CHAPTER XII

From Moeggelingen to Aalen they were obliged to use three horses, and yet it took fully six hours, so that they were obliged to spend the night there. Next morning they set off early, and reached the village of Hofen by mid-day without accidents. Here for a time the travelling ceased, for a hundred paces beyond the village the carriage fell into a puddle, and they were all terribly soiled; the maid's right shoulder was dislocated, and the manservant's hand injured. The axle of one of the wheels was broken, and a horse completely lamed in the left forefoot. They had to put up a second time for the night, leave horses, carriage, man, and maid in Hofen, and hire a rack waggon, in which at last, pitifully shaken, they reached the gates of Ellwangen on Wednesday at vesper bells.

When Eva König, Lessing'sfiancée, was on her way from Brunswick to Nuremberg in 1772, she wrote to him from Rattelsdorf (two miles north of Bamberg), on February 28th, as follows:

You will certainly never in your life have heard of a village called Rattelsdorf? We have been in it already twenty-four hours, and who knows if we shall not have to stay four times as long! It depends on the Maine, whether it falls or not; as it is now, one could not cross it, even if one dared to. I have never in my life met with so many hindrances, so many dangers and hardships, as on this journey. I canhardly think of any misfortunes which we have not already had.

She goes on to describe that in thirty-eight hours two axles and two poles had been broken, the horses had bolted with them, one horse had fallen and died, and so on; on March 2nd they were still prisoners in the wretched village.

In 1750 a day's journey was still reckoned at five miles, two hours to the mile; and when in July 1750 Klopstock travelled with Gleim from Halberstadt to Magdeburg in a light carriage drawn by four horses, at the rate of six miles in six hours, he thought this speed remarkable enough to merit comparison with the racing in the Olympian games. People of any pretensions shunned the discomforts of travelling on foot--the bad roads, the insecurity, the dirty inns, and the rough treatment in them; to walk abroad in good clothes and admire the scenery was an unknown thing. (G. Freytag.)

It was only after the widening of thoroughfares, the invention of steamboats (the first was on the Weser 1827) and railways (1835), that travelling became commoner and more popular, and feeling for Nature was thereby increased.

After the Swiss Alps had been discovered for them, people began to feel interest in their native mountains; Zimmermann led the way with his observations on a journey in the Harz 1775, and Gatterer in 1785 publishedA Guide to Travelling in the Harzin five volumes.

In 1806 appeared Nicolas'sGuide to Switzerland, in 1777 J.T. Volkmar'sJourney to the Riesengebirge, and before long each little country and province, be it Weimar, Mecklenburg, or the Mark, had discovered a Switzerland within its own boundaries, with mountains as much like the Swiss Alps as a charming little girl is like a giant.

It was the opening of men's eyes to the charms of romantic scenery at home.

The Isle of Rügen too, Swedish at that time, with its striking contrasts of deep blue bays and inlets, chalk rocks and beech woods, came into fashion with lovers of Nature, especially after the road from Sagard to Stubbenkamer had been improved[17]--so much so, in fact, that in 1805 Grümbke was complaining that many people only went there to feast, not to enjoy the scene:

You know I am no foe to pleasure, and appreciate my food and drink after physical exertion as much as any one; but it is desecration to make that the main object here. In this dreadfully beautiful wilderness, under these green corridors of beeches, on the battlements of this great dazzling temple, before this huge azure mirror of the sea, only high and serious thoughts should find a place--the whole scene, stamped as it is with majesty and mystery, seems designed to attract the mind to the hidden life of the unending world around it. For this, solitude and rest are necessary conditions, hence one must visit Stubbenkamer either alone or with intimate and congenial friends.

The eighteenth century, so proudly distinguished as the century of Frederic the Great and Maria Theresa, Kant and Lessing, Rousseau and Voltaire, the age of enlightenment, and, above all, of the Revolution, was the most sentimental period in history. Its feeling for Nature bore the same stamp. Many of the Anacreontists and Göttingen poets, as well as Klopstock, shewed genuine enthusiasm; but their horizon was narrow, and though F. Stolberg sang of the sea and his native mountains, most of them only rang the changes on moonlight and starlight, pastoral idylls, the joys of spring, and winter excursions on the ice. Even Rousseau, the prophet of high mountains, was the child of the same sentimental, self-adoring time; a morbid strain, call it misanthropy, melancholy, what you will, underlay all his passion for Nature. It was Goethe who dissolved the spell which lay over the world, and, although born into the days of beautiful souls, moonshine poets, seraphic heaven stormers, pastoral poems, andLa Nouvelle Héloise, ennobled and purified the tone of the day and freed it from convention!

