“I felt the need,” writes Tolstoy of his youthful period, “t_Three essays

THOMAS MANN

THREE

ESSAYS

_Translated

from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter_

NEW YORK · ALFRED · A · KNOPF

1929

THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1929

SECOND PRINTING NOVEMBER, 1929

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS

_Friedrich und Die Grosse Koalition_

REDE UND ANTWORT

AND AS

_Goethe und Tolstoi_ and _Okkulte Erlebnisse_

BEMÜHUNGEN

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I · GOETHE AND TOLSTOY · 3

II · FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION · 143

III · AN EXPERIENCE IN THE OCCULT · 219

GOETHE AND TOLSTOY

At the beginning of our century a man was still living in Weimar,

Julius Stötzer by name and schoolmaster by calling, who, as a

sixteen-year-old student, had dwelt under the same roof with Dr.

Eckermann and only a few steps away from Goethe’s door. Young Stötzer

and a schoolmate and fellow-lodger would now and again, with beating

hearts, catch gleams and glimpses of the hallowed form as the old man

sat by his window. But the lads were possessed by a desire to see him

for once close at hand and get a good look at him. They applied to his

famulus, their house-mate, and implored him by some means or other to

procure them this boon. Eckermann was a kindly soul. One summer day

he let the boys in by the back gate to the garden of the illustrious

house; and there, hugely confused, they stood and waited for Goethe;

who, to their consternation, did actually appear. He was strolling

about the garden in a light-coloured house-coat--very probably the

famous flannel dressing-gown we wot of--and catching sight of the lads

went up to them. There he stood, wafting odours of eau-de-Cologne, with

his hands, of course, on his back, and his abdomen to the fore; with

that air of a city father beneath which, so we are told, he hid his

self-consciousness--and asked the youths their names and what they

wanted. Probably all in one breath; which indeed, if it thus happened,

so added to the austere effect that they could scarcely get out an

answer. However, they stammered something; whereupon the old man bade

them be diligent in their tasks--which they were free to interpret as

meaning that they would do better to be at them and not stand gaping

here--and went his way.

So much for that--it happened in the year 1828.--Thirty-three years

afterwards, one day about one o’clock Stötzer--now an experienced

and devoted master in the secondary schools--was about to take the

second class of the session when a seminary pupil stuck his head

in at the door and announced that a stranger wanted to see Herr

Stötzer. And without more ado the stranger entered at his heels: a man

considerably younger than the schoolmaster, with a thinnish beard,

prominent cheek-bones, and small grey eyes, with furrows between

the heavy brows. He neglected to introduce or otherwise account for

himself; but simply and straightway asked what lessons there were

this afternoon, and on hearing that there was first history and then

language, professed himself well pleased. He said that he had been

visiting schools in southern Germany, France, and England; and sought

an acquaintance with those of northern Germany as well. He spoke like

a German. You would take him for a schoolmaster, from the comments he

made, his well-informed, intelligent questions, and the way he kept

putting things down in his notebook. He stopped for the whole of the

lesson-hour. The children wrote a theme, an exercise on some subject

in their copy-books; and the stranger said he was greatly interested

in these compositions--might he take them away with him? “Dear me,”

Stötzer thought, “that _is_ naïve.” Who was to reimburse the children

for their copy-books? After all, Weimar was a poor city.... He said

as much, in politer phrases. But the stranger replied that that might

be managed, and went out. Stötzer sent a message to the Director,

telling him of the unusual occurrence. And the adjective he used was

the correct one--though it was only much later that he understood

how correct it had been. For at the moment and on the spot it could

not mean much to him, when the stranger came back, with a bundle of

writing-paper under his arm, and gave his name to Stötzer and the

Director: Count Tolstoy, from Russia. But Schoolmaster Stötzer lived to

a ripe old age, and consequently had plenty of time to hear about the

gentleman whose acquaintance he had thus made.

* * * * *

This man, then, who lived in Weimar from 1812 to 1905, and whose life

was otherwise no doubt uneventful enough, might boast of having enjoyed

one extraordinary privilege: the personal acquaintance of both Goethe

and Tolstoy, the two great men whose names form the subject of this

essay. Yes, Tolstoy was in Weimar! When he was thirty-three years

old--for he was born in the year that saw young Stötzer’s interview

with Goethe--Count Leo Nikolaevich came to Germany from Brussels (where

he had in the first place met Proudhon and been convinced by him

that _la propriété_ is _le vol_, and in the second place had written

the story called _Polikuschka_) and visited the city of Goethe. As

a distinguished stranger and guest of the Russian Embassy he was

admitted to the house on the Frauenplan, which was not then open to the

public. We are told, however, that he was more interested in the Fröbel

kindergarten, conducted by one of Fröbel’s own pupils, and studied its

pedagogic system with the greatest zeal and curiosity.

