ABSTRACT
Goethe’s privileged position in Weimar gave him frequent opportunity to take to flight. Sometimes he travelled in company with the Duke and not infrequently this was in the nature of a flight for both of them. In 1777 he writes in his diary, ‘projects for a secret journey’, while Karl August and his companions are off boar hunting again. His journey to the Harz mountains he calls a ‘dark move’, or a vagary, undertaken in the depth of winter. He conceals himself under a new disguise, takes the name of Weber, pretends to be a painter, and enjoys the incognito. ‘So far I have had nothing to do with women’, he writes to Frau von Stein. He travels in the simplest manner, and is delighted to find how small a man’s needs really are. He enjoys talking to simple people, the ‘so-called lower classes’, in whom he finds a combination of all the virtues: loyalty, contentment, endurance, perseverance. The Mephistopheles in him gets fun out of his disguise too: ‘No one gives me more enjoyment than the dirty old scamps, whom I can now permit to do just what they like and to go through all their tricks at their ease in front of me.’ He feels as he did when he was a boy, and that, after all, was not so very long ago. When the weather turns mild, and there is a gentle rain, he notes down the first lines of one of his most beautiful poems on nature and the countryside, Dem Gleier gleich ... (Like a vulture’s flight). He visits the mines and smelting works, so that he can have something useful and practical to report when he gets back. ‘Went over the whole mine to the very bottom’, and the next moment he is climbing to the very top, to the summit of the Brocken, the highest peak. This is also a sporting achievement, and it is only with difficulty that he manages to persuade the forester, who regards the venture in snow and ice as risky, to go with him.
