TEXT FLY WITHIN THE BOOK ONLY (f)> CO OU1 68061 co ,OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY / Q JL Accession No. Call No. tf airrfl-V/ G S" ^ U & 6 0^ 1 Author Title This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below. GOETHE Selections by Ludwig Curtius Translated and edited, with an Introduction, by Hermann J. Weigand ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LTD First Edition in England 1949 <b- Paul Ltd. Copyright 1949 by Routledgc Kegan Broadway House- 68-74 Carter Lane, London, E, C. 4 Printed in U.S.A. Introduction 7 b\j Hermann ]. Wcigand Editor's Note 38 RELIGION 43 Religion in General 45 Christianity 49 Protestantism - Catholicism 55 Old and New Testament 64 Superstition 67 Faith 70 God and Nature 73 God and the World 77 God and Man 79 NATURE 85 The Creative Process 87 The Incommensurable 92 Idea and Experience 95 Genius 97 The Daemonic 98 Imagination 102 The Aging Process 104 Youth 108 Happiness 109 CONTENTS SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 113 Theory 115 Subject - Object 123 Truth 125 Antinomies 128 Relativism 131 Life 134 Spirit 137 Immortality - Entelechy 139 Man and History 145 THE SOCIAL SPHERE 149 Bildung 151 Humanity 156 Man Among Men 159 Man and the World 163 Man and Fate 166 Man and Society 167 The Individual arid the Public 170 Knowledge of Human Nature 172 - Spiritual Community Friendship 172 Critique of the Times 174 THE MORAL SPHERE 181 Freedom 183 Conscience 184 Law and Order 185 Authority 185 Faults - Virtues 187 Humility - Reverence - Mystery 189 - - Character Personality Individuality 190 Education 195 Love 197 CONTENTS Marriage 200 Know Thyself 202 Positive Values 209 Activity 212 Time 215 Follow-Through 216 Negativism 217 221 Fundamentals: Beauty-Style 223 Art and Nature: The Subject 227 Art, Religion, and Morals 228 Study of the Ancients 230 The Greeks: Poetry and Literature 232 Classical Art 235 Rome 238 Composition 239 The Human Figure 240 Architecture 242 Art Criticism 243 History of Art 245 Poetry and the Poet 246 Language: The Word 250 Translation 252 Literature: Literary Art Forms 253 Symbol: Abstraction 259 Music 260 THE BODY POLITIC 263 Government 265 Patriotism 267 Public Affairs - Political Ideas - The Press 270 Revolution 272 CONTENTS The Middle Class 274 The People 275 Nations 276 The Romans 278 The Germans 279 The English 287 The French 289 The French Language 291 The Jews 292 War and Peace 294 Napoleon 297 The Contemporary Scene 299 INTRODUCTION GOETHE is the man of most commanding stature ever to have issued from the German people. He has been hailed, not by Germans alone, as the most universally gifted in- dividual ever to be born into this world. Few men have that sweep of perspective and that intimate knowledge of the subject which warrant authoritative pronounce- ments of so general a nature. A more modest judgment stands on rather firm ground, however, in saying at least this: No comparably gifted individual has striven like Goethe to make all his talents tell; no man has been con- scious to a like degree of feeling himself to be an epitome of civilized mankind; no other man has left so full and detailed a record of a career keyed to the aim of uni- versality. Napoleon may have caught something of this essence of Goethe's spirit when he remarked in the course of that famous interview: "Voila. un homme!" To say the same thing in another way: Goethe's life exhibits two dominating aspects genius and responsi- Goethe's is bility. youth one incredible, uninterrupted exhibition of genius, prodigal in its effusions, profligate in its unconcern for their fate. The maturing process brings to responsibility the fore. Genius has not evaporated, but it is bridled by a sense of responsibility. There is a close interpenetration between the two. Aware of his inexhaus- fund of Goethe comes to think of tible giftedness, his gifts as a trust to be developed. No item of his endowment must be lost or neglected; each is to be cultivated, rather, to the ultimate limit of its potentialities. As he conceived IN TROD UCTION the demigod Prometheus taking the clay in his hands and fashioning out of it the image of man, so he focuses upon the individual aptitudes he has discovered in himself; he takes them in hand to form them and bring to fulfillment the latent promise of each. For this exacting task and aim Goethe has the word Bildung. Simultaneous, not excessive development is his concern. The whole is to be an or- ganism exhibiting all its functioning members in har- monious balance. But there is a second consideration which encroaches upon the free play of genius: