There may be some among my readers who will dispute Goethe's claim to greatness. They will admit that he was a great poet, but deny that he was a great man. In denying it, they will set forth the qualities which constitute their ideal of greatness, and finding him deficient in some of these qualities, declare his title null. But in awarding him that title, I do not mean to imply that he was an ideal man; I do not present him as the exemplar of all greatness. No man can be such an exemplar. Humanity reveals itself in fragments. One man is the carrier of one kind of excellence, another of another. Achilles wins the victory, and Homer immortalizes it: we bestow the laurel-crown on both. In virtue of a genius such as modern times have only seen equalled once or twice, Goethe deserves the epithet of great; unless we believe a great genius can belong to a small mind. Nor is it in virtue of genius alone that he deserves the name. Merck said of him, that what he lived was more beautiful than what he wrote; and his Life, amid all its weaknesses and all its errors, presents a picture of a certain grandeur of soul, which cannot be contemplated unmoved. I shall make no attempt to conceal his faults. Let them be dealt a with as harshly as severest justice may dictate, they will not eclipse the central light which shines throughout his life. He was great, if only in large-mindedness magnanimity which admitted no trace of envy, of pettiness, of ignoble feeling to stain or to distort his thoughts. He was great, if only in his lovingness, simplicity, benevolence. He was great, if only in his gigantic activity. He was great, if only in self-mastery, which subdued rebellious impulses into the direct path prescribed by his will and reason. 'This man, we may say, became morally great, by being in his own age what in some other ages many might have been, a genuine man. His grand ex cellency was this, that he was genuine. As his primary faculty, the foundation of all others, was Intellect, depth and force of Vision; so his primary virtue was Justice, was the courage to be just. A giant's strength we admired in him; yet strength ennobled into softest mildness. The greatest of hearts was also the bravest ; fearless, unwearied, peacefully invincible.'* The following pages will, it is hoped, furnish evidence for such a judgment, and help to dissipate the many misconstructions which darken the glory of the life of Germany's greatest son. ance. The hereditary transmission of qualities is one among the many physiological problems still far from a solution ; and the parentage of genius is one of the most difficult aspects of that problem, although usually treated by writers with a very light hand, especially when their facile progress is unimpeded by any perplexing weight of knowledge. Definite ignorance rides swiftly over a field, where indefinite knowledge painfully picks its way. The maternal influence is popularly credited with the preponder'All remarkable men have remarkable mothers,' is a current saying. But this hasty and empirical generalization is no truer than such generalizations usually are. It is disproved by fact. It is disproved by what is known of hereditary transmission. It leads also to this fatal conclusion, namely, that if the mother had the preponderating influence over the organization of the child, the race would be in perpetual degeneration; just as the white man's superior organization is gradually lost when a few white. men intermarry with a preponderating black race. The whole question of hereditary transmission is at present beyond the scope of science. We know that form, fea ture, temperament, idiosyncrasy, acquired habit, diseases, anomalies of structure, and duration of life, are transmitted to offspring; but the law of transmission is still hidden from us.* Certain qualities are transmitted from parents to children in so direct a manner as to strike the least observant eye; on the other hand it often happens that the transmitted quality is masked by the presence of some different quality, and only reappears in the second or third generation. New combinations also take place. Still we can say with safety that whenever a child exhibits any remarkable aptitude we may detect that aptitude in one or both of his parents or grandparents. Thus it is that observation detects families illustrious through several generations; and families also which, through many generations, transmit idiotcy and imbecility. That talent runs in families' we are taught by examples, such as the wit of the Sheridans' and the 'esprit des Mortemarts.' Nor am I aware of any musical genius springing from a family in which during two generations musical aptitude was not remarkable. It is necessary to include two generations, because, among the curious phenomena of hereditariness there is the phenomenon of atavism, in which children resemble their ancestors, but do not resemble their progenitors. ‡ * The reader curious on this curious subject is referred to the large work of Dr. Lucas, De l'Hérédité Naturelle (Paris, 1847-50), or the work of Girou de Buzareingues, De la Génération (Paris, 1828), in which are recorded the results of numerous experiments on the breeding of animals. + Haller Elementa Physiologiæ, vol. viii, p. 92. Aristotle seems to have had a glimpse of the law of transmission; De Partibus Animalium, i, p. 4, ed. Bekker. See, besides the works already named, Burdach: Physiologie, ii, p. 269; and Longet: Traité de Physiol., ii, 133. But popular experience declares that the children of men of genius are dunces: how is this to be reconciled with the doctrine of hereditariness? A decisive answer cannot be given; but we may suggest that there is some confusion inevitably arising from the exaggerated demands made upon the children of a man of genius; and from our not taking into account the rarity of genius as a phenomenon, which rarity points to a peculiarity in the confluence of circumstances not likely to be transmitted. I am not so certain that these much decried children have been dunces. If they have seemed insignificant when compared with their fathers, they would have been estimated quite otherwise had their position been otherwise; and the man who, bearing an illustrious name, seems unworthy of the burthen, would be lauded by biographers as a man of considerable merit, had he been the father instead of the son of a genius.* There is consequently a philosophic interest aiding a natural curiosity in the inquiry into Goethe's ancestry. That he had inherited his organization and tendencies from his forefathers, and could call nothing in himself original, he has told us in these verses: Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes Führen ; Das zuckt wohl durch die Glieder. * In our own day, Byron, Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt, were the fathers of children remarkable even among the remarkable and Shelley's son has faculties which would have distinguished any one bearing a less onerous name. Sind nun die Elemente nicht, Aus dem Complex zu trennen, The first glimpse we get of his ancestry is about the middle of the seventeenth century. In the Grafschaft of Mansfeld in Thuringia, the little town of Artern numbered among its scanty inhabitants a farrier, by name Hans Christian Goethe. His son, Frederick, being probably of a more meditative turn, selected a more meditative employment than that of shoeing horses. He became a tailor. Having passed an apprenticeship, (not precisely that of Wilhelm Meister,) he commenced his Wanderings, in the course of which he reached Frankfurt. Here he soon found employment, and being, as we learn, a 'ladies' man,' he soon also found a wife. The master tailor, Sebastian Lutz, gave him his daughter, on his admission to the citizenship of Frankfurt and to the guild of tailors. This was in 1687. Several children were born, and vanished; in 1700 his wife, too, vanished, to be replaced, *From my father I inherit my frame, and the steady guidance of life; from dear little mother my happy disposition, and love of story-telling. My ancestor was a "ladies' man," and that haunts me now and then; my ancestress loved finery and show, which also runs in the blood. If, then, the elements are not to be separated from the whole, what can one call original in the descendant? This is a very inadequate translation; but believing that to leave German untranslated is very unfair to those whose want of leisure or inclination has prevented their acquiring the language, I shall throughout translate every word cited. At the same time it is very unfair to the poet, and to the writer quoting the poet, to be forced to give translations which are after all felt not to represent the force and spirit of the original. I will do my best to give approximative translations, which the reader will be good enough to accept as such, rather than be left in the dark. |