It was by dint of his genius for expression, the gift of finding the one right word, that he became the world's greatest lyrist: what he felt became a poem, what he saw a picture.

To see and to fashion into poetry were one withhim, whereas his predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus--nymphs, Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr--even the still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery, without lyric thought and feeling.

But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder.

Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of poetry and painting inLaocoon, he attacked the error of his day which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of seasons, places, plants, etc.

He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said:

Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide sphere of poetry.... This fault-finding criticism has partially misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry a fondness for description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem without having considered in how far painting can express universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.... Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect must be chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

And against descriptive poetry he said:

When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through pleasant meadows, a rushing river, or a rainbow. Pope expressly enjoined upon every one who would not prove himself unworthy the name of poet, to abandon as early as possible this fondness for description. A merely descriptive poem he declared to be a feast made up of sauces.

Acute as his distinction was between poetry as the representative art of actions in time, and painting as the representative art of bodies in space, he did not give due value to lyric feeling or landscape painting.[1]They belong to a region in which his sharp, critical acumen was not at home.

But his discussions established the position that external objects of any sort, including Nature in all her various shapes, are not proper subjects for poetry when taken as Thomson, Brockes, and Haller took them, by themselves alone, but must first be imbued with human feeling. And the same holds good of landscape painting. Goethe's lyrics are the most perfect examples of this blending of the outer and inner world.

Lessing's criticisms had a salutary, emancipating effect upon prevalent taste; but a more positive influence came into play through Herder's warm predilection for the popular songs, which had been so long neglected, and for all that rises, as in the Psalms, Homer, Shakespeare, Ossian, from primitive sources of feeling, and finds spontaneous expression in poetry. The effect of his pioneering was marked, especially upon Goethe. Herder understood the revulsion of feeling from the unnatural restraint of the Pigtail period, and while holding up the mirror to his own day, he at the same time led its taste and the expression of it towards what was simple and natural, by disclosing the treasures which lay hidden in the poetry of the people. The lyric was freed from the artificiality and conventionwhich had so long ruled it, and although he did not carry out his plan of a history of poetry, his collections and his profound remarks upon them were of great service, sowing a seed that bore fruit in succeeding days.

The popular songs to him were children of the same mother as the plants and flowers. 'All the songs of such unlettered folk,'[2]he said, 'weave a living world around existing objects, actions, and events. How rich and manifold they all become! And the eye can actually see them, the mind realize them; they are set in motion. The different parts of the song are no more connected together than the trees and bushes in a wood, the rocks in a desert, or the scenes depicted.' In another place[3]he put the history of feeling for Nature very tersely: 'There is no doubt that the spirit of man is made gentler by studying Nature. What did the classics aim at in their Georgics, but under various shapes to make man more humane and raise him gradually to order, industry, and prosperity, and to the power to observe Nature?...' Hence, when poetry revived in the Middle Ages, she soon recollected the true land of her birth among the plants and flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the same descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes, Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their finest minutiæ, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes are often too laboured, too wide in scope, but still his poems are a storehouse of pictures direct from Nature. Haller'sAlps, Kleist's poems and Gessner's, Thomson'sSeasons, speak for themselves.'

He delighted in Shaftesbury's praises of Nature as the good and beautiful in theMoralists, and translated it[4]; in fact, in Herder we have already an æsthetic cult of the beauties of Nature.

After the moral disquisitions of Pope, Addison, Shaftesbury, etc., Nature's influence on man, moral and æsthetic, became, as we have already seen, a favourite theme in Germany too, both in pious and rationalistic circles[5]; but there are few traces of any æsthetic analysis.

The most important one was Kant's, in hisObservations on the Beautiful and Sublimein 1764. He distinguished, in the finer feeling for Nature, a feeling for the sublime and a feeling for the beautiful.

Both touch us pleasantly, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain with a snowy peak reaching above the clouds, the account of a storm ... these excite pleasure, but mixed with awe; while flowery meadows, valleys with winding streams and covered by browsing herds, a description of Elysium ... also cause pleasant feelings, but of a gay and radiant kind. To appreciate the first sensations adequately, we must have a feeling for the sublime; to appreciate the second, a feeling for the beautiful.

