5. Früh wenn Thal, Gebirg und Garten 6. Und wenn mich am Tag die Ferne 7. Die Feier meines siebzigsten Geburtstages 8. Gutes zu empfangen, zu erweisen INTRODUCTION It has been said that Homer gave to the Greeks their gods. The great German poets, above all Goethe, have impressed upon the soul of man the image of a new, higher humanity. And for almost a century the best men of other nations have been travelling as pilgrims toward this ideal. Why is it that hundreds of thousands in England, France and America read and study to-day the works of the German poets, and above all the works of Goethe? Because something in them appeals to us like the revelation of a new life; because in them one feels the life-breath of German idealism, triumphant over the world and fate; because they impart to us the spirit of German freedom. For if one asks in what does the influence consist which Goethe exercises upon us and the cultured of other races I answer: above all in the freedom of spirit (Geistesfreiheit) which emanates from his works and his person. Not long ago our poet was still reproached as being a thrall of princes, little concerned with freedom. In fact there are still many to-day in whose eyes Goethe does not equal the poet of freedom — Schiller. Those who speak thus have caught but little of the spirit of our poet. Certainly Goethe was not concerned with. that political freedom which as a cheap catch-word can so easily be preached to the masses in honeyed phrases. But rightly he said of himself and his writings, "He who has learned to understand them must confess that he has gained a certain inward freedom." The dominant tendency throughout the course of modern history has been the effort towards the liberation of individuality-of the ego from all narrowing restraints, whether it be that it revolts against the power of a church which endeavors to hold sway over conscience, as at the time of the Reformation, or whether it rebels against the despotism of the state as during the French Revolution. Our classic German. poetry stands in the closest relation to this struggle. To it was allotted the task of bringing to light again the normal and complete man and of sweeping away the accumulated rubbish of tradition, pedantry and false culture under which he had been buried. It was to be the work of German poetry to uncover once more in the sanctuary of the human spirit the spring from which all life flows. And this work of liberation was carried forward by no one on so great a scale and so comprehensively as by Goethe. But not by the seduction of a glowing rhetoric nor by an appeal to our passions, as a false prophet of freedom, but by encompassing the soul as it were with an invisible power and by drawing out our inmost selves, as the light of the sun draws forth the germ from the earth. The health-bringing, strengthening, liberative power of Goethe's poetry is seen in this, that he who gives himself up to it with his whole soul finds again his inmost self, strengthened, ennobled and freed, subtilely and unconsciously, as if in some mythical fountain of youth. On this account, then, he sways our hearts as if with the wand of the messenger of the gods, finding the center and source of that new life which he sets free within us in strong, vital emotion. This discovery, too, does not belong to Goethe alone; it is, as it were, the foundation upon which our entire classic poetry is built up. But with Goethe the very essence of his nature is direct, intuitive, all-embracing feeling to a degree that is true of no other poet. Even our great Schiller busied himself too long and too intently with the philosophy of the schools. No one upon whom, in some moment of insight, this fact has not dawned, can claim that he has penetrated into the secret of the personality of our poet. Our age with its barren culture of the intellect, its servile imitation of reality and its delight in representations of abnormal emotions of the human. soul appears no longer to have any conception of the significance of feeling as Goethe understood it. While to-day we are inclined to understand by feeling only a tearful sentimentality, for Goethe feeling and emotion were the expression of buoyant health, the manifestation of that perfect harmony of the powers of the soul which after the lapse of a long interval first comes to light again in him. His feeling is not merely a feminine receptivity but a virile creative power, not merely a subjective emotion or frame of mind but a vigorous grasp upon the actual content of the world. We can still follow how under Herder's guidance it gradually becomes clear to him that the root of man's existence is to be found in vital emotion and not in abstract thinking. "Poor man," he exclaims at this. time, to whom the intellect is everything." His creative period (Geniezeit) begins and the spring of human emotion which had long been repressed appears to gush forth with elemental force. How it rushes and foams and rages in the earlier scenes of Faust, in Werther and in Götz, and how it bubbles and sings in sweet melodies in the splendid songs of his youth. We can readily understand how his astonished contemporaries looked up to the young poet as to a god and unhesitatingly recognized in him their leader and liberator. And as such the poet himself is quite conscious of his task. In his old age he still exclaims: Seht mich an als Propheten! Viel Denken, mehr Empfinden. And the value of his literary productions and his office as a poet he characterizes in these words: Denn edlen Seelen vorzufühlen Jst wünschenswertester Beruf. We need therefore only to follow in feeling the poetprophet who has marked out the path before us, we need only to allow ourselves to be carried along by the power which streams from his heart in order to experience the deliverance which results from independent, personal emotion. When his contemporaries proposed to erect a monument to him Goethe was certainly justified in saying: Ihr könnt mir immer ungescheut |