You see, of course, why I have told you this little tale. It was

in hope to render more palatable the “and” at the top of the page,

which must have made you lift your eyebrows at first sight. Goethe

and Tolstoy. What sort of arbitrary and unseemly combination is that?

Nietzsche once reproached us Germans with a peculiar clumsiness in

the use of the word “and.” We said “Schopenhauer and Hartmann,” he

sneered; we said “Goethe and Schiller” too--he was very much afraid

we even said “Schiller and Goethe”! Setting Schopenhauer and Hartmann

aside; as far as Goethe and Schiller are concerned, Nietzsche’s highly

subjective dislike of moralists and theatre people should not have led

him so far astray as to deny a relationship which is not less valid

because of the inherent and typical contrast it displays. Its best

spokesman, indeed, was its supposedly affronted half! It was hasty of

Nietzsche, it was unjustifiably autocratic, thus to mock, and in his

mockery to invoke, or assume, an order of merit which is, and must

remain, highly controversial, the most controversial thing in the

world. It is not on the whole the German way to be hasty in deciding

precisely this question of all questions. We instinctively avoid

putting ourselves on record, on one side or the other. We prefer a

free-handed policy, and so, personally, do I; and I mean to stick to

this policy, to support and glorify it, in all that follows. Precisely

this policy, and no other, is the meaning of the conjunction when we

say “Goethe _and_ Schiller”: where it converts the combination to an

antithesis, and combines with the deliberate intention of contrast. No

one who has ever come into contact with the sphere of German thought

represented by that classic essay which comprehends all the others and

makes them superfluous--I mean Schiller’s _Naive und Sentimentalische

Dichtung_--can fail to find this “and” deeply antithetic. Another

precisely similar instance is the conjunction “Tolstoy _and_

Dostoyevsky.” On the other hand, if we deny the “and” its right to

point a contrast, and confine its function to asserting essential

affinity, essential similarity--what then? Would there not at once take

place in our fancy a change of partners? On profound intellectual,

nay, rather, on profoundly natural grounds, would not Schiller and

Dostoyevsky move together, and on the other side--Goethe and Tolstoy?

You will be feeling far from satisfied. Obviously. You will say: there

is something besides quality, there is position, there is rank. All

honour, you will say, to antithesis, but things which differ so much in

order of greatness really cannot be placed alongside like that. Granted

that the one was a European humanist and thorough-paced pagan, while

the other was an anarchist, and a primitive oriental Christian to boot.

But the German world-poet, whose name one names with the highest, with

Dante, with Shakespeare, and the realistic novelist who in our own era

and not so long ago ended his enigmatic life, and that truly in a most

enigmatic manner; to speak of these two in the same breath--it simply

will not do, it is an offence against the aristocratic instinct, it is

in bad taste.

We put on one side the paganism of the one, the Christianity of the

other. Let us leave them there--we may find time to come back to them

later on. But as for this aristocratic instinct, if you like to call

it that; let me say roundly that so far from offending against it

with my parallel, I do it explicit honour. Are you certain you have

no delusions--are you sure your perspective is not distorted in this

matter of rank and relative greatness? Turgeniev, in his last letter

to Tolstoy, written on his death-bed in Paris, in which he conjured

his friend to return to literature and stop tormenting himself with

theology, Turgeniev was the first to give Tolstoy the title of “the

great writer of Russia,” which he has had ever since, and which seems

to mean that he holds in the eyes of his countrymen the same rank that

the author of _Faust_ and _Wilhelm Meister_ does in ours. Tolstoy

himself, as we were saying, was Christian through and through. Yet his

humility was not so exaggerated as to prevent him from setting his name

boldly beside the greatest, yes, beside the legendary great. He said of

_War and Peace_: “Modesty aside, it is something like the Iliad.” He

was heard to say the same of his earliest work, _Childhood, Boyhood,

Youth_. Was that megalomania? To me, frankly, it sounds like plain and

simple fact. “_Nur die Lumpe_,” says Goethe, “_sind bescheiden._” A

heathen saying. But Tolstoy subscribed to it. He saw himself always of

heroic grandeur; and as early as at thirty-seven, writing in his diary,

he ranked his own works, the finished and the still to write, with the

great literature of the world.

In the judgment, then, of those competent to render it, the great

writer of Russia; by his own estimate, the Homer of his time--but that

is not all. After Tolstoy’s death Maxim Gorky published a little book

of reminiscences, the best book, in my humble opinion, that he has

written. It closes with the words: “And I, who do not believe in God,

looked at him timidly, for some dark reason looked at him and thought:

The man is godlike.” Godlike. Extraordinary. Nobody ever said or

thought that of Dostoyevsky, nobody ever could have thought or said it.

