VOLUME XII SLICE II Gloss to Gordon, Charles George (continued 6)

1 For an analysis of Caleb Williams see the chapter on “Theorists of Revolution” in Professor E. Dowden’s The French Revolution and English Literature (1897).

GODWIN-AUSTEN, ROBERT ALFRED CLOYNE (1808-1884), English geologist, the eldest son of Sir Henry E. Austen, was born on the 17th of March 1808. He was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in 1830. He afterwards entered Lincoln’s Inn. In 1833 he married the only daughter and heiress of General Sir Henry T. Godwin, K.C.B., and he took the additional name of Godwin by Royal licence in 1854. At Oxford as a pupil of William Buckland he became deeply interested in geology, and soon afterwards becoming acquainted with De la Beche, he was inspired by that great master, and assisted him by making a geological map of the neighbourhood of Newton Abbot, which was embodied in the Geological Survey map. He also published an elaborate memoir “On the Geology of the South-East of Devonshire” (Trans. Geol. Soc. ser. 2, vol. viii.). His attention was next directed to the Cretaceous rocks of Surrey, his home-county, his estates being situated at Chilworth and Shalford near Guildford. Later he dealt with the superficial accumulations bordering the English Channel, and with the erratic boulders of Selsea. In 1855 he brought before the Geological Society of London his celebrated paper “On the possible Extension of the Coal-Measures beneath the South-Eastern part of England,” in which he pointed out on well-considered theoretical grounds the likelihood of coal-measures being some day reached in that area. In this article he also advocated the freshwater origin of the Old Red Sandstone, and discussed the relations of that formation, and of the Devonian, to the Silurian and Carboniferous. He was elected F.R.S. in 1849, and in 1862 he was awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London, on which occasion he was styled by Sir R. I. Murchison “pre-eminently the physical geographer of bygone periods.” He died at Shalford House near Guildford on the 25th of November 1884.

His son, Lieut-Colonel Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen (b. 1834), entered the army in 1851, and served for many years on the Trigonometrical Survey of India, retiring in 1877. He gave much attention to geology, but is more especially distinguished for his researches on the natural history of India and as the author of The Land and Freshwater Mollusca of India (1882-1887).

GODWINE (d. 1053), son of Wulfnoth, earl of the West-Saxons, the leading Englishman in the first half of the 11th century. His birth and origin are utterly uncertain; but he rose to power early in Canute’s reign and was an earl in 1018. He received in marriage Gytha, a connexion of the king’s, and in 1020 became earl of the West-Saxons. On the death of Canute in 1035 he joined with Queen Emma in supporting the claim of Hardicanute, the son of Canute and Emma, to the crown of his father, in opposition to Leofric and the northern party who supported Harold Harefoot (see Hardicanute). While together they held Wessex for Hardicanute, the ætheling Ælfred, son of Emma by her former husband Æthelred II., landed in England in the hope of winning back his father’s crown; but falling into the hands of Godwine, he and his followers were cruelly done to death. On the death of Hardicanute in 1042 Godwine was foremost in promoting the election of Edward (the Confessor) to the vacant throne. He was now the first man in the kingdom, though his power was still balanced by that of the other great earls, Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumberland. His sons Sweyn and Harold were promoted to earldoms; and his daughter Eadgyth was married to the king (1045). His policy was strongly national in opposition to the marked Normanizing tendencies of the king. Between him and Edward’s foreign favourites, particularly Robert of Jumièges, there was deadly feud. The appointment of Robert to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1051 marks the decline of Godwine’s power; and in the same year a series of outrages committed by one of the king’s foreign favourites led to a breach between the king and the earl, which culminated in the exile of the latter with all his family (see Edward the Confessor). But next year Godwine returned in triumph; and at a great meeting held outside London he and his family were restored to all their offices and possessions, and the archbishop and many other Normans were banished. In the following year Godwine was smitten with a fit at the king’s table, and died three days later on the 15th of April 1053.

Godwine appears to have had seven sons, three of whom—King Harold, Gyrth and Leofwine—were killed at Hastings; two others, Wulfnoth and Ælfgar, are of little importance; another was Earl Tostig (q.v.). The eldest son was Sweyn, or Swegen (d. 1052), who was outlawed for seducing Eadgifu abbess of Leominster. After fighting for the king of Denmark he returned to England in 1049, when his murder of his cousin Beorn compelled him to leave England for the second time. In 1050, however, he regained his earldom, and in 1051 he shared his father’s exile. To atone for the murder of Beorn, Sweyn went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and on the return journey he died on the 29th of September 1052, meeting his death, according to one account, at the hands of the Saracens.

GODWIT, a word of unknown origin, the name commonly applied to a marsh-bird in great repute, when fattened, for the table, and formerly abundant in the fens of Norfolk, the Isle of Ely and Lincolnshire. In Turner’s days (1544) it was worth three times as much as a snipe, and at the same period Belon said of it—“C’est vn Oyseau es delices des Françoys.” Casaubon, who Latinized its name “Dei ingenium” (Ephemerides, 19th September 1611), was told by the “ornithotrophaeus” he visited at Wisbech that in London it fetched twenty pence. Its fame as a delicacy is perpetuated by many later writers, Ben Jonson among them, and Pennant says that in his time (1766) it sold for half-a-crown or five shillings. Under the name godwit two perfectly distinct species of British birds were included, but that which seems to have been especially prized is known to modern ornithologists as the black-tailed godwit, Limosa aegocephala, formerly called, from its loud cry, a yarwhelp,1 shrieker or barker, in the districts it inhabited. The practice of netting this bird in large numbers during the spring and summer, coupled with the gradual reclamation of the fens, to which it resorted, has now rendered it but a visitor in England; and it probably ceased from breeding regularly in England in 1824 or thereabouts, though under favourable conditions it may have occasionally laid its eggs for some thirty years later or more (Stevenson, Birds of Norfolk, ii. 250). This godwit is a species of wide range, reaching Iceland, where it is called Jardraeka (= earth-raker), in summer, and occurring numerously in India in winter. Its chief breeding-quarters seem to extend from Holland eastwards to the south of Russia. The second British species is that which is known as the bar-tailed godwit, L. lapponica, and this seems to have never been more than a bird of double passage in the United Kingdom, arriving in large flocks on the south coast about the 12th of May, and, after staying a few days, proceeding to the north-eastward. It is known to breed in Lapland, but its eggs are of great rarity. Towards autumn the young visit the English coasts, and a few of them remain, together with some of the other species, in favourable situations throughout the winter. One of the local names by which the bar-tailed godwit is known to the Norfolk gunners is scamell, a word which, in the mouth of Caliban (Tempest, II. ii.), has been the cause of much perplexity to Shakespearian critics.

The godwits belong to the group Limicolae, and are about as big as a tame pigeon, but possess long legs, and a long bill with a slight upward turn. It is believed that in the genus Limosa the female is larger than the male. While the winter plumage is of a sober greyish-brown, the breeding-dress is marked by a predominance of bright bay or chestnut, rendering the wearer a very beautiful object. The black-tailed godwit, though varying a good deal in size, is constantly larger than the bar-tailed, and especially longer in the legs. The species may be further distinguished by the former having the proximal third of the tail-quills pure white, and the distal two-thirds black, with a narrow white margin, while the latter has the same feathers barred with black and white alternately for nearly their whole length.

America possesses two species of the genus, the very large marbled godwit or marlin, L. fedoa, easily recognized by its size and the buff colour of its axillaries, and the smaller Hudsonian godwit, L. hudsonica, which has its axillaries of a deep black. This last, though less numerous than its congener, seems to range over the whole of the continent, breeding in the extreme north, while it has been obtained also in the Strait of Magellan and the Falkland Islands. The first seems not to go farther southward than the Antilles and the Isthmus of Panama.

From Asia, or at least its eastern part, two species have been described. One of them, L. melanuroides, differs only from L. aegocephala in its smaller size, and is believed to breed in Amurland, wintering in the islands of the Pacific, New Zealand and Australia. The other, L. uropygialis, is closely allied to and often mistaken for L. lapponica, from which it chiefly differs by having the rump barred like the tail. This was found breeding in the extreme north of Siberia by Dr von Middendorff, and ranges to Australia, whence it was, like the last, first described by Gould.

(A. N.)

1 This name seems to have survived in Whelp Moor, near Brandon, in Suffolk.

GOEBEN, AUGUST KARL VON (1816-1880), Prussian general of infantry, came of old Hanoverian stock. Born at Stade on the 10th of December 1816, he aspired from his earliest years to the Prussian service rather than that of his own country, and at the age of seventeen obtained a commission in the 24th regiment of Prussian infantry. But there was little scope there for the activities of a young and energetic subaltern, and, leaving the service in 1836, he entered the Carlist army campaigning in Spain. In the five campaigns which he made in the service of Don Carlos he had many and various vicissitudes of fortune. He had not fought for two months when he fell, severely wounded, into the hands of the Spanish Royal troops. After eight months’ detention he escaped, but it was not long before he was captured again. This time his imprisonment was long and painful, and on two occasions he was compelled to draw lots for his life with his fellow-captives. When released, he served till 1840 with distinction. In that year he made his way back, a beggar without means or clothing, to Prussia. The Carlist lieutenant-colonel was glad to be re-admitted into the Prussian service as a second lieutenant, but he was still young, and few subalterns could at the age of twenty-four claim five years’ meritorious war service. In a few years we find him serving as captain on the Great General Staff, and in 1848 he had the good fortune to be transferred to the staff of the IV. army corps, his immediate superior being Major von Moltke. The two “coming men” became fast friends, and their mutual esteem was never disturbed. In the Baden insurrection Goeben served with distinction on the staff of Prince William, the future emperor. Staff and regimental duty (as usual in the Prussian service) alternated for some years after this, till in 1863 he became major-general commanding the 26th infantry brigade. In 1860, it should be mentioned, he was present with the Spanish troops in Morocco, and took part in the battle of Tetuan.

In the first of Prussia’s great wars (1864) he distinguished himself at the head of his brigade at Rackebüll and Sonderburg. In the war of 1866 Lieutenant-General von Goeben commanded the 13th division, of which his old brigade formed part, and, in this higher sphere, once more displayed the qualities of a born leader and skilful tactician. He held almost independent command with conspicuous success in the actions of Dermbach, Laufach, Kissingen, Aschaffenburg, Gerchsheim, Tauber-Bischofsheim and Würzburg. The mobilization of 1870 placed him at the head of the VIII. (Rhineland) army corps, forming part of the First Army under Steinmetz. It was his resolute and energetic leading that contributed mainly to the victory of Spicheren (6th August), and won the only laurels gained on the Prussian right wing at Gravelotte (18th August). Under Manteuffel the VIII. corps took part in the operations about Amiens and Bapaume, and on the 8th of January 1871 Goeben succeeded that general in the command of the First Army, with which he had served throughout the campaign as a corps commander. A fortnight later he had brought the war in northern France to a brilliant conclusion, by the decisive victory of St Quentin (18th and 19th January 1871). The close of the Franco-German War left Goeben one of the most distinguished men in the victorious army. He was colonel of the 28th infantry, and had the grand cross of the Iron Cross. He commanded the VIII. corps at Coblenz until his death in 1880.

