Goethe, JOHANN WOLFGANG, was born in Frankfort-on-the-Main, August 28, 1749. His father was a Doctor of Laws and obtained the title of imperial councillor. He was a man of honour- able life, vigorous character, steadfast, industrious, and methodical; he possessed considerable culture, and was a special lover of Italian literature and art. Goethe's mother (1731-1808), daughter of J. W. Textor, chief-magistrate of Frankfort, was only eighteen when her son was born; she was remarkable for her bright temper and good sense. One child besides Goethe lived to adult years—his sister Cornelia, the companion of his youth (married 1773 to J. G. Schlosser, died 1777). The family occupied a house in the Hirschgraben, the rebuilding of which was a notable event in Goethe's boyhood. There was much in the life of the old free imperial city to stimulate his curiosity and awaken his imagination. He was quick to learn, and had the advantage of careful instruction from his father and from tutors. In 1759 French troops, siding with Austria in the Seven Years' War, entered Frankfort, and Count Thorane, a French officer, a cultivated man and a lover of art, was quartered in Goethe's house. The French theatre opened in the city attracted the boy, and thus he became familiar with Racine and more recent dramatists. He even attempted to compose in the manner of some of these, while also he was receiving literary influences from the lyrical poets of Germany. Latin, Greek, Italian, English, even Hebrew, were studied, and he planned a kind of prose fiction maintained by several correspondents in various languages. He had his moods of religious feeling, which at an early age were somewhat disturbed by doubts of God's goodness suggested by the Lisbon earthquake. The primitive, pastoral scenes of the Old Testament had a peculiar charm for his imagination. But while an ardent student in so many directions, he enjoyed the amusements of a boy among boys, and sometimes indeed among ill-chosen companions. When about fifteen years old (1763-64) he underwent a boy's joys and sorrows of love; Gretchen was of humbler rank than his own, and was some years his senior. She treated him as a child, and, circumstances having brought to light Goethe's wanderings in doubtful company, the pair were parted. For a time Goethe gave himself up to bitter feelings.
In the autumn of 1765 he was admitted a student of the university of Leipzig. He cared not at all for his law lectures, and not much for Gellert's lectures on literature or Ernesti's on Cicero's De Oratore; the awakening of his critical powers for a time damped his ardour for composition, and he fell into a melancholy mood. Companionship roused him to activity. The serious Schlosser, afterwards his brother-in-law, widened his range of literary sympathies; Behrisch served him as a severe yet kindly critic; but it was from Oeser, director of the academy of arts, and the friend of Winckelmann, that he received the most important intellectual gains of this period. 'Oeser,' he wrote, 'taught me that the ideal of beauty is simplicity and repose.' Goethe took lessons in drawing, tried to etch, studied the paintings at Leipzig, and visited the Dresden gallery. He read with enthusiasm Lessing's Laocoön and his Minna von Barnhelm, heard concerts, and was frequent in his attendance at the theatre. Nor in Goethe's life could much time ever pass without the presence or the incursion of love. His Frankfort fancy for Charitas Meixner faded before the stronger attraction of Käthelen Schönpopf (the Aennchen of his autobiography), daughter of a wine-seller at whose house he dined, a bright, frank girl, three years his senior. He began for her (1767) the little pastoral drama in Alexandrine verse, Die Laune des Verliebten (known to us in a revised form), to atone for his jealous humours. At Leipzig in 1768 he began a second play, painful in subject, Die Mitschuldigen, afterwards finished in Frankfort. A group of songs set to music by Breitkopf belong also to the Leipzig period. Käthchen was wooed and two years later was won by the advocate Kanne. The friendship which Goethe had for Oeser's delightful daughter Friederike should not be classed among his loves.
