The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 02

Your letter, dear and honored friend, came at a remarkable juncture which made it doubly interesting; Schiller's letters had just been collected, and I was looking them through from the very first, finding there the most charming traces of the happy and fruitful hours which we passed together. The invitation to the Horen is contained in the first letter of June 13, 1794; then the correspondence continues, and with every letter admiration for Schiller's extraordinary spirit and joy over his influence on our entire development increases in intensity and elevation. His letters are an infinite treasure, of which you also possess rich store; and as, through them, we have made noteworthy progress, so we must read them again to be protected against backward steps to which the precious world about us is inclined to tempt us day by day and hour by hour.

Just imagine to yourself now, my dearest friend, how highly welcome your announcement seemed to me at this moment when, after ripe reflection, I desired to give you very friendly counsel to visit us toward the end of October. Should the gods not dispose otherwise concerning us, you will surely find me, and whatever else is near and dear to you, assembled here; quiet, personal communication may very happily alternate with social recreations, and, above all things, we can take delight in Schiller's correspondence, since then you will also bring with you the letters of several years, and in the fruitful present we may edify and refresh ourselves with the fair bloom of by-gone days. Riemer sends his very best greetings; he is well; our relation is permanent, mutually beneficial, and profitable. Aulic Councillor Meyer has left for Wiesbaden; unfortunately, his health is not of the best.

Two new numbers of Ueber Kunst und Alterthum and Zur Naturwissenschaft are about to appear—the fruits of my winter's labors. Fortunately, they have been so carefully prepared that no noteworthy hindrance was presented by my troubles and by the subsequent illness of our Grand Duchess, which filled us all, especially my convalescent self, with fear and anxiety.

Please give my kindest regards to your wife, and, by the way, I need not assure you that you will certainly be most highly welcome to our most gracious court. In my household children and grandchildren will meet you with joyous faces; our nearest friends we shall assemble as we wish. If in the interval you should have some message for me, I beg you to send it to my address here, for then it will reach me most quickly.

And now I again send the very best of all kind greetings to your dear wife; may good fortune bring me once more to her side. Pardon a somewhat distracted way of writing, indicative of packing.

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GOETHE TO WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

October 22, 1826.

Your letter and package, most honored friend, gave me a very welcome token of your continuous remembrance and friendly sympathy. I wish, however, that I might have received an equal assurance of your good health. For my own part, I cannot complain; a ship that is no longer a deep-sea sailer may perhaps still be useful as a coaster.

I have passed the entire summer at home, laboring undisturbed at editing my works. Possibly you still remember, my dearest friend, a dramatic Helena, which was to appear in the second part of Faust. From Schiller's letters at the beginning of the century I see that I showed him the commencement of it, and also that he, with true friendship, counseled me to continue it. It is one of my oldest conceptions, resting on the marionette tradition that Faust compelled Mephistopheles to produce Helen of Troy for his nuptials. From time to time I have continued to work on it, but the piece could not be completed except in the fulness of time, for its action has now covered three thousand years, from the fall of Troy to the capture of Missolonghi. This can, therefore, also be regarded as a unity of time in the higher sense of the term; the unities of place and action are, however, likewise most carefully regarded in the usual acceptation of the word. It appears under the title:

Helena

Classico-Romantic Phantasmagoria.

Interlude to Faust.

This says little indeed, and yet enough, I hope, to direct your attention more vividly to the first instalment of my works which I hope to present at Easter.

I next ask, with more confidence, whether perchance you still remember an epic poem which I had in mind immediately after the completion of Hermann and Dorothea—in a modern hunt a tiger and a lion were concerned. At the time you dissuaded me from elaborating the idea, and I abandoned it; now, in searching through old papers, I find the plot again, and cannot refrain from executing it in prose; for it may then pass as a tale, a rubric under which an extremely large amount of remarkable stuff circulates.

