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Goethe’s “Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit” is a merry satire on the sentimental movement, but is not to be connected directly with Sterne, since Goethe is more particularly concerned with the petty imitators of his own “Werther.” Baumgartner in his Life of Goethe asserts that Sterne’s Sentimental Journey was one of the books found inside the ridiculous doll which the love-sick Prince Oronaro took about with him.
Where the two types of naturalism really understand themselves nothing but sharp antagonism can exist between them. Those on the one side must condemn this unfeeling and irreverent, cold and mathematical dissection and analysis of the “Great Goddess” as a sacrilege and outrage. Goethe’s Attitude to Naturalism.
We are not only admitted to contemplate the pomp and majesty of his world-wide fame, we are also admitted to the sordid circumstances of Goethe’s “home.” And our awe and reverence are turned into pity.
Indeed, Goethe’s significant words already quoted came from the last years of his life, when the new century had learned to smile almost incredulously at the relation of a bygone folly.
The next morning he stormed into the room. Eleanore was only half dressed. With an expression of wrath flitting across her face she reached for a towel and draped it about her shoulders. He sat down on Gertrude’s bed, and let loose a torrent of words: “I am going to set Goethe’s ‘Wanderers Sturmlied’ to music!
Without going here into the purely formal and artistic qualities of Goethe’s works, there is one fact which, perhaps more than any other, impressed itself on the imagination of the world, and that is the realization of his own personality, the achievement of his own destiny. Of all his poems, the rarest and most perfect is the poem of his life.
Goethe’s connection with the “Koran,” which forms the most interesting phase of its German career, will be treated later.
It is claimed by Goebel that Goethe’s “Homunculus,” suggested to the master partly by reading of Paracelsus and partly by Sterne’s mediation, is in some characteristics of his being dependent directly on Sterne’s creation. In a meeting of the “Gesellschaft für deutsche Litteratur,” November, 1896, Brandl expressed the opinion that Maria of Moulines was a prototype of Mignon in “Wilhelm Meister.”
He said: “I have lost my picture again; I want to try to find it in others.” Gertrude begged him, with a pale face, to be permitted to stay in the living room. She closed the door only partly. In Goethe’s verses entitled “Harzreise im Winter,” thoughts lie scattered about like erratic strata in the world of geology, and feelings that are as big and terrible as the flames from burning planets.
For to Goethe nature is far from being a piece of mechanism which can be calculated on and summed up in mathematical formulæ, an everlasting “perpetuum mobile,” a magnificent all-powerful machine. In fact, all this and especially the word “machine” expresses exactly what Goethe’s conception was most directly opposed to.
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