He has been called a saint; and one might in all sincerity apply the

word to Schiller, at least in the Christian sense which it must always

connote, if without the specifically Byzantine flavour. But Goethe and

Tolstoy, these two, have been found godlike. The epithet “Olympian” is

a commonplace. It was not, however, only as a world-renowned old man of

commanding intellect that Goethe had it applied to him; it was while

he was still young, still the youth, of whose godlike, compelling gaze

Wieland sang, that he had the attribute conferred upon him, a thousand

times, by his own contemporaries. Riemer relates that at sixty the old

man took occasion to make rather acridly merry over it. “The deuce take

godlike,” he cried. “What good does it do me to have people say: ‘That

is a godlike man,’ when I go by? They behave just as they like, they

impose on me just the same. People only call a man godlike when he lets

them have their own way!”--As for Tolstoy, you could not say he was

Olympian; he was not a humanistic god, of course. He was, Gorky says,

more like some sort of Russian god, sitting on a maple throne under a

golden lime-tree; pagan, then, with a difference, compared with the

Zeus of Weimar, but pagan none the less, because gods _are_ pagan. Why?

Because they are of the same essence as nature. One does not need to be

a follower of Spinoza--as Goethe was, and had his own good reasons for

it--to feel God and Nature as one, and the nobility that nature confers

as godlike. “His superhumanly developed individuality is a monstrous

phenomenon, almost forbidding, he has something in him of the fabled

Sviatogor, whom the earth cannot hold.” Thus Gorky, on Tolstoy. And I

cite it in this matter of relative greatness. Gorky, for instance, goes

on to say: “There is something about him which always makes me want to

shout: ‘Behold what a marvellous man lives upon this earth!’ For he

is, so to speak, in general and beyond everything else, a human human

being, a man.” That sounds like something we have heard before. It

reminds us of--whom?

No, the question of rank, the aristocratic problem, is no problem at

all, within the grouping I have chosen. It becomes one only when we

change partners: when we take saintly humanity and couple it, by means

of the antithetic conjunction, with the godlike; when we say “Goethe

and Schiller,” “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” Only then, I think, do we

pose the question of aristocracy, the problem in ethics and æsthetics:

Which is greater? Which is more aristocratic? I shall not answer either

of these. I will let the reader come to his individual conclusion in

this matter of value, according to his own taste. Or, less glibly put,

according to the conception he has of humanity, which--I must add,

_sotto voce_--will have to be one-sided and incomplete to admit of his

coming to any decision at all.

* * * * *

Is it not strangely moving to hear that one man had known them both,

the creator of _Faust_ and the “great writer of Russia”? For certainly

they belonged to different centuries. Tolstoy’s life covered the

greater part of the nineteenth. He is absolutely its son. As an artist

he exhibits all of its characteristics, and, indeed, those of its

second half. As for Goethe, the eighteenth century brought him forth,

and essential traits of his character and training belong to it--a

statement it would be very easy to substantiate. Yet on the other hand

one might say that just as much of the eighteenth, Goethe’s century,

survived in Tolstoy as there had already come to birth of Tolstoy’s,

of the nineteenth, in Goethe. Tolstoy’s rationalizing Christianity

has more in common with the deism of the eighteenth century than it

has with Dostoyevsky’s violent and mystical religiosity, which was

entirely of the nineteenth. His system of practical religion--the

essence of which was a destructive intellectual force that undermined

all regulations, human and divine--had more affinity with the

social criticism of the eighteenth century than with Dostoyevsky’s

moralizations, although those were, on the one hand, far more profound,

on the other far more religious. And Tolstoy’s _penchant_ for Utopias,

his hatred of civilization, his passion for rusticity, for a bucolic

placidity of the soul--an aristocratic passion, the passion of a

nobleman--to all that, the eighteenth century, and indeed the French

eighteenth century, can lay claim. And, on the other hand, Goethe. What

most astonishes us in that masterpiece of his old age, the sociological

novel _Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre_, is the intuition, the keenness

and breadth of vision--they seem positively occult, but are simply

the expression of a finer organism, the fruit of the most sensitive

penetration--which anticipate the whole social and economic development

of the nineteenth century: the industrialization of the old cultural

and agrarian countries, the triumph of the machine, the rise of the

organized labouring classes, the class conflict, democracy, socialism,

Americanism itself, with the intellectual and educational consequences

of all these.

But when all is said, and whatever the chronological affinity of these

two great men, they cannot be called contemporaries. Only four years

did the two of them inhabit this mortal sphere together: from 1828,

when Tolstoy was born, to 1832, when Goethe died. Which does not

prevent them from having one cultural element of their intellectual and

spiritual make-up in common, and that a very real and positive one--to

say nothing of universally human elements like Homer and the Bible. I

mean the element Rousseau.

