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GOETHE: AN ESTIMATE H. WALTER I N I 884 Profes~or Se.eley of Cambridge publish~d three · essays on Goethe tn the Contemporary Review~ reprinted ten years later with considerable additions under the title Goethe reviewed after sixty years. The title of the present article might .very well have been "Goethe reviewed after a hundred years" but for a very natural hesitation to challenge a comparison which might appear presumptuous with Professor Seeley's work. Nevertheless~ this is a review written with .a very similar purpose: to revise if necessary o~r estimate ot Goethe, a task which will., in this year of the centenary, he attempted in many places and by many pens. Probably the present occasion is more significant, more likely to yield definite results than the mere lapse of sixty years which gave birth to Professor Seely's book. When Professor Seeley wrote his essays for the Contemporary Review, the last of Goethe's grandsons ·was still alive and jealously ·guarding the treasures of the Goethe House. When the essays were reprinted in book form only nine of the Goethe Jahrbucher and about a dozen of the one hundred and forty volumes of the Weimar edition haci been published. As this edition comprises :fifty volumes of correspondence, all his diaries (which enable us to follow Goethe during many periods, not only day by day but often hour by hour) and, in addition to his completed works, all his fragments, plans and notes, we can dispense with most of the often. very ingenious guesswork of the older biographers. We may say confidently that we have all obtainable facts before us~ facts that have been sifted and resifted by an anny of industrious scholars. This process of winnowing and 259 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY interpreting is likely to go on for _ an indefinite time, for the appeal of his stupendous personality must differ in the case of each individual student. So the question: "What think ye of Goethe?" may receive a different answer every time it is asked. Goethe himself sets the example by viewing the same events of his life and his own personality differently at different periods, a fact. which is borne out by his Dichtung und Wahrheit and by his letters and conversations. No treatment of Goethe can therefore hope to meet with the approval of all readers. This looks like a warning; perhaps it is one. Goethe in his Iphigenie makes his heroine say: Es erzeugt nicht gleich Ein Haus den Halbgott noch das Ungeheuer; Erst eine Reihe Boser oder Guter Bringt endlich das Entsetzen, bringt die Freude Der Welt hervor. In Goethe's ancestry we look in vain for such gradation of distinguished individuals leading finally up to Goethe. VVhile on the mother's side we have a number of lawyers and other professional persons, on the father's side we find t.he usual humble occupations represented: smaJl tradesmen, farmers and the inevitable blacksmith. Goethe's own grandfather on the father's side was a successful ladies' tailor, who laid the foundations of the prosperity of the Goethe family by taking as his second wife an opulent innkeeper's widowJ whose very lucrative business ·he carried on. The Goethes were not a vigorous stock. For generations back most of the children died young. His father Johann l(aspar was the youngest of a family of eleven, of whom the first eight died in childhood. Of Goethe's five brothers and sisters only one, his sister Cornelia, a hopeless neurotic, lived to grow up) and of Goethe's own 260 GOETHE: AN ESTIMATE five children by Christiane only the first, August, survived , dying at the age of forty-one, a lamentable decadent . Among the Goethes who live to a ripe old age, senile imbecility seems to be the rule. This certainly was the fate of Goethe's father and of the grandfather on the· mother's side. Well may we ask with King Thoas: Sage mir, durch welches Wunder Von diesem wilden Stamme du entsprangst. When Goethe writes: Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur Des Lebens ernstes Fiihren,·Vom Mutterchen die Frohnatur, Die Lust am Fabuliren. we have to remember that...

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