He mentioned tall oaks, lonely shades in consecrated groves, and night-time, as sublime; day, beds of flowers, low hedges, and trees cut into shapes, as beautiful.

Minds which possess the feeling for the sublime are inclined to lofty thoughts of friendship, scorn of the world, eternity, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening, when the twinkling starlight breaks the darkness. The light of day impels to activity and cheerfulness. The sublime soothes, the beautiful stimulates.

He goes on to subdivide the sublime:

This feeling is sometimes accompanied by horror or by dejection, sometimes merely by quiet admiration, at other times by a sense of wide-spread beauty. I will call the first the terrible, the second the noble, the third the splendid sublime.Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always been the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and ghostly spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the beautiful may be small, elaborate, and ornamental.

Profound solitude is sublime, but in a terrible way. This is why great deserts, like the Desert of Gamo in Tartary, have always been the supposed abode of fearful shades, hobgoblins, and ghostly spectres. The sublime is always great and simple; the beautiful may be small, elaborate, and ornamental.

He tried, too, to define the romantic in Nature, though very vaguely:

The dreadful variety of the sublime, when quite unnatural, is adventurous. When sublimity or beauty is excessive, it is called romantic.

In hisKalligone, which appeared in 1800, Herder quoted Kant in making one of the characters say, 'One calls day beautiful, night sublime,' and tried to carry the idea a step further; 'The sublime and beautiful are not opposed to each other, but stem and boughs of a tree whose top is the most sublimely beautiful of all,' that is the romantic. In the same book he attempted to analyze his impressions of Nature, calling a rugged place odious, an insignificant one without character tedious. 'In the presence of great mountains,' he says, 'the spirit is filled with bold aspirations, whereas in gentle valleys it lies quiet.' Harmony in variety was his ideal, like the sea in storm and calm. 'An ocean of beautiful forms in rest and movement.'

And in reference to the contrast between a place made 'dreadful and horrible' by a torrent dashing over rocks and a quiet and charming valley, he said: 'These changes follow unalterable laws, which are recognized by our minds, and in harmony with our feelings.' He saw the same order in variety among plants, from the highest to the lowest, from palm tree to moss. In the second part of the book he gave an enthusiastic description of the sublime in sky and sea.

His beautiful words on the inspiration of Nature shew his insight into her relation to the poet soul of the people:

Everything in Nature must be inspired by life, or it does not move me, I do not feel it. The cooling zephyr and the morning sunbeam, the wind blowing through the trees, and the fragrant carpet of flowers, must cool, warm, pervade us--then we feel Nature. The poet does not say he feels her, unless he feels her intensely, living, palpitating and pervading him, like the wild Nature of Ossian, or the soft luxuriant Nature of Theocritus and the Orientals. In Nature, the more varieties the better; for instance, in a beautiful country I rustle with the wind and become alive (and give life--inspire), I inhale fragrance and exhale it with the flowers; I dissolve in water; I float in the blue sky; I feel all these feelings.

Herder touched the lyre himself with a skilful hand. Thought predominated with him, but he could make Nature live in his song.[7]'I greet thee, thou wing of heaven,' he sang to the lark; and to the rainbow, 'Beautiful child of the sun, picture and hope over dark clouds ... hopes are colours, are broken sun-rays and the children of tears, truth is the sun.'

InBy the Sea at Napleshe wrote:

A-weary of the summer's fiery brand,I sat me down beside the cooling sea,Where the waves heaving, rolled and kissed the strandOf the grey shore, ...And over me, high over in the air,Of the blue skyey vault, rustled the tree ...Queen of all trees, slender and beautiful,The pine tree, lifting me to golden dreams.

A-weary of the summer's fiery brand,

I sat me down beside the cooling sea,

Where the waves heaving, rolled and kissed the strand

Of the grey shore, ...

And over me, high over in the air,

Of the blue skyey vault, rustled the tree ...

Queen of all trees, slender and beautiful,

The pine tree, lifting me to golden dreams.

InRecollections of Naples:

Yes! they are gone, those happy, happy hoursJoyous but short, by Posilippo's bay!Sweet dream of sea and lake, of rock and hill,Grotto and island, and the mirrored sunIn the blue water--thou hast passed away!

Yes! they are gone, those happy, happy hours

Joyous but short, by Posilippo's bay!

Sweet dream of sea and lake, of rock and hill,

Grotto and island, and the mirrored sun

In the blue water--thou hast passed away!

and

When the glow of evening softly fadesFrom the still sea, and with her gleaming hostThe moon ascends the sky.

