Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/746

Rh First l UVB. 722 GOE then in fashion. The influence of Lessing hail scarcely made itself felt; Herder was only ﬁve years older than Goethe himself. Gellert and Gottsched were the two oracles of poetry,—-Gottsched a pedantic product of the earlier French culture, Gellert old and immovable, and unable to comprehend the new spirit. The chief debt that Goethe owed to him was the improvement in his hand- writing. on which Gellert laid great stress, and which he coupled with moral excellence. Goethe’s father had a great respect for these rhyming poets, and he so strongly objected to the new German hexameters that Wolfgang could only read Klopstock’s Jlessiu/L with his sister in the greatest secrecy and iii terror of discovery. He did, how- ever, read it, and learned much of it by heart. French cul- ture gave at this time the prevailing tone to Europe. Goethe could not have escaped its inﬂuence, and he was destined to fall under it in a special manner. In the Seven Years’ ‘Var, which was now raging, France took the side of the empire against Frederick the Great. Frankfort was full of French soldiers, and a. certain Comte Thorane, who was quartered in Goethe’s house, had an im- portant influence on the boy. Still more strongly was he affected by the French company of actors, whom he came to know both on and off the stage. He learned to declaim in this manner passages of Racine without under- standing a word of them. At a later period he knew French thoroughly well, and composed both prose and poetry in that language. His first writings were imitations of the French manner; his earliest play was the imitation of a French after-piece. We can understand how these different forces were to work upon his future life. From his father he derived the steadfastness of character which enabled him to pursue an independent career of self-culture and devotion to art in the midst of every kind of distract- ing influence; from his mother he inherited the joyous nature and lively sympathy, the flow of language and love of narration, without which he could not have been a poet. Before the age of sixteen he had seen every kind of life in a city particularly favourable to a richness of individual char- acter; he was entirely free from the prejudices of a small state ; and as far as he cared for Germany he cared for it as a whole. He was tinged at an early age with the inﬂuence of the clearest and most ﬁnished language in Europe, and this influence, uniting with the natural clearness of Goethe’s mind, made his prose a new phenomenon in the literature of his country, unlike anything which had been seen before. Lastly, with the most passionate aspirations for freedom and independence of life, he was born into the slavery of a mechanical career of prosaic prosperity, the pressure of which was not strong enough to conﬁne him, but was strong enough to stimulate all his efforts to break the bonds. Goethe, if we may believe his autobiography, experienced his ﬁrst love about the age of fifteen in the person of Gretchen, whom some have supposed to be the daughter of an innkeeper at Offenbach. Hc worshipped her as Dante worshipped Beatrice. She treated him as a child, much as Miss Chaworth treated Byron. But there is no other evi- dence of this ﬁrst love, and it would be quite in accordance with Goethe’s manner to enlarge on a very small founda- tion, or to concentrate on one person the feelings which were devoted to several individuals. His letters speak of a boyish love for one Charitas Meixner, a friend of his sister, two years younger than himself, the daughter of a rich mer- chant at Vorms. He expresses his affection for her with all the fervour of French phraseology, and the passion did not leave him when he had removed to Leipsic. But Charitas was able to console herself with another engagement. She married in February 1773 a merchant of her native town, and died at the end of the following year. In the autumn of 176.3 Goethe, who had just completed '1‘ H E his sixteenth year, travelled to Leipsic in the company of a bookseller, Fleischer, and his wife, who were on their way to attend the fair. On the 19th of October he was admitted as a student of the Bavarian nation, one of the four into which the university was divided. For his lodging he had two neat little rooms in the Feuerkugel, the Fire Ball, looking into the long court—yard which leads from the old market to the new. When we remember that his three years at Leipsic, about which so much has been written, correspond with the last three years of an English boy at a public school, we can form some idea of the singular individuality of his character and the maturity and ripeness of his genius. He was sent to Leipsic to study law, in order that he might return to Frankfort ﬁtted for the regular course of municipal dis tinction. For this purpose be carried with him a letter to Professor Biihme, who taught history and imperial law in. the university, but had no other distinction to reconnncnd him. He told Professor B'ohme that he intended to devote himself not to law but to belles lettres, or, to use the word which F. A. Wolf had invented, philology. Biihme did his best to dissuade him, and in this was assisted by his wife. The effect of their advice was rather to disgust Goethe with modern German literature, to make him despise what he had already written, and to drive him into the distractions of society, which wasted both his time and his money. He did, however, attend some lectures. He heard Ernesti on Cicero’s Orator, but he dealt rather with questions of grammar than of taste. He attended Gellert’s lectures on literature, and even joined his private class. Gellert held a high position among German men of letters, which was due quite as much to his character as to his genius. He advised Goethe to desert poetry for prose, and to take to authorship only as an employment subordinate to the serious occupations of his life. Goethe tells us that in his lectures upon taste he never heard Gellert mention the names of Klopstock, Kleist, Wieland, Gessner, Gleim, or Lessing. He also attended the lectures of another literary professor, Clodius, a young man about ten years older than himself. Clodius corrected Goethe’s writings with red ink, and pointed out the faults without showing the way to mend them. Goethe had written a poem of congratulation for the marriage of his uncle Textor (February 17, 1766), which, according to the fashion of the time, was full of gods and goddesses and other mytho- logical apparatus. Clodius was unsparingly hard upon this production, and Goethe then perceived that his critic was just as faulty as himself in the use of abstractions and strange outlandish words to give weight. and authority to his verse. He satirized Clodius in a poem in praise of the cakes of the confectioner Handel, and by a parody of his drama illcdon. Ilis position towards the professors of his university was not an enviable one. His real university education was derived from intercourse with his friends. First among these was J. G. Schlosser, who afterwards married his sister. Goethe used to dine with him at a table d’hOte kept by a wine-dealer, Schijnkopf, in the Bruhl (No. 79), in a house which still exists. Schlosser, who was at this time private secretary to the duke of Wiirtemberg and tutor to his children, was ten years older than Goethe. He had a great inﬂuence upon him, chiefly in introducing him to a wider circle of German, French, English, and Italian poetry. At the table of Professor- Ludwig, where Goethe had previously dined, the conversa- tion had generally turned on medical and scientiﬁc sub- jects. Another friend of Goethe’s was Behrisch, tutor tn the young Count Lindenau. He was a man in middle life, and he combined originality of character and clearness of literary judgment with a dry and caustic wit, and an ever- abiding sense of humour, much in the same proportions as