s a
consequence of the French Revolution, Germans were forced to flee from
German territory west of the Rhine. Goethe was present with Prussian
troops in France in 1792, and observed the siege of Mainz in 1793.
Hence his knowledge of war and exile, with their attendant cruelties
and sufferings. Thirdly, the personal experiences of his own life
could not but contribute to his description of the then German
present. Features of Frankfurt and Ilmenau reappear. The characters
show traits of Goethe's parents, and possibly something of his wife is
in Dorothea. Hermann's mother bears the name of the poet's and reveals
many of her qualities. But some of these are given to the
landlord-father, while the elder Goethe's pedantry and petty
weaknesses are shown in the apothecary. The poet's experiences in the
field are realistically reproduced in many particulars of character
and incident, as are doubtless also his mother's vivid reports of
events in Frankfurt during July and August, 1796. We may feel sure too
that it was the occurrences of this summer that led Goethe to
transform the short, pure idyl of his first intention into a longer
epic of his own present. The fourth source is literary tradition,
which we may trace back through the verse idyl of Voss to the prose
idyl of Gessner, thence through the unnatural Arcadian pastorals of
the seventeenth and earlier centuries to the great Greek
creators,--Theocritus, of the idyl, and Homer, of the epic.

From whatever source derived, the materials were transmuted and
combined by Goethe's genius into a broad, full picture of German life,
with characters typical of the truly human and of profound ethical
importance, interpreting to the attentive reader the significance of
life for the individual, the family, the nation.

HERMANN AND DOROTHEA (1797)[32]

TRANSLATED BY ELLEN FROTHINGHAM

CALLIOPE

FATE AND SYMPATHY

Truly, I never have seen the market and street so deserted!
How as if it were swept looks the town, or had perished! Not fifty
Are there, methinks, of all our inhabitants in it remaining.

What will not curiosity do! here is every one running,
Hurrying to gaze on the sad procession of pitiful exiles.
Fully a league it must be to the causeway they have to pass over,
Yet all are hurrying down in the dusty heat of the noonday.
I, in good sooth, would not stir from my place to witness the sorrows
Borne by good, fugitive people, who now, with their rescued possessions,