Very recently there has reached my hermitage the portrayal of the very active life of a man of the world, which highly entertains me—the journal of Duke Bernhard of Weimar, who left Ghent in April, 1825, and who returned to us only a short time past. It is written uninterruptedly, and since his station, his mode of thought, and his demeanor introduced him to the highest circles of society, and since he was at ease among the middle classes and did not disdain the most humble, his reader is very agreeably conducted through most diverse situations, which, for me at least, it was highly important to survey directly.

Now, however, I must assure you that the outline which you have sent is extremely profitable to Riemer and myself, and has given a most admirable opportunity for discussions on linguistics and philosophy. I am by no means averse to the literature of India, but I am afraid of it; for it draws my imaginative power towards the formless and the deformed, against which I am forced to guard myself more than ever; but if it comes over the signature of a valued friend, it will always be welcome, for it gives me the desired opportunity to converse with him on what interests him, and what must certainly be of importance.

Now, as I prepare to close, I simply say that I am engaged in combining and uniting the scattered Wanderings of Wilhelm Meister, in its old and new portions, as two volumes. While engaged in which task nothing could give me greater delight than to welcome the chief of wanderers, your highly esteemed brother, to our house, and to learn directly of his ceaseless activity; nor do I fail to express my hearty wishes to your dear wife for the best results from the cure which she is seeking in such lofty regions.

And so, for ever and ever, in truest sympathy, GOETHE.

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GOETHE TO WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

October 19, 1830.

How often during these weeks, my dear and honored friend, have I sought refuge at your side, again taken out your magnificent letters, and found refreshment in them!

As almost in an instant the earthquake of Lisbon caused its influences to be felt in the remotest lakes and springs, so we also have been shaken directly by that western explosion, as was the case forty years ago.

How comforting it must have been for me in such moments to take up your priceless letters, you yourself will feel and graciously express. Through a decided antithesis I was carried back to those times when we felt mutually pledged to procure a preliminary culture, when, united with our great and noble friend, we strove after concrete truths, and most faithfully and diligently sought to attain all that was most beautiful and sublime in the world about us, for the edification of our willing, yearning spirits, and to fill to its full an atmosphere which required substance and contents.

How beautiful and splendid is it now that you should lay the foundations for your latest composition (Review of Goethe's Italian Travels) in that happy soil, that you should seek to explain me and my endeavors at that laborious time, and that attentively and lovingly you should have traced back that which in my efforts might seem incidental or lacking in coherence, in sequence, to a spiritual necessity and to individual characteristic combinations.

Here, now, there would be a most beautiful theme for discussion by word of mouth. It is impossible to commit to writing how I was mirrored in your words; how I received elucidation on many things; how, at the same time, I was again challenged to reflect on the many enigmas that ever remain unsolved in man, even as regards himself; and seriously to reflect on the inner nexus of many qualities which cross in the individual and which, despite a certain degree of contradiction, are intertwined and united.

Here belongs preëminently my relation to plastic art, to which you have devoted an attention so deserving of thanks. It is marvelous enough that man feels an irresistible impulse to prosecute what he cannot achieve, and yet that by this very process he is most essentially furthered in his actual achievements.

That, however, this long-delayed letter may no further lag behind, I shall close, but shall, nevertheless, at the same time inform you that, while I uttered the sentiments written above, I once more returned to your letters, and by seeing myself mirrored in them afresh was challenged to new considerations, and was powerfully reminded of those times when, united in spirit though not in body, we, already advanced in years, enjoyed with the strength of youth and with delight those idyllic days.

For six months[32 - August, who went to Italy, in March, 1830, and died there eight days after this letter was written.] now my son has shared in the exuberance with which, on the priceless peninsula, nature and centuries have, with most marvelous intricacy, amassed and destroyed in life, created and demolished in the arts, and played with the fates of men and nations.

He went by steamer from Leghorn to Naples, where he may be even yet, a decision which, once carried out, has brought very special advantages. He found Professor Zahn there, and himself, under this scholar's guidance, completely at home both above and below the ground.