When the glow of evening softly fades

From the still sea, and with her gleaming host

The moon ascends the sky.

Nightis very poetic:

And comest thou again,Thou Mother of the stars and heavenly thoughts?Divine and quiet Mother, comest thou?The earth awaits thee, from thy chalice cupBut one drop of thy heavenly dew to quaff,Her flowers bend low their heads;And with them, satiate with vision, droopsMy overcharged soul....O starry goddess with the crown of gold,Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleamA thousand worlds ...Silence divine, that filleth all the world,Flowing so softly to the eternal shoresOf an eternal universe....

And comest thou again,

Thou Mother of the stars and heavenly thoughts?

Divine and quiet Mother, comest thou?

The earth awaits thee, from thy chalice cup

But one drop of thy heavenly dew to quaff,

Her flowers bend low their heads;

And with them, satiate with vision, droops

My overcharged soul....

O starry goddess with the crown of gold,

Upon whose wide-spread sable mantle gleam

A thousand worlds ...

Silence divine, that filleth all the world,

Flowing so softly to the eternal shores

Of an eternal universe....

And inSt John's Night, he exclaims:

Infinite, ah! inexhaustible art thou, Mother Nature!

Like the rest, Herder suffered from the over-sensitiveness of his day. His correspondence with hisfiancéeshews this[8]; one sees Rousseau's influence:

My pleasantest hours are when, quite alone, I walk in a charming wood close to Bückeburg, or lie upon a wall in the shade of my garden, or lastly, for we have had capital moonlight for three nights, and the last was the best of all, when I enjoy these hours of sweetly sleeping night with all the songs of the nightingale.I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only poets, lovers, and philosophers can live.

I reckon no hours more delightful than those of green solitude. I live so romantically alone, and among woods and churches, as only poets, lovers, and philosophers can live.

And hisfiancéewrote:

'Tis all joy within and around me since I have known thee, my best beloved: every plant and flower, everything in Nature, seems beautiful to me.

and

I went early to my little room; the moon was quite covered by clouds, and the night so melancholy from the croaking of the frogs, that I could not leave the window for a long time: my whole soul was dark and cloudy; I thought of thee, my dear one, and that thought, that sigh, reduced me to tears.

and

Do you like the ears of wheat so much? I never pass a cornfield without stroking them.

Goethe focussed all the rays of feeling for Nature which had found lyrical expression before him, and purged taste, beginning with his own, of its unnatural and sickly elements. So he became the liberating genius of modern culture. Not only did German lyric poetry reach its climax in him; but he was the most accurate, individual, and universal interpreter of German feeling for Nature.

His wide original mind kept open house for the most diverse elements of feeling, and exercised an ennobling control upon each and all at will; Homer's naivete, Shakespeare's sympathy, Rousseau's enthusiasm, even Ossian's melancholy, found room there.

While most love lyrics of his day were false in feeling, mere raving extravagances, and therefore poor in those metaphors and comparisons which prove sympathy between Nature and the inner life, it could be said of him that 'Nature wished to know what she looked like, and so she created Goethe.' He was the microcosm in which the macrocosm of modern times was reflected.

He was more modern and universal than any of his predecessors, and his insight into Nature and love for her have been rarely equalled in later days. He did not live, like so many of the elegiac and idyllic poets of the eighteenth century, a mere dream-life of the imagination: Goethe stood firmly rooted among the actualities; from boyhood up, as he said inWahrheit und Dichtung, he had 'a warm feeling for all objective things.'

No poet, Klopstock not excepted, was richer in verbal invention, and many of the phrases and epithets which he coined form in themselves very striking evidence (which is lost in translation) of his close and original observation of Nature.

He has many beautiful comparisons to Nature:

His lady-love is 'brightly beautiful as morning clouds on yonder height.'

'I was wont to look at thee as one looks at the stars and moon, delighting in thee without the most distant wish in my quiet breast to possess thee.'

'I give kisses as the spring gives flowers.'

'My feeling for thee was like seed, which germinates slowly in winter, but ripens quickly in summer.'

The stars move 'with flower feet.'

The graces are 'pure as the heart of the waters, as the marrow of earth.'

A delicate poem is a rainbow only existing against a dark ground.

InStella:

Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to return to thy breast from the sandy desert world.I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning.

Thou dost not feel what heavenly dew to the thirsty it is, to return to thy breast from the sandy desert world.

