The Youth of Goethe | Page 8

to concern
regarding his spiritual welfare, nor to make religion the all-engrossing

subject of his thoughts and affections. There was one friend of the
family, indeed, the Fräulein von Klettenberg (the Schöne Seele of
Wilhelm Meister), in whom Goethe saw the exemplar of the religious
life in its more ecstatic manifestations, but her special influence on him
belongs to a later date. In accordance with the family rule he regularly
attended church, but the homilies to which he listened were not of a
nature to quicken his religious feelings, while the doctrinal instruction
he received at home he has himself described as "nothing but a dry kind
of morality." Against one article of the creed taught him--the doctrine
of original and inherited sin--all his instincts rebelled; and the antipathy
was so compact with all his later thinking that we may readily believe
that it manifested itself thus early. If we may accept his own account of
his youthful religious experiences, he was already on the way to that
Ur-religion, which was his maturest profession of faith, and which he
held to be the faith of select minds in all stages of human history. Now,
as at all periods of his life, it was the beneficent powers in nature that
most deeply impressed him, and he records how in crude childish
fashion he secretly reared an altar to these powers, though an unlucky
accident in the oblation prevented him from repeating his act of
worship.
Like other children, he was quick to see the inconsistency of the creed
he was taught with the actual facts of experience. One event in his
childhood, the earthquake of Lisbon, especially struck him as a
confounding commentary on the accepted belief in the goodness of
God; and the impression was deepened when in the following summer
a violent thunder-storm played havoc with some of the most treasured
books in his father's library. In all his soul's troubles, however, Goethe,
according to his own account, found refuge in a world where
questionings of the ways of Providence had never found an entrance. In
the Old Testament, and specially in the Book of Genesis, with its
picture of patriarchal life, he found a world which by engaging his
feelings and imagination worked with tranquilising effect (stille
Wirkung) on his spirit, distracted by his miscellaneous studies and his
varied interests. Of all the elements that entered into his early culture,
indeed, Goethe gives the first place to the Bible. "To it, almost alone,"
he expressly says, "did I owe my moral education." To the Bible as an

incomparable presentment of the national life and development of a
people, and the most precious of possessions for human culture, Goethe
bore undeviating testimony at every period of his life. It need hardly be
said that his attitude towards the Bible was divided by an impassable
gulf from the attitude of traditional Christianity. For Goethe it was a
purely human production, the fortunate birth of a time and a race which
in the nature of things can never be paralleled. What the Churches have
found in it was not for him its inherent virtue. Even in his youth it was
in its picturesque presentation of a primitive life that he found what
satisfied the needs of his nature. The spiritual aspirations of the Psalms,
the moral indignation of the prophets, found no response in him either
in youth or manhood. His ideal of life was never that of the saints, but
it was an ideal, as his record of his early religious experience shows,
which had its roots in the nature which had been allotted him.
To certain events in his early life Goethe assigned a decisive influence
on his future development. To the gift of a set of puppets by his
grandmother he attributes his first awakened interest in the drama; and
the extraordinary detail with which Wilhelm Meister describes his
youthful absorption in the play of his puppets proves that in his
Autobiography Goethe does not lay undue stress on the significance of
the gift. To another event which occurred when he was entering his
seventh year, he ascribes the origin of an attitude of mind which in his
own opinion he did not overcome till his later years. In 1756 broke out
the Seven Years' War, in the course of which there was a cleavage in
German public opinion that disturbed the peace of families and set the
nearest relatives at bitter feud. Such was the case in the Goethe
circle--the father passionately sympathising with Frederick; the
maternal grandfather, Textor, the chief magistrate of Frankfort, as
passionately taking the side of Maria Theresa. In this case the son's
sympathies were those of his father, and in boyish fashion he made a
hero of the king of Prussia, though, as he