Autobiography · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
SEVENTH BOOK.
How is this truly spiritual connection shattered to pieces in Protestantism, by part of the above-mentioned symbols being declared apocryphal, and only a few canonical!--and how, by their indifference to one of these, will they prepare us for the high dignity of the others? In my time I had been confided to the religious instruction of a good old infirm clergyman, who had been confessor of the family for many years. The "Catechism," a "Paraphrase" of it, and the "Scheme of Salvation," I had at my finger's ends: I lacked not one of the strongly proving biblical texts, but from all this I reaped no fruit; for, as they assured me that the honest old man arranged his chief examimation according to an old set form, I lost all pleasure and inclination for the business, spent the last week in all sorts of diversions, laid in my hat the loose leaves borrowed from an older friend, who had gotten them from the clergyman, and unfeelingly and senselessly read aloud all that I should have known how to utter with feeling and conviction.
But I found my good intention and my aspirations in this important matter still more paralyzed by a dry, spiritless routine, when I was now to approach the confessional. I was indeed conscious of having many failings, but no great faults; and that very consciousness diminished them, since it directed me to the moral strength which lay within me, and which, with resolution and perseverance, was at last to become master over the old Adam. We were taught that we were much better than the Catholics for the very reason, that we were not obliged to confess any thing in particular in the confessional,--nay, that this would not be at all proper, even if we wished to do it. I did not like this at all; for I had the strangest religious doubts, which I would readily have had cleared up on such an occasion. Now, as this was not to be done, I composed a confession for myself, which, while it well expressed my state of mind, was to confess to an intelligent man, in general terms, that which I was forbidden to tell him in detail. But when I entered the old choir of the Barefoot Friars, when I approached the strange latticed closets in which the reverend gentlemen used to be found for that purpose, when the sexton opened the door for me, when I now saw myself shut up in the narrow place face to face with my spiritual grandsire, and he bade me welcome with his weak, nasal voice, all the light of my mind and heart was extinguished at once, the well- conned confession-speech would not cross my lips: in my embarrassment I opened the book I had in my hand, and read from it the first short form I saw, which was so general, that anybody might have spoken it with quite a safe conscience. I received absolution, and withdrew neither warm nor cold; went the next day with my parents to the Table of the Lord, and, for a few days, behaved myself as was becoming after so holy an act.
In the sequel, however, there came over me that evil, which, from the fact of our religion being complicated by various dogmas, and founded on texts of scripture which admit of several interpretations, attacks scrupulous men in such a manner, that it brings on a hypochondriacal condition, and raises this to its highest point, to fixed ideas. I have known several men, who, though their manner of thinking and living was perfectly rational, could not free themselves from thinking about the sin against the Holy Ghost, and from the fear that they had committed it. A similar trouble threatened me on the subject of the communion; for the text, that one who unworthily partakes of the sacrament /eateth and drinketh damnation to himself/, had, very early, already made a monstrous impression upon me. Every fearful thing that I had read in the histories of the Middle Ages, of the judgments of God, of those most strange ordeals, by red-hot iron, flaming fire, swelling water, and even what the Bible tells us of the draught which agrees well with the innocent, but puffs up and bursts the guilty,--all this pictured itself to my imagination, and formed itself into the most frightful combinations; since false vows, hypocrisy, perjury, blasphemy, all seemed to weigh down the unworthy person at this most holy act, which was so much the more horrible, as no one could dare to pronounce himself worthy: and the forgiveness of sins, by which every thing was to be at last; done away, was found limited by so many conditions, that one could not with certainty dare appropriate it to one's self.
This gloomy scruple troubled me to such a degree, and the expedient which they would represent to me as sufficient seemed so bald and feeble, that it gave the bugbear only a more fearful aspect; and, as soon as I had reached Leipzig, I tried to free myself altogether from my connection with the church. How oppressive, then, must have been to me the exhortations of Gellert, whom, considering the generally laconic style with which he was obliged to repel our obtrusiveness, I was unwilling to trouble with such singular questions, and the less so as in my more cheerful hours I was myself ashamed of them, and at last left completely behind me this strange anguish of conscience, together with church and altar.
And thus also did good society, which cannot easily endure any thing worthy near it, know how to spoil, on occasion, the moral influence which Gellert might have had upon us. Now it was taken ill of him that he instructed the Danes of distinction and wealth, who were particularly recommended to him, better than the other students, and had a marked solicitude for them; now he was charged with selfishness and nepotism for causing a /table d'hôte/ to be established for these young men at his brother's house. This brother, a tall, good-looking, blunt, unceremonious, and somewhat coarse, man, had, it was said, been a fencing-master; and, notwithstanding the too great lenity of his brother, the noble boarders were often treated harshly and roughly: hence the people thought they must again take the part of these young folks, and pulled about the good reputation of the excellent Gellert to such a degree, that, in order not to be mistaken about him, we became indifferent towards him, and visited him no more; yet we always saluted him in our best manner when he came riding along on his tame gray horse. This horse the elector had sent him, to oblige him to take an exercise so necessary for his health,--a distinction for which he was not easily to be forgiven.