I felt free in soul, free as a spring morning.

InFaust:

The cataract bursting through the rocks is the image of human effort; its coloured reflection the image of life.

When Werther feels himself trembling between existence and non-existence, everything around him sinking away, and the world perishing with him:

The past flashes like lightning over the dark abyss of the future.

These are among his still more numerous metaphors:

A sea of folly, an ocean of fragrance, the waves of battle, the stream of genius, the tiger claw of despair, the sun-ray of the past. Iphigenia says to Orestes:

O let the pure breath of love blow lightly on thy heart's flame and cool it.

and Eleonora complains about Tasso:

Let him go! But what twilight falls round me now! Formerly the stream carried us along upon the light waves without a rudder.

In Goethe we see very clearly how the inner life, under the pressure of its own intensity, will, so to speak, overflow into the outer world, making that live in its turn; and how this is especially the case when the amorous passion is present to add its impetus to feeling, and attribute its own fervour to all around.

May Song,On the Lake,Ganymede, are instances of this.

Ganymede:

Oh, what a glowAround me in morning'sBlaze thou diffusest,Beautiful spring!With the rapture of love but intenser,Intenser and deeper and sweeter,Nestles and creeps to my heartThe sensation divineOf thy fervour eternal,Oh, thou unspeakably fair!

Oh, what a glow

Around me in morning's

Blaze thou diffusest,

Beautiful spring!

With the rapture of love but intenser,

Intenser and deeper and sweeter,

Nestles and creeps to my heart

The sensation divine

Of thy fervour eternal,

Oh, thou unspeakably fair!

Beautiful personifications abound:

The sun is proudly throned in heaven.

The glowing sun gazes at the rugged peak or charms it with fiery love,

Or bathes like the moon in the ocean.

The parting glance of Mother Sun broods on the grapes.

'Morning came frightening away light sleep with its footsteps.'

'The young day arose with delight.'

The moon: 'Thou spreadest thy glance soothingly over my abode.'

On a cloudy night: 'Evening already rocked earth, and night hung on the mountains; from a hill of clouds the moon looked mournfully out of the mist.'

'The lofty stars turn their clear eyes down to me.'

Even the rock lives: 'The hard rock opens its bosom, not envying earth its deep springs.'

The stream: 'Thou hurriest on with joyful light mood; see the rock spring bright with the glance of the stars, yet no shady valley, no flowers make him tarry ... his course winds downwards to the plain, then he scatters in delightful spray, in cloud waves ... foams gloomily to the abyss.'

With gradual step from out the far-off grey,Self-heralded draws on the storm.Birds on the wing fly low across the water, weighted down,And seamen hasten to reef in the sailBefore its stubborn wrath.

With gradual step from out the far-off grey,

Self-heralded draws on the storm.

Birds on the wing fly low across the water, weighted down,

And seamen hasten to reef in the sail

Before its stubborn wrath.

His flowers are alive:

The beauteous snowdropsDroop o'er the plain,The crocus opensIts glowing bud ...With saucy gesturePrimroses flare,And roguish violetsHidden with care.

The beauteous snowdrops

Droop o'er the plain,

The crocus opens

Its glowing bud ...

With saucy gesture

Primroses flare,

And roguish violets

Hidden with care.

But these are only examples. To obtain a clear idea of Goethe's attitude, we must take a more general survey of his work, for his poetic relationship to Nature, like his mental development in general, passed through various stages of growth. That it was a warm one even in youth is shewn by the letter in 1766 from Leipzig[9]:

You live contented in M. I even so here. Lonely, lonely, altogether lonely. Dearest Riese, this loneliness has impressed my soul with a certain sadness.

This solitary joy is mine,When far apart from all mankind,By shady brook-side to recline.And keep my loved ones in my mind....

This solitary joy is mine,

When far apart from all mankind,

By shady brook-side to recline.

And keep my loved ones in my mind....

He goes on with these lines:

Then is my heart with sorrow filled,Sad is mine eye.The flooded brook now rages by,That heretofore so gently rilled.No bird sings in the bushes now,The tree so green is dry,The zephyr which on me did blowSo cheering, now storms northerly,And scattered blossoms bears on high.

Then is my heart with sorrow filled,

Sad is mine eye.

The flooded brook now rages by,

That heretofore so gently rilled.

No bird sings in the bushes now,

The tree so green is dry,

The zephyr which on me did blow

So cheering, now storms northerly,

And scattered blossoms bears on high.

