get into debt, which in my place would be very unseemly. This sum you shall receive regularly. Try to make it do. "I certainly do not suppose that you will change your place of residence without my knowledge and consent. Every man has his duty, make a duty of your love to me and you will find it light. "It would be very disagreeable to me if you were to borrow from anyone. It is precisely this miserable unrest now troubling you which has been the misfortune of your whole life, and you have never been more contented with a thousand dollars than you now are with two hundred; because you always still desired something which you had not, and have never accustomed your soul to accept the limits of necessity. I do not reproach you with it; I know, unhappily too well, how it pertains to you, and feel how painful must be the contrast between your present and your past. But enough! One word for a thousand: at the end of every quarter you shall receive fifty dollars; for the present an advance shall be made. Limit your wants the Must is hard, and yet solely by this Must can we show how it is with us in our inner man. To live according to caprice requires no peculiar powers."* The following explains itself: 66 If you once more read over my last letter you will see plainly that you have misinterpreted it. You are neither fallen in my esteem, nor have I a bad opinion of you, neither have I suffered my good opinion to be led astray, nor has your mode of thinking become damaged in my eyes: all these are exaggerated expressions, such as a rational man should not permit himself. Because I also speak out my thoughts with freedom, because I wish certain traits in your conduct and views somewhat different, does that mean that I look on you as a bad man, and that I wish to discontinue our relations? "It is these hypochondriacal, weak and exaggerated notions, such as your last letter contains, which I blame and regret. Is it proper that you should say to me: I am to prescribe the tone in which all your future letters must be written. Does one command an honourable, rational man such things as that? Is it ingenuous in you on such an occasion to underline the words that you eat my bread? Is it becoming in a moral being, when one gently blames him, or names something in him as a malady, to fly out as if one had pulled the house about his ears? Do not misconstrue me, therefore, if I wish to see you contented and satisfied with the little I can do for you. I will give the original of this fine saying, as I have rendered it but clumsily: Das Muss ist hart, aber beim Muss kann der Mensch allein zeigen wie's inwendig mit ihm steht. Willkürlich leben kann jeder. So, if you will, things shall remain just as they were; at all events I shall not change my behaviour towards you." The unhappy man seems to have been brought to a sense of his injustice by this, for although there is but one more letter, bearing the date 1783, that is, two years subsequent to the one just given, the connection lasted for seven years. When Goethe undertook to write the life of Duke Bernhard he employed Kraft to make extracts for him from the Archives; which extracts, Luden, when he came to look over them with a biographical purpose, found utterly worthless. The last words we find of Goethe's addressed to Kraft are, "You have already been of service to me, and other opportunities will offer. I have no grace to dispense, and my favour is not so fickle. Farewell, and enjoy your little in peace." It was terminated only by the death of the poor creature in 1785. Goethe buried him at his own expense, but even to the Jena officials he did not disclose Kraft's real name.† To my apprehension these letters reveal a nature so exquisite in far-thoughted tenderness, so true and human in its sympathies with suffering, and so ready to alleviate suffering by sacrifices rarely made to friends, much less to strangers, that, after reading them, the epithets of "cold" and "heartless," often applied to Goethe, sound like blasphemies against the noblest feelings of humanity. Observe, this Kraft was no romantic object appealing to the sensibility; he had no thrilling story to stimulate sympathy; there was no subscription list opened for him; there were no coteries weeping over his misfortunes. Unknown, unfriended, ill at ease with himself and with the world, he revealed his wretchedness in secret to the great poet, and in secret that poet pressed his hand, dried his eyes, and ministered to his wants. And he did this not as one act, not as one passing impulse, but as the sustained sympathy of seven years. Pitiful and pathetic is the thought that such a man can, for so many years, both in his own country and in ours, have been reproached, nay even vituperated as cold and heartless! A certain reserve and stiffness of manner, a certain soberness of old age, a want of political enthusiasm, and some sentences wrenched from their true meaning, are the evidences whereon men build the strange hypothesis that he was an Olympian Jove sitting above Humanity, seeing life but not feeling it, his heart dead to all noble impulses, his * See LUDEN's Rückblicke in Mein Leben. + I learn this from a letter to the Judge at Jena, which was exhibited at the Goethe Austellung in Berlin, 1861. career a calculated egotism. How it was that one so heartless became the greatest poet of modern times-how it was that he whose works contained the widest compass of human life, should himself be a bloodless pulseless diplomatist-no one thought of explaining, till Menzel arose, aud with unparalleled effrontery maintained that Goethe had no genius, but only talent, and that the miracle of his works lies in their style-a certain adroitness in representation. Menzel is a man so completely rejected by England-the translation of his work met with such hopeless