General von Goeben left many writings. His memoirs are to be found in his works Vier Jahre in Spanien (Hanover, 1841), Reise- und Lagerbriefe aus Spanien und vom spanischen Heere in Marokko (Hanover, 1863) and in the Darmstadt Allgemeine Militärzeitung. The former French port (Queuleu) at Metz was renamed Goeben after him, and the 28th infantry bears his name. A statue of Goeben by Schaper was erected at Coblenz in 1884.

See G. Zernin, Das Leben des Generals August von Goeben (2 vols., Berlin, 1895-1897); H. Barth, A. von Goeben (Berlin, 1906); and, for his share in the war of 1870-71; H. Kunz, Der Feldzug im N. und N.W. Frankreichs 1870-1871 (Berlin, 1889), and the 14th Monograph of the Great General Staff (1891).

GOEJE, MICHAEL JAN DE (1836-1909), Dutch orientalist, was born in Friesland in 1836. He devoted himself at an early age to the study of oriental languages and became especially proficient in Arabic, under the guidance of Dozy and Juynboll, to whom he was afterwards an intimate friend and colleague. He took his degree of doctor at Leiden in 1860, and then studied for a year in Oxford, where he examined and collated the Bodleian MSS. of Idrīsī (part being published in 1866, in collaboration with R. P. Dozy, as Description de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne). About the same time he wrote Mémoires de l’histoire et de la géographie orientales, and edited Expugnatio regionum. In 1883, on the death of Dozy, he became Arabic professor at Leiden, retiring in 1906. He died on the 17th of May 1909. Though perhaps not a teacher of the first order, he wielded a great influence during his long professoriate not only over his pupils, but over theologians and eastern administrators who attended his lectures, and his many editions of Arabic texts have been of the highest value to scholars, the most important being his great edition of Ṭabarī. Though entirely averse from politics, he took a keen interest in the municipal affairs of Leiden and made a special study of elementary education. He took the leading part in the International Congress of Orientalists at Algiers in 1905. He was a member of the Institut de France, was awarded the German Order of Merit, and received an honorary doctorate of Cambridge University. At his death he was president of the newly formed International Association of Academies of Science. Among his chief works are Fragmenta historicorum Arabicorum (1869-1871); Diwan of Moslim ibn al-Wālid (1875); Bibliotheca geographorum Arabicorum (1870-1894); Annals of Ṭabari (1879-1901); edition of Ibn Qutaiba’s biographies (1904); of the travels of Ibn Jubaye (1907, 5th vol. of Gibb Memorial). He was also the chief editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (vols. i.-iii.), and contributed many articles to periodicals. He wrote for the 9th and the present edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

GOES, DAMIÃO DE (1502-1574), Portuguese humanist, was born of a patrician family at Alemquer, in February 1502. Under King John III. he was employed abroad for many years from 1523 on diplomatic and commercial missions, and he travelled over the greater part of Europe. He was intimate with the leading scholars of the time, was acquainted with Luther and other Protestant divines, and in 1532 became the pupil and friend of Erasmus. Goes took his degree at Padua in 1538 after a four years’ course. In 1537, at the instance of his friend Cardinal Sadoleto, he undertook to mediate between the Church and the Lutherans, but failed through the attitude of the Protestants. He married in Flanders a rich and noble Dutch lady, D. Joanna de Hargen, and settled at Louvain, then the literary centre of the Low Countries, where he was living in 1542 when the French besieged the town. He was given the command of the defending forces, and saved Louvain, but was taken prisoner and confined for nine months in France, till he obtained his freedom by a heavy ransom. He was rewarded, however, by a grant of arms from Charles V. He finally returned to Portugal in 1545, with a view of becoming tutor to the king’s son, but he failed to obtain this post, owing to the denunciations of Father Simon Rodriguez, provincial of the Jesuits, who accused Goes of favouring the Lutheran doctrines and of being a disciple of Erasmus. Nevertheless in 1548 he was appointed chief keeper of the archives and royal chronicler, and at once introduced some much-needed reforms into the administration of his office.

In 1558 he was given a commission to write a history of the reign of King Manoel, a task previously confided to João de Barros, but relinquished by him. It was an onerous undertaking for a conscientious historian, since it was necessary to expose the miseries as well as relate the glories of the period, and so to offend some of the most powerful families. Goes had already written a Chronicle of Prince John (afterwards John II.), and when, after more than eight years’ labour, he produced the First Part of his Chronicle of King Manoel (1566), a chorus of attacks greeted it, the edition was destroyed, and he was compelled to issue a revised version. He brought out the three other parts in 1566-1567, though chapters 23 to 27 of the Third Part were so mutilated by the censorship that the printed text differs largely from the MS. Hitherto Goes, notwithstanding his Liberalism, had escaped the Inquisition, though in 1540 his Fides, religio, moresque Aethiopum had been prohibited by the chief inquisitor, Cardinal D. Henrique; but the denunciation of Father Rodriguez in 1545, which had been vainly renewed in 1550, was now brought into action, and in 1571 he was arrested to stand his trial. There seems to be no doubt that the Inquisition made itself on this occasion, as on others, the instrument of private enmity; for eighteen months Goes lay ill in prison, and then he was condemned, though he had lived for thirty years as a faithful Catholic, and the worst that could be proved against him was that in his youth he had spoken against Indulgences, disbelieved in auricular confession, and consorted with heretics. He was sentenced to a term of reclusion, and his property was confiscated to the crown. After he had abjured his errors in private, he was sent at the end of 1572 to do penance at the monastery of Batalha. Later he was allowed to return home to Alemquer, where he died on the 30th of January 1574. He was buried in the church of Nossa Senhora da Varzea.

Damião de Goes was a man of wide culture and genial and courtly manners, a skilled musician and a good linguist. He wrote both Portuguese and Latin with classic strength and simplicity, and his style is free from affectation and rhetorical ornaments. His portrait by Albrecht Dürer shows an open, intelligent face, and the record of his life proves him to have been upright and fearless. His prosperity doubtless excited ill-will, but above all, his ideas, advanced for Portugal, his foreign ways, outspokenness and honesty contributed to the tragedy of his end, at a time when the forces of ignorant reaction held the ascendant. He had, it may be presumed, given some umbrage to the court by condemning, in the Chronicle of King Manoel, the royal ingratitude to distinguished public servants, though he received a pension and other rewards for that work, and he had certainly offended the nobility by his administration of the archive office and by exposing false genealogical claims in his Nobiliario. He paid the penalty for telling the truth, as he knew it, in an age when an historian had to choose between flattery of the great and silence. The Chronicle of King Manoel was the first official history of a Portuguese reign to be written in a critical spirit, and Damião de Goes has the honour of having been the first Portuguese royal chronicler to deserve the name of an historian.

His Portuguese works include Chronica do felicissimo rei Dom Emanuel (parts i. and ii., Lisbon, 1566, parts iii. and iv., ib. 1567). Other editions appeared in Lisbon in 1619 and 1749 and in Coimbra in 1790. Chronica do principe Dom Joam (Lisbon, 1558), with subsequent editions in 1567 and 1724 in Lisbon and in 1790 in Coimbra. Livro de Marco Tullio Ciceram chamado Catam Mayor (Venice, 1538). This is a translation of Cicero’s De senectute. His Latin works, published separately, comprise: (1) Legatio magni imperatoris Presbiteri Joannis, &c. (Antwerp, 1532); (2) Legatio Davidis Ethiopiae regis, &c. (Bologna, 1533); (3) Commentarii rerum gestarum in India (Louvain, 1539); (4) Fides, religio, moresque Aethiopum (Louvain, 1540), incorporating Nos. (1) and (2); (5) Hispania (Louvain, 1542); (6) Aliquot epistolae Sadoleti Bembi et aliorum clarissimorum virorum, &c. (Louvain, 1544); (7) Damiani a Goes equitis Lusitani aliquot opuscula (Louvain, 1544); (8) Urbis Lovaniensis obsidia (Lisbon, 1546); (9) De bello Cambaico ultimo (Louvain, 1549); (10) Urbis Olisiponensis descriptio (Evora, 1554); (11) Epistola ad Hieronymum Cardosum (Lisbon, 1556). Most of the above went through several editions, and many were afterwards included with new works in such collections as No. (7), and seven sets of Opuscula appeared, all incomplete. Nos. (3), (4) and (5) suffered mutilation in subsequent editions, at the hands of the censors, because they offended against religious orthodoxy or family pride.

Authorities.—(A) Joaquim de Vasconcellos, Goesiana (5 vols.), with the following sub-titles: (1) O Retrato de Albrecht Dürer (Porto, 1879); (2) Bibliographia (Porto, 1879), which describes 67 numbers of books by Goes; (3) As Variantes das Chronicus Portuguezas (Porto, 1881); (4) Damião de Goes: Novos Estudos (Porto, 1897); (5) As Cartas Latinas—in the press (1906). Snr. Vasconcellos only printed a very limited number of copies of these studies for distribution among friends, so that they are rare. (B) Guilherme J. C. Henriques, Ineditos Goesianos, vol. i. (Lisbon, 1896), vol. ii. (containing the proceedings at the trial by the Inquisition) (Lisbon, 1898). (C) A. P. Lopes de Mendonça, Damião de Goes e a Inquisição de Portugal (Lisbon, 1859). (D) Dr Sousa Viterbo, Damião de Goes e D. Antonio Pinheiro (Coimbra, 1895). (E) Dr Theophilo Braga, Historia da Universidade de Coimbra (Lisbon, 1892), i. 374-380. (F) Menendez y Pelayo, Historia de los Heter. Españoles, ii. 129-143.

(E. Pr.)