social re- himself is sponsibility. Rather despite Goethe made aware of his individual self in relation to the community with which his lot has been cast. By a turn of fate rather than as the result of personal ambition, Goethe found himself in a position of authority, power and influence. The bonds were not of his choosing, but the implications could not be ignored. The acquaintance of young Goethe's genius can be made in a very delightful way by reading Dichtung und Wahrheit, the autobiography, which takes the whole story somewhat beyond the end of his twenty-sixth year to the point where the ducal carriage is waiting to take him to Weimar on a visit destined to expand into lifetime resi- dence. It includes the great events of his childhood and adolescence, the occupation of his native Frankfurt by the French during the Seven Years' War involving the billeting of the King's deputy upon the Goethe house- hold, and a few years later the coronation of Joseph the Second as head of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with all the pomp that the Free City of Frank- furt, proud of its long tradition as the site of such august festivities, could muster. It includes the account of his three years at the University of Leipzig in an atmosphere of rococo culture and the year at the University of Strass- burg, where Herder transmitted to him the new natural- INTRODUCTION istic anticonventional outlook fathered by Rousseau and destined to revolutionize the intellectual and emotional climate of successive generations. It includes the famous Sesenheim idyll as it does the sojourn at Wetzlar that was to supply the material for Werther which gave Goethe the status of a European celebrity and involved a sensa- tional success never again equaled during his literary life. It includes several intervals spent at home with more en- tanglements of the heart, a trip down the Rhine and an- other to Switzerland. And it includes a full account of the writing of his Gotz, and of a host of other works in the making. Some of them, like Prometheus, never got beyond the second act, while Faust occupied Goethe intermit- tently over sixty years. In this autobiography the genius of young Goethe is omnipresent, but it is not his genius in the raw; it is fil- tered through the medium of a mind that has moved three and a half decades beyond the end point of that glorious and turbulent epoch of free adventure. There is a perspec- tive about the biography which was not a part of that life as it was lived, a perspective which shows a great aware- ness of responsibility toward his own self and toward his fellows. If we want to get the impact of his genius in the raw there is no way but to read that documentary collection of his youthful works and letters which fills the six volumes of Der Junge Goethe, and if we have the pa- tience to begin with his Juvenilia and look at the samples of calligraphy submitted by the seven-and-a-half-year-old Wolfgang in a prize contest and pore over his schoolboy exercises in Latin and Greek and follow these up with his early letters which present a fantastic medley of prose and verse in German, English, French, Italian, and even Yiddish, we find ourselves on the threshold of an astound- ing wealth of imaginative production. And we must not overlook the abundant testimony contained in letters by INTRODUCTION a host of bosom friends and more casual acquaintances to the effect that they were as we would say "crazy about Goethe," that they saw in him a unique human phenome- non, a prodigy and a marvel. There was no catching up with his lightning-like changes of mood. He knew of this faculty and repeatedly spoke of himself as a chameleon. They were captivated as well as bewildered, men and women alike. Only Herder's irritable humor rebelled against this volatility and tried to disparage it when he said that Goethe had the brain of a sparrow. Fritz Jacobi had a lively pique against Goethe for circulating a cruel skit about him and his brother. But the moment he laid eyes on Goethe in July 1774 his grudge melted away; he retracted the warning he had addressed to Wieland and wrote: The more I think it over, the more impossible it be- comes to convey to one who has not seen Goethe or heard Goethe, any comprehensible idea of this extra- ordinary creature of God. To quote Heinse, Goethe is genius from top to toe. He is possessed: there is hardly a situation in which he is free to act at will. Spending an hour with him is enough to make it seem ridiculous in the highest degree to expect of him that he should think and act in a manner differ- ent from what he does.