Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 13.djvu/28

6 ship of Frankfort and to the guild of tailors. This was in 1687. Several children were born, and vanished; in 1700 his wife, too, vanished, to be replaced, five years afterward, by Frau Cornelia Schellhorn, the daughter of another tailor, Georg Walter; she was then a widow, blooming with six and thirty summers, and possessing the solid attractions of a good property, namely, the hotel Zum Weidenhof, where her new husband laid down the scissors, and donned the landlord's apron. He had two sons by her, and died in 1730, aged seventy-three.

Of these two sons, the younger, Johann Caspar, was the father of our poet. Thus we see that Goethe, like Schiller, sprang from the people. He makes no mention of the lucky tailor, nor of the Thuringian farrier, in his Autobiography. This silence may be variously interpreted. At first, I imagined it was aristocratic prudery on the part of von Goethe, minister and nobleman; but it is never well to put ungenerous constructions, when others, equally plausible and more honourable, are ready; let us rather follow the advice of Arthur Helps, to "employ our imagination in the service of charity." We can easily imagine that Goethe was silent about the tailor, because, in truth, having never known him, there was none of that affectionate remembrance which encircles the objects of early life, to make this grandfather figure in the Autobiography beside the grandfather Textor, who was known and loved. Probably, also, the tailor was seldom talked of in the parental circle. There is a peculiar and indelible ridicule attached to the idea of a tailor in Germany, which often prevents people of much humbler pretensions than Goethe from whispering their connection with such a trade. Goethe does mention this grandfather in the Second Book of his Autobiography, and tells us how he was teased by the taunts of boys respecting his humble parentage; these taunts even