GOES, HUGO VAN DER (d. 1482), a painter of considerable celebrity at Ghent, was known to Vasari, as he is known to us, by a single picture in a Florentine monastery. At a period when the family of the Medici had not yet risen from the rank of a great mercantile firm to that of a reigning dynasty, it employed as an agent at the port of Bruges Tommaso Portinari, a lineal descendant, it was said, of Folco, the father of Dante’s Beatrix. Tommaso, at that time patron of a chapel in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova at Florence, ordered an altar-piece of Hugo van der Goes, and commanded him to illustrate the sacred theme of “Quem genuit adoravit.” In the centre of a vast triptych, comprising numerous figures of life size, Hugo represented the Virgin kneeling in adoration before the new-born Christ attended by Shepherds and Angels. On the wings he portrayed Tommaso and his two sons in prayer under the protection of Saint Anthony and St Matthew, and Tommaso’s wife and two daughters supported by St Margaret and St Mary Magdalen. The triptych, which has suffered much from decay and restoring, was for over 400 years at Santa Maria Nuova, and is now in the Uffizi Gallery. Imposing because composed of figures of unusual size, the altar-piece is more remarkable for portrait character than for charms of ideal beauty.

There are also small pieces in public galleries which claim to have been executed by Van der Goes. One of these pictures in the National Gallery in London is more nearly allied to the school of Memling than to the triptych of Santa Maria Nuova; another, a small and very beautiful “John the Baptist,” at the Pinakothek of Munich, is really by Memling; whilst numerous fragments of an altar-piece in the Belvedere at Vienna, though assigned to Hugo, are by his more gifted countryman of Bruges. Van der Goes, however, was not habitually a painter of easel pieces. He made his reputation at Bruges by producing coloured hangings in distemper. After he settled at Ghent, and became a master of his gild in 1465, he designed cartoons for glass windows. He also made decorations for the wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in 1468, for the festivals of the Rhetoricians and papal jubilees on repeated occasions, for the solemn entry of Charles the Bold into Ghent in 1470-1471, and for the funeral of Philip the Good in 1474. The labour which he expended on these occasions might well add to his fame without being the less ephemeral. About the year 1475 he retired to the monastery of Rouge Cloître near Ghent, where he took the cowl. There, though he still clung to his profession, he seems to have taken to drinking, and at one time to have shown decided symptoms of insanity. But his superiors gradually cured him of his intemperance, and he died in the odour of sanctity in 1482.

GOES, a town in the province of Zeeland, Holland, on the island of South Beveland, 11½ m. by rail E. of Middelburg. Pop. (1900) 6919. It is connected by a short canal with the East Scheldt, and has a good harbour (1819) defended by a fort. The principal buildings are the interesting Gothic church (1423) and the picturesque old town hall (restored 1771). There are various educational and charitable institutions. Goes has preserved for centuries its prosperous position as the market-town of the island. The chief industries are boat-building, brewing, book-binding and cigar-making. The town had its origin in the castle of Oostende, built here by the noble family of Borssele. It received a charter early in the 15th century from the countess Jacoba of Holland, who frequently stayed at the castle.

GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON (1749-1832), German poet, dramatist and philosopher, was born at Frankfort-on-Main on the 28th of August 1749. He came, on his father’s side, of Thuringian stock, his great-grandfather, Hans Christian Goethe, having been a farrier at Artern-on-the-Unstrut, about the middle of the 17th century. Hans Christian’s son, Friedrich Georg, was brought up to the trade of a tailor, and in this capacity settled in Frankfort in 1686. A second marriage, however, brought him into possession of the Frankfort inn, “Zum Weidenhof,” and he ended his days as a well-to-do innkeeper. His son, Johann Kaspar, the poet’s father (1710-1782), studied law at Leipzig, and, after going through the prescribed courses of practical training at Wetzlar, travelled in Italy. He hoped, on his return to Frankfort, to obtain an official position in the government of the free city, but his personal influence with the authorities was not sufficiently strong. In his disappointment he resolved never again to offer his services to his native town, and retired into private life, a course which his ample means facilitated. In 1742 he acquired, as a consolation for the public career he had missed, the title of kaiserlicher Rat, and in 1748 married Katharina Elisabeth (1731-1808), daughter of the Schultheiss or Bürgermeister of Frankfort, Johann Wolfgang Textor. The poet was the eldest son of this union. Of the later children only one, Cornelia, born in 1750, survived the years of childhood; she died as the wife of Goethe’s friend, J. G. Schlosser, in 1777. The best elements in Goethe’s genius came from his mother’s side; of a lively, impulsive disposition, and gifted with remarkable imaginative power, Frau Rat was the ideal mother of a poet; moreover, being hardly eighteen at the time of her son’s birth, she was herself able to be the companion of his childhood. From his father, whose stern, somewhat pedantic nature repelled warmer feelings on the part of the children, Goethe Inherited that “holy earnestness” and stability of character which brought him unscathed through temptations and passions, and held the balance to his all too powerful imagination.

Unforgettable is the picture which the poet subsequently drew of his childhood spent in the large house with its many nooks and crannies, in the Grosse Hirschgraben at Frankfort. Books, pictures, objects of art, antiquities, reminiscences of Rat Goethe’s visit to Italy, above all a marionette theatre, kindled the child’s quick intellect and imagination. His training was conducted in its early stages by his father, and was later supplemented by tutors. Meanwhile the varied and picturesque life of Frankfort was in itself an education. In 1759, during the Seven Years’ War, the French, as Maria Theresa’s allies, occupied the town, and, much to the irritation of Goethe’s father, who was a stanch partisan of Frederick the Great, a French lieutenant, Count Thoranc, was quartered on the Goethe household. The foreign occupation also led to the establishment of a French troupe of actors, and to their performances the boy, through his grandfather’s influence, had free access. Goethe has also recorded his memories of another picturesque event, the coronation of the emperor Joseph II. in the Frankfort Römer or town hall in 1764; but these memories were darkened by being associated in his mind with the tragic dénouement of his first love affair. The object of this passion was a certain Gretchen, who seems to have taken advantage of the boy’s interest in her to further the dishonest ends of one of her friends. The discovery of the affair and the investigation that followed cooled Goethe’s ardour and caused him to turn his attention seriously to the studies which were to prepare him for the university. Meanwhile the literary instinct had begun to show itself; we hear of a novel in letters—a kind of linguistic exercise, in which the characters carried on the correspondence in different languages—of a prose epic on the subject of Joseph, and various religious poems of which one, Die Höllenfahrt Christi, found its way in a revised form into the poet’s complete works.

In October 1765, Goethe, then a little over sixteen, left Frankfort for Leipzig, where a wider and, in many respects, less provincial life awaited him. He entered upon his university studies with zeal, but his own education in Frankfort had not been the best preparation for the scholastic methods which still dominated the German universities; of his professors, only Gellert seems to have won his interest, and that interest was soon exhausted. The literary beginnings he had made in Frankfort now seemed to him amateurish and trivial; he felt that he had to turn over a new leaf, and, under the guidance of E. W. Behrisch, a genial, original comrade, he learned the art of writing those light Anacreontic lyrics which harmonized with the tone of polite Leipzig society. Artificial as this poetry is, Goethe was, nevertheless, inspired by a real passion in Leipzig, namely, for Anna Katharina Schönkopf, the daughter of a wine-merchant at whose house he dined. She is the “Annette” after whom the recently discovered collection of lyrics was named, although it must be added that neither these lyrics nor the Neue Lieder, published in 1770, express very directly Goethe’s feelings for Käthchen Schönkopf. To his Leipzig student-days belong also two small plays in Alexandrines, Die Laune des Verliebten, a pastoral comedy in one act, which reflects the lighter side of the poet’s love affair, and Die Mitschuldigen (published in a revised form, 1769), a more sombre picture, in which comedy is incongruously mingled with tragedy. In Leipzig Goethe also had time for what remained one of the abiding interests of his life, for art; he regarded A. F. Oeser (1717-1799), the director of the academy of painting in the Pleissenburg, who had given him lessons in drawing, as the teacher who in Leipzig had influenced him most. His art studies were also furthered by a short visit to Dresden. His stay in Leipzig came, however, to an abrupt conclusion; the distractions of student life proved too much for his strength; a sudden haemorrhage supervened, and he lay long ill, first in Leipzig, and, after it was possible to remove him, at home in Frankfort. These months of slow recovery were a time of serious introspection for Goethe. He still corresponded with his Leipzig friends, but the tone of his letters changed; life had become graver and more earnest for him. He pored over books on occult philosophy; he busied himself with alchemy and astrology. A friend of his mother’s, Susanne Katharina von Klettenberg, who belonged to pietist circles in Frankfort, turned the boy’s thoughts to religious mysticism. On his recovery his father resolved that he should complete his legal studies at Strassburg, a city which, although then outside the German empire, was, in respect of language and culture, wholly German. From the first moment Goethe set foot in the narrow streets of the Alsatian capital, in April 1770, the whole current of his thought seemed to change. The Gothic architecture of the Strassburg minster became to him the symbol of a national and German ideal, directly antagonistic to the French tastes and the classical and rationalistic atmosphere that prevailed in Leipzig. The second moment of importance in Goethe’s Strassburg period was his meeting with Herder, who spent some weeks in Strassburg undergoing an operation of the eye. In this thinker, who was his senior by five years, Goethe found the master he sought; Herder taught him the significance of Gothic architecture, revealed to him the charm of nature’s simplicity, and inspired him with enthusiasm for Shakespeare and the Volkslied. Meanwhile Goethe’s legal studies were not neglected, and he found time to add to knowledge of other subjects, notably that of medicine. Another factor of importance in Goethe’s Strassburg life was his love for Friederike Brion, the daughter of an Alsatian village pastor in Sesenheim. Even more than Herder’s precept and example, this passion showed Goethe how trivial and artificial had been the Anacreontic and pastoral poetry with which he had occupied himself in Leipzig; and the lyrics inspired by Friederike, such as Kleine Blumen, kleine Blätter and Wie herrlich leuchtet mir die Natur! mark the beginning of a new epoch in German lyric poetry. The idyll of Sesenheim, as described in Dichtung und Wahrheit, is one of the most beautiful love-stories in the literature of the world. From the first, however, it was clear that Friederike Brion could never become the wife of the Frankfort patrician’s son; an unhappy ending to the romance was unavoidable, and, as is to be seen in passionate outpourings like the Wanderers Sturmlied, and in the bitter self-accusations of Clavigo, it left deep wounds on the poet’s sensitive soul.

To Strassburg we owe Goethe’s first important drama, Götz von Berlichingen, or, as it was called in its earliest form, Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen dramatisiert (not published until 1831). Revised under the now familiar title, it appeared in 1773, after Goethe’s return to Frankfort. In estimating this drama we must bear in mind Goethe’s own Strassburg life, and the turbulent spirit of his own age, rather than the historical facts, which the poet found in the autobiography of his hero published in 1731. The latter supplied only the rough materials; the Götz von Berlichingen whom Goethe drew, with his lofty ideals of right and wrong, and his enthusiasm for freedom, is a very different personage from the unscrupulous robber-knight of the 16th century, the rough friend of Franz von Sickingen and of the revolting peasants. Still less historical justification is to be found for the vacillating Weisslingen in whom Goethe executed poetic justice on himself as the lover of Friederike, or in the women of the play, the gentle Maria, the heartless Adelheid. But there is genial, creative power in the very subjectivity of these characters, and a vigorous dramatic life, which is irresistible in its appeal. With Götz von Berlichingen, Shakespeare’s art first triumphed on the German stage, and the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang was inaugurated.