And thus, by degrees, the epoch approached when all authority was to vanish from before me, and I was to become suspicious--nay, to despair, even--of the greatest and best individuals whom I had known or imagined. Frederick the Second still stood at the head of all the distinguished men of the century in my thoughts; and it must therefore have appeared very surprising to me, that I could praise him as little before the inhabitants of Leipzig as formerly in my grandfather's house. They had felt the hand of war heavily, it is true; and therefore they were not to blame for not thinking the best of him who had begun and continued it. They, therefore, were willing to let him pass as a distinguished, but by no means as a great, man. "There was no art," they said, "in performing something with great means; and, if one spares neither lands nor money nor blood, one may well accomplish one's purpose at last. Frederick had shown himself great in none of his plans, and in nothing that he had, properly speaking, undertaken. So long as it depended on himself, he had only gone on making blunders, and what was extraordinary in him had only come to light when he was compelled to make these blunders good again. It was purely from this that he had obtained his great reputation; since every man wishes for himself that same talent of making good, in a clever way, the blunders which he frequently commits. If one goes through the Seven Years' War, step by step, it will be found that the king quite uselessly sacrificed his fine army, and that it was his own fault that this ruinous feud had been protracted to so great a length. A truly great man and general would have got the better of his enemies much sooner." In support of these opinions they could cite infinite details, which I did not know how to deny; and I felt the unbounded reverence which I had devoted to this remarkable prince, from my youth upwards, gradually cooling away.
As the inhabitants of Leipzig had now destroyed for me the pleasant feeling of revering a great man; so did a new friend, whom I gained at the time, very much diminish the respect which I entertained for my present fellow-citizens. This friend was one of the strangest fellows in the world. He was named Behrisch, and was tutor to the young Count Lindenau. Even his exterior was singular enough. Lean and well-built, far advanced in the thirties, a very large nose, and altogether marked features: he wore from morning till night a scratch which might well have been called a peruke, but dressed himself very neatly, and never went out but with his sword by his side, and his hat under his arm. He was one of those men who have quite a peculiar gift of killing time, or, rather, who know how to make something out of nothing, in order to pass time away. Every thing he did had to be done with slowness, and with a certain deportment which might have been called affected if Behrisch had not even by nature had something affected in his manner. He resembled an old Frenchman, and also spoke and wrote French very well and easily. His greatest delight was to busy himself seriously about drolleries, and to follow up without end any silly notion. Thus he was constantly dressed in gray; and as the different parts of his attire were of different material, and also of different shades, he could reflect for whole days as to how he should procure one gray more for his body, and was happy when he had succeeded in this, and could put to shame us who had doubted it, or had pronounced it impossible. He then gave us long, severe lectures about our lack of inventive power, and our want of faith in his talents.
For the rest, he had studied well, was particularly versed in the modern languages and their literature, and wrote an excellent hand. He was very well disposed towards me; and I, having been always accustomed and inclined to the society of older persons, soon attached myself to him. My intercourse served him, too, for a special amusement; since he took pleasure in taming my restlessness and impatience, with which, on the other hand, I gave him enough to do. In the art of poetry he had what is called taste,--a certain general opinion about the good and bad, the mediocre and tolerable: but his judgment was rather censorious; and he destroyed even the little faith in contemporary writers which I cherished within me, by unfeeling remarks, which he knew how to advance with wit and humor, about the writings and poems of this man and that. He received my productions with indulgence, and let me have my own way, but only on the condition that I should have nothing printed. He promised me, on the other hand, that he himself would copy those pieces which he thought good, and would present me with them in a handsome volume. This undertaking now afforded an opportunity for the greatest possible waste of time.
For before he could find the right paper, before he could make up his mind as to the size, before he had settled the breadth of the margin and the form of handwriting, before the crow- quills were provided and cut into pens, and Indian ink was rubbed, whole weeks passed, without the least bit having been done. With just as much ado he always set about his writing, and really, by degrees, put together a most charming manuscript. The title of the poems was in German text; the verses themselves in a perpendicular Saxon hand; and at the end of every poem was an analogous vignette, which he had either selected somewhere or other, or had invented himself, and in which he contrived to imitate very neatly the hatching of the wood-cuts and tail- pieces which are used for such purposes. To show me these things as he went on, to celebrate beforehand in a comico-pathetical manner my good fortune in seeing myself immortalized in such exquisite handwriting, and that in a style which no printing-press could attain, gave another occasion for passing the most agreeable hours.