On September 3, 1768, Goethe was again in Frankfort, seriously ill; it was feared that his lungs were affected. For the greater part of the following year he remained an invalid, and during this illness he sought religious consolation under the direction of his mother's friend, Fräulein von Klettenberg, one of the Moravian Brethren. Under her guidance and that of his doctor he made a study of alchemy, a subject not forgotten when he afterwards wrote Faust. Gradually health returned, and it was decided that he should complete his studies at the university of Strasburg. In April 1770 he arrived at the old city and saw for the first time its cathedral, which by-and-by made him a deeply-interested student of Gothic architecture. At the table where he dined he found lovers of literature in Lerse and the actuary Salzmann, and a man of a singular religious spirit in Jüng Stilling. Goethe's pietistic fervour declined as he earnestly devoted himself to chemistry, anatomy, literature, antiquities, and, as far as was necessary, to his proper study, law. He had the good fortune to come under the influence of Herder, already known as an author, and through Herder he came to feel the attraction of old ballad poetry, of Ossian, and in a new and higher degree the power of Homer and of Shakespeare. Herder was well acquainted with English writers of his own century, and Goldsmith's Vicar especially delighted Goethe. When (October 1770) he made the acquaintance of Pastor Brion's family at the village of Sessenheim, it seemed to him that the Primrose household stood before him. The pastor's beautiful daughter, Friederike, eighteen or nineteen years old, and as good as she was beautiful, filled his heart with a new love, which she modestly yet ardently returned. She was the inspiration of some of Goethe's loveliest lyrics. But he would not or could not fetter his freedom, and he parted from her not without some sense of self-reproach. Having obtained his doctor's degree, he returned (August 1771) to his native city.
Admitted an advocate, Goethe had no heart in his profession. His creative genius was fully roused, and when he read Shakespeare he felt himself moved to something like rivalry. In Goetz von Berlichingen, the German champion of freedom in the 16th century, he found a dramatic hero. He completed his play of Goetz, in its earliest form, before the close of 1771, and named it a dramatised history rather than a drama. In the following year he was engaged in critical work for the Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen, edited by a friend recently made, J. H. Merck of Darmstadt, a man of fine taste, somewhat cynical, and yet capable of generous admiration for one whose genius he was prompt to recognise. To this period belong the strikingly-contrasted poems Der Wanderer and Wanderers Sturmted, the former telling of the beauty of ruined classic art amid the ever-living freshness of nature, the latter an improvisation of tempest and the genius of man which can defy the fury of the elements.
To gain further knowledge of law procedure Goethe settled for the summer (May-September) of 1772 in the little town of Wetzlar, the seat of the imperial courts of justice. His thoughts were, however, more with Homer and Pindar than with matters of the law. The months are memorable chiefly for Goethe's love for Lotte Buff, daughter of a steward of lands belonging to the Teutonic Order of Knights. Her brightness, her ingenuous goodness, her kind and graceful rendering of household duties charmed Goethe; but she was the betrothed of Kestner, the Gotha Secretary of Lega- tion, and Goethe, as it has been described, 'saved himself by flight.'
Before returning to Frankfort he visited the authoress, Frau von Laroche, near Coblenz, and was interested in her dark-eyed daughter Maximiliane, soon to be the wife of the Italian Brentano. When once more at home he occupied himself with an essay on architecture, biblical studies, and the design for a dramatic poem on Mohammed. Early in 1773 he set himself to recast the Goetz, and this great work was ready for the printer in March of that year. Its fame was secured by the fact that it expressed with the energy of genius much of the passionate striving after freedom of thought and action characteristic of his own time; its romantic revival of the past fell in with another tendency of the age. A fervour of creation now possessed Goethe. To 1773 belong works of the most varied description, his majestic Prometheus, an important group of satirical farces, the comedy of Erwin und Elmire (finished June 1774, founded on Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina), and already he was engaged on Faust and on Werther. He had heard some time previously of the suicide of young Jerusalem, a Wetzlar acquaintance, and weaving the story of Jerusalem with that of his own love for Lotte Buff, and adding something derived from the character of the jealous Brentano, he produced his wonderful book Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (finished March 1774), which gives as in an essence all the spirit of the 18th-century sentimental movement—that movement of which the most eminent French exponent was Rousseau. The marriage of Goethe's sister and his first acquaintance with Lavater are facts which also belong to the year 1773. Through Lavater he became much interested in the study of physiognomy.
