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"If My Girl Remains." Goethe explained what he meant by this when, to the horror of his admirers, he took Christiane Vulpius, a simple girl who earned her living by making artificial flowers, to bed & board with him. Almost illiterate ("She has not read a line of all my works," said Goethe), Christiane not only loved Goethe but delighted him by her absolute refusal to be anything but' what nature had intended her to be. She bore him several children. It was the hidden, human Goethe, warm behind the icy mask, who told his friend Johann Herder: "If you continue to be fond of me and a few friends stick to me and my girl remains faithful and my baby lives and my big stove works well—why, I have nothing left to wish for."
In 1806, when drunken French soldiers invaded Goethe's house, faithful Christiane defied them. Conscience-stricken and deeply impressed, Goethe rushed her to the church and made her his wife. When later asked by an admirer how he had fared in those critical days of invasion, Goethe instantly assumed his statuary expression: "I was like a man who from the height of a cliff surveys the raging sea. Though he cannot succor the shipwrecked, neither can he be reached by the tumultuous waters."
With his magnum opus, Faust, which he began in his 20s and worked over repeatedly until just before his death at 82, Goethe raised a poetic monument to himself that is comparable to those of England's Shakespeare and Italy's Dante. An ardent sideline scientist (he discovered that the intermaxillary bone in apes was also present in a rudimentary form in man, and developed a new theory regarding the nature of colors), he took special delight in noting the similarities that related phenomena of the most diverse kinds. When his son, August, showed no particular interest in a literary life, Goethe was no more upset than he had been by the strange ways of mistress Christiane. "In the last analysis," he said, "all sane and sensible things coincide."
Silence on the Pedestal. It was this breadth of vision and unity of spirit, plus a high scorn for the battles of the metaphysicians, that aroused the indignation of German pedants and specialists. "People were never thoroughly contented with me," Goethe confided in his last years to Johann Peter Eckermann, the youth who was to become his Boswell. "[They] always wished me otherwise than it has pleased God to make me ... People expected from me some modest expression, humbly setting forth the total unworthiness of my person and my work ... I believed in God and in Nature, and in the triumph of good over evil; but this was not enough for pious souls: I was also required to believe other points, which were opposed to the feeling of my soul for truth . . ."
In 1832, the poet-philosopher lay on his deathbed, and the idolaters whom he could no longer fight off set up on a pedestal the godlike image that has persisted ever since. The unhappy transubstantiation is described by Eckermann himself: