GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG vox (1749 1832). The greatest German writer and one of the greatest of the world, excelling in every lit erary genre, distinguished in many branches of science and in literary and artistic criticism. He was born in Frankfort-on-the-Main, August 28, 1749. Both his parentage and the place of his birth were significant for his future development. He was among the first of German literary men since the Meistersinger days to spring from a commercial environment and parents closely affili ated with political life in what remained of the old free cities. His father's father was a tailor and inn-keeper. His father received a good edu cation, traveled in Italy, attained the distinction of Imperial Councilor, and, though never wealthy, was always in easy circumstances. He married (1748) Katherine Elisabeth Textor (or Weber), and Goethe was the first of their four children, of whom only himself and a sister, Cornelia, survived childhood.
In the pages of Goethe's brilliant autobiograph ical Dichtung and Wahrheit, we seldom see the councilor unbend from his philistine self-satis faction. But the mother must have been a very remarkable woman, simple, hearty, joyous, affec tionate, not highly educated, but with a faculty of rapid assimilation that made her no unworthy companion or correspondent of persons of deeper culture or higher station. The relation of mother and child was ideal. His childhood and youth owed more to her direct influence than to all else besides. She died in, 1808. Her Letters are pub lished by the Goethe Society ( 1894 ) . ConsultHeine mann, Goethe's Mutter (6th ed., Leipzig, 1900).
But Frankfort, too, had a molding influence on hini. It was a commercial city, then even more than now the centre of German financial life, of industrialism grafted on an old feudal stock. Old and new in turn and together left their im press on the brilliant and receptive boy. He was precocious, knew something at eight of Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, had acquired from his mother a knack of story-telling and from a toy puppet-show in his nursery a taste for the stage, and a stimulus to imagination on which his autobiography lays much stress. He never
went regularly to school, and as a child showed consciousness of superiority. The French occu pation of Frankfort in 1759 served to polish his French, and still further to cultivate his interest in the stage. He continued to study books and men at Frankfort till he was sixteen, and had had one love affair, from which he recovered with the facile mobility of youth before he went to Leipzig to study law and be fascinated by his host's daughter, Kitchen Schlinkopf.
Leipzig in 1765 was a 'little Paris' in its social and literary ideals. Goethe's letters show that he quickly caught a spirit that accorded well with his nature. He studied little, wrote love songs, interested himself critically in art, learned far more about life than about law, lost his health, and by 1768 had come to look at life on its seamy side, and showed his disillusionment in a drama, Die Mitschuldigen, where vice and meanness in manifold variety find it convenient to forgive and forget. This was completed later in Frank fort. Another drama, Die Laune des Verliebten, begun in Leipzig, is an embellished version of his relation to Kitchen. It was his author's instinct to put into literary form every experience. All his works, he says, are confessions of his life. These two youthful dramatic essays, both in their matter and their form, show Goethe as a realist. He ideal ized neither the world nor individual characters.
Goethe returned ill to Frankfort in the autumn of 1768. He remained there sick or convalescent till April, 1770, gaining the while from the works of Lessing a sharpened aesthetic sense and a more balanced judgment. Here, too, he began the scientific studies that were later to round out his fame, and from an amiable acquaintance, Frau lein von Klottenberg, the Beautiful Soul of his Wilhelm Meister, he gained some insight into the phenomena of pietistic religious experience and became interested in alchemy and kindred lore, all of which proved useful for Faust.