If the opinion of his contemporaries become the judgment of posterity, the name of Goethe is destined to occupy, in future ages, that pre-eminent station in the literary history of Germany which is now undisputedly held in their respective nations, by Shakspeare, Dante, and Cervantes. Until this judgment be pronounced by the final tribunal, we may characterize him as the happiest of great poets. He attained a length of years granted to few; and his long life was spent in successful literary labour, not imposed by necessity, but prompted by the suggestions of his own genius and love of art. Nature had endowed him with the much-prized gifts of bodily strength and personal beauty. He indulged freely in the pleasures of society; associated with his superiors in station as their equal; lived in ease and affluence; and, finally, in exception to the general rule, enjoyed, during his life,

The founders of the new theory of poetics in Germany, the Schlegels, have characterized his genius as universal. Its productions, including posthumous writings, will occupy fifty-five volumes of works of imagination and science, and cannot be even named by us individually. A few of these works, which have occasioned volumes of criticism, we shall be constrained to designate in brief sentences, and we shall as briefly advert to the main incidents of the author’s life.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born of affluent parents, August 28, 1749, at Frankfort on the Main. He attended successively the universities of Leipzig and Strasburg; and, in 1771, took a doctor’s degree in jurisprudence; but from his early youth literature was his ruling passion. In his twenty-fourth year he had already acquired unexampled popularity by his original and daring tragedy of ‘GÖtz von Berlichingen,’ published in 1773. In 1774 he gained a European celebrity by the ‘Sorrows of Werter;’ and he had already rendered himself an object of admiration to the young, and of terror to the timid, by the publication of several pungent satirical writings, when his good genius guided to the vicinity of Frankfort the young Duke of Saxe Weimar, who was about to assume the government on coming of age. In accepting the friendship, and taking up his residence at the court of this prince, Goethe entered on an unvarying career of prosperity. For a few years the young Duke and his friend led a life of gaiety, of which there are many curious anecdotes current in Germany; but, during a joyous and somewhat wild life, the intellectual singularly prevailed over the sensual. Even during that course of dissipation, the most important of Goethe’s works were commenced, though none of them were published until after his return from Italy. That country he visited in 1786, and to the time which he spent in it he ever after recurred with delight. Though Shakspeare was the individual poet he most prized, and Greek the literature which he held up as the rule of all excellence, Italy was the land of his affections. He remained two winters in Rome. Here he cultivated the studies of archaeology and the fine arts, which he had begun to practise in his youth, but now abandoned for poetry and the study of nature.

To these pursuits, on his return to Germany, he applied as the chief business of his life; and the insignificance of the patron as a sovereign tended to render the poet more conspicuous, and to increase his power over the minds of the Germans. The Duke was a general in the Prussian service, and, as a minor power, followed the course of policy pursued by the head of his house, the Elector of Saxony. He could not indulge in ambition, and spent his small revenue more like a private nobleman than a sovereign prince. He was desirous to collect a library for the use of himself and the inhabitants of Weimar. He had mines on one portion of his small territory. With the other Dukes of Saxony he was jointly the possessor of a university, Jena. He wished to found a school of drawing; and the creation of a German theatre, and the collecting eminent men of all kinds at Weimar and Jena, were the especial objects of his ambition. In all these things Goethe was the right-hand to execute, if his, in fact, was not the mind to design. In the matters which most governments make their prime concern, such as finances, military affairs, and courts of justice, Goethe had certainly no inclination to take any part; he was what, in France, would be called a minister of public instruction. Scarcely was he settled in his new office when the French Revolution broke out. This led to one famous exception to the life he was pursuing. He has recorded it in the volume of his ‘Memoirs,’ relating his participation in the too famous campaign of 1792, when he, as a non-combatant, accompanied the Duke of Saxe Weimar, who served under the Duke of Brunswick in his famous march which did not reach to Paris. The early retirement of Prussia from the league against France restored peace to the North of Germany, and Goethe was at liberty to return to his favourite pursuits. In the prosecution of these he had the happiness soon to connect himself with Schiller, a man ten years younger than himself, of a genius totally opposite to his own, and therefore perhaps best adapted to act in concert with him.

