled into calling it, the "Confessions of a Fair Saint." The schöne Seele une belle âme, was one of the favourite epithets of the last century. Goethe applies it to Klopstock, who was neither "saint nor fair."

2 In Varnhagen von Ense's "Vermischte Schriften " (vol. iii. p. 33) the reader will find a few significant details respecting this remarkable person, and some of her poems.