“I have read the whole of Rousseau, the whole twenty volumes, including

the lexicon of music. What I felt for him was more than enthusiasm;

it was worship. At fifteen I wore round my neck, instead of the usual

crucifix, a medallion with his picture. I am so familiar with some of

the passages in his works that I feel as though I had written them

myself.” These are Tolstoy’s words, taken from his _Confessions_. And

certainly he was Rousseauian more intimately, more personally, more

damagingly, so to speak, than was Goethe, who as a man had nothing in

common with poor Jean Jacques’s enigmatic and not always ingratiating

complexities. Yet hear Goethe (I quote from an early review):

“Religious conditions, and the social conditions so narrowly bound

up with them; the pressure of the laws, the still greater pressure

of society, to say nothing of a thousand other factors, leave the

civilized man or the civilized nation no soul of his own. They stifle

the promptings of nature, they obliterate every trait out of which

a characteristic picture could be made.” That is, from the literary

point of view, _Sturm und Drang_. But from the intellectual and

historical, it is Rousseauianism. It bears the impress of revolution,

even of anarchy; though in the Russian seeker after God that impress is

religious and early Christian, whereas in Goethe’s words the humanistic

trend can be felt, the irradiation of a cultural and self-developing

individualism which Tolstoy would have banned as egoistic and

unchristian. But unchristian, egoistic, it is not: it means work on

man, on mankind, on humanity, and it issues, as the _Wanderjahre_

shows, in the social world.

What two ideas does the very sound of Rousseau’s name inevitably

evoke--aside, that is, from the idea of nature, which is, of course,

first and foremost? Why, naturally, the idea “education” and the idea

“autobiography.” Jean Jacques Rousseau was the author of _Émile_ and

of the _Confessions_. Now, both these elements, the pedagogic and the

autobiographic, are present in full strength in Goethe as in Tolstoy;

they cannot be dissociated from the work or the life of either. It

is as an amateur pedagogue that Tolstoy has been introduced in this

essay; and we know that for long years he was nothing else, that he

forced into this channel the whole violence of the passion that was

in him, and wrestled theoretically and practically to the very verge

of exhaustion with the problem of the Russian primary school. As for

Goethe, it is needless to say that his was a pedagogic nature in the

fullest sense of the word. The two great monuments of his life, one

in poetry and one in prose, the _Faust_ and the _Wilhelm Meister_,

are both creative treatments of the theme of education. And whereas

in the _Lehrjahre_ the idea is still that of the individual forming

himself--“for to form myself, just as I am, was darkly, from my

youth up, my purpose and my desire,” says Wilhelm Meister--in the

_Wanderjahre_ the educational idea is objectivated, and issues in

social, even in political concepts; while at the heart of the work is,

as you know, the stern and beautiful Utopia of the _Pedagogic Province_.

The second association, the autobiographic, the confessional, is of

course easy to attest in both authors. That all of Goethe’s works

represent “fragments of one great confession” we should know ourselves

even if he did not tell us; and is not _Dichtung und Wahrheit_,

next to the _Confessions_ of Saint Augustine and Rousseau, the most

famous autobiography in the world? Well, and Tolstoy too wrote

confessions: I mean in the main a book with that title, laid down

throughout on the line of the great self-revelations that runs from

the African saint to Strindberg, the son of the servant. But Tolstoy

is in the same case with Goethe: not by virtue of one book alone is

he autobiographical. Beginning with the _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_,

throughout the whole body of his work, he is autobiographical to an

extent that makes it possible for Merezhkovsky, the great Russian

critic, to say: “The artistic work of Leo Tolstoy is at bottom

nothing else than one tremendous diary, kept for fifty years, one

endless, explicit confession.” Yes, and this critic adds: “In the

literatures of all times and peoples there will hardly be found a

second example of an author who reveals his personal and private life,

often in its most intimate aspects, with such open-hearted sincerity.”

Well--open-hearted.... I may be allowed a comment upon the somewhat

euphemistic epithet. One might, if one wanted to be invidious, use

a different adjective to characterize this sincerity--an adjective

that would suggest what Turgeniev had in mind when he once ironically

referred to the shortcomings inevitable in a great writer: by which,

obviously, he meant the lack of certain restraints, the absence of a

customary reserve, discretion, decency, shame, or, on the positive

side, the domination of a definite claim on the love of the world--an

absolute claim, indeed, in that it is all one to the revealer whether

he reveal virtues or vices. He craves to be known and loved, loved

because known, or loved _although_ known; that is what I mean by an

absolute claim on love. And the remarkable thing is that the world

acknowledges and honours the claim.

“A life that is romantic has always self-love at the bottom of it.”

I like this saying; and subjoin that self-love is also always at

the bottom of all autobiography. For the impulse a man feels to

“fixate” his life, to exhibit its development, to celebrate his own

destiny in set literary form and passionately invoke the sympathy

of his contemporaries and posterity, has for a premise the same

uncommonly lively sense of his own ego which, according to that

penetrating saying, is at the bottom of a life full of romantic

happenings. Subjectively, for the man himself, but also objectively

for the world at large. Of course, this love of self is something

different, something stronger, deeper, more fruitful, than any mere

self-complacency or self-love of the ordinary kind. In the finest

instances it is what Goethe in the _Wanderjahre_ calls “_Ehrfurcht vor

sich selbst_,” and celebrates as the highest form of awe. It is the

grateful and reverent self-absorption of the darling of the gods, that

rings with incomparable sincerity from the lines:

_Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,

Ihren Lieblingen ganz:

Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,

Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz._

It is a proud and naïve interest in the mystery of high preferment,

tangible superiority, perilous privilege, whose standard-bearer the

chosen one feels himself to be; it is a craving to bear witness, out

of the deeps of experience, how a genius is shaped; a desire to link

together, by some miracle of grace, joy, and service; it was this

desire which brought forth _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ and in the truest

sense inspires all great autobiography.

