the question of nobility, the matter of rank. But I am wary of hasty
decisions, and even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to
my policy of the free hand and my faith in its ultimate fruitfulness.
Why should I not be a cautious judge of the swaying battle, when I know
that what I called above the arrogance of spirit is one with that great
and highly affecting principle which we call freedom?
Schiller’s loftiest boast is the freedom of the singer. But Goethe’s
attitude toward the conception of freedom is at all times cautious, not
only in the political field, but consistently, fundamentally, and in
every connexion. Of Schiller he says: “In his latter years, when he had
had enough of freedom in a physical sense, he went over to it in the
realm of the ideal, and I might almost say that it killed him; for it
caused him to make demands on his physical powers that were altogether
too much for them. I have great respect for the categorical imperative,
I know how much good can come of it; but one must not carry it too far,
for then this idea of the ideal freedom certainly leads to no good.”--I
confess that this habit of using Schiller’s heroic life to point a
warning against exaggerations in the use of the categorical imperative
has always made me smile. To confront the moral with the natural is
always humorous. But in other places where this child of God expresses
himself about heroes and saints his words have quite a different ring
and bear witness frankly and sincerely to the nobility of spirit. He
declared one day that he passed for an aristocrat, but that Schiller
was at bottom much more of a one than he. The remark bears directly
upon the problem of aristocracy: certainly not in the political
field, nor yet to the fact that Schiller had spoken of the “eternally
blind,” to whom one must not lend Heaven’s torches of light; no, it
has immediate reference to the aristocracy of spirit, which Goethe was
at the moment comparing with his own, the aristocracy of nature, and
finding it the more lofty of the two. “Nothing disturbed him,” he says
admiringly, “nothing constrained him, nothing distracted the flight of
his thoughts. He was as great at the tea-table as he would have been
in the council-chamber.” This admiring wonder rises from the depths of
Goethe’s Antæus-nature, which had no consciousness at all of a freedom
like that, of such independence and unrestraint. Rather he knew himself
to be constantly conditioned by a hundred circumstances; influenced,
obligated, willingly indeed, with a certain pride in his earth-bound
aristocracy, yet influenced and obligated none the less. Pantheistic
necessity was the fundamental feeling of his existence. It is not
enough to say he did not believe in the freedom of the will. He denied
the conception, he denied that such a thing was even conceivable. “We
belong to the laws of nature,” he says, “even when we rebel against
them; we are working with her, even when we work against her.” That
dæmonic determinism of his whole being was often felt by others. They
said he was possessed, and not able to act voluntarily. His earth-bound
state manifested itself, for instance, in such sensitiveness to weather
that he called himself a regular barometer. And we may not take it that
he felt his dependence, which amounted to compulsion, as personally
lowering, or that his will had ever rebelled against it. The will is
the spirit: nature is by way of being mild and easy-going. Thus the
aristocrat in bondage may feel a noble pride as he bends the knee
to the dark power to which he belongs and which guides him so well;
and yet be capable, as Goethe’s case shows at least, of a gesture of
elegant homage before the aristocracy of freedom. “_Denn hinter ihm_,”
says Goethe in the Epilogue to _The Bell_, with reference to Schiller:
_Denn hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine._
Truly this is homage which breathes a spirit of the most profound
resignation. For what _is_ “_das Gemeine_”? Nothing else than the
natural, from the point of view of spirit and of freedom. For freedom
is spirit; it is release from nature, rebellion against her; it is
humanity conceived as emancipation from the natural and its bondage,
this emancipation being the thing that is actually human and worthy
of humanity. Here we see the question of aristocracy flowing together
with that of human dignity. Which is finer, which worthier of humanity,
freedom or bonds, self-will or submission, the moral or the natural?
If I refuse to answer, it is in the conviction that this question can
never be answered with finality.