Having received his degree in Strassburg, Goethe returned home in August 1771, and began his initiation into the routine of an advocate’s profession. In the following year, in order to gain insight into another side of his calling, he spent four months at Wetzlar, where the imperial law-courts were established. But Goethe’s professional duties had only a small share in the eventful years which lay between his return from Strassburg and that visit to Weimar at the end of 1775, which turned the whole course of his career, and resulted in his permanent attachment to the Weimar court. Goethe’s life in Frankfort was a round of stimulating literary intercourse; in J. H. Merck (1741-1791), an army official in the neighbouring town of Darmstadt, he found a friend and mentor, whose irony and common-sense served as a corrective to his own exuberance of spirits. Wetzlar brought new friends and another passion, that for Charlotte Buff, the daughter of the Amtmann there—a love-story which has been immortalized in Werthers Leiden—and again the young poet’s nature was obsessed by a love which was this time strong enough to bring him to the brink of that suicide with which the novel ends. A visit to the Rhine, where new interests and the attractions of Maximiliane von Laroche, a daughter of Wieland’s friend, the novelist Sophie von Laroche, brought partial healing; his intense preoccupation with literary work on his return to Frankfort did the rest. In 1775 Goethe was attracted by still another type of woman, Lili Schönemann, whose mother was the widow of a wealthy Frankfort banker. A formal betrothal took place, and the beauty of the lyrics which Lili inspired leaves no room for doubt that here was a passion no less genuine than that for Friederike or Charlotte. But Goethe—more worldly wise than on former occasions—felt instinctively that the gay, social world in which Lili moved was not really congenial to him. A visit to Switzerland in the summer of 1775 may not have weakened his interest in her, but it at least allowed him to regard her objectively; and, without tragic consequences on either side, the passion was ultimately allowed to yield to the dictates of common-sense. Goethe’s departure for Weimar in November made the final break less difficult.

The period from 1771 to 1775 was, in literary respects, the most productive of the poet’s life. It had been inaugurated with Götz von Berlichingen, and a few months later this tragedy was followed by another, Clavigo, hardly less convincing in its character-drawing, and reflecting even more faithfully than the former the experiences Goethe had gone through in Strassburg. Again poetic justice is effected on the unfortunate hero who has chosen his own personal advancement in preference to his duty to the woman he loves; more pointedly than in Götz is the moral enforced by Clavigo’s worldly friend Carlos, that the ground of Clavigo’s tragic end lies not so much in the defiance of a moral law as in the hero’s vacillation and want of character. With Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), the literary precipitate of the author’s own experiences in Wetzlar, Goethe succeeded in attracting, as no German had done before him, the attention of Europe. Once more it was the gospel that the world belongs to the strong, which lay beneath the surface of this romance. This, however, was not the lesson which was drawn from it by Goethe’s contemporaries; they shed tears of sympathy over the lovelorn youth whose burden becomes too great for him to bear. While Götz inaugurated the manlier side of the Sturm und Drang literature, Werther was responsible for its sentimental excesses. And to the sentimental rather than to the heroic side belongs also Stella, “a drama for lovers,” in which the poet again reproduced, if with less fidelity than in Werther, certain aspects of his own love troubles. A lighter vein is to be observed in various dramatic satires written at this time, such as Götter, Helden und Wieland (1774), Hanswursts Hochzeit, Fastnachtsspiel vom Pater Brey, Satyros, and in the Singspiele, Erwin und Elmire (1775) and Claudine von Villa Bella (1776); while in the rankfurter Gelehrte Anzeiger (1772-1773), Goethe drove home the principles of the new movement of Sturm und Drang in terse and pointed criticism. The exuberance of the young poet’s genius is also to be seen in the many unfinished fragments of this period; at one time we find him occupied with dramas on Caesar and Mahomet, at another with an epic on Der ewige Jude, and again with a tragedy on Prometheus, of which a magnificent fragment has passed into his works. Greatest of all the torsos of this period, however, was the dramatization of Faust. Thanks to a manuscript copy of the play in its earliest form—discovered as recently as 1887—we are now able to distinguish how much of this tragedy was the immediate product of the Sturm und Drang, and to understand the intentions with which the young poet began his masterpiece. Goethe’s hero changed with the author’s riper experience and with his new conceptions of man’s place and duties in the world, but the Gretchen tragedy was taken over into the finished poem, practically unaltered, from the earliest Faust of the Sturm und Drang. With these wonderful scenes, the most intensely tragic in all German literature, Goethe’s poetry in this period reaches its climax. Still another important work, however, was conceived, and in large measure written at this time, the drama of Egmont, which was not published until 1788. This work may, to some extent, be regarded as supplementary to Faust; it presents the lighter, more cheerful and optimistic side of Goethe’s philosophy in these years; Graf Egmont, the most winning and fascinating of the poet’s heroes, is endowed with that “demonic” power over the sympathies of men and women, which Goethe himself possessed in so high a degree. But Egmont depends for its interest almost solely on two characters, Egmont himself and Klärchen, Gretchen’s counterpart; regarded as a drama, it demonstrates the futility of that defiance of convention and rules with which the Sturm und Drang set out. It remained for Goethe, in the next period of his life, to construct on classic models a new vehicle for German dramatic poetry.

In December 1774 the young “hereditary prince” of Weimar, Charles Augustus, passing through Frankfort on his way to Paris, came into personal touch with Goethe, and invited the poet to visit Weimar when, in the following year, he took up the reins of government. In October 1775 the invitation was repeated, and on the 7th of November of that year Goethe arrived in the little Saxon capital which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. During the first few months in Weimar the poet gave himself up to the pleasures of the moment as unreservedly as his patron; indeed, the Weimar court even looked upon him for a time as a tempter who led the young duke astray. But the latter, although himself a mere stripling, had implicit faith in Goethe, and a firm conviction that his genius could be utilized in other fields besides literature. Goethe was not long in Weimar before he was entrusted with responsible state duties, and events soon justified the duke’s confidence. Goethe proved the soul of the Weimar government, and a minister of state of energy and foresight. He interested himself in agriculture, horticulture and mining, which were of paramount importance to the welfare of the duchy, and out of these interests sprang his own love for the natural sciences, which took up so much of his time in later years. The inevitable love-interest was also not wanting. As Friederike had fitted into the background of Goethe’s Strassburg life, Lotte into that of Wetzlar, and Lili into the gaieties of Frankfort, so now Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a Weimar official, was the personification of the more aristocratic ideals of Weimar society. We possess only the poet’s share of his correspondence with Frau von Stein, but it is possible to infer from it that, of all Goethe’s loves, this was intellectually the most worthy of him. Frau von Stein was a woman of refined literary taste and culture, seven years older than he and the mother of seven children. There was something more spiritual, something that partook rather of the passionate friendships of the 18th century than of love in Goethe’s relations with her. Frau von Stein dominated the poet’s life for twelve years, until his journey to Italy in 1786-1788. Of other events of this period the most notable were two winter journeys, the first in 1777, to the Harz Mountains, the second, two years later, to Switzerland—journeys which gave Goethe scope for that introspection and reflection for which his Weimar life left him little time. On the second of these journeys he revisited Friederike in Sesenheim, saw Lili, who had married and settled in Strassburg, and made the personal acquaintance of Lavater in Zürich.

The literary results of these years cannot be compared with those of the preceding period; they are virtually limited to a few wonderful lyrics, such as Wanderers Nachtlied, An den Mond, Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, or ballads, such as Der Erlkönig, a charming little drama, Die Geschwister (1776), in which the poet’s relations to both Lili and Frau von Stein seem to be reflected, a dramatic satire, Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (1778), and a number of Singspiele, Lila (1777), Die Fischerin, Scherz, List und Rache, and Jery und Bätely (1780). But greater works were in preparation. A religious epic, Die Geheimnisse, and a tragedy Elpenor, did not, it is true, advance much further than plans; but in 1777, under the influence of the theatrical experiments at the Weimar court, Goethe conceived and in great measure wrote a novel of the theatre, which was to have borne the title Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung; and in 1779 himself took part in a representation before the court at Ettersburg, of his drama Iphigenie auf Tauris. This Iphigenie was, however, in prose; in the following year Goethe remoulded it in iambics, but it was not until he went to Rome that the drama finally received the form in which we know it.

In September, 1786 Goethe set out from Karlsbad—secretly and stealthily, his plan known only to his servant—on that memorable journey to Italy, to which he had looked forward with such intense longing; he could not cross the Alps quickly enough, so impatient was he to set foot in Italy. He travelled by way of Munich, the Brenner and Lago di Garda to Verona and Venice, and from thence to Rome, where he arrived on the 29th of October 1786. Here he gave himself up unreservedly to the new impressions which crowded on him, and he was soon at home among the German artists in Rome, who welcomed him warmly. In the spring of 1787 he extended his journey as far as Naples and Sicily, returning to Rome in June 1787, where he remained until his final departure for Germany on the 2nd of April 1788. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Goethe’s Italian journey. He himself regarded it as a kind of climax to his life; never before had he attained such complete understanding of his genius and mission in the world; it afforded him a vantage-ground from which he could renew the past and make plans for the future. In Weimar he had felt that he was no longer in sympathy with the Sturm und Drang, but it was Italy which first taught him clearly what might take the place of that movement in German poetry. To the modern reader, who may well be impressed by Goethe’s extraordinary receptivity, it may seem strange that his interests in Italy were so limited; for, after all, he saw comparatively little of the art treasures of Italy. He went to Rome in Winckelmann’s footsteps; it was the antique he sought, and his interest in the artists of the Renaissance was virtually restricted to their imitation of classic models. This search for the classic ideal is reflected in the works he completed or wrote under the Italian sky. The calm beauty of Greek tragedy is seen in the new iambic version of Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787); the classicism of the Renaissance gives the ground-tone to the wonderful drama of Torquato Tasso (1790), in which the conflict of poetic genius with the prosaic world is transmuted into imperishable poetry. Classic, too, in this sense, were the plans of a drama on Iphigenie auf Delphos and of an epic, Nausikaa. Most interesting of all, however, is the reflection of the classic spirit in works already begun in earlier days, such as Egmont and Faust. The former drama was finished in Italy and appeared in 1788, the latter was brought a step further forward, part of it being published as a Fragment in 1790.

