Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Page 3

sufficiently
recommended to the best attention of all thinking men. But, unhappily,
it is not a subject susceptible of demonstration: the merits and
characteristics of a Poet are not to be set forth by logic; but to be
gathered by personal, and as in this case it must be, by deep and careful
inspection of his works. Nay Goethe's world is everyway so different
from ours; it costs us such effort, we have so much to remember, and so
much to forget, before we can transfer ourselves in any measure into
his peculiar point of vision, that a right study of him, for an Englishman,
even of ingenuous, open, inquisitive mind, becomes unusually difficult;
for a fixed, decided, contemptuous Englishman, next to impossible. To
a reader of the first class, helps may be given, explanations will remove
many a difficulty; beauties that lay hidden may be made apparent; and
directions, adapted to his actual position, will at length guide him into
the proper tract for such an inquiry. All this, however, must be a work
of progression and detail. To do our part in it, from time to time, must
rank among the best duties of an English Foreign Review. Meanwhile,
our present endeavour limits itself within far narrower bounds. We
cannot aim to make Goethe known, but only to prove that he is worthy
of being known; at most, to point out, as it were afar off, the path by

which some knowledge of him may be obtained. A slight glance at his
general literary character and procedure, and one or two of his chief
productions which throw light on these, must for the present suffice. A
French diplomatic personage, contemplating Goethe's physiognomy, is
said to have observed: /Voila un homme qui a eu beaucoup de
chagrins./ A truer version of the matter, Goethe himself seems to think,
would have been: Here is a man who has struggled toughly; who has
/es sich recht sauer werden lassen./ Goethe's life, whether as a writer
and thinker, or as a living active man, has indeed been a life of effort,
of earnest toilsome endeavour after all excellence. Accordingly, his
intellectual progress, his spiritual and moral history, as it may be
gathered from his successive Works, furnishes, with us, no small
portion of the pleasure and profit we derive from perusing them.
Participating deeply in all the influences of his age, he has from the
first, at every new epoch, stood forth to elucidate the new
circumstances of the time; to offer the instruction, the solace, which
that time required. His literary life divides itself into two portions
widely different in character: the products of the first, once so new and
original, have long either directly or through the thousand thousand
imitations of them, been familiar to us; with the products of the second,
equally original, and in our day far more precious, we are yet little
acquainted. These two classes of works stand curiously related with
each other; at first view, in strong contradiction, yet, in truth, connected
together by the strictest sequence. For Goethe has not only suffered and
mourned in bitter agony under the spiritual perplexities of his time; but
he has also mastered these, he is above them, and has shown others
how to rise above them. At one time, we found him in darkness, and
now he is in light; he was once an Unbeliever, and now he is a Believer;
and he believes, moreover, not by denying his unbelief, but by
following it out; not by stopping short, still less turning back, in his
inquiries, but by resolutely prosecuting them. This, it appears to us, is a
case of singular interest, and rarely exemplified, if at all elsewhere, in
these our days. How has this man, to whom the world once offered
nothing but blackness, denial and despair, attained to that better vision
which now shows it to him, not tolerable only, but full of solemnity and
loveliness? How has the belief of a Saint been united in this high and
true mind with the clearness of a Sceptic; the devout spirit of a Fenelon

made to blend in soft harmony with the gaiety, the sarcasm, the
shrewdness of a Voltaire?
Goethe's two earliest works are /Götz von Berlichingen/ and the
/Sorrows of Werter/. The boundless influence and popularity they
gained, both at home and abroad, is well known. It was they that
established almost at once his literary fame in his own country; and
even determined his subsequent private history, for they brought him
into contact with the Duke of Weimar; in connection with whom, the
Poet, engaged in manifold duties, political as well as literary, has lived
for fifty-four years. Their effects over Europe at large were not less
striking than in Germany.
'It would be