But, on the other hand, the moral “sentimentalist” can be no
“sentimentalist” at all if he does not on his side display an even
livelier and profounder eagerness to pay homage to the aristocracy
which is of nature. Unquestionably there is a certain charming humility
in the attitude of spirit toward nature, a delicate readiness, often
quite unrequited, to pay her respect, which is one of the greatest
and most touching phenomena of the higher life. Dostoyevsky read
Tolstoy’s early work _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_ in Siberia, in the
periodical called _The Contemporary_, and was so taken with it that he
inquired on all sides after the anonymous author. “Calm, deep, clear,
yet unfathomable as nature is unfathomable, that is the impression it
leaves,” he writes. “There it is, and everything, even the smallest
detail, shows the beautiful unity of the temperament from which it
flows.”--No, these are not Dostoyevsky’s words, though they might
have been. It is Schiller who writes thus, about _Wilhelm Meister_,
in that letter in which, for the first time, he apostrophizes Goethe
as “Dearest Friend”: an emotional form of address, in which, so far
as I know, Goethe never explicitly acquiesced. Dostoyevsky wrote
the profoundest and most loving of all existing critiques of _Anna
Karenine_; a masterpiece of enthusiastic exposition, which Tolstoy,
perhaps, never even read (he never did read criticisms of his works),
to say nothing of his ever feeling impelled to write reviews of
anything by Dostoyevsky. When Feodor Michaelovich died, Tolstoy is
said to have said: “I loved that man very much.” But his consciousness
of the fact came a little late in the day; for while Dostoyevsky was
alive Tolstoy never troubled his head about him; while afterwards, in
a letter to Strachof, Dostoyevsky’s biographer, he compared him with
a horse, who seemed a splendid creature and worth a thousand roubles,
until suddenly he went lame, and then the fine strong animal was not
worth a groschen. “The longer I live,” he said, “the more I think of
men who are not lame.” But this horse-philosophy, as applied to the
author of _The Brothers Karamazof_ does not seem quite happy, to put it
mildly.
We know, and we rejoice to know, that in the case of Goethe and
Schiller nature’s attitude to spirit was altogether more brotherly
and dignified, and on a higher plane. But if Goethe played here too
the part of Hatem, the richly bestowing and receiving one, he did not
after all take from the dear friend more than he gave him, to say
nothing of all he gave by virtue of his mere existence, unconsciously,
involuntarily. Was not Schiller’s part in the relationship, after all,
that of service? I think so, myself, simply because it lies in the
nature of the thing, because Schiller did not in the least need, to
keep him fruitful, the meed of praise, love, inspiration, which he
bestowed upon Goethe. And I note that such a letter as his famous first
one, which knit the bond between them, in which with kindly hand he
“gave the sum” of Goethe’s life, he never did get from Goethe in return.
One utterance of Schiller’s to Goethe has always delighted me, it seems
to characterize the relationship so wonderfully. I mean the passage
in a letter where he warns Goethe against Kant, his own spiritual
master and his idol. Goethe, he tells him, can only be a Spinozan; his
beautiful simple nature would be at once vitiated by contact with a
philosophy of freedom. It is no more and no less than the problem of
irony which we catch sight of here: without exception the profoundest
and most fascinating in the world. For we see here that nothing is
more foreign to spirit than a desire to convert nature to itself.
It warns nature against itself. To the moral “sentimentalist,” all
that is nature seems beautiful and highly worth preserving. Knowledge
feels that life is beautiful; and this is the feeling of the moral
for the simple, of the holy for the divine, of nature for spirit; and
in this peculiarly absolute judgment of values resides the ironic
god, resides Eros. Spirit accordingly enters into a relationship with
nature which is in a sense erotic, in a sense determined by male-female
sex-polarity. And by virtue of the relation it can venture to abase
itself and dare the ultimate self-surrender, without thereby resigning
any of its own nobility. Indeed, it will always retain the accent of a
certain tender contempt. In Hölderlin’s lines precisely this emotional
irony is immortalized:
_Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste,
Hohe Tugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt,
Und es neigen die Weisen
Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich._
On the other hand, this simple nature too has an ironic mood, which
is one with the objectivity of its character and precisely coincides
with the conception of poetry, inasmuch as it lifts itself above
its subject, above joy and grief, good and bad, death and life, to
play freely with them. Goethe speaks of this mood in _Dichtung und
Wahrheit_, with reference to Herder.
