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"Is it possible, my dear mother?" "The Duchess Amelia!" cried Goethe, astonished. "Yes," laughed the duchess, greeting them with an affectionate look. "The proverb proves itself 'Like mother, like son. On the highway mother and son have met. You should have done the honors in a stately equipage." "May I be permitted to ask where you come from?" asked the duke.
A hundred years ago, as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for culture.
Of all the countless books which have appeared, there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall. Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds.
"It is surprising to me," remarked I, "that even Mérimée, who is one of your favorites, has entered upon this ultra-romantic path, through the horrible subjects of his Guzla." "Mérimée," returned Goethe, "has treated these things very differently from his fellow-authors.
The company of these students, of the embassies from the component parts of the empire, and of various imperial officials, made the society a pleasant and lively one. Goethe soon found friends. His favorite house was occupied by one of the officials of the order, by name Buff, an honest man with a large family of children.
Madam Freeze was a native of Heidelburg, and evidently loved the Rhine better than the Volga. She gave me a letter to her brother in Moscow, where she promised me an introduction to a niece of the poet Goethe. In the evening Colonel Molostoff called at the hotel and took me to the New Year's ball of the nobility of Kazan.
"That is a false effort in art," says Goethe, towards the close of his long and splendid career, "which, in giving reality to the appearance, goes so far as to leave in it nothing but the common, every-day actual." It is neither the actual, nor Chinese copies of the actual, that we demand of art.
"That Shakespeare has come back to life!" marvelled the Duchessa. "Do you mean to say that most literary men fancy that?" "I think perhaps I am acquainted with three who don't," Peter replied; "but one of them merely wears his rue with a difference. He fancies that it's Goethe." "How extravagantly how exquisitely droll!" she laughed.
"How can a man come to know himself?" asked Goethe. "Never by thinking, but by doing." Now, this knowledge of self in the large sense is precisely the knowledge which ripens and clarifies us, which gives us sanity, repose, and power.
In the presence of some priggish youths, we have heard a cheerful old man declare that, apparently, there would soon be nothing but "old boys" left. Cheerfulness, being generous and genial, joyous and hearty, is never the characteristic of prigs. Goethe used to exclaim of goody-goody persons, "Oh! if they had but the heart to commit an absurdity!"
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