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An advanced class in German read Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, and the first part of Faust, "three weeks of thorough study," she calls it, "as valuable to me as to them." The class in Italian went at an equal pace.
Sir Walter Scott's first literary enterprise was a translation of /Goetz von Berlichingen/; and, if genius could be communicated like instruction, we might call this work of Goethe's the prime cause of /Marmion/ and the /Lady of the Lake/, with all that has followed from the same creative hand. Truly, a grain of seed that has lighted on the right soil!
'But overlooking these spiritual genealogies, which bring little certainty and little profit, it may be sufficient to observe of /Berlichingen/ and /Werter/, that they stand prominent among the causes, or, at the very least, among the signals of a great change in modern literature.
The work into which he threw all his genius was the dramatization of the history of the imperial knight of the Middle Ages, Gottfried or Goetz von Berlichingen. The immediate cause of this enterprise was his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. After reading him he felt, he said, like a blind man who suddenly receives his sight.
Seeing that all was at an end, Goetz von Berlichingen secretly fled from their ranks and took refuge in his castle. Many of the bodies of peasantry dispersed. Others made head against the troops and were beaten with great slaughter. All was at an end.
"No! he declares that it is the language of barbarians and bear-catchers; scolds about us, and despises us, and yet knows as little of us as the man in the moon. He adores his Voltaire. Old Fritz knows the French poet by heart, but Lessing he knows nothing of. He abuses 'Goetz von Berlichingen, and 'Werther's Sorrows." "Oh! I know it all I know the king's adjutant-general, von Siedlitz.
Goethe, who tells us that Goetz von Berlichingen was written in the Shakespearian manner, and we certainly should not have guessed it, if he had not blabbed, comes to the final conclusion, that Shakespeare was a poet, but not a dramatist. Chateaubriand thinks that he has corrupted art.
Goethe's two earliest works are /Goetz von Berlichingen/ and the /Sorrows of Werter/. The boundless influence and popularity they gained, both at home and abroad, is well known.
Then we hired the hack and the horse which Goetz von Berlichingen used to use, and drove several miles into the country to visit the place called WEIBERTREU Wife's Fidelity I suppose it means. It was a feudal castle of the Middle Ages. When we reached its neighborhood we found it was beautifully situated, but on top of a mound, or hill, round and tolerably steep, and about two hundred feet high.
Herder, proclaiming the vital connection between the soul of a whole nation and its literature, and preaching a religion of the feelings rather than a gospel of "enlightenment;" young Goethe, by his daring and untrammeled Shakespearian play, Goetz von Berlichingen, and by his open defiance, announced in Werther, of the authority of all artistic rules and standards; and Bürger, asserting the right of the common man to be the only arbiter of literary values, were, each in his own way, upsetting the control of an artificial "classicism."
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