In the spring of 1774 Goethe was at work on Werther, and he hastily wrote his play of Clavigo, a tragedy of faithless love, which was successful both on the stage and in book-form. It is in part founded on the Mémoires of Beaumarchais. A few scenes of Faust were written, and Goethe dreamed of a somewhat kindred theme in the Wandering Jew; at the same time his farcical vein was not exhausted. Eminent men were added to his acquaintance; among these were Klopstock and the educational reformer Basedow. In company with Basedow and Lavater he voyaged down the Rhine; and at Pempelfort he visited Fritz Jacobi, who grew to be a friend of his heart. Among influences derived from books, the most powerful was that of Spinoza's writings. The Ethics sustained and calmed Goethe's spirit amid its various agitations and helped to give a unity to his life. The dramatic writings of 1775, excepting that Egmont was begun, are of secondary importance—a little play with songs named Claudine von Villa Bella, and the more celebrated Stella (suggested by Swift's love perplexities with his Stella and Vanessa). Fernando in Goethe's play by a happy arrangement contrives to keep on terms with his pair of wives; in the author's recast of the play of many years later the hero shoots himself and Stella takes poison. Some of Goethe's most exquisite lyrics belong to 1775, and are connected with his love for Lili Schönemann, orphan daughter of a wealthy Frankfort banker, which led to an engagement and almost to marriage. Lili was graceful, accomplished, somewhat coquettish, and Goethe was not always a contented lover. After a time it was felt on both sides that a marriage would not lead to happiness. In the summer Goethe visited Switzerland in company with the two Counts Stolberg. He would have passed into Italy but that his love for Lili drew him back. A new life, however, was in store for him; in the autumn the young Duke of Weimar, Karl August, invited him to visit Weimar; he accepted the invitation, and on November 7, 1775, entered Weimar, not then aware that he had here found an abiding place for life.
A new period of activity begins with Goethe's entrance to Weimar. When the first days of boisterous entertainment had passed, and in the spring of 1776 Goethe was made a member of the privy-council (Geheimer Legationsrath), he set himself strenuously to serve the state. By degrees much public work fell into his hands, and he acquitted himself of every duty with masterly intelligence and a rare thoroughness. In 1782 he received a patent of nobility. He superintended mines, saw to public roads and buildings, regulated finance, conducted military and university affairs, elevated the theatrical performances, in every direction making the influence of his mind felt. Above all, he helped to form the immature character of the duke. Nor did he fail to gain true friends. The dowager-duchess from the first had confidence in him, and by degrees he won the esteem and affection of the young wife of Karl August. Wieland, now of mature years, declared that he was 'as full of Goethe as a dewdrop of the morning sun.' Through Goethe's influence Herder obtained a public position and a home at Weimar. But his dearest friend was Charlotte von Stein, wife of Oberstallmeister von Stein, the mother of seven children, and several years older than Goethe. During ten years she was his confidant, his directress, the object of his ardent and tender homage. And she knew how to hold his feelings in check, and to chasten them when he was over-violent in his passion. She kept alive the ideal in his imagination while he was occupied with the details of real affairs. Yet there was something of unhealthy strain in this love which could not hope for its highest accomplishment in marriage. During these years Goethe's mind turned away from vague aspirations and sentimental moods to the definite and the real. He became deeply interested in the natural sciences—in geology and mineralogy, botany, comparative anatomy. His discovery of the intermaxillary bone in man (1784), and his theory of later date that all the parts of a plant are variations of a type which is most clearly seen in the leaf, show how his observing powers were aided by his imagination, and place him among the scientific forerunners of those great thinkers who have set forth the doctrine of evolution. Many literary works were begun in this period, but not many were brought to completion. Some lyrics of larger design and more elaborate form than his earlier songs show the growth of his powers. But the poem Die Geheimnisse, which was meant to embody his thoughts on the religions of the world, is a fragment. Two acts of his drama of Tasso were written (1780-81), but in prose. His noble dramatic poem, Iphigenia, classical in subject, partly modern in feeling, was written in full (1779), but, like Tasso, as yet only in prose. The short play, Die Geschwister, as well as the Iphigenia, was partly inspired by his feeling for Frau von Stein. In 1777 he began his novel of Wilhelm Meister, designed to show how the vague strivings of youth may be ennobled by their transition into definite and useful activity, and from time to time he made progress with it. The constant pressure of public business at length fatigued his mind, for, except a visit to Switzerland in 1779, he had few seasons of refreshment. He had long desired to visit Italy. When ten years of toil were ended he resolved to gratify that deep desire, and on September 3, 1786, he started on his journey for the south.