“I felt the need,” writes Tolstoy of his youthful period, “to be known

and loved of all the world; to _name my name_, the sound of which would

greatly impress everybody, so that they would troop round me and thank

me for something....” That was quite early, before he had conceived

any of his creative works or envisaged the idea of founding a new,

practical, earthly, dogmaless religion--though this idea, according to

his journal, had occurred to him by the time he was twenty-seven years

old. His name, he feels, his mere name, Leo Tolstoy, this formula for

his darkly and mightily stirring ego, should, as it were, serve notice

to the world; whereby, for some reason as yet unknown, the world should

be greatly impressed, and feel impelled to surround him in grateful

throngs. Long after that, in 1883--at about the same date that Tolstoy

posed for an artist friend, sitting at his table and writing--he reads

aloud to another friend and admirer, the one-time officer Tschertkof,

from the manuscript of his just-completed personal revelations _What

Does My Faith Consist In?_ He reads from this manuscript a categorical

reprobation of military service, on the grounds of his Christianity;

which so gratifies the ex-officer that he hears nothing else, ceases to

listen, and only rouses out of his absorption when he hears, suddenly

uttered, the reader’s own name. Tolstoy, coming to the end of his

manuscript, had, with particular clarity, says Tschertkof, enunciated

the name signed underneath the text: “Leo Tolstoy.”

Goethe once played a little literary hoax with his own name, which I

have always found singularly touching. You will recall that in the

_West-östliche Divan_ he selected for himself as the lover of Marianne

Zuleika the name of Hatem (the most richly giving and receiving one).

The choice betrays a blissful self-preoccupation. Now, in one of

the poems, a glorious one, he uses this name at the end of a line,

where, however, it does not rhyme as according to the structure of the

verse it should, and the name which would rhyme if it stood there is

another, is Goethe’s own; so that the reader involuntarily makes the

substitution mentally as he reads. “_Nur dies Herz_,” says the already

white-haired lover to the youthful beloved,

“_Nur dies Herz, es ist von Dauer,

Schwillt in Jugendlichstem Flor;

Unter Schnee und Nebelschauer

Rast ein Ätna dir hervor.

Du beschämst wie Morgenröte

Jener Gipfel ernste Wand,

Und noch einmal fühlet Hatem

Frühlingshauch und Sommerbrand._”

“_Und noch einmal fühlet Goethe_ ...” With what delightful playfulness

the poet makes the reader eliminate the name Hatem, which does not

give the rhyme his ear expects! The eastern masquerade is abandoned for

autobiography, the ear confutes the eye, and Goethe’s own name, beloved

of men and gods, emerges with peculiar clarity, rhymed to perfection

and irradiated by the most beautiful thing the world of sense can show:

the rosy dawn.

May one call that “_Selbstgefälligkeit_,” that awestruck sense of

plenitude, of copious abundance, which pervades the consciousness of

the darling of the gods? Goethe all his life had set his face against

the affectation which might condemn such a feeling. He let it be known

that in his opinion self-condemnation was the business of those who

had no ground for anything else. He even openly spoke a good word for

ordinary vanity, and said that the suppression of it would mean social

decay, adding that the vain man can never be entirely crude. Whereupon

follows the question: Is love of self ever quite distinguishable from

love of humanity?

_Wie sie sich an mich verschwendet,

Bin ich mir ein wertes Ich;

Hätte sie sich weggewendet,

Augenblicks verlör’ ich mich._

And is not young Tolstoy’s dream of glory, his craving to be known and

loved, evidence of his love to the great _Thou_ of the world? Love of

the ego and love of the world are psychologically not to be divorced;

which makes the old question whether love is ever altruistic, and not

utterly egotistic, the most idle question in the world. In love, the

contradiction between egotism and altruism is abrogated quite.

From which it follows that the autobiographical impulse scarcely ever

turns out to be a mere dilettante trifling. It seems to carry its own

justification with it. Talent, generally speaking, is a ticklish,

difficult conception; the point of which is really less whether a man

_can do_ something than whether a man _is_ something. One might almost

say that talent is nothing more or less than a high state of adequacy

to one’s lot in life. But whose life is it that possesses this dignity

in the face of destiny? With brains and sensibility anything can be

made out of any life, out of any life a romantic existence can be made.

