years. The inevitable love-interest was also not wanting. As Friederike had fitted into the background of Goethe’s Strassburg life, Lotte into that of Wetzlar, and Lili into the gaieties of Frankfort, so now Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a Weimar official, was the personification of the more aristocratic ideals of Weimar society. We possess only the poet’s share of his correspondence with Frau von Stein, but it is possible to infer from it that, of all Goethe’s loves, this was intellectually the most worthy of him. Frau von Stein was a woman of refined literary taste and culture, seven years older than he and the mother of seven children. There was something more spiritual, something that partook rather of the passionate friendships of the 18th century than of love in Goethe’s relations with her. Frau von Stein dominated the poet’s life for twelve years, until his journey to Italy in 1786–1788. Of other events of this period the most notable were two winter journeys, the first in 1777, to the Harz Mountains, the second, two years later, to Switzerland—journeys which gave Goethe scope for that introspection and reflection for which his Weimar life left him little time. On the second of these journeys he revisited Friederike in Sesenheim, saw Lili, who had married and settled in Strassburg, and made the personal acquaintance of Lavater in Zürich.
The literary results of these years cannot be compared with those of the preceding period; they are virtually limited to a few wonderful lyrics, such as Wanderers Nachtlied, An den Mond, Gesang der Geister über den Wassern, or ballads, such as Der Erlkönig, a charming little drama, Die Geschwister (1776), in which the poet’s relations to both Lili and Frau von Stein seem to be reflected, a dramatic satire, Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (1778), and a number of Singspiele, Lila (1777), Die Fischerin, Scherz, List und Rache, and Jery und Bätely (1780). But greater works were in preparation. A religious epic, Die Geheimnisse, and a tragedy Elpenor, did not, it is true, advance much further than plans; but in 1777, under the influence of the theatrical experiments at the Weimar court, Goethe conceived and in great measure wrote a novel of the theatre, which was to have borne the title Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung; and in 1779 himself took part in a representation before the court at Ettersburg, of his drama Iphigenie auf Tauris. This Iphigenie was, however, in prose; in the following year Goethe remoulded it in iambics, but it was not until he went to Rome that the drama finally received the form in which we know it.
In September, 1786 Goethe set out from Karlsbad—secretly and stealthily, his plan known only to his servant—on that memorable journey to Italy, to which he had looked forward with such intense longing; he could not cross the Alps quickly enough, so impatient was he to set foot in Italy. He travelled by way of Munich, the Brenner and Lago di Garda to Verona and Venice, and from thence to Rome, where he arrived on the 29th of October 1786. Here he gave himself up unreservedly to the new impressions which crowded on him, and he was soon at home among the German artists in Rome, who welcomed him warmly. In the spring of 1787 he extended his journey as far as Naples and Sicily, returning to Rome in June 1787, where he remained until his final departure for Germany on the 2nd of April 1788. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Goethe’s Italian journey. He himself regarded it as a kind of climax to his life; never before had he attained such complete understanding of his genius and mission in the world; it afforded him a vantage-ground from which he could renew the past and make plans for the future. In Weimar he had felt that he was no longer in sympathy with the Sturm und Drang, but it was Italy which first taught him clearly what might take the place of that movement in German poetry. To the modern reader, who may well be impressed by Goethe’s extraordinary receptivity, it may seem strange that his interests in Italy were so limited; for, after all, he saw comparatively little of the art treasures of Italy. He went to Rome in Winckelmann’s footsteps; it was the antique he sought, and his interest in the artists of the Renaissance was virtually restricted to their imitation of classic models. This search for the classic ideal is reflected in the works he completed or wrote under the Italian sky. The calm beauty of Greek tragedy is seen in the new iambic version of Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787); the classicism of the Renaissance gives the ground-tone to the wonderful drama of Torquato Tasso (1790), in which the conflict of poetic genius with the prosaic world is transmuted into imperishable poetry. Classic, too, in this sense, were the plans of a drama on Iphigenie auf Delphos and of an epic, Nausikaa. Most interesting of all, however, is the reflection of the classic spirit in works already begun in earlier days, such as Egmont and Faust. The former drama was finished in Italy and appeared in 1788, the latter was brought a step further forward, part of it being published as a Fragment in 1790.
Disappointment in more senses than one awaited Goethe on his return to Weimar. He came back from Italy with a new philosophy of life, a philosophy at once classic and pagan, and with very definite ideas of what constituted literary excellence. But Germany had not advanced; in 1788 his countrymen were still under the influence of that Sturm und Drang from which the poet had fled. The times seemed to him more out of joint than ever, and he withdrew into himself. Even his relations to the old friends were changed. Frau von Stein had not known of his flight to Italy until she received a letter from Rome; but he looked forward to her welcome on his return. The months of absence, however, the change he had undergone, and doubtless those lighter loves of which the Römische Elegien bear evidence, weakened the Weimar memories; if he left Weimar as Frau von Stein’s lover he returned only as her friend; and she naturally resented the change. Goethe, meanwhile, satisfied to continue the freer customs to which he had adapted himself in Rome, found a new mistress in Christiane Vulpius (1765–1816), the least interesting of all the women who attracted him. But Christiane gradually filled up a gap in the poet’s life; she gave him, quietly, unobtrusively, without making demands on him, the comforts of a home. She was not accepted by court society; it did not matter to her that even Goethe’s intimate friends ignored her; and she, who had suited the poet’s whim when he desired to shut himself off from all that might dim the recollection of Italy, became with the years an indispensable helpmate to him. On the birth in 1789 of his son, Goethe had some thought of legalizing his relations with Christiane, but this intention was not realized until 1806, when the invasion of Weimar by the French made him fear for both life and property.
The period of Goethe’s life which succeeded his return from Italy was restless and unsettled; relieved of his state duties, he returned in 1790 to Venice, only to be disenchanted with the Italy he had loved so intensely a year or two before. A journey with the duke of Weimar to Breslau followed, and in 1792 he accompanied his master on that campaign against France which ended so ingloriously for the German arms at Valmy. In later years Goethe published his account both of this Campagne in Frankreich and of the Belagerung von Mainz, at which he was also present in 1793. His literary work naturally suffered under these distractions. Tasso, and the edition of the Schriften in which it was to appear, had still to be completed on his return from Italy; the Römische Elegien, perhaps the most Latin of all his works, were published in 1795, and the Venetianische Epigramme, the result of the second visit to Italy, in 1796. The French Revolution, in which all Europe was engrossed, was in Goethe’s eyes only another proof that the passing of the old régime meant the abrogation of all law and order, and he gave voice to his antagonism to the new democratic principles in the dramas Der Grosskophta (1792), Der Bürgergeneral (1793), and in the unfinished fragments Die Aufgeregten and Das Mädchen von Oberkirch. The spirited translation of the epic of Reinecke Fuchs (1794) he took up as a relief and an antidote to the social disruption of the time. Two new interests, however, strengthened the ties between Goethe and Weimar,—ties which the Italian journey had threatened to sever: his appointment in 1791 as director of the ducal theatre, a post which he occupied for twenty-two years, and his absorption in scientific studies. In 1790 he published his important Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, which was an even more fundamental achievement for the new science of comparative morphology