Disappointment in more senses than one awaited Goethe on his return to Weimar. He came back from Italy with a new philosophy of life, a philosophy at once classic and pagan, and with very definite ideas of what constituted literary excellence. But Germany had not advanced; in 1788 his countrymen were still under the influence of that Sturm und Drang from which the poet had fled. The times seemed to him more out of joint than ever, and he withdrew into himself. Even his relations to the old friends were changed. Frau von Stein had not known of his flight to Italy until she received a letter from Rome; but he looked forward to her welcome on his return. The months of absence, however, the change he had undergone, and doubtless those lighter loves of which the Römische Elegien bear evidence, weakened the Weimar memories; if he left Weimar as Frau von Stein’s lover he returned only as her friend; and she naturally resented the change. Goethe, meanwhile, satisfied to continue the freer customs to which he had adapted himself in Rome, found a new mistress in Christiane Vulpius (1765-1816), the least interesting of all the women who attracted him. But Christiane gradually filled up a gap in the poet’s life; she gave him, quietly, unobtrusively, without making demands on him, the comforts of a home. She was not accepted by court society; it did not matter to her that even Goethe’s intimate friends ignored her; and she, who had suited the poet’s whim when he desired to shut himself off from all that might dim the recollection of Italy, became with the years an indispensable helpmate to him. On the birth in 1789 of his son, Goethe had some thought of legalizing his relations with Christiane, but this intention was not realized until 1806, when the invasion of Weimar by the French made him fear for both life and property.

The period of Goethe’s life which succeeded his return from Italy was restless and unsettled; relieved of his state duties, he returned in 1790 to Venice, only to be disenchanted with the Italy he had loved so intensely a year or two before. A journey with the duke of Weimar to Breslau followed, and in 1792 he accompanied his master on that campaign against France which ended so ingloriously for the German arms at Valmy. In later years Goethe published his account both of this Campagne in Frankreich and of the Belagerung von Mainz, at which he was also present in 1793. His literary work naturally suffered under these distractions. Tasso, and the edition of the Schriften in which it was to appear, had still to be completed on his return from Italy; the Römische Elegien, perhaps the most Latin of all his works, were published in 1795, and the Venetianische Epigramme, the result of the second visit to Italy, in 1796. The French Revolution, in which all Europe was engrossed, was in Goethe’s eyes only another proof that the passing of the old régime meant the abrogation of all law and order, and he gave voice to his antagonism to the new democratic principles in the dramas Der Grosskophta (1792), Der Bürgergeneral (1793), and in the unfinished fragments Die Aufgeregten and Das Mädchen von Oberkirch. The spirited translation of the epic of Reinecke Fuchs (1794) he took up as a relief and an antidote to the social disruption of the time. Two new interests, however, strengthened the ties between Goethe and Weimar,—ties which the Italian journey had threatened to sever: his appointment in 1791 as director of the ducal theatre, a post which he occupied for twenty-two years, and his absorption in scientific studies. In 1790 he published his important Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, which was an even more fundamental achievement for the new science of comparative morphology than his discovery some six years earlier of the existence of a formation in the human jaw-bone analogous to the intermaxillary bone in apes; and in 1791 and 1792 appeared two parts of his Beiträge zur Optik.

Meanwhile, however, Goethe had again taken up the novel of the theatre which he had begun years before, with a view to finishing it and including it in the edition of his Neue Schriften (1792-1800). Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung became Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; the novel of purely theatrical interests was widened out to embrace the history of a young man’s apprenticeship to life. The change of plan explains, although it may not exculpate, the formlessness and loose construction of the work, its extremes of realistic detail and poetic allegory. A hero, who was probably originally intended to demonstrate the failure of the vacillating temperament when brought face to face with the problems of art, proved ill-adapted to demonstrate those precepts for the guidance of life with which the Lehrjahre closes; unstable of purpose, Wilhelm Meister is not so much an illustration of the author’s life-philosophy as a lay-figure on which he demonstrates his views. Wilhelm Meister is a work of extraordinary variety, ranging from the commonplace realism of the troupe of strolling players to the poetic romanticism of Mignon and the harper; its flashes of intuitive criticism and its weighty apothegms add to its value as a Bildungsroman in the best sense of that word. Of all Goethe’s works, this exerted the most immediate and lasting influence on German literature; it served as a model for the best fiction of the next thirty years.

In completing Wilhelm Meister, Goethe found a sympathetic and encouraging critic in Schiller, to whom he owed in great measure his renewed interest in poetry. After years of tentative approaches on Schiller’s part, years in which that poet concealed even from himself his desire for a friendly understanding with Goethe, the favourable moment arrived; it was in June 1794, when Schiller was seeking collaborators for his new periodical Die Horen; and his invitation addressed to Goethe was the beginning of a friendship which continued unbroken until the younger poet’s death. The friendship of Goethe and Schiller, of which their correspondence is a priceless record, had its limitations; it was purely intellectual in character, a certain barrier of personal reserve being maintained to the last. But for the literary life of both poets the gain was incommensurable. As far as actual work was concerned, Goethe went his own way as he had always been accustomed to do; but the mere fact that he devoted himself with increasing interest to literature was due to Schiller’s stimulus. It was Schiller, too, who induced him to undertake those studies on the nature of epic and dramatic poetry which resulted in the epic of Hermann und Dorothea and the fragment of the Achilleis; without the friendship there would have been no Xenien and no ballads, and it was his younger friend’s encouragement which induced Goethe to betake himself once more to the “misty path” of Faust, and bring the first part of that drama to a conclusion.

Goethe’s share in the Xenien (1796) may be briefly dismissed. This collection of distichs, written in collaboration with Schiller, was prompted by the indifference and animosity of contemporary criticism, and its disregard for what the two poets regarded as the higher interests of German poetry. The Xenien succeeded as a retaliation on the critics, but the masterpieces which followed them proved in the long run much more effective weapons against the prevailing mediocrity. Prose works like the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795) were unworthy of the poet’s genius, and the translation of Benvenuto Cellini’s Life (1796-1797) was only a translation. But in 1798 appeared Hermann und Dorothea, one of Goethe’s most perfect poems. It is indeed remarkable—when we consider by how much reflection and theoretic discussion the composition of the poem was preceded and accompanied—that it should make upon the reader so simple and “naïve” an impression; in this respect it is the triumph of an art that conceals art. Goethe has here taken a simple story of village life, mirrored in it the most pregnant ideas of his time, and presented it with a skill which may well be called Homeric; but he has discriminated with the insight of genius between the Homeric method of reproducing the heroic life of primitive Greece and the same method as adapted to the commonplace happenings of 18th-century Germany. In this respect he was undoubtedly guided by a forerunner who has more right than he to the attribute “naïve,” by J. H. Voss, the author of Luise. Hardly less imposing in their calm, placid perfection are the poems with which, in friendly rivalry, Goethe seconded the more popular ballads of his friend; Der Zauberlehrling, Der Gott und die Bayadere, Die Braut von Korinth, Alexis und Dora, Der neue Pausias and Die schöne Müllerin—a cycle of poems in the style of the Volkslied—are among the masterpieces of Goethe’s poetry. On the other hand, even the friendship with Schiller did not help him to add to his reputation as a dramatist. Die natürliche Tochter (1803), in which he began to embody his ideas of the Revolution on a wide canvas, proved impossible on the stage, and the remaining dramas, which were to have formed a trilogy, were never written. Goethe’s classic principles, when applied to the swift, direct art of the theatre, were doomed to failure, and Die natürliche Tochter, notwithstanding its good theoretic intention, remains the most lifeless and shadowy of all his dramas. Even less in touch with the living present were the various prologues and Festspiele, such as Paläophron und Neoterpe (1800), Was wir bringen (1802), which in these years he composed for the Weimar theatre.

Goethe’s classicism brought him into inevitable antagonism with the new Romantic movement which had been inaugurated in 1798 by the Athenaeum, edited by the brothers Schlegel. The sharpness of the conflict was, however, blunted by the fact that, without exception, the young Romantic writers looked up to Goethe as its master; they modelled their fiction on Wilhelm Meister; they regarded his lyrics as the high-water mark of German poetry; Goethe, Novalis declared, was the “Statthalter of poetry on earth.” With regard to painting and sculpture, however, Goethe felt that a protest was necessary, if the insidious ideas propounded in works like Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen were not to do irreparable harm, by bringing back the confusion of the Sturm und Drang; and, as a rejoinder to the Romantic theories, Goethe, in conjunction with his friend Heinrich Meyer (1760-1832), published from 1798 to 1800 an art review, Die Propyläen. Again, in Winckelmann und seine Zeit (1805) Goethe vigorously defended the classical ideals of which Winckelmann had been the founder. But in the end he proved himself the greatest enemy to the strict classic doctrine by the publication in 1808 of the completed first part of Faust, a work which was accepted by contemporaries as a triumph of Romantic art. Faust is a patchwork of many colours. With the aid of the vast body of Faust literature which has sprung up in recent years, and the many new documents bearing on its history—above all, the so-called Urfaust, to which reference has already been made—we are able now to ascribe to their various periods the component parts of the work; it is possible to discriminate between the Sturm und Drang hero of the opening scenes and of the Gretchen tragedy—the contemporary of Götz and Clavigo—and the superimposed Faust of calmer moral and intellectual ideals—a Faust who corresponds to Hermann and Wilhelm Meister. In its original form the poem was the dramatization of a specific and individualized story; in the years of Goethe’s friendship with Schiller it was extended to embody the higher strivings of 18th-century humanism; ultimately, as we shall see, it became, in the second part, a vast allegory of human life and activity. Thus the elements of which Faust is composed were even more difficult to blend than were those of Wilhelm Meister; but the very want of uniformity is one source of the perennial fascination of the tragedy, and has made it in a peculiar degree the national poem of the German people, the mirror which reflects the national life and poetry from the outburst of Sturm und Drang to the well-weighed and tranquil classicism of Goethe’s old age.

The third and final period of Goethe’s long life may be said to have begun after Schiller’s death. He never again lost touch with literature as he had done in the years which preceded his friendship with Schiller; but he stood in no active or immediate connexion with the literary movement of his day. His life moved on comparatively uneventfully. Even the Napoleonic régime of 1806-1813 disturbed but little his equanimity. Goethe, the cosmopolitan Weltbürger of the 18th century, had himself no very intense feelings of patriotism, and, having seen Germany flourish as a group of small states under enlightened despotisms, he had little confidence in the dreamers of 1813 who hoped to see the glories of Barbarossa’s empire revived. Napoleon, moreover, he regarded not as the scourge of Europe, but as the defender of civilization against the barbarism of the Slavs; and in the famous interview between the two men at Erfurt the poet’s admiration was reciprocated by the French conqueror. Thus Goethe had no great sympathy for the war of liberation which kindled young hearts from one end of Germany to the other; and when the national enthusiasm rose to its highest pitch he buried himself in those optical and morphological studies, which, with increasing years, occupied more and more of his time and interest.