Differing in this from the pure poetic impulse, which so often rests

upon sheer self-deception, the autobiographic, as it seems, always

presupposes a degree of brains and sensibility which justifies it

beforehand; so that it need only become productive to be certain of our

sympathy. Hence the conclusion I drew: that if the world sanction the

love of self, which is at the bottom of the impulse, it will as a rule

respond to it as well.

* * * * *

“Behold, what a marvellous creature lives upon this earth!” Gorky,

contemplating Tolstoy, utters this inward cry. And this cry it is to

which all biography seeks to move the world. Any human life, given

brains and sensibility, can be made interesting and sympathetic, even

the most wretched. J. J. Rousseau was not precisely one’s idea of a

darling of the gods. The father of the French Revolution was an unhappy

wretch, half or three-quarters mad, and probably a suicide. Certainly

the blend of sensibility and catarrh of the bladder displayed in the

_Confessions_ is not, æsthetically speaking, to everybody’s taste.

Nevertheless, his self-exposure contains and constitutes a claim

upon the love of the world, which has been so abundantly honoured,

with so many tears, that really one might call poor Jean Jacques the

well-beloved, _le bien-aimé_. And this world-wide emotional response

he owes to his bond with nature--rather a one-sided bond, it must

be owned, for certainly this fool of genius, this exhibitionistic

world-shaker, was a stepchild of the All-Mother rather than one of her

pets, an accident of birth instead of a god-given miracle of favour and

preference. His relation to nature was sentimental in the fullest sense

of the word, and the tale of his life swept over the world in a wave of

sentiment, not to say sentimentality. Poor Jean Jacques!

No, not in this tone does one refer to the two whom men called godlike,

divine; in whom, as we have seen, important traits of Rousseau’s

character are reproduced. For they were not sentimental, scarcely had

they occasion to yearn for nature, they themselves were nature. Their

bond with her was not one-sided, like Rousseau’s--or if it was, then it

was nature who loved them, her darlings, loved them and clung to them,

while on their side they drew away, and strove to free themselves from

her heavy and earth-bound domination; with indifferent success, it must

be said, looking at them both singly and together. Goethe confesses:

“So here I am, with all my thousand thoughts, sent back to be a child

again, unacquainted with the moment, in darkness about myself.” And

to Schiller, the singer of the highest freedom, he writes: “How great

an advantage your sympathy and interest will be to me you will soon

see, when you discover in me a sort of sluggishness and gloom which

is stronger than myself.” And yet we may agree that Goethe’s highly

humanistic effort to “convert the cloudy natural product into a clear

image of itself (i.e., of reason) and so discharge the duty and the

claim of existence,” as Riemer with extraordinary beauty expresses

it, was crowned with a purer success than the attempt of Count Leo

Nikolaevich Tolstoy to transform his life into the holy life of our

blessed father the Bojar Lev, as Gorky says. This process of making

a Christian and a saint of himself, on the part of a human being and

artist so loved of nature that she had endowed him with godlikeness,

was, as an effort at spiritual regeneration, most inept. Anglo-Saxondom

hailed it with acclaim, but, after all, the spectacle is painful rather

than gratifying, compared with Goethe’s high endeavour. For there is

no conflict between nature and culture; the second only ennobles the

first, it does not repudiate it. But Tolstoy’s method was not the

ennoblement but the renunciation of self, and that can quite easily

become the most mortifying kind of deception. It is true that Goethe,

at a certain stage in his development, called _Götz_ the work of

an undisciplined boy; but never did he so childishly and miserably

calumniate his own art as the ageing Tolstoy did, when he regretted

having written _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_, the fruit of his fresh

youthful vigour, condemning it as insincere, literary, sinful; or when

he spoke at large of “the artistic twaddle” that filled the twelve

volumes of his works, and to which “people today ascribe an unmerited

significance.” That is what I call false self-renunciation, a clumsy

attempt at spiritualization. Yet renounce himself as he would in words,

his very existence gave him the lie; and Gorky looked at him, the

patriarch with the “sly” little smile and the artist hands with their

swollen veins, and thought to himself: “The man is godlike.”

* * * * *

Weimar, and Yasnaya Polyana. There is no spot on earth today whence

power streams out as once from these two, no shrine strong in grace,

the resort of pilgrims, whither the longings and vague hopes of men,

their need and craving to adore, turn as they did thitherward at

the beginning of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth

century. We possess descriptions of the state Goethe kept in Weimar;

when he, now no longer merely the creator of certain works of art,

but a prince of life, the highest representative of European culture,

civilization, and humanity, with his staff of secretaries, his higher

aides and eager friends at his back, bore up, with that bestarred

official dignity which the world enjoined upon him and behind which

he hid the mysteries and abysses of his genius, against the onrushing

tide of civilized humanity--princes, artists, youths, and rustics,

to whom the consciousness of having been vouchsafed one glimpse of

him might gild the rest of their lives; even though the great moment

itself might and often did turn out to be a chilling disappointment.

