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With respect to Goethe, as a councillor so near the duke’s person, it may be supposed that his presence was never wanting where it promised to be useful. In the earlier campaigns of the duke, Goethe was his companion; but in the final contest with Napoleon be was unequal to the fatigues of such a post. In all the functions of peace, however, he continued to be a useful servant to the last, though long released from all official duties. Each had indeed most honorably earned the gratitude of the other. Goethe had surrendered the flower of his years and the best energies of his mind to the service of his serene master. On the other hand, that master had to him been at once his Augustus and his Maecenas; such is his own expression. Under him he had founded a family, raised an estate, obtained titles and decorations from various courts; and in the very vigor of his life he had been allowed to retire, with all the honors of long service, to the sanctuary of his own study, and to the cultivation of his leisure, as the very highest mode in which he could further the public interest.

The life of Goethe was so quiet and so uniform after the year 1775, when he may first be said to have entered into active life, by taking service with the Duke of Weimar, that a biographer will find hardly any event to notice, except two journeys to Italy, and one campaign in 1792, until he draws near the close of his long career. It cannot interest an English reader to see the dates of his successive appointments. It is enough to know that they soon raised him to as high a station as was consistent with literary leisure; and that he had from the beginning enjoyed the unlimited confidence of his sovereign. Nothing remained, in fact, for the subject to desire which the prince had not previously volunteered. In 1825, they were able to look back upon a course of uninterrupted friendship, maintained through good and evil fortunes, unexampled in their agitation and interest for fifty years. The duke commemorated this remarkable event by a jubilee, and by a medal in honor of Goethe. Full of years and honor, this eminent man might now begin to think of his departure. However, his serenity continued unbroken nearly for two years more, when his illustrious patron died. That shock was the first which put his fortitude to trial. In 1830 others followed; the duchess, who had won so much admiration from Napoleon, died; then followed his own son; and there remained little now to connect his wishes with the earth. The family of his patron he had lived to see flourishing in his descendants to the fourth generation. His own grandchildren were prosperous and happy. His intellectual labors were now accomplished. All that remained to wish for was a gentle dismission. This he found in the spring of 1832. After a six days’ illness, which caused him no apparent suffering, on the morning of the 22d of March he breathed away as if into a gentle sleep, surrounded by his daughter-in-law and her children. Never was a death more in harmony with the life it closed; both had the same character of deep and absolute serenity.

Such is the outline of Goethe’s life, traced through its principal events. But as these events, after all, borrow their interest mainly from the consideration allowed to Goethe as an author, and as a model in the German literature,–that being the centre about which all secondary feelings of interest in the man must finally revolve,–it thus becomes a duty to throw a glance over his principal works. Dismissing his songs, to which has been ascribed by some critics a very high value for their variety and their lyrical enthusiasm; dismissing also a large body of short miscellaneous poems, suited to the occasional circumstances in which they arose; we may throw the capital works of Goethe into two classes, philosophic novels, and dramas. The novels, which we call philosophic by way of expressing their main characteristic in being written to serve a preconceived purpose, or to embody some peculiar views of life, or some aspects of philosophic truth, are three, viz., the Werther’s Leiden; secondly, the Wilhelm Meister; and, lastly, the Wahloer-wand-schaften. The first two exist in English translations; and though the Werther had the disadvantage of coming to us through a French version, already, perhaps, somewhat colored and distorted to meet the Parisian standards of sentiment, yet, as respects Goethe and his reputation amongst us, this wrong has been redressed, or compensated at least, by the good fortune of his Wilhelm Meister, in falling into the hands of a translator whose original genius qualified him for sympathizing even to excess with any real merits in that work. This novel is in its own nature and purpose sufficiently obscure; and the commentaries which have been written upon it by the Hurnboldts, Schlegels, etc., make the enigma still more enigmatical. We shall not venture abroad upon an ocean of discussion so truly dark, and at the same time so illimitable. Whether it be qualified to excite any deep and sincere feeling of one kind or another in the German mind,–in a mind trained under German discipline,–this we will consent to waive as a question not immediately interesting to ourselves. Enough that it has not gained, and will not gain, any attention in this country; and this not only because it is thoroughly deficient in all points of attraction to readers formed upon our English literature, but because in some capital circumstances it is absolutely repulsive. We do not wish to offend the admirers of Goethe; but the simplicity of truth will not allow us to conceal, that in various points of description or illustration, and sometimes in the very outline of the story, the Wilhelm Meister is at open war, not with decorum and good taste merely, but with moral purity and the dignity of human nature. As a novelist, Goethe and his reputation are problems, and likely to continue such, to the countrymen of Mrs. Inchbald, Miss Harriet Lee, Miss Edgeworth, and Sir Walter Scott. To the dramatic works of Goethe we are disposed to pay more homage; but neither in the absolute amount of our homage at all professing to approach his public admirers, nor to distribute the proportions of this homage amongst his several performances according to the graduations of their scale. The Iphigenie is built upon the old subject of Iphigenia in Tauris, as treated by Euripides and other Grecian dramatists; and, if we are to believe a Schlegel, it is in beauty and effect a mere echo or reverberation from the finest strains of the old Grecian music. That it is somewhat nearer to the Greek model than a play after the fashion of Racine, we grant. Setting aside such faithful transcripts from the antique as the Samson Agonistes, we might consent to view Goethe as that one amongst the moderns who had made the closest approximation to the Greek stage. Proximus, we might say, with Quintilian, but with him we must add,” sed lango intervallo; “and if in the second rank, yet nearer to the third than to the first. Two other dramas, the Clavigo and the Egmont, fall below the Iphigenie by the very character of their pretensions; the first as too openly renouncing the grandeurs of the ideal; the second as confessedly violating the historic truth of character, without temptation to do so, and without any consequent indemnification. The Tasso has been supposed to realize an Italian beauty of genial warmth and of sunny repose; but from the common defect of German criticism–the absence of all sufficient illustrations–it is as difficult to understand the true nature and constituents of the supposed Italian standard set up for the regulation of our judgments, as it is to measure the degree of approach made to that standard in this particular work. Eugenie is celebrated for the artificial burnish of the style, but otherwise has been little relished. It has the beauty of marble sculpture, say the critics of Goethe, but also the coldness. We ar
e not often disposed to quarrel with these critics as below the truth in their praises; in this instance we are. The Eugenie is a fragment, or (as Goethe himself called it in conversation) a torso, being only the first drama in a trilogy or series of three dramas, each having a separate plot, whilst all are parts of a more general and comprehensive plan. It may be charged with languor in the movement of the action, and with excess of illustration. Thus, e. g. the grief of the prince for the supposed death of his daughter, is the monotonous topic which occupies one entire act. But the situations, though not those of scenical distress, are so far from being unexciting, that, on the contrary, they are too powerfully afflicting.