Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

Excerpt

POEMS AND BALLADS OF GOETHE.

No. I.

It may be as well to state at the outset, that we have not the most distant intention of laying before the public the whole mass of poetry that flowed from the prolific pen of Goethe, betwixt the days of his student life at Leipsic and those of his final courtly residence at Weimar. It is of no use preserving the whole wardrobe of the dead; we do enough if we possess ourselves of his valuables—articles of sterling bullion that will at any time command their price in the market—as to worn-out and threadbare personalities, the sooner they are got rid of the better. Far be it from us, however, to depreciate or detract from the merit of any of Goethe's productions. Few men have written so voluminously, and still fewer have written so well. But the curse of a most fluent pen, and of a numerous auditory, to whom his words were oracles, was upon him; and seventy volumes, more or less, which Cotta issued from his wareroom, are for the library of the Germans now, and for the selection of judicious editors hereafter. A long time must elapse after an author's death, before we can pronounce with perfect certainty what belongs to the trunk-maker, and what pertains to posterity. Happy the man—if not in his own generation, yet most assuredly in the time to come—whose natural hesitation or fastidiousness has prompted him to weigh his words maturely, before launching them forth into the great ocean of literature, in the midst of which is a Maelstrom of tenfold absorbing power!

From the minor poems, therefore, of Goethe, we propose, in the present series, to select such as are most esteemed by competent judges, including, of course, ourselves. We shall not follow the example of dear old Eckermann, nor preface our specimens by any critical remarks upon the scope and tendency of the great German's genius; neither shall we divide his works, as characteristic of his intellectual progress, into eras or into epochs; still less shall we attempt to institute a regular comparison between his merits and those of Schiller, whose finest productions (most worthily translated) have already enriched the pages of this Magazine. We are doubtless ready at all times to back our favourite against the field, and to maintain his intellectual superiority even against his greatest and most formidable rival. We know that he is the showiest, and we feel convinced that he is the better horse of the two; but talking is worse than useless when the course is cleared, and the start about to commence.

Come forward, then, before the British public, O many-sided, ambidextrous Goethe, as thine own Thomas Carlyle might, or could, or would, or should have termed thee, and let us hear how the mellifluous Teutonic verse will sound when adapted to another tongue. And, first of all—for we yearn to know it—tell us how thy inspiration came? A plain answer, of course, we cannot expect—that were impossible from a German; but such explanation as we can draw from metaphor and oracular response, seems to be conveyed in that favourite and elaborate preface to the poems, which accordingly we may term the