In the mean time, his intercourse was always secretly instructive, by reason of his liberal acquirements, and, as he knew how to subdue my restless, impetuous disposition, was also quite wholesome for me in a moral sense. He had, too, quite a peculiar abhorrence of roughness; and his jests were always quaint without ever falling into the coarse or the trivial. He indulged himself in a distorted aversion from his countrymen, and described with ludicrous touches even what they were able to undertake. He was particularly inexhaustible in a comical representation of individual persons, as he found something to find fault with in the exterior of every one. Thus, when we lay together at the window, he could occupy himself for hours criticising the passers-by, and, when he had censured them long enough, in showing exactly and circumstantially how they ought to have dressed themselves, ought to have walked, and ought to have behaved, to look like orderly people. Such attempts, for the most part, ended in something improper and absurd; so that we did not so much laugh at how the man looked, but at how, perchance, he might have looked had he been mad enough to caricature himself. In all such matters. Behrisch went quite unmercifully to work, without being in the slightest degree malicious. On the other hand, we knew how to tease him, on our side, by assuring him, that, to judge from his exterior, he must be taken, if not for a French dancing-master, at least for the academical teacher of the language. This reproval was usually the signal for dissertations an hour long, in which he used to set forth the difference, wide as the heavens, which there was between him and an old Frenchman. At the same time he commonly imputed to us all sorts of awkward attempts, that we might possibly have made for the alteration and modification of his wardrobe.
My poetical compositions, which I only carried on the more zealously as the transcript went on becoming more beautiful and more careful, now inclined altogether to the natural and the true: and if the subjects could not always be important, I nevertheless always endeavored to express them clearly and pointedly, the more so as my friend often gave me to understand what a great thing it was to write down a verse on Dutch paper, with the crow-quill and Indian ink; what time, talent, and exertion it required, which ought not to be squandered on any thing empty and superfluous. He would, at the same time, open a finished parcel, and circumstantially to explain what ought not to stand in this or that place, or congratulate us that it actually did not stand there. He then spoke with great contempt of the art of printing, mimicked the compositor, ridiculed his gestures and his hurried picking out of letters here and there, and derived from this manoeuvre all the calamities of literature. On the other hand, he extolled the grace and noble posture of a writer, and immediately sat down himself to exhibit it to us; while he rated us at the same time for not demeaning ourselves at the writing-table precisely after his example and model. He now reverted to the contrast with the compositor, turned a begun letter upside down, and showed how unseemly it would be to write any thing from the bottom to the top, or from the right to the left, with other things of like kind with which whole volumes might have been filled.
With such harmless fooleries we squandered our precious time; while it could have occurred to none of us, that any thing would chance to proceed out of our circle which would awaken a general sensation and bring us into not the best repute. Gellert may have taken little pleasure in his "Practicum;" and if, perhaps, he took pleasure in giving some directions as to prose and poetical style, he did it most privately only to a few, among whom we could not number ourselves. Professor Clodius thought to fill the gap which thus arose in the public instruction. He had gained some renown in literature, criticism, and poetry, and, as a young, lively, obliging man, found many friends, both in the university and in the city. Gellert himself referred us to the lectures now commenced by him; and, as far as the principal matter was concerned, we remarked little difference. He, too, only criticised details, corrected likewise with red ink; and one found one's self in company with mere blunders, without a prospect as to where the right was to be sought. I had brought to him some of my little labors, which he did not treat harshly. But just at this time they wrote to me from home, that I must without fail furnish a poem for my uncle's wedding. I felt far removed from that light and frivolous period in which a similar thing would have given me pleasure; and, since I could get nothing out of the actual circumstance itself, I determined to trick out my work in the best manner with extraneous ornament. I therefore convened all Olympus to consult about the marriage of a Frankfort lawyer, and seriously enough, to be sure, as well became the festival of such an honorable man. Venus and Themis had quarrelled for his sake; but a roguish prank, which Amor played the latter, gained the suit for the former: and the gods decided in favor of the marriage.
My work by no means displeased me. I received from home a handsome letter in its praise, took the trouble to have another fair copy, and hoped to extort some applause from my professor also. But here I had missed my aim. He took the matter severely; and as he did not notice the tone of parody, which nevertheless lay in the notion, he declared the great expenditure of divine means for such an insignificant human end in the highest degree reprehensible; inveighed against the use and abuse of such mythological figures, as a false habit originating in pedantic times; found the expression now too high, now too low; and, in divers particulars, had indeed not spared the red ink, though he asserted that he had yet done too little. Such pieces were read out and criticised anonymously, it is true; but we used to watch each other, and it remained no secret that this unfortunate assembly of the gods was my work: yet since his critique, when I took his point of view, seemed to be perfectly just, and those divinities more nearly inspected were in fact only hollow shadow-forms, I cursed all Olympus, flung the whole mythic Pantheon away; and from that time Amor and Luna have been the only divinities which at all appear in my little poems.
