INCAPABLE OF TRUE LOVE 287 ple emotion. But women thought it was love, and they poured out their love upon him. He seemed to them the greatest star they had ever descried in the human firmament, and in some respects he was. But he? Ah, there was no star for him but that same Goethe-starthe star of self. .It is said that he had the perpetual habit of falling in love, and the list of his lady-loves is very long. Sixteen of these have been catalogued and minutely described. Eight of them are scientifically classified as AI, hotly and passionately loved. Five are enumerated as A2, to whom he was very intimately attached. Then follow a great number B1 and B2, to whom he gave a more transient adoration. One might say of them as Sainte Beuve said of Chateaubriand's attachments: "'T is like the stars in the sky; the more you look at them, the more you discover." Professor Blackie has gone so far as to say that this talent for falling in love was an essential part of Goethe's genius, that it was inseparable from his insight into character and life, and that it is to be commended rather than to be condemned. I venture to say that Goethe was incapable of any true love, and that all these passions were mere means of self-gratification and self-glorification. There was unquestionably an easy flow of sentiment which simulated love. But if love is self-devotion and self-impartation, Goethe knew nothing of this sacred and divine emotion. Up to a certain point his nature was stirred, but when he found that the object of his regard desired an exclusive and eternal affection, he drew back. has been well said that the conception of living for another probably never occurred to him. The bright It and cheerful mother to whom he owed so much was visited in Frankfort, because Goethe was her son, by every distinguished stranger who passed through the town; but the son visited her very rarely, and, during the last eleven years of her old age, he visited her not at all. His vacations were spent in other places than Frankfort, though Frankfort was not a hundred miles from Weimar. Nor are his few letters to her distinguished by any special love or gratitude. His affair of the heart with Friederike Brion, the pastor's daughter at Sesenheim, near Strasburg, was one in which it is difficult to acquit Goethe from the charge of treachery. The sweet young girl gave herself to him; the parents regarded the pair as virtually betrothed; but he left her, without explanations, to wait and pine in vain. It is said that he suffered for years from self-reproach, but no sign of this appears in his account of the matter. What was a small thing to him was a great thing to her. She refused excellent offers of marriage, saying that to have loved a Goethe was enough for one life. She fell into a consumption and died, still loving her early but inconstant admirer. It would have been far better for Goethe's soul, and far better for his genius, if he had married Friederike. It would have saved him from a long series of illicit connections which did much to benumb his moral sense, cut the wings of his imagination and limit his outlook to merely earthly and temporal things. It would have prevented the composition of those Roman Elegies, which sing the praises of unhallowed love; it would have made impossible the eighteen hundred love letters to Frau von Stein; and still more impossible the seven INCAPABLE OF TRUE LOVE 289 teen years of concubinage with Christiane Vulpius, whom he afterward took to be his wife. But the radical defect in Goethe's character was that which constitutes the essence of sin everywhere, namely, the overweening love of self. He looked upon others as mere instruments, to be used for purposes of self-advancement, and to be thrown aside so soon as he had exhausted their power to be of use to him. This is the secret of all his so-called love affairs. Under the portrait of the Frau von Stein, when he first saw it, he wrote: "What a glorious poem it would be to see how the world mirrors itself in this soul!" He regarded women as furnishing mere studies of human nature. He played upon their affections, as upon harp strings, until he had possessed himself of every melody of which they were capable. He felt more or less, indeed, but then he was always master of his feeling; he never by any accident permitted it to master him. He Bettine von Arnim said to Lord Houghton that Goethe treated women as, in his childhood, he treated flowers and birds: pulling off the leaves to see how the petals were joined to the calyx, or plucking birds to observe how the feathers were inserted into the wings. subjected each woman who loved him to a process of spiritual vivisection, in order that he might obtain literary material. In the case of Kestner and his wife, he repaid the unmeasured adoration which the innocent pair bestowed upon him, by misrepresenting his relations to them in his "Sorrows of Werther," by staining the reputation of Kestner's wife, and finally by berating Kestner himself for the indignation he felt at the attack upon her honor. T Treachery in the case of Friederike, and ingratitude in the case of Lotta, were matched by Goethe's indifference to the cause of his country at the crisis of her fate. Napoleon had invaded Germany, and every patriotic German was eager to drive out the invader. The emperor, with his usual desire to lead men of thought captive in his train, invited the poet of Weimar to an audience. Goethe accepted the advances of his country's enemy, and flattered the conqueror. The poet's defenders are accustomed to argue that his greatness made him cosmopolitan; it was not the invader whom he flattered, but the man of might; breadth of intellect, we are told, renders patriotism impossible. This is true only if greatness absolves a man from all moral relations. And this was the view of Goethe. Evil and To know good were alike to be studied and admired. the world and to reproduce it in literature, this was his mission. And, to do this efficiently, he must be thoroughly master of himself, and must reach the utmost pitch of self-culture and self-development. There was an element of personal character here, and there was an element of philosophic theory. I believe that the character shaped the philosophy first of all, and that then the philosophy in turn reacted upon the character. Let me, therefore, call attention primarily to the moral attitude of Goethe in his early life. A wonderfully gifted child, an object of the father's pride and the mother's indulgence, he early contracted a selfconfidence that was phenomenal. Nothing seems ever to have disturbed it. The only possible exception was in his boyhood, when his schoolfellows and himself wrote competitive verses. MORAL ATTITUDE IN EARLY LIFE 291 He noticed that they thought just as well of their productions as he thought of his, and for a moment the question occurred to him whether his own estimate of his work might not be a self-deception, as he felt assured theirs was. But these doubts of himself soon vanished, and they appear never to have returned. He was the most imperturbable believer in himself that ever attained literary fame. By virtue of his powers, he regarded himself as pledged to make the most of himself. The object was, not to serve God or man, but simply to gather in to himself whatever of knowledge or of power the world could give, and then to express himself in literature. This was not merely a spontaneous and constitutional tendency-it was the deliberate decision and purpose of his life. In a youthful letter to Lavater he writes: "The desire to raise the pyramid of my existence, the base of which is already laid, as high as possible into the air, absorbs every other desire, and scarcely ever leaves me." And he held on in this course to the end. In Faust, published only in his later life, one of the most admired verses has been thus translated by Carlyle : Like as a star, That maketh not haste, His God-given hest. But Boyeson points out that in the original there is no mention of God or of a “God-given hest." The proper translation is: "Be each revolving about his own weight"—that is, about the center of his own personal |