He was already in full sympathy with Nature. A few of his earlier poems[10]shew prevalent taste, the allusions to Zephyr and Lima, for instance, inNight; but they are followed by lines which are all his own.

He had an incomparable way of striking the chords of love and Nature together.

Where his lady-love dwells, 'there is love, and goodness is Nature.' He thinks of her

When the bright sunlight shimmersAcross the sea,When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers.Thou art seductive and charming; flowers,Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee.

When the bright sunlight shimmersAcross the sea,When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers.

When the bright sunlight shimmers

Across the sea,

When the clear fountain in the moonbeam glimmers.

Thou art seductive and charming; flowers,Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee.

Thou art seductive and charming; flowers,

Sun, moon, and stars only worship thee.

There is passionate feeling for Nature in theMay Songof his Sesenheimer period:

How gloriously gleamethAll Nature to me!How bright the sun beameth,How fresh is the lea!White blossoms are burstingThe thickets among,And all the gay greenwoodIs ringing with song!There's radiance and raptureThat nought can destroy,Oh earth, in thy sunshine,Oh heart, in thy joy.Oh love! thou enchanterSo golden and bright,Like the red clouds of morningThat rest on yon height,It is them that art clothingThe fields and the bowers,And everywhere breathingThe incense of flowers.

How gloriously gleameth

All Nature to me!

How bright the sun beameth,

How fresh is the lea!

White blossoms are bursting

The thickets among,

And all the gay greenwood

Is ringing with song!

There's radiance and rapture

That nought can destroy,

Oh earth, in thy sunshine,

Oh heart, in thy joy.

Oh love! thou enchanter

So golden and bright,

Like the red clouds of morning

That rest on yon height,

It is them that art clothing

The fields and the bowers,

And everywhere breathing

The incense of flowers.

Looking back in old age to those happy days of youth, he saw in memory not only Frederica but the scenery around her. He said (Wahrheit und Dichtung): 'Her figure never looked more charming than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm of her bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace he wrote:

One has only to abandon oneself to the present in order to enjoy the charms of the sky, the glow of the rich earth, the mild evenings, the warm nights, at the side of one's love, or near her.

and one of the poems to Frederica says:

The world lies round me buried deep in mist, butIn one glance of thine lies sunshine and happiness.

The world lies round me buried deep in mist, but

In one glance of thine lies sunshine and happiness.

There is a strong pulse of life--life that overflows into Nature--inThe Departure:

To horse! Away, o'er hill and steep,Into the saddle blithe I spring;The eve was cradling earth to sleep,And night upon the mountains hung.With robes of mist around him set,The oak like some huge giant stood,While, with its hundred eyes of jet,Peer'd darkness from the tangled wood.Amid a bank of clouds the moonA sad and troubled glimmer shed;The wind its chilly wings unclosed,And whistled wildly round my head.Night framed a thousand phantoms dire,Yet did I never droop nor start;Within my veins what living fire!What quenchless glow within my heart!

To horse! Away, o'er hill and steep,

Into the saddle blithe I spring;

The eve was cradling earth to sleep,

And night upon the mountains hung.

With robes of mist around him set,

The oak like some huge giant stood,

While, with its hundred eyes of jet,

Peer'd darkness from the tangled wood.

Amid a bank of clouds the moon

A sad and troubled glimmer shed;

The wind its chilly wings unclosed,

And whistled wildly round my head.

Night framed a thousand phantoms dire,

Yet did I never droop nor start;

Within my veins what living fire!

What quenchless glow within my heart!

And very like it, though in a minor key, is the Elegy which begins, 'A tender, youthful trouble.'

He tells inWahrheit und Dichtunghow he found comfort for his love troubles in Frankfort:

They were accustomed to call me, on account of wandering about the district, the 'wanderer.' In producing that calm for the mind, which I felt under the open sky, in the valleys, on the heights, in the fields, and in the woods, the situation of Frankfort was serviceable.... On the setting in of winter a new world was revealed to us, since I at once determined to skate.... For this new joyous activity we were also indebted to Klopstock, to his enthusiasm for this happy species of motion.... To pass a splendid Sunday thus on the ice did not satisfy us, we continued in movement late into the night.... The full moon rising from the clouds, over the wide nocturnal meadows which were frozen into fields of ice, the night breeze which rustled towards us on our course, the solemn thunder of the ice which sunk as the water decreased, the strange echo of our own movements, rendered the scenes of Ossian just present to our minds.