Goethe's residence in Italy lasted from the autumn of 1786 to June 1788. It was a most fruitful period. Now the steadfast habits of mind acquired in the course of public business in Weimar were applied to the study of art. He lived in a blissful calm, which was in fact the highest energy, examining the monuments of ancient art and renaissance painting, enjoying the beauty of nature, and studying the life of the people. His friends were chiefly artists—Tischbein, who painted his portrait at Rome, the Swiss Meyer, Angelica Kauffmann. He strove hard to draw, but with only moderate success. In the spring of 1787 he visited Naples and Sicily; at Palermo he made a sudden advance in his theory of botanical metamorphosis. Once again in Rome, he renewed his study of plastic art, and was inexpressibly happy amid a world of beauty. The literary work of the period was chiefly that of revising or recasting earlier writings. Egmont was carried to completion (1787); the prose Iphigenia was recast in verse (1786); the scene of the Witches' Kitchen was added to Faust; he sketched the plan and wrote a fragment of a tragedy, Nausikaa. On June 18, 1788, Goethe re-entered Weimar greatly enriched by his travel.
He was now relieved from the most irksome of his public duties, but continued to take an interest in the Ilmenau mines and in university reform at Jena. His private life also underwent a great change which relieved his heart from a strain, though in an ill way. His ardent idealising friendship for Charlotte von Stein was broken, and he took to his home a beautiful girl of humble rank, Christiane Vulpius, whom from the first he regarded as his wife, though the marriage ceremony was not celebrated until October 1806. Christiane had good qualities, and was dear to Goethe, but his choice was in many respects unsuitable. In December 1789 his son August was born. Memories of Italy mingle with his love of Christiane in the Roman Elegies, poems sensuously classical in their feeling and classical in their form. In the summer of 1789 he put the last touches to the play of Tasso, which contrasts the passionate heart of the poet with the worldly wisdom of the statesman and man of affairs—two sides of Goethe's own nature. Next year in the seventh volume of his Works appeared a great portion of the first part of Faust as 'a Fragment.' This, the story of Faust's measureless strivings for truth and for joy, and the love-tragedy of Gretchen, belongs essentially to Goethe's earlier years of the Sturm-und-Drang. The first part of Faust, completed in 1806, did not appear until 1808. Science continued to interest Goethe profoundly. His remarkable essay on the Metamorphosis of Plants was given to the printer in 1790, and when at Venice in May he suddenly struck out his much-discussed theory of the vertebral structure of the skull. His studies in optics, by which he hoped to disprove Newton's theory of colours, were a great affair of his life from this time onwards, but here his conclusions, though ingeniously argued, were unsound. In 1791 Goethe was entrusted with the control of the court theatre at Weimar, and it was his aim and earnest effort to make the stage a means of true artistic culture. He was himself roused to dramatic composition, and several pieces of these years were concerned with the revolutionary movement in France. In his Venetian Epigrams he complains that the political commotion threw back the advance of quiet culture. The Grosskopftha (1791) dramatises the affair of the Diamond Necklace, studies Cagliostro's arts of imposture, and represents the demoralisation of aristocratic society in France. Die Aufgeregten—a dramatic fragment—in some degree holds the balance between conflicting political parties. The Bürgergeneral (acted 1793) is a broad jest at the German apostles of the Revolution. In Goethe's hexameter version of the old Low German beast-epic, Reynard the Fox (printed 1794), he satirises the lusts and greeds of men under the disguise of beasts, and glances at the special vices of the Revolution days. In 1792 Goethe accompanied the duke on the disastrous campaign against the French; he heard the cannonade of Valmy, and went under fire in order to study his own sensations. Next year he was present at the siege of Mainz, and watched the French garrison march out. He has recorded his experiences and observations in an admirable narrative.
