Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/314

 308 Roller of'Goethe's own utterances concerning his views and study of Greek and Latin letters. Keller's book was begun before but not finished till some years after Maass's appeared. The former neither supersedes, nor duplicates, but rather complements the latter. They have at least that much in common that each devotes only one chapter to Latin literature. Dr. Keller set for himself the task, which, let it be said at the outset, he well succeeded in accomplishing, " to collect and present, in a manner convenient for reference and in an entirely objective way, all of Goethe's more important spoken and written utterances on these literatures." "What Goethe actually said about so important a part of the literature of the world as the Greek and Latin, seems . . . worthy of being collected and presented systematically; and that is the object of the following pages" (p. 5). The Greek writers from Homer to the days of Justinian (and also the Latin authors in the last, twelfth, chapter, pp. 149-184) and, in general, Goethe's utterances under each author, are chronologically arranged; the record for any author is thus kept together and offered in the order of the time of expression. Quotations are only occa- sionally repeated when the opinion has to do with more than one author. Goethe studied the Greek language intermittently from boyhood to the age of forty, and probably even later, and attained to a degree of proficiency as shown especially by his translations from Greek authors. Nevertheless Dr. Keller thinks that there is no doubt that Goethe never regarded him- self as really proficient in the Greek language. Goethe "always depended to a large extent on translations; in fact, as will be seen below, in many cases his whole occupation with a Greek writer is due to some translation" (p. 9). This is amply proven and abundantly substantiated by K. in the course of his book. In particular, recent translations and translations in the making served as incentives to Goethe to take up a Greek author. Goethe constantly encouraged translators in their work. We learn of the extent of Goethe's knowledge of Greek in 1811 from a letter he wrote to Wolf (September 28, 1811) who loaned him a copy of Kaltwasser's translation of Plutarch's M or alia: Wolf will scarcely see it again, "Denn was sollte sie (die Ueberset- zung) Ihnen auch, da das mir zugeschlossene Original (italics mine) Ihnen frei und off en steht." Even as late as November 22, 1831, Goethe writes to Zelter: "Ich werde nicht von ihm (Euripides) ablassen diesen ganzen Winter. Wir haben Ueber- setzungen genug die einer Anmaszung ins Original zu sehen gar loblich bei der Hand sind." It is different with Latin; there is no doubt of his proficiency in that language. Goethe says (D.u.W., 6; Weimar ed., I, 27, 39), he read much in Latin with