It is plain that what kept Goethe apart from Schiller so long was,
more than anything else, the latter’s prepossessions on the subject
of freedom: his conception of human dignity, which was entirely based
on the dictatorship of spirit--that is, was entirely revolutionary in
character--which conceived in this emancipated sense all humanity, all
nobility, all human nobility--and that, to a nature like Goethe’s,
must have seemed both odious and insulting to nature. It is, for
instance, certain _a priori_ that Goethe took the greatest umbrage at
the famous essay _Über Anmut und Würde_. In it occur things like the
following: “Movements which have as principle only animal sensuousness
belong only, however voluntary we may suppose them to be, to physical
nature, which never reaches of itself to grace. If it were possible to
have grace in the manifestations of physical appetites and instincts,
grace would no longer be either capable or worthy to serve as the
expression of humanity.” That one might describe as idealistic malice
of spirit against nature, and so Goethe must have regarded it. For it
is audacious to assert that grace cannot come out of the sensuous, nor
nature reach to grace. Grace, then, is not a manifestation worthy of
humanity; for that desire can express itself with charm, and instinct
with grace, is a “charming” fact of experience. And when Schiller goes
on to say: “Grace is a beauty not given by nature, but produced by
the subject itself ... it is the beauty of form under the influence
of free will; it is the beauty of those particular phenomena which
the person himself determines. The architectonic beauty does honour
to the author of nature; grace does honour to him who possesses it.
That is a gift, this is a personal merit”--the moral distinction
he draws between talent and personal merit becomes a consummate
affront to Goethe’s vital consciousness and his aristocratic feeling.
“Fools never think,” says Goethe, “how fortune and merit are linked
together.” What he means by “fortune” is what Schiller calls “nature”
and “talent,” and distinguishes from free human merit. While Goethe,
half-maliciously, half-paradoxically going about to deprive the
word “merit” of the moralistic flavour that clings to it, likes to
talk about “inborn merit.” Everybody is free to call this a logical
contradiction. But there are cases where logic is confronted by a
metaphysical certainty higher than itself; and Goethe, who on the
whole was certainly no metaphysician, undoubtedly felt the problem of
freedom to be a metaphysical one. That is to say, an undemonstrable
intuition told him that freedom, and therewith merit and demerit, were
not a matter of the empirical but of the intelligible world; that, to
speak with Schopenhauer, freedom does not consist in _operari_ but in
_esse_. Herein lies the humbleness of his aristocracy, the aristocracy
of his humility; both of them so categorically opposed to Schiller’s
idealistic evaluations, his personal and moral pride in his freedom.
Goethe, when he wants to characterize the principle which composes his
essential nature, speaks humbly and gratefully of a “gift of fortune.”
But the conception of a “gift,” of “grace,” is more aristocratic than
one might think. What it means is the indissoluble union of fortune and
merit, a synthesis of freedom and necessity, in short “inborn merit”;
and the gratitude, the humility, carry with them that metaphysical
consciousness of being at all times and absolutely certain of the
favour of destiny.
There is, in Goethe’s case, an amazing bit of evidence on this point,
which I cannot refrain from quoting. Speaking of Bentham, he says it
is the height of madness for the man, at his age, to be so radical. He
is answered that if His Excellence had been born in England he could
hardly have escaped being a radical and reformer. Whereat Goethe, with
Mephistophelian mien: “What do you take me for? You think I would be
spying out abuses and tacking names on to them? I, who if I had been
born in England would have been living on abuses? If I had been born
in England I should have been a duke, or better still a bishop with
revenues of thirty thousand pounds sterling.”--“Very fine. But suppose
Your Excellence had not drawn the big prize in the lottery; suppose you
had drawn a blank?” To which Goethe: “Not everybody, my dear friend,
is _made for the big prize_. Do you think I should have played such a
foolish trick (_sottise_) as to draw a blank?”
