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 than his discovery some six years earlier of the existence of a formation in the human jaw-bone analogous to the intermaxillary bone in apes; and in 1791 and 1792 appeared two parts of his Beiträge zur Optik.

Meanwhile, however, Goethe had again taken up the novel of the theatre which he had begun years before, with a view to finishing it and including it in the edition of his Neue Schriften (1792–1800). Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung became Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; the novel of purely theatrical interests was widened out to embrace the history of a young man’s apprenticeship to life. The change of plan explains, although it may not exculpate, the formlessness and loose construction of the work, its extremes of realistic detail and poetic allegory. A hero, who was probably originally intended to demonstrate the failure of the vacillating temperament when brought face to face with the problems of art, proved ill-adapted to demonstrate those precepts for the guidance of life with which the Lehrjahre closes; unstable of purpose, Wilhelm Meister is not so much an illustration of the author’s life-philosophy as a lay-figure on which he demonstrates his views. Wilhelm Meister is a work of extraordinary variety, ranging from the commonplace realism of the troupe of strolling players to the poetic romanticism of Mignon and the harper; its flashes of intuitive criticism and its weighty apothegms add to its value as a Bildungsroman in the best sense of that word. Of all Goethe’s works, this exerted the most immediate and lasting influence on German literature; it served as a model for the best fiction of the next thirty years.

In completing Wilhelm Meister, Goethe found a sympathetic and encouraging critic in Schiller, to whom he owed in great measure his renewed interest in poetry. After years of tentative approaches on Schiller’s part, years in which that poet concealed even from himself his desire for a friendly understanding with Goethe, the favourable moment arrived; it was in June 1794, when Schiller was seeking collaborators for his new periodical Die Horen; and his invitation addressed to Goethe was the beginning of a friendship which continued unbroken until the younger poet’s death. The friendship of Goethe and Schiller, of which their correspondence is a priceless record, had its limitations; it was purely intellectual in character, a certain barrier of personal reserve being maintained to the last. But for the literary life of both poets the gain was incommensurable. As far as actual work was concerned, Goethe went his own way as he had always been accustomed to do; but the mere fact that he devoted himself with increasing interest to literature was due to Schiller’s stimulus. It was Schiller, too, who induced him to undertake those studies on the nature of epic and dramatic poetry which resulted in the epic of Hermann und Dorothea and the fragment of the Achilleis; without the friendship there would have been no Xenien and no ballads, and it was his younger friend’s encouragement which induced Goethe to betake himself once more to the “misty path” of Faust, and bring the first part of that drama to a conclusion.

Goethe’s share in the Xenien (1795) may be briefly dismissed. This collection of distichs, written in collaboration with Schiller, was prompted by the indifference and animosity of contemporary criticism, and its disregard for what the two poets regarded as the higher interests of German poetry. The Xenien succeeded as a retaliation on the critics, but the masterpieces which followed them proved in the long run much more effective weapons against the prevailing mediocrity. Prose works like the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795) were unworthy of the poet’s genius, and the translation of Benvenuto Cellini’s Life (1796–1797) was only a translation. But in 1798 appeared Hermann und Dorothea, one of Goethe’s most perfect poems. It is indeed remarkable—when we consider by how much reflection and theoretic discussion the composition of the poem was preceded and accompanied—that it should make upon the reader so simple and “naïve” an impression; in this respect it is the triumph of an art that conceals art. Goethe has here taken a simple story of village life, mirrored in it the most pregnant ideas of his time, and presented it with a skill which may well be called Homeric; but he has discriminated with

the insight of genius between the Homeric method of reproducing the heroic life of primitive Greece and the same method as adapted to the commonplace happenings of 18th-century Germany. In this respect he was undoubtedly guided by a forerunner who has more right than he to the attribute “naïve,” by J. H. Voss, the author of Luise. Hardly less imposing in their calm, placid perfection are the poems with which, in friendly rivalry, Goethe seconded the more popular ballads of his friend; Der Zauberlehrling, Der Gott und die Bayadere, Die Braut von Korinth, Alexis und Dora, Der neue Pausias and Die schöne Müllerin—a cycle of poems in the style of the Volkslied—are among the masterpieces of Goethe’s poetry. On the other hand, even the friendship with Schiller did not help him to add to his reputation as a dramatist. Die natürliche Tochter (1803), in which he began to embody his ideas of the Revolution on a wide canvas, proved impossible on the stage, and the remaining dramas, which were to have formed a trilogy, were never written. Goethe’s classic principles, when applied to the swift, direct art of the theatre, were doomed to failure, and Die natürliche Tochter, notwithstanding its good theoretic intention, remains the most lifeless and shadowy of all his dramas. Even less in touch with the living present were the various prologues and Festspiele, such as Paläophron und Neoterpe (1800), Was wir bringen (1802), which in these years he composed for the Weimar theatre.

Goethe’s classicism brought him into inevitable antagonism with the new Romantic movement which had been inaugurated in 1798 by the Athenaeum, edited by the brothers Schlegel. The sharpness of the conflict was, however, blunted by the fact that, without exception, the young Romantic writers looked up to Goethe as its master; they modelled their fiction on Wilhelm Meister; they regarded his lyrics as the high-water mark of German poetry; Goethe, Novalis declared, was the “Statthalter of poetry on earth.” With regard to painting and sculpture, however, Goethe felt that a protest was necessary, if the insidious ideas propounded in works like Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen were not to do irreparable harm, by bringing back the confusion of the Sturm und Drang; and, as a rejoinder to the Romantic theories, Goethe, in conjunction with his friend Heinrich Meyer (1760–1832), published from 1798 to 1800 an art review, Die Propyläen. Again, in Winckelmann und seine Zeit (1805) Goethe vigorously defended the classical ideals of which Winckelmann had been the founder. But in the end he proved himself the greatest enemy to the strict classic doctrine by the publication in 1808 of the completed first part of Faust, a work which was accepted by contemporaries as a triumph of Romantic art. Faust is a patchwork of many colours. With the aid of the vast body of Faust literature which has sprung up in recent years, and the many new documents bearing on its history—above all, the so-called Urfaust, to which reference has already been made—we are able now to ascribe to their various periods the component parts of the work; it is possible to discriminate between the Sturm und Drang hero of the opening scenes and of the Gretchen tragedy—the contemporary of Götz and Clavigo—and the superimposed Faust of calmer moral and intellectual ideals—a Faust who corresponds to Hermann and Wilhelm Meister. In its original form the poem was the dramatization of a specific and individualized story; in the years of Goethe’s friendship with Schiller it was extended to embody the higher strivings of 18th-century humanism; ultimately, as we shall see, it became, in the second part, a vast allegory of human life and activity. Thus the elements of which Faust is composed were even more difficult to blend than were those of Wilhelm Meister; but the very want of uniformity is one source of the perennial fascination of the tragedy, and has made it in a peculiar degree the national poem of the German people, the mirror which reflects the national life and poetry from the outburst of Sturm und Drang to the well-weighed and tranquil classicism of Goethe’s old age.

The third and final period of Goethe’s long life may be said to have begun after Schiller’s death. He never again lost touch with literature as he had done in the years which preceded his