In much the same way, I say, the little Russian village became,

about 1900, the centre and nodal point, the shrine whose virtue was

such that it drew all the world. The host of pilgrims was even more

colourful, more international, more heterogeneous; for during the

century communications had increased, the world had broadened out.

South Africans, Americans, Japanese, Australians, natives of the Malay

Peninsula, Siberian refugees, and Indian Brahmins, representatives

of all the European nations, scholars, poets, artists, statesmen,

governors, senators, students, military personages, workmen, peasants,

French politicians, journalists of every stripe, from every country

on the globe; and again youth, youth from all over the world. “Who

does not go to him?” asks a Russian writer: “to greet him, to express

sympathy with his ideas, to seek relief from tormenting problems.” And

his biographer Birukov says: “One and all they troop to this village

and then go home to talk about the great words and great thoughts of

the grey old seer who lives there.”

“Great words and great thoughts.” Of course. But it is quite likely

the words and thoughts with which the prophet regaled them were not

always so remarkable. Neither were Goethe’s; out of sheer embarrassment

he might fail to utter great things to those who waited on him. But

it is a question whether people ever went to Weimar or to the village

called “Bright Meadow” for the sake of the great words and thoughts

they might perchance hear, or were led by a much more profound and

elemental craving. I shall be accused of mysticism if I say that the

attraction such shrines possess for all the world, so that men promise

themselves salvation from a visit, is not at all intellectual in its

nature but something else entirely. “Elemental” is the only word for

it. For Goethe’s case, I may quote Wilhelm von Humboldt, who declared,

a few days after the master’s death, that the strangest thing of all

was the way this man had exercised so powerful an influence, without

as it were meaning to at all, unconsciously, unintentionally, by

the mere fact of his existence; this, he says, quite apart from his

intellectual activity as a thinker and poet, and as an outgrowth of

his great and unique personality. Well and good. But, after all, we

use the word “personality” when we want to express an idea which at

bottom escapes definition. Personality is not immediately a matter of

mind or spirit--nor yet of culture. Our conception of it is one which

takes us outside the domain of the rational, into the sphere of the

mystic and elemental, into the _natural_ sphere. “A great nature”--that

is another phrase we use in our effort to find a formula and a symbol

which shall express power streaming forth and drawing the world to

itself. But nature is not spirit; in fact, this antithesis is, I should

say, the greatest of all antitheses. Gorky not only disbelieved in

Tolstoy’s Christian, Buddhistic, Chinese gospel of wisdom, he did not

even believe that Tolstoy believed in it. And yet he gazed at him,

and thought, in amaze: “The man is like God.” It was not spirit, but

nature, moved him to this inward cry. And when the pilgrims trooped to

Weimar and “Bright Meadow” the refreshment and quickening they dimly

hoped for was not of the mind; it was the sight of and contact with

great vital energy, with human nature richly endowed, with the lofty

nobility of a beloved child of God. For one does not need to be a

Spinozist, like Goethe, who had his own good reasons for being one, to

hail the favourites of nature as the favourites of God.

Schiller, great sufferer though he was, was kinder, more human to his

visitors. This we learn for instance from the actor Friederich, who

says he left this glorious poet “more consoled,” after having just

previously taken a chill, to speak figuratively, at an audience on the

Frauenplan. “Goethe’s whole appearance,” he goes on, “seemed measured

and formal. I sought in vain a trait that betrayed the genial creator

of _The Sorrows of Werther_ or _Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre_. You can

imagine how this frigid reception and unfriendly treatment put me off,

it was so contrary to all my expectations. Dearly should I have liked

to say to Goethe: ‘What sort of graven image are you? It is impossible

that you could have written the _Lehrjahre_.’ But I choked it down.”

One is reminded of the Moscow worthy with whom Gorky drove away from

Yasnaya Polyana: who for a long time could not get his breath at all,

only kept ruefully smiling and ejaculating as in a daze: “Well, well,

that was a cold douche! Gracious, but he’s stiff! And I thought he was

an anarchist!” Perhaps, even probably, if it had been Dostoyevsky he

visited, he would have found him more anarchistic--in other words, less

“stiff”--and would have parted from him “more consoled,” as did the

good Friederich from the glorious Schiller, who even let Friederich

recite to him. On the other hand, neither Schiller’s nor Dostoyevsky’s

genius would have turned any odd corner of the earth into a shrine for

pilgrims. Anyhow, neither of them lived long enough for that. They

died too young, they did not reach the patriarchal years of Goethe and

Tolstoy, nature denied them the dignity and consecration of great age,

she did not grant them to be characteristically fruitful throughout

all the stages of the human scene, to live a whole and classic human

life. True, it may be said that the dignity that comes with length

of days has nothing to do with spirit. A greybeard may be stupid and

ordinary; yet men do regard with religious awe his white hair and

wrinkles; his is a natural nobility conferred by length of years--but

natural nobility is probably a pleonasm. Nobility is always natural.