Goethe has, with delightful frankness, related how, exceedingly disliking the ‘Robbers,’ Schiller’s first, worst, and most famous play, and feeling a strong aversion towards the Kantian philosophy, to which Schiller was attached, he had conceived an antipathy towards the offending poet, whom he resolutely shunned. But having once met, the passionate zeal of Schiller in pursuit of their common objects was irresistible. Dislike subsided into tolerance, and was at last converted into warm admiration and love. Memorable consequences followed from their union, and their literary correspondence remains an instructive example of what may be effected by the collision of powerful minds of opposite character. Schiller died in 1804. During the time allotted to their joint exertions, Goethe produced many of his greatest works, and Schiller all the best of his. During the same period, Goethe pursued his philosophical studies with the eminent men who then filled professors’ chairs at Jena. The metaphysical systems of Fichte, and afterwards of Schelling, which succeeded that of Kant, met with some favour in his eyes. At least, though he kept aloof from the controversies of the day, he laboured to connect with philosophical speculations his own particular studies in various branches of natural history and science.

It was after Schiller’s death, and when Goethe was approaching his sixtieth year, that the storm of war unexpectedly burst upon Weimar and Jena. He did not leave Weimar; but aware of the peril to which he with every one was exposed, on the very day of the battle of Jena, the 14th of October, 1806, he married a lady with whom he had lived for many years, and at the same time legitimated his only child, a son. During the short period of extreme degradation into which Prussia and Saxony sunk, from 1806 till the fall of Bonaparte in 1813, he withdrew, as much as possible, from political life; he would not suffer newspapers to be brought him, or politics to be discussed in his presence, but fled to the arts and sciences as an asylum against the miserable realities of life. Such had always been his practice. He has said of himself that he never had a disease of the mind which he did not cure by turning it into a poem. In his early youth, having lost a mistress through foolish petulance of temper, he, as a penance, made his own folly the subject of a comedy. And, in after life, while Europe was convulsed, he was absorbed in studies independent of the incidents of the day. Thus varying his pursuits, he kept on his serene course with no other interruptions than such as inevitably befall those who attain old age. It was his lot to survive the associates of his youth. In 1827, he lost his early friend, from whom he had never been estranged, the Grand Duke of Weimar. In 1830, he met with a severer privation, in the death of his son at Rome. It was feared that this calamity would prove fatal to Goethe, whose strength was sensibly declining; but he survived the blow, and enjoyed the best consolation which could be afforded to him in the exemplary care of his amiable and gifted daughter-in-law, and in his two young grand-children, to whom he was tenderly attached. His last years were spent in cheerful retirement. He possessed an elegant and spacious house in Weimar, but he also had a cottage in the park, where he dwelt alone, receiving his friends tÊte-À-tÊte; and, on particular occasions, going into the town to entertain company. He retained his faculties to the last, and made a very precise disposition of his property. His extensive collections in natural history and art were directed to be preserved as a museum for twenty years. These were among the objects of his latest solicitude. He died March 24, 1832, in the eighty-third year of his age.

Goethe’s figure was commanding, and his countenance severely handsome. He appears to have acquired a great ascendency over his fellow-students at the universities, and to have kept the professors in awe. In after life he was reproached by BÜrger and others with haughtiness, and was accused of making his inferiors in station and in genius too sensible of their inferiority; but his powers of captivation were irresistible when he pleased to exert them. His social talents were of the highest order. Such was Goethe for his own generation and country. To posterity he will live chiefly as a poet. Of his most remarkable works we will now speak, not chronologically, but according to the classes which are recognised by systematic writers.

In epic poetry, his pretensions will be derided by those who adhere to the theory of M. Bossu, adopted by Pope. According to this, the common opinion, the ‘Epos’ requires supernatural machinery, illustrious actors, and heroic incident. The German critics, on the contrary, maintain that the essential character of the Homeric poetry lies in the epic style, not in the subject of the narrative; a style analogous to that of Herodotus, whom they place at the head of the epic historians, and to be found in a very large proportion of our own ancient ballads, such as relate to Robin Hood, Chevy Chase, &c. Goethe on this idea began a continuation of the Iliad in his ‘Achilleis,’ and he threw the graces of his own style over the old epic fable of ‘Reynard the Fox.’ But it was in ‘Herman and Dorothea’ that he displayed all his powers: this is both a patriotic and domestic tale; the characters in humble life; the incident, a flight over the Rhine on the invasion of the French. It abounds in maxims of moral wisdom, and in pathos; but it is too national to bear translating.

It is as a lyric poet that Goethe is popular in the fullest sense of the word, and may challenge comparison with the greatest masters of all ages. In the song, he abounds in master-pieces, passionate and gay. His elegy has sometimes the erotic character of Propertius, (as in the famous ‘Roman Elegies,’) and sometimes emulates the refinement and purity of Petrarch: his ballads are as wild and tender as any that Spain or Scotland have produced. His very numerous epigrams bear more resemblance to the Greek Anthology than to the pointed style of the Latin writers. Besides these he has produced a number of allegorical and enigmatical poems on art and philosophy, which cannot be placed under any known class.