All that, of course, is in jest. But is it only in jest? Does it
not rather voice that deep metaphysical certainty that never and
under no circumstances should he or could he be other than favoured
and privileged, ever other than well-born? And in this certainty is
there not after all something like a consciousness of freedom of the
will, if only of freedom after the event? Really, it is priceless.
To be born into the world a starving revolutionary, an idealistic
“sentimentalist,” that he calls a _sottise_. Is that the irony the
children of God wreak on the children of spirit? If there be such a
thing as inborn merit, then there is inborn demerit as well; and if
it is a _sottise_ to come into the world an average man, or poor, or
sick, or stupid, then the criminal is indeed not only empirically but
metaphysically culpable. For merit and reward, guilt and punishment,
are conceptions that belong together. And one punishment at least,
all those merit who have committed the _sottise_ of drawing a blank
in life’s lottery: that of eternal destruction; whereas the chosen
ones get eternal life too at the end. “_Wer keinen Namen sich erwarb,
noch Edles will, gehört den Elementen an; so fahret hin!_” But as the
possibility of nobly aspiring and achieving a name is not a matter
of empirical freedom of the will, this “_so fahret hin_” is a piece
of gross heartlessness. And if the conception of election by grace,
to which that of metaphysical depravity corresponds, is a Christian
conception, at any rate it shows Christianity turning its aristocratic
side outwards.
* * * * *
I said awhile back that it seemed to me not accidental that Schiller
and Dostoyevsky were sick men and did not, like Goethe and Tolstoy,
arrive at a reverend length of days. Rather I was inclined to regard
their poor health as fundamental to their characters. Quite as symbolic
is the further external fact, that the two great realists and creative
artists were of upper station, born to a privileged social status,
whereas the heroes and saints of the idea, Schiller and Dostoyevsky,
one the son of a Swabian army surgeon and the other of a Moscow
hospital physician, were the children of modest people and spent all
their days in pinched and homely, one might almost say undignified
circumstances. I call this biographical fact symbolic, because it
testifies to the Christianity of the spirit, whose kingdom, as the
Scriptures say, is not of this world--in personalities as little as
in the realm of the ideal and the artistic. Wherein it opposes a
perpetual contrast to the kingdom of nature and nature’s favourites,
whose rank and essence are quite and entirely “of this world,” the
physical, pagan world. Therein lies their “realism.” And they were,
both Tolstoy and Goethe, realists enough to feel a naïve enjoyment in
their privileged status, yes, in a sort to lay stress upon it and show
themselves imbued by a consciousness of it; which would impress one as
curiously unenlightened were it not plain that they themselves regard
it in a symbolic sense and even rather childishly assimilate it in
their own minds to their consciousness of their higher, extra-social,
human aristocracy. Goethe’s patrician birth was so dear to him that his
patent of nobility, when he had it in his hands, meant “nothing, simply
nothing.” “We Frankfort patricians,” he said, “always felt ourselves
like nobility.” But in the same conversation and connexion, by way of
refuting a slur upon himself as the obsequious servant of royalty, he
puts it thus: “Yes, I felt so much at ease (_so wohl in meiner Haut_),
and so very much the aristocrat, that if they had made me a prince
it would not have surprised me.” I may say in passing that it would
have become him to be a prince. Had he taken up Napoleon’s invitation
to transfer his activity to Paris, had he written there the _Cæsar_
Napoleon wanted him to write, in which he need only have given vent
to the hatred he had felt as a youth for the “base, the contemptible
murder,” the Emperor would certainly have made him a prince, as by his
own account he would have done for Corneille as well. My point is to
show how, in Goethe’s mind, the consciousness of his social position
lay very close to that of his nobility as a human being, as a child
of God. The two flow together in one and the same consciousness of
nobility, or “inborn merit.”
