Schiller had been living in or near Weimar since 1787, but a strange irony of destiny kept the poets estranged till 1794, though Schiller was drawing, unperceived, into closer sympathy with Goethe's classic ideals. Meantime Goethe's son August was horn (December 25, 1789), the only one of several children to reach maturity. This and the storm clouds of the French Revolution led him to defer a visit to Italy, though in 1790 he went to Venice, to meet the Duchess Amalie there, and wrote a group of Venetianische Epigramme, that show how his quasi-marriage had helped him to a calmer judgment of Italian culture than that of the Elegies. Work in lighter vein now attracted him, Wilhelm Meister and the Court Theatre (the management of which he under took in 1791), till in the summer of 1792 he was summoned by Karl August to join him in the in vasion of France that was to culminate in the defeat of the Duke of Brunswick at Valmy. Goethe recorded his six weeks' impressions in his Kampagne in Frankreich, and returned to Wei mar to find almost ready for his occupancy a mansion presented to him by the Duke, and now, as the home of the Goethe Society and its museum, inseparably connected with his name. The pleasure of this enlarged domesticity is re flected in Reineke Fuchs, written in 1793 and published in 1794, the adaptation to social satire of an animal fable that can be traced back to iEsop and to India, though Goethe's immediate model was a German rendering of the medizeval Flemish version of the fable by a certain Willem (about 1250). Out of this comic epic he made, without local or personal allusions, a social and political satire full of ease and vigor, a humor ous apotheosis of impudence that has become and is likely to remain one of his most popular poems, though at the time it passed almost unnoticed.
Goethe had met Schiller on several occasions since 1779, and had secured for him a professor ship at Jena, though it had seemed to him that the author of Die Hi:tuber stood in the way of development of classical taste which, since his return from Italy, Goethe had been anxious to foster. But Schiller was himself developing along these lines, and when they came to understand one another, in 1794, Goethe may well have felt that Schiller, more than any other in Germany, was fitted to appreciate and aid him. He was first to speak of friendship, first to visit his new found friend. Their intercourse grew constant, especially after Schiller came to Weimar (1799), and was interrupted only by Schiller's death (1805). To Goethe the relation was of stimu lating rather than of directing force. He con tributed to Schiller's periodical Dic Iloren ( 1795 97) the Unterhaltungen deutseher Ausgeteander ten and the Riiinisehe Elegien, and to the Musen. almanach. (1796-1800) his share of the Xenicn vouplets of stinging literary criticism that aroused great excitement and lifelong enmities.
Under this new influence Wilhelm. Meister's Lchrjahre (1795) was completed, a novel with no definite plot, its purpose being the unfolding of characters drawn from varied social spheres, wonderfully realistic studies involving much rip ened worldly wisdom and philosophy. Mignon
and Philine are enduring creations, the songs in terspersed in the novel are among the most ex quisite in any literature, and the analysis of Hamlet is a very acute criticism. Some fine bal lads and elegies belong to this period also, and it closes with that hymn to the family and master piece of classic realism, Hermann Dorothea (1797). Here all is studied from life; there is no idealization, no sentimentality. It was an old story, hut instinct with a conservative pa triotism in these years of revolution and social upheaval. Other less important works of this pe riod are a realistic drama, Die natiirliche Tochter, and Achilleis, an attempt to continue the Iliad.
Some work was done on Faust also; but sickness and public cares interrupted it, and the first part was not published till it was included in the first edition of Goethe's Works (13 vols., 1808).
Meantime Goethe had lost many friends—Gleim, Klopstock, and Herder in 1803, Schiller in 1805, his mother in 1808. In that year Goethe came in frequent contact with Napoleon at Erfurt. It was about this time, too, that Bettina von Arnim Brentano conceived that violent attachment for him that appears in her Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde, which, however, does not represent an actual correspondence; but Bettina could not endure Christiane, and the acquaintance ceased after 1811. In 1809 Goethe published his second novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaf ten, a story of the conflict of love and conjugal duty, with a tragic close. Though now little read, its influence has been great, for it is the starting-point of German psyehologic fiction. It has also an autobiographi cal value. Charlotte is Frau von Stein, and Ed ward is what Goethe felt he might have become. Ottilie has been thought by some, probably wrongly, to be studied from a young Jena girl, Minna Herzlieb.
From 1811 to 1814 appeared the first three parts of Dichtung end Wahrheit, one of the most fascinating autobiographies in any language. It is early memories seen through a long vista of years and under the transforming influence of an artist's eye, beginning with infancy and closing with his coming to Weimar. Meantime the War of Liberation had restored national independence to Germany; but while the fate of his country was changing before his eyes Goethe was studying the Oriental poets and checking the effect of their exuberance by renewed reading of Homer. It was in these years that he wrote in great part the Divan (1819), foreign in ex ternals, mysterious and oracular in parts. but aiming to cultivate international sympathies, so cial and literary, in years of intense Chauvinism. The Zuleika poems in the Divan have been thought to be addressed in gracefully platonic affection to :Marianne Willemer, wife of his con genial host on a journey to the Rhine in 1815, but this is very doubtful. He also undertook at this time some antiquarian studies, standing in tentionally aloof from the temporal aspirations of the German people that he might labor more effectively for their intellectual uplifting.