It is possible that at this time Goethe might have grown discouraged and bitter were it not for the friendship formed with Schiller in 1794. This friendship and its fruits fill the memorable years from that date to 1805, the year of Schiller's death. Together they worked in the Horen, a review designed to elevate the literary standard in Germany. Together in the Xenien (1796) they discharged their epigrams against their foes, the literary Philistines. Schiller's sympathy encouraged Goethe to set to work once more on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, but the later books (1796) of the novel are written on a diminished scale as compared with the earlier. It may be said more than any other work of Goethe to exhibit his criticism on life. The charming epic-idyll, Hermann und Dorothea, in which Goethe's feeling for what is best in German life and character is happily united with his artistic Hellenism, belongs to 1796-97. Then, as it were in noble rivalry with Schiller, he wrote several of his finest ballads. He had also found time to translate from the Italian the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. His third and last visit to Switzerland (August-November 1797) interrupted the flow of his creative activity, and the works undertaken after his return were of less happy conception. The literary and artistic periodical, Die Propyläen (1798), was ill supported, and did not live long. Next year he planned his epic, Achilleis, but it did not advance beyond one canto. His productive power slackening, he occupied himself in part with translating and adapting Voltaire's Mahomet (1799) and Tanerède (1800), and at a somewhat later date he translated Diderot's dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau, from a manuscript. His drama, Die natürliche Tochter, founded on a French memoir, was designed as one part of a trilogy which should embody his mature views and feelings, but in a wholly impersonal form, on the events in France. It contains much admirable writing, but has a certain abstract air and a superficial coldness which prevented it from becoming popular. In 1801 Goethe was seriously ill, and painful attacks recurred from time to time. The death of Schiller in 1805 occurred while he himself was ailing, and it affected him with profound sorrow.
National disaster followed hard upon this grievous loss. In October 1806 the battle of Jena was fought, and next day Napoleon entered Weimar. Two years later, at the Congress of Erfurt, Goethe and Napoleon met. 'Voilà un homme !' exclaimed Napoleon; and in his turn Goethe recognised in the emperor a 'demonic' power created to rule the world. He has been blamed for lack of patriotism; but in a thoughtful kind of patriotism he was not deficient; his age and habits of mind forbade patriotism of a passionate, demonstrative nature.
In 1808-9 was written the novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities). It contrasts characters of self-control with characters of impulse, is disinterestedly just to both, insists on the duty of renunciation, and shows the tragic consequences of infidelity of heart in married life. Some traits of the character of the heroine Ottilie are taken from Minna Herzlieb, the adopted daughter of the
Jena bookseller Frommann, a beautiful girl, who might have grown too dear to Goethe if he had not checked the feeling. A little later Goethe published his two volumes on light and colour, Zur Farbenlehre; and these were speedily followed by the first part of his autobiography—Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811), the continuation of which occupied him from time to time during several subsequent years. It is a work of the deepest interest to students of Goethe's life and character, but its details of fact are not always exact, and its record of past feelings must be controlled by Goethe's letters written at the dates of which he treats.