Count Leo Tolstoy came, as we know, from one of the oldest and finest
of Russian families. When we read his books, _Childhood, Boyhood,
Youth_, or _Anna Karenine_, that picture of high life in Moscow, we
are impressed with the fact that the author is a man who was brought
up with all the advantages. We get the same feeling when we read
_Dichtung und Wahrheit_ or _Die Wahlverwandtschaften_. And in Tolstoy
too we find the same familiar and perhaps childish phenomenon we
noticed in Goethe: his noble blood and the distinction conferred
by his great gifts both belonged to him quite simply because they
belonged to him, and his consciousness of them mingled in his joy in
himself, of which, despite all his attacks of poverty of spirit, he
possessed a very great deal. His fame as a writer, so he wrote to
his father-in-law, delights him very much; he finds it most pleasant
to be an author _and_ a nobleman. An author and a nobleman--all his
Christianity, all his anarchism, to the contrary and notwithstanding,
he never ceased to be a striking combination of those two. When
Turgeniev first made the acquaintance of the youthful Tolstoy he said:
“Not a word, not a gesture of his is natural. He is constantly posing;
it is a mystery to me how such a sensible man can take such childish
pride in his silly title.” This is the same Turgeniev who wrote to a
French publisher: “I am not worthy to untie his shoe-laces”; so it
is unlikely that the first-quoted remark misrepresents the facts. As
for the aged Tolstoy, Gorky relates: “His comfortable, democratic
manner took many people in; and I have often seen Russians, who judge
people by their clothes, gush over him with their famous ‘simplicity
of manner,’ which might better be called ‘beastly familiarity.’ And
suddenly, from under his peasant beard, and his rumpled democratic
blouse, the old Russian _Barin_, the aristocrat of aristocrats, would
peep forth; and in the chill that emanated from him the confiding
visitor’s nose would be frost-bitten. It was a joy to see this
blue-blooded creature: the noble charm of his gestures, the haughty
reticence of his speech, the murderous and fastidious sharpness of
his tongue. He displayed just so much of the _Barin_ as these servile
souls needed to see; when they roused the _Barin_ in Tolstoy it came
easy and natural and overwhelmed them so that they shrivelled up
and whined.”--The blue noses call up memories of Weimar, chilling
memories of receptions and formal calls--only that Goethe was never
malicious enough to put on the democratic pose; and his most frigid
manner concealed more love than Tolstoy ever felt--Tolstoy, whose
last and most frightful secret Turgeniev’s penetrating mind laid
bare: it was that Tolstoy could love nobody but himself! But it was a
“joy,” in Gorky’s sense of the word, to see Tolstoy for instance at
the Petrov yearly fair, whither he drove from his estate in Samara in
the seventies. His charm made him very popular in the merry whirl of
peasants, Cossacks, Bashkirs, and Kirghiz. Even with drunken folk,
we are told, he did not hesitate to strike up a conversation. And
then came the following quiet and characteristic little episode. A
drunken peasant, in his excess of feeling, wanted to embrace Tolstoy.
But one stern and expressive look from Leo Nikolaevich’s eyes met the
man and sobered him in a twinkling. He dropped his hands of himself,
and said: “No? Well, all right, then.” What was there in that look to
make it have such an arresting, quenching, sobering effect? Was it the
consciousness of the _Barin_? Or of the great author? In such a case it
is quite impossible to distinguish between them--as little objectively
as doubtless it was subjectively.
“When Leo Nikolaevich wanted to please,” Gorky tells us, “he could do
it better than a pretty and clever woman. Imagine a crowd of all sorts
of people sitting in his room: the Grand Duke Nicholai Michailovich,
the house-painter Ilya, a social-democrat from Jalta, a musician, a
German, the poet Bulgakov, and so on; they all look at him with the
same enamoured eyes, while he expounds to them the doctrine of Lao
Tse.... I used to look at him just like the others. And now I long to
look at him once more--and I shall never see him again.”--One thing
is obvious: it was _not_ the doctrine of Lao Tse which brought that
lovelorn look into all their eyes. The teaching would have roused very
scant general interest but for the expounder. But that look in every
eye is the very same that Karl August had in mind when he passed on to
Goethe the greetings sent by Napoleon on the Emperor’s way back from
Russia: “You see,” he added, “heaven and hell are both making eyes at
you.”