The works and events of the last twenty-five years of Goethe’s life may be briefly summarized. In 1805, as we have seen, he suffered an irreparable loss in the death of Schiller; in 1806, Christiane became his legal wife, and to the same year belongs the magnificent tribute to his dead friend, the Epilog zu Schillers Glocke. Two new friendships about this time kindled in the poet something of the juvenile fire and passion of younger days. Bettina von Arnim came into personal touch with Goethe in 1807, and her Briefwechsel Goethes mit einem Kinde (published in 1835) is, in its mingling of truth and fiction, one of the most delightful products of the Romantic mind; but the episode was of less importance for Goethe’s life than Bettina would have us believe. On the other hand, his interest in Minna Herzlieb, foster-daughter of the publisher Frommann in Jena, was of a warmer nature, and has left its traces on his sonnets.

In 1808, as we have seen, appeared the first part of Faust, and in 1809 it was followed by Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The novel, hardly less than the drama, effected a change in the public attitude towards the poet. Since the beginning of the century the conviction had been gaining ground that Goethe’s mission was accomplished, that the day of his leadership was over; but here were two works which not merely re-established his ascendancy, but proved that the old poet was in sympathy with the movement of letters, and keenly alive to the change of ideas which the new century had brought in its train. The intimate psychological study of four minds, which forms the subject of the Wahlverwandtschaften, was an essay in a new type of fiction, and pointed out the way for developments of the German novel after the stimulus of Wilhelm Meister had exhausted itself. Less important than Die Wahlverwandtschaften was Pandora (1810), the final product of Goethe’s classicism, and the most uncompromisingly classical and allegorical of all his works. And in 1810, too, appeared his treatise on Farbenlehre. In the following year the first volume of his autobiography was published under the title Aus meinem Leben, Dichtung und Wahrheit. The second and third volumes of this work followed in 1812 and 1814; the fourth, bringing the story of his life up to the close of the Frankfort period in 1833, after his death. Goethe felt, even late in life, too intimately bound up with Weimar to discuss in detail his early life there, and he shrank from carrying his biography beyond the year 1775. But a number of other publications—descriptions of travel, such as the Italienische Reise (1816-1817), the materials for a continuation of Dichtung und Wahrheit collected in Tag- und Jahreshefte (1830)—have also to be numbered among the writings which Goethe has left us as documents of his life. Meanwhile no less valuable biographical materials were accumulating in his diaries, his voluminous correspondence and his conversations, as recorded by J. P. Eckermann, the chancellor Müller and F. Soret. Several periodical publications, Über Kunst und Altertum (1816-1832), Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt (1817-1824). Zur Morphologie (1817-1824), bear witness to the extraordinary breadth of Goethe’s interests in these years. Art, science, literature—little escaped his ken—and that not merely in Germany: English writers, Byron, Scott and Carlyle, Italians like Manzoni, French scientists and poets, could all depend on friendly words of appreciation and encouragement from Weimar.

In West-östlicher Diwan (1819), a collection of lyrics—matchless in form and even more concentrated in expression than those of earlier days—which were suggested by a German translation of Hafiz, Goethe had another surprise in store for his contemporaries. And, again, it was an actual passion—that for Marianne von Willemer, whom he met in 1814 and 1815—which rekindled in him the lyric fire. Meanwhile the years were thinning the ranks of Weimar society: Wieland, the last of Goethe’s greater literary contemporaries, died in 1813, his wife in 1816, Charlotte von Stein in 1827 and Duke Charles Augustus in 1828. Goethe’s retirement from the direction of the theatre in 1817 meant for him a break with the literary life of the day. In 1822 a passion for a young girl, Ulrike von Levetzow, whom he met at Marienbad, inspired the fine Trilogie der Leidenschaft, and between 1821 and 1829 appeared the long-expected and long-promised continuation of Wilhelm Meister, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. The latter work, however, was a disappointment: perhaps it could not have been otherwise. Goethe had lost the thread of his romance and it was difficult for him to resume it. Problems of the relation of the individual to society and industrial questions were to have formed the theme of the Wanderjahre; but since the French Revolution these problems had themselves entered on a new phase and demanded a method of treatment which it was not easy for the old poet to learn. Thus his intentions were only partially carried out, and the volumes were filled out by irrelevant stories, which had been written at widely different periods.

But the crowning achievement of Goethe’s literary life was the completion of Faust. The poem had accompanied him from early manhood to the end and was the repository for the fullest “confession” of his life; it is the poetic epitome of his experience. The second part is, in form, far removed from the impressive realism of the Urfaust. It is a phantasmagory; a drama the actors in which are not creatures of flesh and blood, but the shadows of an unreal world of allegory. The lover of Gretchen had, as far as poetic continuity is concerned, disappeared with the close of the first part. In the second part it is virtually a new Faust who, at the hands of a new Mephistopheles, goes out into a world that is not ours. Yet behind these unconvincing shadows of an imperial court with its financial difficulties, of the classical Walpurgisnacht, of the fantastic creation of the Homunculus, the noble Helena episode and the impressive mystery-scene of the close, where the centenarian Faust finally triumphs over the powers of evil, there lies a philosophy of life, a ripe wisdom born of experience, such as no European poet had given to the world since the Renaissance. Faust has been well called the “divine comedy” of 18th-century humanism.

The second part of Faust forms a worthy close to the life of Germany’s greatest man of letters, who died in Weimar on the 22nd of March 1832. He was the last of those universal minds which have been able to compass all domains of human activity and knowledge; for he stood on the brink of an era of rapidly expanding knowledge which has made for ever impossible the universality of interest and sympathy which distinguished him. As a poet, his fame has undergone many vicissitudes since his death, ranging from the indifference of the “Young German” school to the enthusiastic admiration of the closing decades of the 19th century—an enthusiasm to which we owe the Weimar Goethe-Gesellschaft (founded in 1885) and a vast literature dealing with the poet’s life and work; but the fact of his being Germany’s greatest poet and the master of her classical literature has never been seriously put in question. The intrinsic value of his poetic work, regarded apart from his personality, is smaller in proportion to its bulk than is the case with many lesser German poets and with the greatest poets of other literatures. But Goethe was a type of literary man hitherto unrepresented among the leading writers of the world’s literature; he was a poet whose supreme greatness lay in his subjectivity. Only a small fraction of Goethe’s work was written in an impersonal and objective spirit, and sprang from what might be called a conscious artistic impulse; by far the larger—and the better—part is the immediate reflex of his feelings and experiences.

It is as a lyric poet that Goethe’s supremacy is least likely to be challenged; he has given his nation, whose highest literary expression has in all ages been essentially lyric, its greatest songs. No other German poet has succeeded in attuning feeling, sentiment and thought so perfectly to the music of words as he; none has expressed so fully that spirituality in which the quintessence of German lyrism lies. Goethe’s dramas, on the other hand, have not, in the eyes of his nation, succeeded in holding their own beside Schiller’s; but the reason is rather because Goethe, from what might be called a wilful obstinacy, refused to be bound by the conventions of the theatre, than because he was deficient in the cunning of the dramatist. For, as an interpreter of human character in the drama, Goethe is without a rival among modern poets, and there is not one of his plays that does not contain a few scenes or characters which bear indisputable testimony to his mastery. Faust is Germany’s most national drama, and it remains perhaps for the theatre of the future to prove itself capable of popularizing psychological masterpieces like Tasso and Iphigenie. It is as a novelist that Goethe has suffered most by the lapse of time. The Sorrows of Werther no longer moves us to tears, and even Wilhelm Meister and Die Wahlverwandtschaften require more understanding for the conditions under which they were written than do Faust or Egmont. Goethe could fill his prose with rich wisdom, but he was only the perfect artist in verse.

Little attention is nowadays paid to Goethe’s work in other fields, work which he himself in some cases prized more highly than his poetry. It is only as an illustration of his many-sidedness and his manifold activity that we now turn to his work as a statesman, as a theatre-director, as a practical political economist. His art-criticism is symptomatic of a phase of European taste which tried in vain to check the growing individualism of Romanticism. His scientific studies and discoveries awaken only an historical interest. We marvel at the obstinacy with which he, with inadequate mathematical knowledge, opposed the Newtonian theory of light and colour; and at his championship of “Neptunism,” the theory of aqueous origin, as opposed to “Vulcanism,” that of igneous origin of the earth’s crust. Of far-reaching importance was, on the other hand, his foreshadowing of the Darwinian theory in his works on the metamorphosis of plants and on animal morphology. Indeed, the deduction to be drawn from Goethe’s contributions to botany and anatomy is that he, as no other of his contemporaries, possessed that type of scientific mind which, in the 19th century, has made for progress; he was Darwin’s predecessor by virtue of his enunciation of what has now become one of the commonplaces of natural science—organic evolution. Modern, too, was the outlook of the aging poet on the changing social conditions of the age, wonderfully sympathetic his attitude towards modern industry, which steam was just beginning to establish on a new basis, and towards modern democracy. The Europe of his later years was very different from the idyllic and enlightened autocracy of the 18th century, in which he had spent his best years and to which he had devoted his energies; yet Goethe was at home in it.

From the philosophic movement, in which Schiller and the Romanticists were so deeply involved, Goethe stood apart. Comparatively early in life he had found in Spinoza the philosopher who responded to his needs; Spinoza taught him to see in nature the “living garment of God,” and more he did not seek or need to know. As a convinced realist he took his standpoint on nature and experience, and could afford to look on objectively at the controversies of the metaphysicians. Kant he by no means ignored, and under Schiller’s guidance he learned much from him; but of the younger thinkers, only Schelling, whose mystic nature-philosophy was a development of Spinoza’s ideas, touched a sympathetic chord in his nature. As a moralist and a guide to the conduct of life—an aspect of Goethe’s work which Carlyle, viewing him through the coloured glasses of Fichtean idealism, emphasized and interpreted not always justly—Goethe was a powerful force on German life in years of political and intellectual depression. It is difficult even still to get beyond the maxims of practical wisdom he scattered so liberally through his writings, the lessons to be learned from Meister and Faust, or even that calm, optimistic fatalism which never deserted Goethe, and was so completely justified by the tenor of his life. If the philosophy of Spinoza provided the poet with a religion which made individual creeds and dogmas unnecessary and impossible, so Leibnitz’s doctrine of predestinism supplied the foundations for his faith in the divine mission of human life.