Since now you, too, my dearest friend, are accustoming yourself to dictating, send me in a happy hour of leisure often a tiny friendly word, so that, from time to time, I may more frequently and concretely be aware of the coexistence which has already so long been vouched us on this terrestrial ball. I tear myself unwillingly from this communication; how much I have to say floats before me, but at this time I shall delay only to bless the fortunate star which at this moment rises over you and your estimable brother. May what has so charmingly been inaugurated endure for the enjoyment of rich results to you and to us all!

And so ever!

Weimar, October 19, 1830. J. W. VON GOETHE.

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GOETHE TO WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT

Weimar, December 1, 1831.

Already informed by the public press, honored friend, that the beating waves of that wild Baltic have exercised so happy an influence on the constitution of my dearest friend, I have rejoiced in a high degree, and have done all honor and reverence to the waters which so often wreak destruction. Your welcome note gave the fairest and the best of all substantiation to these good tidings, so that with comfort I could look forth from my hermitage over the monastery gardens veiled in snow, since I could fancy to myself my dearest friend in his four-towered castle, amid roomy surroundings, surveying a landscape over which winter had spread far and wide, and at the same time with good courage pursuing to the minutest detail his deep-founded tasks.

Generally speaking, I can perhaps say that the apperception of great productive maxims of nature absolutely compels us to continue our investigations to the minutest possible details, just as the final ramifications of the arteries meet, at the extreme finger-tips, the nerves to which they are linked. In particular I might perhaps say that I have often been brought more closely to you than you probably know; for conversations with Riemer very often turn on a word, its etymological signification, formation and mutation, relationship, and strangeness.

I have been highly grateful to your brother, for whom I find no epithet, for several hours of frank, friendly conversation; for although assimilation of his theory of geology, and practical work in accordance with it, are impossible for my mental process, yet I have seen with true sympathy and admiration how that of which I cannot convince myself in him obtains a logical coherence and is amalgamated with the tremendous mass of his knowledge, where it is then held together by his priceless character.

If I may express myself with my old frankness, my most honored friend, I gladly admit that in my advanced years everything becomes more and more historical to me. Whether a thing has happened in days gone by, in distant realms, or very close to myself, is quite immaterial; I even seem to become more and more historical to myself; and when, in the evening, Plutarch is read to me, I often appear ridiculous to myself, should I narrate my biography in this way.

Forgive me expressions of this character! In old age men become garrulous, and since I dictate, it is very easy for this natural tendency to get the better of me.

Of my Faust there is much and little to say; at a peculiarly happy time the apothegm occurred to me:

"If bards ye are, as ye maintain;

Now let your inspiration show it."

And through a mysterious psychological turn, which probably deserves investigation, I believe that I have risen to a type of production which with entire consciousness has brought forth that which I myself still approve of—though perhaps without being able ever again to swim in this current—but which Aristotle and other prose-writers would even ascribe to a sort of madness. The difficulty of succeeding consisted in the fact that the second part of Faust—to whose printed portions you have possibly devoted some attention—has been pondered for fifty years in its ends and aims, and has been elaborated in fragmentary fashion, as one or the other situation occurred to me; but the whole has remained incomplete.

Now, the second part of Faust demands more of the understanding than the first does, and therefore it was necessary to prepare the reader, even though he must still supply bridges. The filling of certain gaps was obligatory both for historical and for æsthetic unity, and this I continued until at last I deemed it advisable to cry:

"Close ye the wat'ring canal; to their fill have the meadows now drunken."

And now I had to take heart to seal the stitched copy in which printed and unprinted are thrust side by side, lest I might possibly be led into temptation to elaborate it here and there; at the same time I regret that I cannot communicate it to, my most valued friends, as the poet so gladly does.

I will not send my Metamorphosis of Plants, translated, with an appendix, by M. Soret, unless certain confessions of life would satisfy your friendship. Recently I have become more and more entangled in these phenomena of nature; they have enticed me to continue my labors in my original field, and have finally compelled me to remain in it. We shall see what is to be done there likewise, and shall trust the rest to the future, which, between ourselves, we burden with a heavier task than would be supposed.