Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/754

Rh Italy. 730 G O E tziry state,——that it is seen distinctly in youth, but as years advance is united with the body of the skull. covery that the skull itself is only a. development of the vertebrae of the spine was made a little later. Ile was led to this further step by picking up the head of a sheep on the shore of the Lido at Venice. The care of his garden cottage naturally led him to the study of plants. He soon found himself attracted to wide and comprehensive generalizations. The _1[ct¢lm07‘])]lOSc’8 of Plrmts was not published till 1790, but the idea. which had possession of his mind was a solid contribution to the science of botany. loethe sought to dis- cover an original or standard flower, from which, as from a Platonic ideal type, all existing ﬂowers were deﬂexions an.l aberrations. In this he followed an unscientiﬁc method, but he clearly saw that all the different parts of the plant, except the stem and the root, might be regarded as modifi- cations of the leaf ; that leaf, calyx, corolla, bud, pistil, and stamen were all referable to the same type ; and that whether a plant produced leaves, or ﬂowers, or fruit-, depended on the differentiation of the nutrition which it received. Less fortuna.te were his speculations in geology, to which he devoted a very large portion of his time and thoughts. It is something that he recognized the importance and reality of that science, then in its infancy, which has had to undergo more than its due share of obloquy and distrust. But he was of necessity a follower of Werner, who based his classiﬁcation of rocks rather on the minerals which they contained than upon an examination of the fossil remains of organic life. All these causes contributed together to one end. His desire to complete the great poetical works which he had begun, to disentangle his life from the complexities which had entwined themselves round it, to give a fair trial to his impulses towards art, to afford opportunity for the careful and systematic interrogation of nature, and, above all, a longing to possess his soul in peace, and solemnly to probe in silence the _depths of his own being, conspired together to drive him from Veimar to the land which he had yearned after from boyhood. The resolu- tion, slowly formed, was boldly executed. In the summer of 1785 he had visited Carlsbad for the first time, passed a pleasant month in the company of the duchess Louise, Herder, and Frau von Stein. In July 1786 he paid it a second visit. After ﬁve weeks of brilliant society, very favourable to his health, spent in revising his works for the press, he stole secretly away. The duke alone knew that he designed an absence of some duration. In the strictest incognito, in the guise of a German merchant, he drove alone to the land of the citron and the orange. Goethe’s Italian journey, the most momentous epoch in the development of his intellectual life, lasted from Septem- ber 3, l786, to June 18, 1788. Assuming the common German name of Miiller, in the strictest incognito he journeyed by way of Munich, where he studied the picture gallery and the collection of antiquities; by the Lake of Garda, where he began his metrical version of the I pleigenie; by Verona, where he saw the first specimen of Roman build- ing in Italy in the stupendous amphitheatre ; by Vicenza, where he was attracted by the grace and harmony of the classical Palladio ; by Parlua, where he neglected the frescos of Giotto, but rose to a clear conception of the form of the 0ri_r/iizal plant by the marks on the leaves of a palm in the botanical garden; to Venice, where for the first time he was able to taste the charm and richness of southern life. As he proceeded farther, F errara spoke to him of Tasso ; Bologna showed him the great masters of the academic school who have now grown pale and dim before the prede- cessors of Raphael; Florence interested him a little; Assisi drew his attention, not to the triple church of Saint Francis, the unrivalled museum of religious art, but to the little ruined temple which no modern traveller would notice but for the The dis- I '1‘ H E name of Goethe 3 Spoleto again delighted him with the re- mains of ancient architecture. ber 28. Ilis first stay was till February. The constant companion of his studies was the painter Tischbein, who helped him to disentangle the many difficulties of the old Rome and the new. He lived chiefly among the German artists and men of letters who frequented the Caffe Greco. Among these were .-‘ gelic.i Kaufinann and Moritz, who deepened his knowledge of German versification, and pre- pared him for the composition of I 1»/u}/t niu. Although Goethe occupied himself chiefly with dr-awing, he was able to announce on June (3 that this work was finished. The second IpIu'genz'c, written in verse, was the first important fruit of the Italian journey. It is in very strong contrast with 0613 -van Berlic/ziizgen. It is written in the strictest classical form. Although based on the I phi;/cnz'a in ]'¢um'.- of Euripides, it has little in common with it. In Euripides Thoas is represented as a cruel barbarian, against whom it i;_: justifiable to employ every artiﬁce of fraud or violence. In Goethe the characters are ennobled by a higher principle, and the struggle between truth and falsehood is made a pro- minent motive of the piece. When Thoa.s discovers that, according to the oracle of Apollo, the return of Orestes’s sister to Greece will satisfy the anger of the gods, he gives his consent, and his last words are a friendly farewell. Towards the end of F ebruary Goethe left Rome for Naples. Here he was attracted less by the remains of antiquity, even the new revelations of Herculaneum and Pompeii, than by the prospects of nature, the bay, the islands, the volca.no, the thousand beauties which make the gulf unrivalled in the world, and by the multitudinous and teeming life which throngs the endless quays that line the shore. Sorrento stimulated him to the revisal of To;-qualo Tasso, but he did not complete the drama till his return from Italy. It did not appear in print till the spring of 1790. The play had a special fascination for him as a picture of his own distracted life. He could depict with feeling the struggle between the actual and the ideal, the ill-assortment of a passionate poet with the jealous and artificial environment of a court. At the end of March Goethe sa.iled to Sicily , rolled up in his cloak he meditated the composition of his Tasso. Sicily struck him, as it must strike all travellers who have studied the ancient world, as a revelation of Greece. It is, if one may say so, more Greek than Greece itself. Its mountains, streams, trees, ﬂowers, the form of its boats and pottery, the habits of the people, the quivering smile of the bright blue sea fringed with golden sand, represent completely the Greece of the 0J3/ssc_I/ and of the choruses of Euripides. Goethe was overmastered by this powerful influence. He sketched and began l'au.s-(am, the story of the 0J_I/ss(_z/ in dramatic form, which always remained a fragment. He returned to Rome in June. The rest of the year was spent in the city and its neighbourhood, in the serious study of drawing, for which unfortunately he had but little talent, and in the composition of Egmonl, a work begun with the approval of his father in the early Frankfort days. It was finished in September 1787, and appeared in the Easter of the following year. Although E_r/mont still keeps the stage, it has very grave faults. It is an unfortunate mixture of the natural and ideal treatment. The licence with which the scenes are transposed in modern performance shows how much the work lacks symmetry and cohesion. Schiller criticized it severely as being untrue to history. He de- scribed the close, where all difficulties are solved by the appearance of Cliirchen, as aclcus ex machina or asallo mortale into the world of opera. The music of Beethoven has contri- buted to it a charm of art which was necessary to its complete- ness. Besides this, Goethe rewrote for publication his early vaudevilles of Ifrwin and Elmire and Claudine eon Villa Jclla. The carnival of 1788 was of importance to his He reached Home on Octo-R vnic. TU .2. Sicily _. 1?;/7;; .¢