His attachment, to Lotte, stirred far deeper feelings than the earlier ones to Frederica and Lilli:

(If I, my own dear Lilli, loved thee not, How should I joy to view this scene so fair! And yet if I, sweet Lilli, loved thee not, Should I be happy here or anywhere?)

and drew him correspondingly nearer to Nature.

There is no book in any language which so lives and moves and has its being in Nature asWerther.[11]InWahrheit und DichtungGoethe said of the 'strange element' in whichWertherwas designed and written:

I sought to free myself internally from all that was foreign to me, to regard the external with love, and to allow all beings, from man downwards, as low as they were comprehensible, to act upon me, each after its own kind. Thus arose a wonderful affinity with the single objects of Nature, and a hearty concord, a harmony with the whole, so that every change, whether of place or region, or of the times of the day and year, or whatever else could happen, affected me in the deepest manner. The glance of the painter associated itself with that ofthe poet; the beautiful rural landscape, animated by the pleasant river, increased my love of solitude and favoured my silent observations as they extended on all sides.

The strong influence ofLa Nouvelle HéloiseuponWertherwas very evident, but there was a marked difference between Goethe's feeling for Nature and Rousseau's. Rousseau had the painter's eye, but not the keen poetic vision.

Goethe's romances are pervaded by the penetrating quality peculiar to his nation, and by virtue of which inWerther, the outer world, the scenery, was not used as framework, but was always interwoven with the hero's mood. The contrast between culture and Nature is always marked in Rousseau, and his religion was deism; Goethe resolves Nature into feeling, and his religion was a growing pantheism. As a work of art,Wertheris excellent,La Nouvelle Héloiseis not. Goethe used his hero's bearing towards Nature with marvellous effect to indicate the turns and changes of his moods, just as he indicated the threatening calamity and the growing apprehension of it by skilful stress laid upon some of her little traits--a faculty which only Theodore Storm among later poets has caught from him.

The growth of amorous passion is portrayed as an elementary force, and the revolutionary element in the book really consists in the strength of this passion and the assertion of its natural rights. Everything artificial, forced, conventional, in thought, act, and feeling--and what at that time was not?--was repugnant to Werther; what he liked most of all was the simplicity of children and uneducated people.

Nothing distresses me more than to see men torment each other; particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season of pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in quarrels and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is too late to repair it.

To such intense sympathy as this, all that had been sung ere now by German poets had to give place. Nature, which hitherto had played norôleat all in fiction, not even among the English, was Werther's truest and most intimate friend.

Werther is sensitive and sentimental, though in a single-hearted way, with a sentimentality that reminds us more and more, as the story proceeds, of the gloomy tone of Ossian and Young. He is a thoroughly original character, who feels that he is right so to be; and although he falls a prey to his melancholy, yet there is much more force and thought in his outpourings than in all the moonshine tirades that preceded him. It is the work of a true poet, in the best days of a brilliant youth.

Werther, like Rousseau, was happiest in solitude. Solitude, in the 'place like paradise,' was precious balm to his feeling heart, which he considers 'like a sick child'; and the 'warm heavenly imagination of the heart' illuminates Nature round him--his 'favourite valley,' the 'sweet spring morning,' Nature's 'unspeakable beauty.' He was absorbed in artistic feeling, though he could not draw; 'I could not draw them, not a stroke, and have never been a greater artist than at that moment.' His power lay in imbuing his whole subject with feeling; he felt the heart of Nature beating, and its echo in his own breast.

When the lovely valley teems with vapour around me, and the meridian sun strikes the upper surface of the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few stray gleams steal into the inner sanctuary, then I throw myself down in the tall grass by the trickling stream; and as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants discover themselves to me. When I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty who formed us in His own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss; and then, myfriend, when darkness overspreads my eyes, and heaven and earth seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the idea of a beloved mistress, then I often long and think: O that you could describe these conceptions, that you could impress upon paper all that lives so full and warm within you, that it might be the mirror of your soul, as your soul is the mirror of the infinite God!O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under the weight of the grandeur of these visions.

O! my friend! but it is too much for my strength. I sink under the weight of the grandeur of these visions.

Werther could not express all his love for Nature, but the secret of it lay in the power to bring his own world of thought and feeling into communion with her, and so give her speech. He divined something immortal in her akin to himself. 'The true feeling of Nature,' he said, 'is love.' He poured 'the stream of his genius' over her, and she became 'dear and familiar' to him.... The simple homely scenery delighted him--the valley, the brook, the fine walnut trees.