Among the persons whom Behrisch had chosen as the butts of his wit, Clodius stood just at the head; nor was it hard to find a comical side in him. Being of small stature, rather stout and thick-set, he was violent in his motions, somewhat impetuous in his utterances, and restless in his demeanor. In all this he differed from his fellow- citizens, who, nevertheless, willingly put up with him on account of his good qualities, and the fine promise which he gave. He was usually commissioned with the poems which had become necessary on festive occasions. In the so-called "Ode," he followed the manner employed by Ramler, whom, however, it alone suited. But Clodius, as an imitator, had especially marked the foreign words by means of which the poems of Ramler come forth with a majestic pomp, which, because it is conformable to the greatness of his subject and the rest of his poetic treatment, produces a very good effect on the ear, feelings, and imagination. In Clodius, on the contrary, these expressions had a heterogeneous air; since his poetry was in other respects not calculated to elevate the mind in any manner. Now, we had often been obliged to see such poems printed and highly lauded in our presence; and we found it highly offensive, that he who had sequestered the heathen gods from us, now wished to hammer together another ladder to Parnassus out of Greek and Roman word-rungs. These oft-recurring expressions stamped themselves firmly on our memory; and in a merry hour, when we were eating some most excellent cakes in the kitchen-gardens (/Kohlgärten/), it all at once struck me to put together these words of might and power, in a poem on the cake-baker Hendel. No sooner thought than done! And let it stand here too, as it was written on the wall of the house with a lead-pencil.
"O Hendel, dessen Ruhm vom /Süd/ zum /Norden/ reicht, Vernimm den /Päan/ der zu deinen Ohren steigt. Du bäckst was /Gallien/ und /Britten/ emsig suchen, Mit /schöpfrischen Genie, originelle/ Kuchen. Des Kaffee's /Ocean/, der sich vor dir ergiesst, Ist süssev als der Saft der vom /Hymettus/ fliesst. Dein Haus ein /Monument/, wie wir den Künsten lohnen Umhangen mit /Trophän/, erzählt den /Nationen/: Auch ohne /Diadem/ fand Hendel hier sein Glück Und raubte dem /Cothurn/ gar manch Achtgroschenstück. Glänzt deine /Urn/ dereinst in majestäts'chen /Pompe/, Dann weint der /Patriot/ an deinem /Katacombe/. Doch leb! dein /Torus/ sey von edler Brut ein /Nest/, Steh' hoch wie der /Olymp/, wie der /Parnassus/ fest! Kein /Phalanx/ Griechenland mit römischen /Ballisten/ Vermög /Germanien/ und Hendel zu verwüsten. Dein /Wohl/ is unser /Stolz/, dein /Leiden/, unser /Schmerz/, /Und/ Hendel's /Tempel ist der Musensöhne Herz/." [Footnote: The humor of the above consists, not in the thoughts, but in the particular words employed. These have no remarkable effect in English, as to us the words of Latin origin are often as familiar as those which have Teutonic roots; and these form the chief peculiarity of the style. We have therefore given the poem in the original language, with the peculiar words (as indicated by Goethe) in Italics, and subjoin a literal translation. It will be observed that we have said that the peculiarity consists /chiefly/, not /solely/, in the use of the foreign words; for there are two or three instances of unquestionably German words, which are Italicized on account of their high-sounding pomp.
"O Hendel, whose fame extends from /south/ to /north/, hear the /paean/i> which ascends to thine ears! Thou bakest that which /Gauls/ and /Britons/ industriously seek, (thou bakest) with /creative genius original/ cakes. The /ocean/ of coffee which pours itself out before thee is sweeter than the juice which flows from /Hymettus/. Thy house, a /monument/, how we reward the arts, hung round with /trophies/, tells the nations: 'Even without a /diadem/, Hendel formed his fortune here, and robbed the /Cothurnus/ of many an eight-groschen-piece.' When thy /urn/ shines hereafter in majestic /pomp/, then will the /patriot/ weep at thy /catacomb/. But live! let /thy/ bed (/torus/) be the /nest/ of a noble brood, stand high as /Olympus/, and firm as /Parnassus/. May no /phalanx/ of Greece with Roman /ballistoe/ be able to destroy /Germania/ and Hendel. Thy /weal/ is our /pride/, thy /woe/ our /pain/, and Hendel's /temple/ is the /heart/ of the /sons of the Muses/."-TRANS.]
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.