“To write military songs, and sit in a room!  That forsooth was my duty!  To have written them in the bivouac, when the horses at the enemy’s outposts are heard neighing at night, would have been well enough; however, that was not my life and not my business, but that of Theodore Koerner.  His war-songs suit him perfectly.  But to me, who am not of a warlike nature, and who have no warlike sense, war-songs would have been a mask which would have fitted my face very badly.

“I have never affected anything in my poetry.  I have never uttered anything which I have not experienced, and which has not urged me to production.  I have composed love-songs only when I have loved.  How could I write songs of hatred without hating!  And, between ourselves, I did not hate the French, although I thanked God that we were free from them.  How could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?

“Altogether,” continued Goethe, “national hatred is something peculiar.  You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.  But there is a degree where it vanishes altogether, and where one stands to a certain extent above nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people, as if it had happened to one’s own.  This degree of culture was conformable to my nature, and I had become strengthened in it long before I had reached my sixtieth year.”

* * * * *

1832.

Sunday, March 11.—­The conversation turned upon the great men who had lived before Christ, among the Chinese, the Indians, the Persians, and the Greeks; and it was remarked, that the divine power had been as operative in them as in some of the great Jews of the Old Testament.  We then came to the question how far God influenced the great natures of the present world in which we live?

“To hear people speak,” said Goethe, “one would almost believe that they were of opinion that God had withdrawn into silence since those old times, and that man was now placed quite upon his own feet, and had to see how he could get on without God, and his daily invisible breath.  In religious and moral matters a divine influence is indeed still allowed, but in matters of science and art it is believed that they are merely earthly and nothing but the product of human powers.

[Illustration:  SCHILLER’S GARDEN HOUSE AT JENA Drawing by Goethe]

“Let any one only try, with human will and human power, to produce something which may be compared with the creations that bear the names of Mozart, Raphael, or Shakespeare.  I know very well that these three noble beings are not the only ones, and that in every province of art innumerable excellent geniuses have operated, who have produced things as perfectly good as those just mentioned.  But if they were as great as those, they rose above ordinary human nature, and in the same proportion were as divinely endowed as they.