When I go out at sunrise in the morning to Walheim, and with my own hands gather the peas in the garden, which are to serve for my dinner; when I sit down to shell them and read my Homer during the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up.... Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness than those traits of patriarchal life, which, thank heaven, I can imitate without affectation.

With the growth of his love-passion his feeling for Nature increased; on July 24th he wrote:

I never felt happier, I never understood Nature better, even down to the veriest stem or smallest blade of grass.

Then Albert came on the scene, and love became a torment, and Nature a tormentor:

August18.--Must it ever be thus, that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of Nature, overwhelming me witha torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bye-gone days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the river and upon the green flowery valley before me, and saw all nature budding and bursting around--the hills clothed from foot to peak with tall thick forest trees, the valleys in all their varied windings shaded with the loveliest woods, and the soft river gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the beautiful clouds which the soft evening breeze wafted across the sky--when I heard the groves about me melodious with the music of birds, and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last golden beams of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around directed my attention to the ground, and I there observed the arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me--all this displayed to me the inner warmth which animates all Nature, and filled and glowed within my heart. I felt myself exalted by this overflowing fulness to the perception of the Godhead, and the glorious forms of an infinite universe became visible to my soul.... From the inaccessible mountains across the desert, which no mortal foot has trod, far as the confines of the unknown ocean, breathes the spirit of the eternal Creator, and every atom to which He has given existence finds favour in His sight. Ah! how often at that time has the flight of a bird soaring above my head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasure of life from the foaming goblet of the infinite, and to partake, if but for a moment, even with the confined powers of my soul, the beatitude of the Creator, who accomplishes all things in himself and through himself.... It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes.... My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature--Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself and every object near it; so that, surrounded by earth, and air, and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart, and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring.... If in such moments I find no sympathy ... I either wander through the country, climb some precipitous cliff, or force a path through the tracklessthicket, where I am lacerated and torn by thorns and briars, and thence I find relief.

Then, as he was going away, he felt how sympathetic the place had been to him:

I was walking up and down the very avenue which was so dear to me--a secret sympathy had frequently drawn me thither....

the moon rose from behind a hill, increasing his melancholy, and Charlotte put his feeling into words, saying (like Klopstock):

September10.--Whenever I walk by moonlight, it brings to my remembrance all my beloved and departed friends, and I am filled with thoughts of death and futurity.

Even in his misery he realises the [Greek: charisgoôn] of Euripides, Petrarch'sdolendi voluptas--theWonne der Wehmuth.

On September 4th he wrote:

It is even so! As Nature puts on her autumn tints, it becomes autumn with me and around me. My leaves are sere and yellow, and the neighbouring trees are divested of their foliage.

It was due to this autumn feeling that he could say:

Ossian has superseded Homer in my heart. To what a world does the illustrious bard carry me! To wander over pathless wilds, surrounded by impetuous whirlwinds, where, by the feeble light of the moon, we see the spirits of our ancestors; to hear from the mountain tops, 'mid the roar of torrents, their plaintive sounds issuing from deep caverns.... And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry, and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life, that active sacred power which created worlds around me, and it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists and illuminating the country round it which is still wrapt in silence, whilst the soft streamwinds gently through the willows which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to attract one tear of joy from my withered heart....

On November 30th he wrote: 'About dinner-time I went to walk by the river side, for I had no appetite,' and goes on in the tone of Ossian:

Everything around me seemed gloomy: a cold and damp easterly wind blew from the mountains, and black heavy clouds spread over the plain.

and in the dreadful night of the flood:

Upon the stroke of twelve I hastened forth. I beheld a fearful sight. The foaming torrents rolled from the mountains in the moonlight; fields and meadows, trees and hedges, were confounded together, and the entire valley was converted into a deep lake which was agitated by the roaring wind. And when the moon shone forth and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of awe and delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, and cried 'Plunge!' For a moment my senses forsook me, in the intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a plunge into that gulf.

To his farewell letter he adds:

Yes, Nature! put on mourning. Your child, your friend, your lover, draws near his end.

The genuine poetic pantheism, which, for all his melancholy and sentimentality, was the spring of Werther's feeling, is seen in loftier and more comprehensive form in the first part ofFaust, when Faust opens the book and sees the sign of macrocosmos:

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