People are not ennobled, that is rubbish; they are noble by birth, on

the ground of their flesh and blood. Nobility then is physical: on the

body and not on the mind all nobility has always laid the greatest

stress. That may explain a certain strain of brutality which has always

been peculiar to human nobility. And is there not something brutal

too, in its way, heathenish, sagalike, in the arrogant way Goethe

sometimes boasted of his vitality, his indestructibility? When he was

eighty-one he said to Soret: “Well, so Sömmering is dead. He was barely

a miserable five-and-seventy years old! What poor things men are, not

to be brave enough to hold out longer than that! On that score I really

must do justice to that highly radical ass my friend Bentham; he is

quite well preserved, and he is a few weeks older than I am myself!”

* * * * *

So Schiller and Dostoyevsky, to get back to them, were not vouchsafed

the ennoblement that comes with length of days. They died comparatively

young. Why? Well, because they were sick men, as everybody knows,

both of them; one consumptive, the other epileptic. But I raise two

questions: First, do we not feel that their illness was deeply founded

in the very being of the two of them, an essential and typical trait of

the kind of men they were? And second, does it not seem that in their

case it is the disease itself that engenders or brings out a nobility

sharply distinguished from that love of self and the autobiographical

pride of birth which is part of its consummate sense of its own ego?

Schiller’s nobility and Dostoyevsky’s nobility mean a quite different

sort of deepening and heightening of their humanity--yes, of their

_humanity_, in view of which does not disease appear precisely as an

aristocratic attribute of heightened humanity? It follows then that the

phrase “natural nobility” is no pleonasm after all; that there does

exist another kind of nobility besides that conferred by nature on her

favoured sons. Clearly there are two ways of heightening and enhancing

human values: one exalts them up to the godlike, and is a gift of

nature’s grace; the other exalts them up to the saintly, by grace of

another power, which stands opposed to her and means emancipation from

her, eternal revolt from her. That other power is the power of the

spirit. But the question which of these two is higher, which kind of

enhancement of human values is the nobler: this it is which I called

the aristocratic problem.

Here, with all due reserve, a little philosophy of disease may not be

out of place. Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and

his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the

physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing

effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about

illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. It may be going too

far to say that disease _is_ spirit, or, which would sound very

tendentious, that spirit is disease. Still, the two conceptions do have

very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a wilful denial and

contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement

from her. Spirit is that which distinguishes from all other forms of

organic life this creature man, this being which is to such a high

degree independent of her and hostile to her. And the question, the

aristocratic problem, is this: is he not by just so much the more man,

the more detached he is from nature--that is to say, the more diseased

he is? For what can disease be, if not disjunction from nature? “_Tut

der Finger dir weh_,” says Hebbel epigrammatically, “_schied er vom

Leibe sich ab,_

_Und die Säfte beginnen, im Gliede gesondert zu kreisen:

Aber so ist auch der Mensch, fürcht’ ich, ein Schmerz nur in Gott._”

Was it not Nietzsche who called man “_das kranke Tier_”? What did he

mean, if not that man is more than beast only in the measure that he

is ailing? In spirit, then, in disease, resides the dignity of man; and

the genius of disease is more human than the genius of health.

You will deny that; you will not agree to have it so. But, in the first

place, disease, as a philosophical term, is by no means a negation

and a condemnation. It is merely a statement, which need be no less

acceptable than the term “health,” there being a nobility of disease

as there is a nobility of health. And, in the second place, may I

remind you that Goethe identified the Schillerian conception of the

“sentimental” with that of disease? After, that is, he had previously

identified the antithesis of “simple and sentimental” with that of

classic and romantic. “The conception of classic and romantic poetry,”

he said one day to Eckermann, “that is abroad today, and making so much

strife and schism, came originally from Schiller and me. My poetical

maxim has been objectivity of treatment, and I wanted it to prevail.

But Schiller, whose method is entirely subjective, thought his way

was right, and wrote the essay on simple and sentimental poetry in

defence of his conception.” Again: “I have thought of a new phrase

which states not too badly the relation between the classic and the

romantic. The classic I call the healthy, the romantic the diseased. If

we distinguish classic and romantic on this basis we shall soon clarify

the situation.”

Here, then, we have an order of things according to which, on the

one hand, the simple, the objective, the sound, and the classic are

identical; and, on the other hand, the “sentimental,” the subjective,

the pathological, the romantic. Thus one might call man the romantic

being, in that he, a spiritual entity, stands outside of and beyond

nature, and in this his emotional separation from her, in this his

double essence of nature and spirit, finds both his own importance

and his own misery. Nature is happy, or she seems so to him. For he,

involved in tragical paradox, is a romantically miserable being.

Does not all our love of our kind rest on a brotherly, sympathetic

recognition of the human being’s well-nigh hopelessly difficult

situation? Yes, there is a patriotism of humanity, and it rests on

this: we love human beings because they have such a hard time--and

because we are one of them ourself!

* * * * *