want of encouragement, that I am perhaps wrong to waste a line upon it; but the bold style in which his trenchant accusations are made, and the assumption of a certain manliness as the momentum to his sarcasms, have given his attacks on Goethe a circulation independent of his book. To me he appears radically incompetent to appreciate a poet. I should as soon think of asking the first stalwart Kentish farmer for his opinion on the Parthenon. The farmer would doubtless utter some energetic sentences expressing his sense of its triviality; but the coarse energy of his language would not supply the place of knowledge, feeling, and taste; nor does the coarse energy of Menzel's style supply those deficiences of nature and education which incapacitate him for the perception of Art. The paradox still remains, then, in spite of Menzel: a great poet destitute of the feelings which poetry incarnates-a man destitute of soul giving expression to all the emotions he has not-a man who wrote Werther, Egmont, Faust, Hermann und Dorothea, and Meister, yet knew not the joys and sorrows of his kind; will any one defend that paradox?* Not only that paradox, but this still more inexplicable one, that all who knew Goethe, whether they were his peers or his servants, loved him only as lovable natures can be loved. Children, women, clerks, professors, poets, princes-all loved him. Even Herder, bitter against every one, spoke of him with a reverence which astonished Schiller, who writes: "He is by many besides. Herder named with a species of devotion, and still more loved as a man than admired as an author. Herder says he has a clear, universal mind, the truest and deepest feeling, and the greatest purity of heart." Men might learn so much from his works, had not the I remember once, as we were walking along Piccadilly, talking about the infamous Büchlein von Goethe, Carlyle stopped suddenly, and with his peculiar look and emphasis, said, " Yes, it is the wild cry of amazement on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not a spooney too! Here is a godlike intellect, and yet you see he is not an idiot! Not in the least a spooney!" + Briefw. mit Körner, 1, p. 136. notion of his coldness and indifference disturbed their judgment. "In no line," says Carlyle, "does he speak with asperity of any man, scarcely of anything. He knows the good and loves it; he knows the bad and hateful and rejects it; but in neither case with violence. His love is calm and active; his rejection implied rather than pronounced.” And Schiller, when he came to appreciate by daily intercourse the qualities of his great friend, thus wrote of him: "It is not the greatness of his intellect which binds me to him. If he were not as a man more admirable than any I have ever known, I should only marvel at his genius from the distance. But I can truly say that in the six years I have lived with him, I have never for one moment been deceived in his character. He has a high truth and integrity, and is thoroughly in earnest for the Right and the Good; hence all hypocrites and phrasemakers are uncomfortable in his presence.' And the man of whom Schiller could think thus is believed by many to have been a selfish egotist, "wanting in the higher moral feelings"! But so it is in life: a rumour, originating perhaps in thoughtless ignorance, and circulated by malice, gains credence in the face of probability, and then no amount of evidence suffices to dissipate it. There is an atmosphere round certain names, a halo of glory or a halo of infamy, and men perceive this halo without seeking to ascertain its origin. Every public man is in some respects mythical; and the fables are believed in spite of all the contradictions of evidence. It is useless to hope that men will pause to inquire into the truth of what they hear said of another, before accepting and repeating it; but with respect to Goethe, who has now been more than a quarter of a century in his grave, one may hope that evidence so strong as these pages furnish may be held more worthy of credence than anything which gossip or ignorance, misconception or partizanship has put forth without proof. BOOK THE FIFTH. 1779 to 1793. "Wenn sich der Most auch ganz absurd gebärdet, "Von jener Macht, die alle Wesen bindet Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet." "Postquam me experientia docuit, omnia, quæ in communi vita frequenter occurrunt, vana et futilia esse; quum viderem omnia, a quibus et quæ timebam, nihil neque boni neque mali in se habere, nisi quatenus ab iis animus movebatur: constitui tandem inquirere, an aliquid daretur quod verum bonum et sui communicabile esset, et a quo solo rejectis ceteris omnibus animus afficeretur; imo an aliquid daretur, quo invento et acquisito continua ac summa in æternum fruerer lætitia." SPINOSA. CHAPTER I. NEW-BIRTH. THE changes slowly determining the evolution of character, when from the lawlessness of Youth it passes into the clear stability of Manhood, resemble the evolution of harmony in the tuning of an orchestra, when from stormy discords wandering in pursuit of concord, all the instruments gradually subside into the true key: round a small centre the hurrying sounds revolve, one by one falling into that centre, and increasing its circle, at first slowly, and afterwards with ever-accelerated velocity, till victorious concord emerges from the tumult. Or they may be likened to the gathering splendour of the dawn, as at first slowly, and afterwards with silent velocity, it drives the sullen darkness to the rear, and with a tidal sweep of light takes tranquil possession of the sky. Images such as these represent the dawn of a new epoch in Goethe's life; an epoch when the wanderings of an excitable nature are gradually falling more and more within the circle of law; when aims, before vague, now become |