Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 1.djvu/17



, in one of his letters written in response to a communication from a sentimental young countess, who wrote him anonymously regarding his "Werther," gives a contrasting picture of himself in two phases. The one is a carnival Goethe, in a laced coat and other consistent finery, illuminated by the unmeaning magnificence of sconces and chandelier, amidst all kinds of people, kept at the card-table by a pair of beautiful eyes, and in varying dissipation driven from party to concert and from concert to ball, and with all the fascination of frivolity paying court to a pretty Blondine: a sentimental Goethe, with affectedly gloomy deep feelings. The other is a wholesome German Goethe, in a gray beaver coat and boots, with brown silk cravat, eagerly detecting the breath of spring in the cool February air, and waiting for his dear wide world to open out once more. This Goethe, ever living, striving, and working in himself, seeks to express, according to his powers, sometimes the innocent feelings of youth in little poems, the strong spices of life in various dramas, the forms of his friends and his neighbourhood and his beloved household possessions with chalk on gray paper, never asking if any of his work is destined to last, for the reason that the very act of working makes him keep rising higher and higher, and he will leap at no ideal, but fight and play, leaving his feelings to develop of themselves.

On the one hand, he found pleasure in the gay coquetries of fashionable life; on the other, he declared that his greatest happiness was to live with the best men of his time. Goethe, when he wrote that, was in his twenty-sixth year. He had drunk deeply of the cup of life and had recognised the danger vii