Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.

Abstract

his conversations with goethe, the stolid and meticulous Johann Eckermann records a ride to Erfurt on an April day in 1827. Goethe, then seventy-eight, looked attentively at the landscape and remarked, in passing, that nature is always filled with good intentions, but one had to admit it nature is not always beautiful. By way of illustration, the master then began a disquisition on the oak. Sometimes an oak, crowded by other trees, grows high and thin, spends its freshest powers "making it" to air and sunshine, and ends up with an overblown crown on a thin body. Then there is the oak that springs up in moist and marshy soil. Overindulged and squat, it is nourished too quickly into an indented, stubborn obesity. Its unfortunate brother may lodge in poor, stony soil on a mountain slope; lacking free development, it becomes knotty and gnarled. Such trees, Goethe said, can hardly be called beautiful at least they are not beautiful as oak trees. Then Goethe described to the recording Eckermann the perfect oak. It grows in sandy soil, where it spreads its roots comfortably in every direction; it needs space in which to feel on all sides the effects of sun, wind, rain, light. "If it grows up snugly sheltered from wind and weather," said Goethe, "it becomes nothing. But a century's struggle with the elements makes it strong and powerful, so that, at its full growth, its presence inspires us with astonishment and admiration."