University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
OLD HUMBUG.

What most interested our travellers in the ancient
city of Frankfort, was neither the opera nor
the Ariadne of Dannecker, but the house in which
Goethe was born, and the scenes he frequented in
his childhood, and remembered in his old age.
Such for example are the walks around the city,
outside the moat; the bridge over the Maine, with
the golden cock on the cross, which the poet beheld
and marvelled at when a boy; the cloister of
the Barefooted Friars, through which he stole with
mysterious awe to sit by the oilcloth-covered table
of old Rector Albrecht; and the garden in which
his grandfather walked up and down among fruit-trees
and rose-bushes, in long morning gown,
black velvet cap, and the antique leather gloves,

which he annually received as Mayor on Pipers-Doomsday,
representing a kind of middle personage
between Alcinous and Laertes. Thus, O Genius!
are thy foot-prints hallowed; and the star
shines forever over the place of thy nativity.

“Your English critics may rail as they list,”
said the Baron, while he and Flemming were returning
from a stroll in the leafy gardens, outside the
moat; “but, after all, Goethe was a magnificent
old fellow. Only think of his life; his youth of
passion, alternately aspiring and desponding, stormy,
impetuous, headlong;—his romantic manhood,
in which passion assumes the form of
strength; assiduous, careful, toiling, without haste,
without rest; and his sublime old age,—the age
of serene and classic repose, where he stands like
Atlas, as Claudian has painted him in the Battle
of the Giants, holding the world aloft upon his
head, the ocean-streams hard frozen in his hoary
locks.”

“A good illustration of what the world calls his
indifferentism.”

“And do you know I rather like this indifferentism?
Did you never have the misfortune to live
in a community, where a difficulty in the parish
seemed to announce the end of the world? or to
know one of the benefactors of the human race,
in the very `storm and pressure period' of his
indiscreet enthusiasm? If you have, I think you
will see something beautiful in the calm and dignified
attitude which the old philosopher assumes.”

“It is a pity, that his admirers had not a little
of this philosophic coolness. It amuses me to read
the various epithets, which they apply to him;
The Dear, dear Man! The Life-enjoying Man!
The All-sided One! The Representative of Poetry
upon earth! The Many-sided Master-Mind of
Germany! His enemies rush into the other extreme,
and hurl at him the fierce names of Old
Humbug! and Old Heathen! which hit like pistol-bullets.”

“I confess, he was no saint.”

“No; his philosophy is the old ethnic philosophy.
You will find it all in a convenient and

concentrated, portable form in Horace's beautiful
Ode to Thaliarcus. What I most object to in the
old gentleman is his sensuality.”

“O nonsense. Nothing can be purer than the
Iphigenia; it is as cold and passionless as a marble
statue.”

“Very true; but you cannot say the same
of some of the Roman Elegies and of that
monstrous book the Elective Affinities.”

“Ah, my friend, Goethe is an artist; and
looks upon all things as objects of art merely.
Why should he not be allowed to copy in words
what painters and sculptors copy in colors and in
marble?”

“The artist shows his character in the choice of
his subject. Goethe never sculptured an Apollo,
nor painted a Madonna. He gives us only sinful
Magdalens and rampant Fauns. He does not so
much idealize as realize.”

“He only copies nature.”

“So did the artists, who made the bronze

lamps of Pompeii. Would you hang one of
those in your hall? To say that a man is an
artist and copies nature is not enough. There are
two great schools of art; the imitative and the
imaginative. The latter is the most noble, and
most enduring; and Goethe belonged rather to the
former. Have you read Menzel's attack upon
him?”

“It is truly ferocious. The Suabian hews into
him lustily. I hope you do not side with him.”

“By no means. He goes too far. He blames
the poet for not being a politician. He might as
well blame him for not being a missionary to the
Sandwich Islands.”

“And what do you think of Eckermann?”

“I think he is a toady; a kind of German
Boswell. Goethe knew he was drawing his portrait,
and attitudinized accordingly. He works
very hard to make a Saint Peter out of an old Jupiter,
as the Catholics did at Rome.”

“Well; call him Old Humbug, or Old Heathen,

or what you please; I maintain, that, with
all his errors and short-comings, he was a glorious
specimen of a man.”

“He certainly was. Did it ever occur to you
that he was in some points like Ben Franklin? a
kind of rhymed Ben Franklin? The practical tendency
of his mind was the same; his love of science
was the same; his benignant, philosophic spirit
was the same; and a vast number of his little
poetic maxims and sooth-sayings seem nothing
more than the worldly wisdom of Poor Richard,
versified.”

“What most offends me is, that now every
German jackass must have a kick at the dead
lion.”

“And every one who passes through Weimar
must throw a book upon his grave, as travellers
did of old a stone upon the grave of Manfredi, at
Benevento. But, of all that has been said or
sung, what most pleases me is Heine's Apologetic,
if I may so call it; in which he says, that the
minor poets, who flourished under the imperial

reign of Goethe `resemble a young forest, where
the trees first show their own magnitude after
the oak of a hundred years, whose branches
had towered above and overshadowed them, has
fallen. There was not wanting an opposition,
that strove against Goethe, this majestic tree.
Men of the most warring opinions united themselves
for the contest. The adherents of the old
faith, the orthodox, were vexed, that, in the trunk
of the vast tree, no niche with its holy image was
to be found; nay, that even the naked Dryads of
paganism were permitted to play their witchery
there; and gladly, with consecrated axe, would
they have imitated the holy Boniface, and levelled
the enchanted oak to the ground. The followers
of the new faith, the apostles of liberalism, were
vexed on the other hand, that the tree could not
serve as the Tree of Liberty, or, at any rate, as a
barricade. In fact the tree was too high; no one
could plant the red cap upon its summit, or dance
the Carmagnole beneath its branches. The multitude,
however, venerated this tree for the very
reason, that it reared itself with such independent
grandeur, and so graciously filled the world with
its odor, while its branches, streaming magnificently
toward heaven, made it appear, as if the stars
were only the golden fruit of its wondrous limbs.'
Don't you think that beautiful?”

“Yes, very beautiful. And I am glad to see,
that you can find something to admire in my favorite
author, notwithstanding his frailties; or, to
use an old German saying, that you can drive
the hens out of the garden without trampling
down the beds.”

“Here is the old gentleman himself!” exclaimed
Flemming.

“Where!” cried the Baron, as if for the moment
he expected to see the living figure of the
poet walking before them.

“Here at the window,—that full-length cast.
Excellent, is it not! He is dressed, as usual, in
his long yellow nankeen surtout, with a white cravat
crossed in front. What a magnificent head!
and what a posture! He stands like a tower of

strength. And, by Heavens! he was nearly
eighty years old, when that was made.”

“How do you know?”

“You can see by the date on the pedestal.”

“You are right. And yet how erect he stands,
with his square shoulders braced back, and his
hands behind him. He looks as if he were standing
before the fire. I feel tempted to put a live
coal into his hand, it lies so invitingly half-open.
Gleim's description of him, soon after he went to
Weimar, is very different from this. Do you
recollect it?”

“No, I do not.”

“It is a story, which good old father Gleim
used to tell with great delight. He was one
evening reading the Göttingen Musen-Almanach
in a select society at Weimar, when a young man
came in, dressed in a short, green shooting-jacket,
booted and spurred, and having a pair of brilliant,
black, Italian eyes. He in turn offered to read;
but finding probably the poetry of the Musen-Almanach
of that year rather too insipid for him,

he soon began to improvise the wildest and most
fantastic poems imaginable, and in all possible forms
and measures, all the while pretending to read from
the book. `That is either Goethe or the Devil,'
said good old father Gleim to Wieland, who sat
near him. To which the `Great I of Osmannstadt'
replied; `It is both, for he has the Devil in
him to-night; and at such times he is like a wanton
colt, that flings out before and behind, and you
will do well not to go too near him!' ”

“Very good!”

“And now that noble figure is but mould. Only
a few months ago, those majestic eyes looked
for the last time on the light of a pleasant spring
morning. Calm, like a god, the old man sat; and
with a smile seemed to bid farewell to the light of
day, on which he had gazed for more than eighty
years. Books were near him, and the pen which
had just dropped, as it were from his dying fingers.
`Open the shutters, and let in more light!' were
the last words that came from those lips. Slowly
stretching forth his hand, he seemed to write in

the air; and, as it sank down again and was motionless,
the spirit of the old man departed.”

“And yet the world goes on. It is strange how
soon, when a great man dies, his place is filled;
and so completely, that he seems no longer wanted.
But let us step in here. I wish to buy that cast;
and send it home to a friend.”