Goethe’s dramatic works are about twenty in number. There is this peculiarity in his career as a dramatic poet, that though the drama is essentially the most popular branch of poetry, he never wrote for the people; his plays are all experiments, and no two resemble each other. He seems to have been unaffectedly indifferent to their reception on the stage. His first juvenile play, ‘GÖtz von Berlichingen,’ was in prose, and unlike any thing that had appeared on the German boards. It exhibited, in a strong light, the manners of the Germans at a romantic period when the petty barons and knights were a sort of privileged freebooters, sometimes generously resisting the oppressions of the emperor and the higher nobility, and sometimes plundering the citizens of the free towns. The style was in harmony with the subject, daring in its originality, and all but licentious in its freedom. By audiences accustomed only to pedantic imitations of the French, it was received with tumultuous applause; but the admiration of the more cultivated classes was given to the ‘Iphigenia in Tauris,’ an echo, as Schlegel expresses it, of the Greek, yet neither a translation nor a copy. Christian purity of morals harmoniously blending with pagan incident, not a line disturbs the exquisite symmetry of this the most generally admired of Goethe’s dramas.

Not less perfect in style is the anomalous ‘Torquato Tasso,’ which deserves especial notice, though not as a play adapted to the stage: it is rather a didactic poem in dialogue than a drama. Tasso and the warrior statesman Antonio exhibit in contrast the poetical character and that of the man of the world. It could secure the attention of an audience only when performed on the Duke’s private theatre, where the members of the Ducal family usually represented the princes of the House of Este, and Goethe himself acted the part of Tasso; and when it was performed as a sort of funeral obsequies on the death of the poet himself.

‘Egmont’ is an historical play in prose, founded on the real tragedy perpetrated by the bloody Alba, in Belgium. Its most remarkable feature is the unheroic character of Egmont himself. While William of Orange is the common stage hero, patriotic and wise, destined to save his country, Count Egmont is the warm-hearted, sensual, and munificent nobleman, a patriot not from reflection but impulse, whose love for the humble Clara is much more prominent than his patriotism, and who is therefore doomed to perish. The pathos lies in the dissonance between the man and the necessities of his position. Goethe, in drawing such a character, probably thought of Hamlet, of whom he makes an analogous remark.

We pass over a number of dramas, all original, all experiments in furtherance of his own studies, and name only ‘Faustus,’ the unique, the undefinable. Begun in youth, continued at intervals during a long life, and finally left unfinished, it has been called a grotesque tragedy. Who knows not the popular legend of the learned magician who sold his soul to the devil? This coarse tale of vulgar superstition is here used as a vehicle into which the adventurous poet has cast all that

The erring philosopher is attended on the wrong road by a laughing devil, Mephistophiles, who leads him through scenes of the wildest frolic and the most appalling wretchedness. All that is most deplorable, most frightful in human life, is here displayed with the running comment of the dÆmon whom Omnipotence does not confound; and the most awful problems of divinity and moral philosophy are treated with pathetic sadness by the wretched victim, or with infernal satire by his master-slave. These repulsive elements are nevertheless combined with the soothing, not to say sanctifying, influence of a Margaret, a confiding, loving, innocent woman, whose very destruction works on the heart like an act of grace, and prepares the spectator for the promised salvation of her lover.

In the romance, as in the drama, Goethe commenced a career which he immediately abandoned. His Werter breathes a spirit of dissatisfaction with the world and its institutions. But by writing that book, which infected the rising generation with the same spirit, he cured himself of the disease; and he then became the declared foe of the sentimental, which he attacked in his romantic comedy, ‘The Triumph of Sentimentality.’

In later years, when he was become the meditating philosopher, and, at the same time, indulged in more cheerful contemplations of life, he produced ‘Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,’ intended to elucidate problems of psychology. The stage being the symbol of life, his hero is thrown among players, and both the real drama, and the drama of life are analyzed, with perpetual illustrations of the one by the other. After an interval of some years, Goethe, in a second part, exhibited his pupil advanced as on a sort of journey. Conscious that his problem, like that of Faustus, was insoluble, he has not dared to exhibit either Faustus in heaven or Wilhelm as a master. Like the Faustus, Wilhelm Meister is still ‘caviare to the million.’

