Note 34 — CONSIDERATIONS, &c.

The following is from Lewes’s “Life of Goethe,” just published. The words in double inverted commas are those of Goethe himself: ‘“I had a large collection of weapons, and among them a very handsome dagger. This I placed by my bedside every night, and before extinguishing my candle I made various attempts to pierce the sharp point a couple of inches into my breast; but not being able to do it I laughed myself out of the notion,” &c. He played with suicidal thoughts, because he was restless, and suicide was a fashionable speculation of the day,’ &c. . . . In October, 1772 the report reaches him that his Wetzlau friend, Goué, has shot himself. “Write to me at once about Goué,” he says to Kestner, “I honour such an act, and pity mankind,” &c.—Vol. I. p. 197. There is more to this abominable purpose in the sequel. Such was Goethe, a man sprung from the people, not the offspring of an effete noblesse, and at a time of life when the very thought of self-destruction is most alien to all the instincts of nature,—‘a canker in youth,’—and with no taint of constitutional melancholy in his system. Goethe’s genius was a sea of glass, capable of reflecting the rays cast upon it from without with unusual brilliancy; but, unlike our Shakspeare, devoid of independent power of originating new thought. Thus he reflected all his days the prevailing fashion of his time, and thus he but re-enacts the sentimentalism of the hour in his suicidal lucubrations.