GOKTIIK 



275 



young Duke of Weimar, Karl August, invited liiin 



\\eimar; he accepted tin- invitation, an<l 



\ ..\enilier 7, 1775, entered Weimar, not then 



ic that he liiul here found an abiding place for 



hi.-. 



\ new peii.id of activity begins with Goethe's 

 entrance in Weimar. When the first days of 

 b.ii-ieinii. entertainment had passed, and in the 

 splint nf 177i Goethe wius made a member of the 

 jiti\\ council ('.'//( ////<; Leqationgrath)* he set 

 himself strenuously to Herve the state. By decrees 

 iinicii public work fell into his hands, and he 

 :ici|tiitied himself of every duty with masterly 

 intelligence and a rare thoroughness. In 1782 he 



\ed a patent of nobility. He su peril) tended 

 mines, sa\\ to public roads and building, regulated 

 finance, conducted military and university affairs, 



i rd the theatrical performances, in every 

 direction making the influence of his mind felt. 

 Above all, he helped to form the immature char- 

 ai'tcr of the duke. Nor did he fail to gain true 

 frit-nils. The dowager-duchess from the first bad 

 mnlidence in him, and by degrees he won the 



MI and affection of the young wife of lv#rl 

 August, Wieland, now of mature vears, declared 

 that he was 'as full of Goethe as a clewdrop of the 

 morning sun.' Through Goethe's influence. Herder 

 obtained a public position and a home at Weimar.. 

 But his dearest friend was Charlotte von Stein, 

 wife of Oberstallmeister von Stein, the mother 

 of seven children, and several years older than 

 Jot-the. During ten years she was his confidant, 

 his directress, the object of his ardent and tender 

 homage. And she knew how to hold his feelings 

 in check, and to chasten them when he was over- 

 violent in his passion. She kept alive the ideal 

 in his imagination while he was occupied with the 

 details of real affairs. Yet there was something 

 of unhealthy strain in this love which could not 

 hope for its highest accomplishment in marriage. 

 I > u ring these years Goethe's mind turned away from 

 vague aspirings and sentimental moods to the 

 definite and the real. He l>ecame deeply interested 

 in the natural sciences in geology and mineralogy, 

 botany, comparative anatomy. His discovery of 

 the intermaxillary bone in man (1784), and his 

 theory of later date that all the parts of a plant are 

 variations of a type which is most clearly seen in the 

 leaf, show how Ins observing powers were aided by 

 his imagination, and place him among the scien- 

 tific t on- runners of those great thinkers who have 

 set forth the doctrine of evolution. Many literary 

 works were liegun in this period, but not many 

 were brought to completion. Some lyrics of larger 

 design and more elaborate form than his earlier 

 songs show the growth of his powers. But the 

 iioein I hi- a>l,i-i,inii.w, whii-h was meant to embody 

 his thoughts on the religions of the world, is a 

 fragment. Two acts of his drama of Tasso were 

 \\ rit ten ( 1780-81 ), but in prose. His noble dramatic 

 poem, //'///'/' '"'", classical in subject, partly modern 

 in feeling, was written in full (1779), but, like 



", as yet only in prose. The short play, Die 

 <!-.-i'-lninster, as well as the Iphigenia, was partly 

 inspired by his feeling for Frau von Stein. In 1777 

 he Mgao his novel of Wilhelm Meister, designed 

 to show how the vague strivings () f youth may 

 lie ennobled by their transition into definite anil 

 useful activity, and from time to time he made 

 progress with it. The constant pressure of public 

 business at length fatigued his mind. for. except a 

 visit to Swit/.erland in 177!'. he had few seasons 

 of refreshment. Me had long desired to visit Italy. 

 When ten years of toil were ended he resolved to 

 gratify that deep desire, and on September 3, 

 1786, ne started on his journey for the south. 