In a third romance, ‘Elective Affinities,’ Goethe treats subtilely of that passion to which Lord Bacon says “the stage is more beholden than the life of man.” As the chemical title suggests, he shows how the felicity of a married couple is marred by the intrusion of other minds, with which each consort has more affinity than with the companion previously chosen.

When ‘Wilhelm Meister’ first appeared, the narrative of Wilhelm’s childhood was related with such spirit and air of truth, that it was believed to be the author’s own personal history; and, in truth, the resemblance between the feigned and real history was soon made manifest by the appearance of Goethe’s own memoirs, under the puzzling title ‘From my Life: Fiction and Truth;’ so entitled, to allow for the unconscious illusions to which we are exposed, when, in advanced life, we try to recollect the occurrences of childhood, and unintentionally confound memory with imagination. These memoirs, including his foreign travels, amount already to nine volumes, and others are to follow; but these earlier volumes treat solely of the author’s intellectual life. Concerning much that men are inquisitive about, he says nothing. Not a hint is dropped concerning the fortune of his father, or the amount of profit which he himself derived from his writings. His being ennobled was an incident which he thought too unimportant for notice; and of honours and distinctions conferred on him he seldom condescends to speak.

Among the studies which partook of Goethe’s attention were antiquities and the fine arts. This led to the composition of a masterpiece, his critical characteristic of Winkelman, and an account of Hackert, the landscape painter. The same course of study led him to translate that delightful work, the auto-biography of Benvenuto Cellini, which was first made known to the European public by the Earl of Bristol, late Bishop of Derry, and which is now in the hands of all lovers of the fine arts. On art, in its various branches, Goethe’s prose writings are very numerous. As a critic also he has written much, and his criticism is remarkably indulgent and generous.

Such being the variety of works in which he has recorded his speculations on man, his powers, his actions, and his productions, it will be naturally asked, what were the main features of his philosophy, and to what results did they lead on those great points which unhappily disunite mankind, religion and politics?

Hume has well designated the great varieties of intellect and moral character by the significant scholastic names of the Platonist, the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Sceptic. According to this classification, it may be said that Goethe was too devotedly attached to the study of nature and actual life to be a Platonist; he loved contemplation too intensely, and was too indolent and self-indulgent to be a stoic; he was too intellectual to be a gross sensualist, or, in the worst sense, an Epicurean; and he had too much imagination to be able to tolerate the modern rational philosophy, a mere system of negatives. In so far, therefore, he was an enemy of vulgar scepticism; yet, blended with the refinement which the poetic mind presupposes, he had a large portion of scepticism and Epicureanism in his nature. Towards the positive religion which he found established in his own country he manifested respect, though he never made any distinct profession of faith upon doctrinal matters; he conformed however to the Lutheran church. On two occasions only do we recollect the expression of any strong feeling as to religion. He early betrayed great contempt towards the German Rationalists, whom he rather despised for their shallowness than reproached with being mischievous. His love of Rome by no means reconciled him to the Church of Rome, against which he would inveigh with a warmth unusual in him. He maintained that Catholic superstition had deeply injured the poetic character of Calderon, and considered the Protestantism of Shakspeare as a happy accident in the life of that incomparable man. It appears from his memoirs, that Judaism and Christianity had occupied his mind very seriously from his childhood. He delighted in portraying the Christian enthusiast in a tone of kindred enthusiasm, as in his ‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,’ of which the original was a Moravian lady, his friend; and it was only in incidental bursts of sarcasm, especially in his gayer poems, that he alarmed the timid and the scrupulous. In spite of occasional ebullitions of spleen or rash speculation, he was habitually hostile towards the French anti-religious party. He makes his devil in Faustus describe himself as the “spirit that always denies,” in the same way that Alfieri scornfully terms Voltaire “Disinventor ed Inventor di nulla.” It was this negative, this merely destructive character, to which Goethe was in all things most resolutely opposed.