This many-sided activity is a tribute to the greatness of Goethe’s mind and personality; we may regard him merely as the embodiment of his particular age, or as a poet “for all time”; but with one opinion all who have felt the power of Goethe’s genius are in agreement—the opinion which was condensed in Napoleon’s often cited words, uttered after the meeting at Erfurt: Voilà un homme! Of all modern men, Goethe is the most universal type of genius. It is the full, rich humanity of his life and personality—not the art behind which the artist disappears, or the definite pronouncements of the thinker or the teacher—that constitutes his claim to a place in the front rank of men of letters. His life was his greatest work.

Bibliography.—(a) Collected Works, Diaries, Correspondence, Conversations. The following authorized editions of Goethe’s writings appeared in the poet’s lifetime: Schriften (8 vols., Leipzig, 1787-1790); Neue Schriften (7 vols., Berlin, 1792-1800); Werke (13 vols., Stuttgart, 1806-1810); Werke (20 vols., Stuttgart, 1815-1819); to which six volumes were added in 1820-1822; Werke (Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand) (40 vols., Stuttgart, 1827-1830). Goethe’s Nachgelassene Werke appeared as a continuation of this edition in 15 volumes (Stuttgart, 1832-1834), to which five volumes were added in 1842. These were followed by several editions of Goethe’s Sämtliche Werke, mostly in forty volumes, published by Cotta of Stuttgart. The first critical edition with notes was published by Hempel, Berlin, in thirty-six volumes, 1868-1879; that in Kürschner’s Deutsche Nationalliteratur, vols. 82-117 (1882-1897) is also important. In 1887 the monumental Weimar edition, which is now approaching completion, began to appear; it is divided into four sections: I. Werke (c. 56 vols.); II. Naturwissenschaftliche Werke (12 vols.); III. Tagebücher (13 vols.); IV. Briefe (c. 45 vols.). Of other recent editions the most noteworthy are: Sämtliche Werke (Jubiläums-Ausgabe), edited by E. von der Hellen (40 vols., Stuttgart, 1902 ff.); Werke, edited by K. Heinemann (30 vols., Leipzig, 1900 ff.), and the cheap edition of the Sämtliche Werke, edited by L. Geiger (44 vols., Leipzig, 1901). There are also innumerable editions of selected works; reference need only be made here to the useful collection of the early writings and letters published by S. Hirzel with an introduction by M. Bernays, Der junge Goethe (3 vols., Leipzig, 1875, 2nd ed., 1887). A French translation of Goethe’s Œuvres complètes, by J. Porchat, appeared in 9 vols., at Paris, in 1860-1863. There is, as yet, no uniform English edition, but Goethe’s chief works have all been frequently translated and a number of them will be found in Bohn’s standard library.

The definitive edition of Goethe’s diaries and letters is that forming Sections III. and IV. of the Weimar edition. Collections of selected letters based on the Weimar edition have been published by E. von der Hellen (6 vols., 1901 ff.), and by P. Stein (8 vols., 1902 ff.). Of the many separate collections of Goethe’s correspondence mention may be made of the Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, edited by Goethe himself (1828-1829; 4th ed., 1881; also several cheap reprints. English translation by L. D. Schmitz, 1877-1879); Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Zelter (6 vols., 1833-1834; reprint in Reclam’s Universalbibliothek, 1904; English translation by A. D. Coleridge, 1887); Bettina von Arnim, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835; 4th ed., 1890; English translation, 1838); Briefe von und an Goethe, edited by F. W. Riemer (1846); Goethes Briefe an Frau von Stein, edited by A. Schöll (1848-1851; 3rd ed. by J. Wahle, 1899-1900); Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und K. F. von Reinhard (1850); Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Knebel (2 vols., 1851); Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Staatsrat Schultz (1853); Briefwechsel des Herzogs Karl August mit Goethe (2 vols., 1863); Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Kaspar Graf von Sternberg (1866); Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Korrespondenz, and Goethes Briefwechsel mit den Gebrüdern von Humboldt, edited by F. T. Bratranek (1874-1876); Goethes und Carlyles Briefwechsel (1887), also in English; Goethe und die Romantik, edited by C. Schüddekopf and O. Walzel (2 vols., 1898-1899); Goethe und Lavater, edited by H. Funck (1901); Goethe und Österreich, edited by A. Sauer (2 vols., 1902-1903). Besides the correspondence with Schiller and Zelter, Bonn’s library contains a translation of Early and Miscellaneous Letters, by E. Bell (1884). The chief collections of Goethe’s conversations are: J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe (1836; vol. iii., also containing conversations with Soret, 1848; 7th ed. by H. Düntzer, 1899; also new edition by L. Geiger, 1902; English translation by J. Oxenford, 1850). The complete conversations with Soret have been published in German translation by C. A. H. Burkhardt (1905); Goethes Unterhaltungen mit dem Kanzler F. von Müller (1870). Goethe’s collected Gespräche were published by W. von Biedermann in 10 vols. (1889-1896).

(b) Biography.—Goethe’s autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, appeared in three parts between 1811 and 1814, a fourth part, bringing the history of his life as far as his departure for Weimar in 1775, in 1833 (English translation by J. Oxenford, 1846); it is supplemented by other biographical writings, as the Italienische Reise, Aus einer Reise in die Schweiz im Jahre 1797; Aus einer Reise am Rhein, Main und Neckar in den Jahren 1814 und 1815, Tag- und Jahreshefte, &c., and especially by his diaries and correspondence. The following are the more important biographies: H. Döring, Goethes Leben (1828; subsequent editions, 1833, 1849, 1856); H. Viehoff, Goethes Leben (4 vols., 1847-1854; 5th ed., 1887); J. W. Schäfer, Goethes Leben (2 vols., 1851; 3rd ed., 1877); G. H. Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe (2 vols., 1855; 2nd ed., 1864; 3rd ed., 1875; cheap reprint, 1906; the German translation by J. Frese is in its 18th edition, 1900; a shorter biography was published by Lewes in 1873 under the title The Story of Goethe’s Life); W. Mézières, W. Goethe, les œuvres expliquées par la vie (1872-1873); A. Bossert, Goethe (1872-1873); K. Goedeke, Goethes Leben und Schriften (1874; 2nd ed., 1877); H. Grimm, Goethe: Vorlesungen (1876; 8th ed., 1903; English translation, 1880); A. Hayward, Goethe (1878); H. H. Boyesen, Goethe and Schiller, their Lives and Works (1879); H. Düntzer, Goethes Leben (1880; 2nd ed., 1883; English translation, 1883); A. Baumgartner, Goethe, sein Leben und seine Werke (1885); J. Sime, Life of Goethe (1888); K. Heinemann, Goethes Leben und Werke (1889; 3rd ed., 1903); R. M. Meyer, Goethe (1894; 3rd ed., 1904); A. Bielschowsky, Goethe, sein Leben und seine Werke (vol. i., 1895; 5th ed., 1904; vol. ii., 1903; English translation by W. A. Cooper, 1905 ff.); G. Witkowsky, Goethe (1899); H. G. Atkins, J. W. Goethe (1904); P. Hansen and R. Meyer, Goethe, hans Liv og Vaerker (1906).

Of writings on special periods and aspects of Goethe’s life the more important are as follows (the titles are arranged as far as possible in the chronological sequence of the poet’s life): H. Düntzer, Goethes Stammbaum (1894); K. Heinemann, Goethes Mutter (1891; 6th ed., 1900); P. Bastier, La Mère de Goethe (1902); Briefe der Frau Rat (2 vols., 2nd ed., 1905); F. Ewart, Goethes Vater (1899); G. Witkowski, Cornelia die Schwester Goethes (1903); P. Besson, Goethe, sa sœur et ses amies (1898); H. Düntzer, Frauenbilder aus Goethes Jugendzeit (1852); W. von Biedermann, Goethe und Leipzig (1865); P. F. Lucius, Friederike Brion (1878; 3rd ed., 1904); A. Bielschowsky, Friederike Brion (1880); F. E. von Durckheim, Lili’s Bild geschichtlich entworfen (1879; 2nd ed., 1894); W. Herbst, Goethe in Wetzlar (1881); A. Diezmann, Goethe und die lustige Zeit in Weimar (1857; 2nd ed., 1901); H. Düntzer, Goethe und Karl August (1859-1864; 2nd ed., 1888); also, by the same author, Aus Goethes Freundeskreise (1868) and Charlotte von Stein (2 vols., 1874); J. Haarhuus, Auf Goethes Spuren in Italien (1896-1898); O. Harnack, Zur Nachgeschichte der italienischen Reise (1890); H. Grimm, Schiller und Goethe (Essays, 1858; 3rd ed., 1884); G. Berlit, Goethe und Schiller im persönlichen Verkehre, nach brieflichen Mitteilungen von H. Voss (1895); E. Pasqué, Goethes Theaterleitung in Weimar (2 vols., 1863); C. A. H. Burkhards, Das Repertoire des weimarischen Theaters unter Goethes Leitung (1891); J. Wahle, Das Weimarer Hoftheater unter Goethes Leitung (1892); O. Harnack, Goethe in der Epoche seiner Vollendung (2nd ed., 1901); J. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Goethe et Diderot (1880); A Fischer, Goethe und Napoleon (1899; 2nd ed., 1900); R. Steig, Goethe und die Gebrüder Grimm (1892).

(c) Criticism.—H. G. Graef, Goethe über seine Dichtungen (1901 ff.); J. W. Braun, Goethe im Urteile seiner Zeitgenossen (3 vols., 1883-1885); T. Carlyle, Essays on Goethe (1828-1832); X. Marmier, Études sur Goethe (1835); W. von Biedermann, Goethe-Forschungen (1879, 1886); J. Minor and A. Sauer, Studien zur Goethe-Philologie (1880); H. Düntzer, Abhandlungen zu Goethes Leben und Werken (1881); A. Schöll, Goethe in Hauptzügen seines Lebens und Wirkens (1882); V. Hehn, Gedanken über Goethe (1884; 4th ed., 1900); W. Scherer, Aufsätze über Goethe (1886); J. R. Seeley, Goethe reviewed after Sixty Years (1894); E. Dowden, New Studies in Literature (1895); É. Rod, Essai sur Goethe (1898); A. Luther, Goethe, sechs Vorträge (1905); R. Saitschik, Goethes Charakter (1898); W. Bode, Goethes Lebenskunst (1900; 2nd ed., 1902); by the same, Goethes Ästhetik (1901); T. Vollbehr, Goethe und die bildende Kunst (1895); E. Lichtenberger, Études sur les poésies lyriques de Goethe (1878); T. Achelis, Grundzüge der Lyrik Goethes (1900); B. Litzmann, Goethes Lyrik (1903); R. Riemann, Goethes Romantechnik (1901); R. Virchow, Goethe als Naturforscher (1861); E. Caro, La Philosophie de Goethe (1866; 2nd ed., 1870); R. Steiner, Goethes Weltanschauung (1897); F. Siebeck, Goethe als Denker (1902); F. Baldensperger, Goethe en France (1904); S. Waetzoldt, Goethe und die Romantik (1888).