The translation by Von Hammer of the Divan of the Persian poet Hafiz interested Goethe, and was an imaginative refuge from the political troubles of 1813-14. He was moved to creation of poems in a kindred spirit, and wrote (chiefly in 1814-15) the lyrical pieces published in 1819 under the title Westöstlicher Divan. Part of their inspiration came from a Saint-Martin's summer of friendship—that felt for Mariann von Willemers, the young wife of a Frankfort banker, and the Suleika of the Divan. The poems are full of the sunny wisdom of a bright old age, which can play without self-deception at some of the passions of youth. A grief, real and deep, came to Goethe in his sixty-seventh year in the death of his wife. The Goethe house would have been desolate, but that in the summer of 1817 his son August brought a bright and sweet-tempered wife to dwell there, Ottilie von Pogwisch, and in due time Goethe had three grandchildren in whose happy childhood the old man found much gladness.
In his elder years Goethe still continued active. In 1821 was published Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, a continuation of the Lehrjahre, but including many short tales that hang loosely together. Here Goethe sets forth an ideal of education, and inculcates the duty of reverence, helpful human toil, and brotherhood. The book was recast, and in this second form was finished February 1829. From time to time during more than half his life he had worked at the second part of Faust; it occupied him much during the closing years. By August 1831 it was at length complete. The hero Faust, leaving behind his first unhappy passion, advances through all forms of culture—statecraft, science, art, war—to the final and simple wisdom of disinterested service rendered to his fellow-men. Such a spirit cannot fall into the power of Mephistopheles, the demon of negation. His soul is received into Paradise and is purified by love.
Goethe's interest in science and art was undiminished by age. He had grown into sympathy with medieval art partly through the influence of his young friend Sulpiz Boisserée; a universal eclecticism is, however, the characteristic of his mind in its latest development. He is best seen during these years in his Conversations with Eckermann. Sorrows came fast towards the end; his older friends, all but Knebel, disappeared one by one. In 1828 died the grand-duke; next year, the Duchess Luise. Goethe's grief was deep; but he was even more violently shaken by the loss of his son August, who died at Rome, October 1830. Tended by his loving daughter-in-law, honoured and reverenced by those around him, Goethe lived until the spring of 1832. On March 22 of that year, after a short illness, he died peacefully in his arm-chair. His body lies near that of Schiller in the ducal vault at Weimar.
Goethe was a man of noble bodily presence both in youth and age. His influence has affected every civilised people, and seems still on the increase. His teaching has been styled the creed of culture; it is rather the creed of self-development with a view to usefulness—usefulness to be effected by activity within wise limits.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—1. Works (collected edd.): Hempel's ed. (indispensable); the Weimar ed. (Böhlau), commenced in 1885; Kürschner's ed. (published by Spemann).—2. Special works: Loeper's ed. of Gedichte; Loeper's larger Faust (1879); Schröer's Faust.—3. Letters: Weimar ed. of Works; Der junge Goethe (Hirzel); letters to the following correspondents: Herder, Jacobi, Karl August, Frau von Stein, Knebel, Schiller, Boisserée, Zelter, Marianne von Willemer; see Strehlke's Verzeichniss (1881).—4. Conversations: Eckermann (q.v.); Biedermann's collection.—5. Life: Düntzer's Life (Macmillan, 1883), Lewes's, Viehoff's, Schaefer's, Sime's.—6. Criticism: Hettner's (the best); Rosenkranz (1856); Düntzer; W. Scherer; E. Schmidt; Loeper; Grimm; Bielschowsky (1896); Seeley (Goethe Reviewed after Sixty Years, 1893); Coupland on Faust; Bayard Taylor's Faust; Kuno Fischer on Faust.—7. Bibliography: Hirzel's Verzeichniss einer Goethe-Bibliothek. British Museum Catalogue, art. Goethe.—8. Miscellaneous: Goethe Gesellschaft's publications. Rollett's Goethe-Bildnisse.