Goethe—from about 1750

THE TRUE CHARACTER OF GOETHE.

—This celebrated man has a large number of enthusiastic admirers in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. The following sketch, by one of his own countrymen, presents his private character in no very favorable light:

"We are far from being idolators of Goethe. We consider the excessive worship of him by Carlyle and Lewis as, in the first, a mental, and in the second, a moral derangement. Goethe, as a man, we not only dislike, but loathe. He had all the faults supposed to be incident to the genial temperment, without that temperment itself. Byron even seems respectable compared to him. Byron was the slave of passion; Goethe sinned on system. Byron was the creature of impulse, Goethe came calm, if not sober, to the perpetration of seduction, and the patronage of suicide. Byron never seduced a female, Goethe many. Byron drank to drown remorse, and to stop despondency on the edge of despair and madness; Goethe to intensify pleasure and to nourish pride. Sin soured Byron; it agreed with Goethe's constitution, and he continued healthy and almost happy with it. Sin was driving Byron latterly towards Christianity; it drove Goethe to a belief in an immoral and lifeless God. Byron shrank, withered, and died, on the poisons he had imbibed; Goethe fattened, flourished, and became an octogenarian on their strength. Byron sinned like an erring man; Goethe like a pagan god whose wickednesses seem all the more intolerable that they are done with a high hand, from a celestial vantage- 
  ground, without any human-like result of remorse. Both become satirists; but, while the satire of Byron—in its very bitterness as well as fire—proves that the iron has entered into his soul, that of Goethe is cool, sardonic, and seems to mock not only the object of its scorn, but that scorn itself. The one, at the worst, is the smile of a Satan —a being of hot heart, disappointed ambition, and awful regrets; the other we may liken to Ahrimanes himself, the fabled aboriginal evil god, who may sneer at, but can hardly be angry at, the evil he has himself made, and which has always seemed to him good.

With these views of Goethe's character we, of course, warmly admire his genius. He united qualities seemingly the most incompatible; Horatian elegance with almost Shaksperean imagination; unbounded command over the regions of the ethereal, with the coolest intellect, and stores of worldly wisdom worthy of Lord Bacon. "No writer," Emerson said once, "has less nonsense in his works than Goethe." No writer, at all events, has turned his nonsonse​ to better account, or handled his filth with a more delicate touch. Some of his looser writings remind you of— 
  "Garden gods, and not so decent either;" but they are formed with all the elegance of Canova's sculpture. The story of the "Elective Affinities" is one of intertangled abomination almost incredible; the characters resemble a knot of foul toads, but few indecorous expressions occur. Many of the scenes are exquisitely beautiful. Sentiment of a pure and lofty kind alternate with essential "smut," and close to the fire-springs of guilty passion lie masses of clear, icy, but true and deep reflection. "The Sorrows of Werter" seems to us a wondrously trashy production, and, were it appearing now, would be classed with inferior French novels. It would now fail in producing a single suicide. Altogether, Goethe's works give us the impression of extreme coldness, and not of the cheerful, bracing cold of snow, but of the deadly cold of the grave, if not rather of that cold which Milton has ventured to represent in the very heart of Pandemonium, where "frozen Alps" nod to "fiery," and where alike fire and frost are everlasting. Intellect and imagination, without heart, principle, or geniality, although with considerable power of simulating sympathy with all three, were, in spite of Lewis, the true constituents of Goethe's genius; and Walsingham, in Sterling's "Onyx Ring," is his perfect likeness.