This sentiment extended to politics. Long before the words “Conservative” and “Destructive” were applied to English parties, Goethe had made frequent use of them. It was the tendency of his mind to look with indulgence, if not with favour, on whatever he found in the exercise of productive power. Laudo manentem might have been his motto. He saw in the French revolutionists, as in their philosophers, the spirit of destruction, and he clung with affection to institutions under which so many fine arts and rapidly advancing sciences had flourished. With reference to public life, Goethe has been severely reproached on two grounds. He has been accused of wanting patriotism; but before a passion can be generated, an object must be presented. What country had Goethe to love in his youth? A walled city, which he could run round before breakfast. The first great political event which he witnessed, was the Seven years’ war. His native city was in the possession of the French, whom one party considered as allies and the other as enemies. Goethe’s father adhered to Frederick, his grandfather was attached to the Imperial House: at the best he could love but half a nation. Hence Wieland said, “I have no fellow-countrymen; I have only sprach-genossen,”—speech-mates. Thus German patriotism could be but a sort of corporation spirit; like the affections of a liveryman, confined to the members of his company. It was not till the close of the last war that the common oppression exercised by Bonaparte generated a common hatred towards France, and with it something like patriotism on a great scale. Yet so anomalous is the condition of Germany, that at this moment this sentiment, or the loud avowal of it, is looked on as akin to disloyalty; and, at the universities, students are forbidden to frequent clubs, or to assume denominations, which have a reference to one general national character. There are few appeals among Goethe’s writings to national feeling; and, in truth, his studies led him to be, in sentiment, the fellow-citizen of the great poets and artists of all nations, the contemporary of the great men of all ages. The other reproach is, that, being admitted to familiarity with princes, he lost his love of the people, as such. Now, it must be owned, that in this respect he felt pretty much as Milton did, in whom attachment to the aristocracy of talent was a marked quality. Of the people, as such, he seems to have thought lowly; his affections were exercised on the select few,—the nobles of nature, not of the herald’s office. That he had no vulgar reverence for persons in authority, or for the privileged orders, is amply proved by all he wrote. It may finally be remarked, as the most characteristic feature of his moral speculations, that he had habitually contemplated mankind, not as a moralist, but as a naturalist. There are some thinkers who never consider men but as objects of praise or blame; others, who only study men with a view of making them different from what they are. Such are reformers, the leaders of institutions, philanthropists, who think only in order to act. To neither of these classes did Goethe belong. He took men as he found them; he was content to take society as he found it, with all its complex institutions. He was disposed to make the best of what he found, but seemed reluctant to waste his powers in the vain attempt to make men materially different from what they were before; hence arose an inert, or indolent acquiescence in what he found existing.

He had early in life laboured to catch a new point of view from which nature might be contemplated on all sides; or a law in conformity with which the manifold operations of nature might be seen as if they were one. He first made this idea known in his ‘Metamorphosis of Plants.’ His botanical studies were continued for many years of his life. He afterwards busied himself with the minute and experimental study of chromatics. He edited a journal of science, and wrote more or less on mineralogy, geology, comparative anatomy, optics, and meteorology. A metaphysical spirit runs through all these writings, so alien from the mode of study pursued in other countries, that we do not recollect any notice of them by any English writer, except Professor Lindley, in his ‘Introduction to Botany,’ who confines his remarks to Goethe’s botanical works. The Professor represents Goethe as having revived a nearly-forgotten doctrine, first promulgated by LinnÆus. But, for thirty years after the first appearance of the ‘Metamorphosis,’ it produced little or no effect even in Germany. Now, indeed, “it has come to be considered the basis of all scientific knowledge of vegetable structure.” Whether, in the revolutions of opinion, the bold polemical writings of Goethe against the Newtonian theory of light and colours will ever be looked upon as more than the extravagances of a great genius wandering out of his own sphere, time will show. For the present this is the view taken of the great poet’s scientific writings, both by Italians and Frenchmen. But, whatever dreams he may have mixed up with his investigations, Goethe was no mere dreamer: to the last hour of his life, he made it his business to inform himself concerning the progress of the sciences in foreign countries. All new books were brought to him, even to the end of his life; he composed elaborate poems at the age of seventy; and when beyond sixty years of age, entered with zeal upon the study of Oriental poetry, to apply the spirit of which, to Western notions and feelings, he composed his ‘West-Eastern Divan.’ In this the infinite variety of his studies and pursuits lay that ‘all-sidedness’ (if we may be pardoned for adopting such a word from the German) for which he was so remarkable. From the same quality proceeded that unusual toleration of novelties which he could reconcile to the love of what is established. He would not permit a clever farce to be acted on the stage, when he was manager, written in derision of Gall’s cranioscopy. Instead of joining in the ridicule of animal magnetism, he would fairly investigate its pretensions. When a book on the Clouds was published by Howard, in England, Goethe instantly wrote an account of it, inventing appropriate German words to designate the forms pointed out. In his hunger and thirst after knowledge, he was omnivorous. This was the ruling passion strong in death. Only the evening before his decease he received some new books from Paris, by which he was greatly excited. It is said that a volume, by Salvandy, was grasped in his hand when he died; and his last words were singularly appropriate to his temper, and might be received by his admirers as almost prophetic. He ordered the window-shutters to be opened, exclaiming, “More light! More light!”