Goethe's residence in Italy lasted from the 

 autumn of 1786 to June 1788. It was a most 



fruitful period. Now the HteadfaM habiu of mind 

 acquired in the course of public businemin Weimar 

 were applied to the study of art. He lived in a 

 Mi ml calm, which was in fact the highlit <-n. 

 examining the monuments of ancient art and 

 renaissance painting, enjoying the beauty of nature, 

 and studying the life of the people. HIM friends 

 were chiefly artiste Tischbein, who painted hut 

 portrait at Home, the Swiss Meyer, Angelica 

 Kauffmann. He strove hard to draw, but with 

 onl\ moderate success. In the soring of 1787 he 

 visited Naples and Sicily ; at Palermo he made a 

 Hiiililen advance in his theory of botanical meta- 

 morphosis. Once again in Home, he renewed his 

 study of plastic art, and was inexpressibly happy 

 am ill a world of beauty. The literary work of tne 

 period was chiefly that of revising or recasting 

 earlier writings. Egmont was carried to com- 

 pletion (1787); the prose Iphigenia was recast in 

 verse (1786); the scene of the Witches' Kitchen 

 was added to Faust ; he sketched the plan and 

 wrote a fragment of a tragedy, NanuHeaa. On June 

 18, 1788, Goethe re-entered Weimar greatly en- 

 riched by his travel. 



He was now relieved from the most irksome of 

 his public duties, but continued to take an inteqpat 

 in tne Ilmenau mines arid in university reform at 

 Jena. His private ' life also underwent a great 

 change which relieved his heart from a strain, 

 though in an ill way. His ardent idealising friend- 

 ship for Charlotte von Stein was broken, and he 

 took to his home a beautiful girl of humble rank, 

 Christiane Vulpius, whom from the first he regarded 

 as his wife, though the marriage ceremony was not 

 celebrated until October 1806. Christiane had good 

 qualities, and was dear to Goethe, but his choice 

 was in many respects unsuitable. In December 

 1789 his son August was born. Memories of Italy 

 mingle with his love of Christiane in the Roman 

 Elegies, poems sensuously classical in their feeling 

 and classical in their form. In the summer of 1789 

 he put the last touches to the play of Tasso, which 

 contrasts the passionate heart of the poet with the 

 worldly wisdom of the statesman and man of affairs 

 two sides of Goethe's own nature. Next year 

 in the seventh volume of his Works appeared a 

 great portion of the first part of Faust as ' a Frag- 

 ment. ' This, the story of Faust's measureless striv- 

 ings for truth and for joy, and the love-tragedy of 

 Gretchen, belongs essentially to Goethe's earlier 

 years of the Sturtn-und- Drang. The first part of 

 Faust, completed in 1806, did not appear until 1808. 

 Science continued to interest Goethe profoundly. 

 His remarkable essay on the Metamorphosis of 

 Plants was given to the printer in 1790, and when 

 at Venice in May he suddenly struck out his much- 

 discussed theory of the vertebral structure of the 

 skull. His studies in optics, by which he hoped 

 to disprove Newton's theory of colours, were a 

 great affair of his life from this time onwards, 

 but here his conclusions, though ingeniously argued, 

 were unsound. In 1791 Goethe was entrusted with 

 the control of the court theatre at Weimar, ami 

 it was his aim and earnest effort to make the stage 

 a means of true artistic culture. He was himself 

 roused to dramatic composition, and several pieces 

 of these years were concerned with the revolu- 

 tionary movement in France. In his Venetian 

 l-'./iiiirniitx he complains that the political commo- 

 tion threw back the advance of quiet culture. The 

 Grosakoi>htn (1791) dramatises the affair of the 

 Diamond Necklace, studies Cagliostro's arts of 

 imposture, and represents the demoralisation of 

 aristocratic society in France. Die Aufgeregten 

 a dramatic fragment in some degree liolds the 

 balance between conHicting political parties. The 

 lluryrriieiiernl | acted 1793) is a broad jest at the 

 German apostles of the Revolution. In Goethe's 