More special treatises dealing with individual works are the following: W. Scherer, Aus Goethes Frühzeit (1879); R. Weissenfels, Goethe in Sturm und Drang, vol. i. (1894); W. Wilmanns, Quellenstudien zu Goethes Götz von Berlichingen (1874); J. Baechtold, Goethes Götz von Berlichingen in dreifacher Gestalt (1882); J. W. Appell, Werther und seine Zeit (1855; 4th ed., 1896); E. Schmidt, Richardson, Rousseau und Goethe (1875); M. Herrmann, Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilen (1900); E. Schmidt, Goethes Faust in ursprünglicher Gestalt (1887; 5th ed., 1901); J. Collin, Goethes Faust in seiner ältesten Gestalt (1896); H. Hettner, Goethes Iphigenie in ihrem Verhältnis zur Bildungsgeschichte des Dichters (1861; in Kleine Schriften, 1884); K. Fischer, Goethes Iphigenie (1888); F. T. Bratranek, Goethes Egmont und Schillers Wallenstein (1862); C. Schuchardt, Goethes italienische Reise (1862); H. Düntzer, Iphigenie auf Tauris; die drei ältesten Bearbeitungen (1854); F. Kern, Goethes Tasso (1890); J. Schubart, Die philosophischen Grundgedanken in Goethes Wilhelm Meister (1896); E. Boas, Schiller und Goethe in Xenienkampf (1851); E. Schmidt and B. Suphan, Xenien 1796, nach den Handschriften (1893); W. von Humboldt, Ästhetische Versuche: Hermann und Dorothea (1799); V. Hehn, Über Goethes Hermann und Dorothea (1893); A. Fries, Quellen und Komposition der Achilleis (1901); K. Alt, Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte von Dichtung und Wahrheit (1898); A. Jung, Goethes Wanderjahre und die wichtigsten Fragen des 19. Jahrhunderts (1854); F. Kreyssig, Vorlesungen über Goethes Faust (1866); the editions of Faust by G. von Loeper (2 vols., 1879), and K. J. Schröer (2 vols., 3rd and 4th ed., 1898-1903); K. Fischer, Goethes Faust (3 vols., 1893, 1902, 1903); O. Pniower, Goethes Faust, Zeugnisse und Excurse zu seiner Entstehungsgeschichte (1899); J. Minor, Goethes Faust, Entstehungsgeschichte und Erklärung (2 vols., 1901).

(d) Bibliographical Works, Goethe-Societies, &c.—L. Unflad, Die Goethe-Literatur in Deutschland (1878); S. Hirzel, Verzeichnis einer Goethe-Bibliothek (1884), to which G. von Loeper and W. von Biedermann have supplied supplements. F. Strehlke, Goethes Briefe: Verzeichnis unter Angabe der Quelle (1882-1884); British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books: Goethe (1888); Goedeke’s Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (2nd ed., vol. iv. 1891); and the bibliographies in the Goethe-Jahrbuch (since 1880). Also K. Hoyer, Zur Einführung in die Goethe-Literatur (1904). On Goethe in England see E. Oswald, Goethe in England and America (1899; 2nd ed., 1909); W. Heinemann, A Bibliographical List of the English Translations and Annotated Editions of Goethe’s Faust (1886). Reference may also be made here to F. Zarncke’s Verzeichnis der Originalaufnahmen von Goethes Bildnissen (1888).

A Goethe-Gesellschaft was founded at Weimar in 1885, and numbers over 2800 members; its publications include the annual Goethe-Jahrbuch (since 1880), and a series of Goethe-Schriften. A Goethe-Verein has existed in Vienna since 1887, and an English Goethe society, which has also issued several volumes of publications, since 1886.

(J. G. R.)

Goethe’s Descendants.—Goethe’s only son, August, born on the 25th of December 1789 at Weimar, married in 1817 Ottilie von Pogwisch (1796-1872), who had come as a child to Weimar with her mother (née Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck). The marriage was a very unhappy one, the husband having no qualities that could appeal to a woman who, whatever the censorious might say of her moral character, was distinguished to the last by a lively intellect and a singular charm. August von Goethe, whose sole distinction was his birth and his position as grand-ducal chamberlain, died in Italy, on the 27th of October 1830, leaving three children; Walther Wolfgang, born on April 9, 1818, died on April 15, 1885; Wolfgang Maximilian, born on September 18, 1820, died on January 20, 1883; Alma, born on October 22, 1827, died on September 29, 1844.

Of Walther von Goethe little need be said. In youth he had musical ambitions, studied under Mendelssohn and Weinlig at Leipzig, under Loewe at Stettin, and afterwards at Vienna. He published a few songs of no great merit, and had at his death no more than the reputation among his friends of a kindly and accomplished man.

Wolfgang or, as he was familiarly called, Wolf von Goethe, was by far the more gifted of the two brothers, and his gloomy destiny by so much the more tragic. A sensitive and highly imaginative boy, he was the favourite of his grandfather, who made him his constant companion. This fact, instead of being to the boy’s advantage, was to prove his bane. The exalted atmosphere of the great man’s ideas was too rarefied for the child’s intellectual health, and a brain well fitted to do excellent work in the world was ruined by the effort to live up to an impossible ideal. To maintain himself on the same height as his grandfather, and to make the name of Goethe illustrious in his descendants also, became Wolfgang’s ambition; and his incapacity to realize this, very soon borne in upon him, paralyzed his efforts and plunged him at last into bitter revolt against his fate and gloomy isolation from a world that seemed to have no use for him but as a curiosity. From the first, too, he was hampered by wretched health; at the age of sixteen he was subjected to one of those terrible attacks of neuralgia which were to torment him to the last; physically and mentally alike he stood in tragic contrast with his grandfather, in whose gigantic personality the vigour of his race seems to have been exhausted.

From 1839 to 1845 Wolfgang studied law at Bonn, Jena, Heidelberg and Berlin, taking his degree of doctor juris at Heidelberg in 1845. During this period he had made his first literary efforts. His Studenten-Briefe (Jena, 1842), a medley of letters and lyrics, are wholly conventional. This was followed by Der Mensch und die elementarische Natur (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1845), in three parts (Beiträge): (1) an historical and philosophical dissertation on the relations of mankind and the “soul of nature,” largely influenced by Schelling, (2) a dissertation on the juridical side of the question, De fragmento Vegoiae, being the thesis presented for his degree, (3) a lyrical drama, Erlinde. In this last, as in his other poetic attempts, Wolfgang showed a considerable measure of inherited or acquired ability, in his wealth of language and his easy mastery of the difficulties of rhythm and rhyme. But this was all. The work was characteristic of his self-centred isolation: ultra-romantic at a time when Romanticism was already an outworn fashion, remote alike from the spirit of the age and from that of Goethe. The cold reception it met with shattered at a blow the dream of Wolfgang’s life; henceforth he realized that to the world he was interesting mainly as “Goethe’s grandson,” that anything he might achieve would be measured by that terrible standard, and he hated the legacy of his name.

The next five years he spent in Italy and at Vienna, tormented by facial neuralgia. Returning to Weimar in 1850, he was made a chamberlain by the grand-duke, and in 1852, his health being now somewhat restored, he entered the Prussian diplomatic service and went as attaché to Rome. The fruit of his long years of illness was a slender volume of lyrics, Gedichte (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1851), good in form, but seldom inspired, and showing occasionally the influence of a morbid sensuality. In 1854 he was appointed secretary of legation; but the aggressive ultramontanism of the Curia became increasingly intolerable to his overwrought nature, and in 1856 he was transferred, at his own request, as secretary of legation to Dresden. This post he resigned in 1859, in which year he was raised to the rank of Freiherr (baron). In 1866 he received the title of councillor of legation; but he never again occupied any diplomatic post.

The rest of his life he devoted to historical research, ultimately selecting as his special subject the Italian libraries up to the year 1500. The outcome of all his labours was, however, only the first part of Studies and Researches in the Times and Life of Cardinal Bessarion, embracing the period of the council of Florence (privately printed at Jena, 1871), a catalogue of the MSS. in the monastery of Sancta Justina at Padua (Jena, 1873), and a mass of undigested material, which he ultimately bequeathed to the university of Jena.

In 1870 Ottilie von Goethe, who had resided mainly at Vienna, returned to Weimar and took up her residence with her two sons in the Goethehaus. So long as she lived, her small salon in the attic storey of the great house was a centre of attraction for many of the most illustrious personages in Europe. But after her death in 1872 the two brothers lived in almost complete isolation. The few old friends, including the grand-duke Charles Alexander, who continued regularly to visit the house, were entertained with kindly hospitality by Baron Walther; Wolfgang refused to be drawn from his isolation even by the advent of royalty. “Tell the empress,” he cried on one occasion, “that I am not a wild beast to be stared at!” In 1879, his increasing illness necessitating the constant presence of an attendant, he went to live at Leipzig, where he died.

Goethe’s grandsons have been so repeatedly accused of having displayed a dog-in-the-manger temper in closing the Goethehaus to the public and the Goethe archives to research, that the charge has almost universally come to be regarded as proven. It is true that the house was closed and access to the archives only very sparingly allowed until Baron Walther’s death in 1885. But the reason for this was not, as Herr Max Hecker rather absurdly suggests, Wolfgang’s jealousy of his grandfather’s oppressive fame, but one far more simple and natural. From one cause or another, principally Ottilie von Goethe’s extravagance, the family was in very straitened circumstances; and the brothers, being thoroughly unbusinesslike, believed themselves to be poorer than they really were.1 They closed the Goethehaus and the archives, because to have opened them would have needed an army of attendants.2 If they deserve any blame it is for the pride, natural to their rank and their generation, which prevented them from charging an entrance fee, an expedient which would not only have made it possible for them to give access to the house and collections, but would have enabled them to save the fabric from falling into the lamentable state of disrepair in which it was found after their death. In any case, the accusation is ungenerous. With an almost exaggerated Pietät Goethe’s descendants preserved his house untouched, at great inconvenience to themselves, and left it, with all its treasures intact, to the nation. Had they been the selfish misers they are sometimes painted, they could have realized a fortune by selling its contents.