owed them far too much of his culture. The words are only right and
proper. But (just as in Tolstoy’s case) the fun begins directly it
is a question of his nature, of that pre-intellectual fundamental
constitution we were talking about, which had its own ways of finding
expression, and which is so extraordinarily un-French that it might
well be described as pre-eminently German. It would be wrong to bring
in evidence here his coldness towards “freedom.” For in the first
place the principle of order (_ordre_) is something just as French
and classic and rationalist as the principle of freedom, which on
party grounds is set over against it. And in the second, there is
nothing un-German about freedom. We know with what éclat Goethe cited
Guizot’s dictum that Germany gave the idea of personal freedom to
the world. But there is in Goethe something that rebels against the
idea, against the doctrinaire and theoretic; a lack of faith that
the particular, existing under definite conditions, could ever be
improved by the method of abstraction; a realism, that is, and a
scepticism, in matters political, which one may as well call un-French
as particularly German--taking France as the country of revolution and
Germany as the country of a certain national weakness for the living,
historically conditioned, “organic.” We must remember that he was a
practical politician, he had governed Saxe-Weimar. But the practical
sphere is not kind to the soul; it is a training in cynicism, as many a
politician has found out, even in France, where more than one radical
has become a conservative and turned the guns on the people after he
came to power. Perhaps Goethe might have been more generous-minded,
politically speaking, if he had not lost his idealism in the practical
field. But this too is unlikely, since from the very beginning he
was insensitive to historical democracy, to history defined as the
evolution of the idea in the masses; he was fundamentally unacquainted
with enthusiasm for political ideas, and in general conceived of
history as the biography of great men--an aristocratism which is as
different from Schiller’s high-flung democratic gesture as it is from
the Christian-moujik disparagement of heroes in _War and Peace_.
It would be foolish to think of him as servile, despite the anecdote
about Beethoven and the imperial company on the promenade at Karlsbad.
His subservience to princes was purely mundane in its character,
wherever no personal friendship came in play. When in 1794 Freiherr
von Gagern published his challenge to the intelligence of Germany, and
to Goethe in particular, to put its pen at the service of the “good,”
that is to say, the conservative cause--no other than that of a new
alliance of German princes for the purpose of saving the country from
anarchy--Goethe, after thanking him politely for the confidence reposed
in him, made the characteristic reply that he considered it impossible
for princes and writers to unite upon a common task. Notwithstanding
which, we need waste no words over his strictly negative attitude
toward the French Revolution.
On the intellectual side, his view of humanity was a cynical one--that
is to say, it was radically sceptical. But we know that this was on
the intellectual side alone, from the fact that it did not prevent him
from loving his fellow-men. We have his confession that the mere sight
of the human countenance could cure him of the blues. What he did not
believe in was drawing up articles and holding love-feasts. We shall
never know whether Hegel was mocking or spoke in honest enthusiasm
when he said: “As long as the sun has stood in the firmament and the
planets circled round it, it has never been seen that a human being
stands on his head--i.e., on his understanding--and bases reality
upon it.” Whether jest or earnest, it was this that revolted Goethe.
He judged it to be entirely against nature to try to insist that
the whole of mankind find just one choice of means, just one route
toward civic happiness. Upon which I may comment as follows: that,
in the first place, one such utterance, by virtue of its strongly
nationalist, individualist, aristocratic emphasis, outweighs the whole
burden of his indifference toward the War of Liberation, and that
surely he who uttered it was only prevented by his admiration for the
genius of Napoleon--likewise aristocratic in its origin--from seeing
in the _Imperator_ the standard-bearer of precisely this democratic
“insistency.” But, in the second place, we must admit that he had a
right to set up as an advocate of nature. To quote again:
_Franztum drängt in unsern verworrenen Tagen, wie einstmals
Luthertum es getan, ruhige Bildung zurück._
(Driven by the spirit of France in our troublous days, as aforetime
By the spirit of Luther oppressed, quiet culture retreats.)
What a telling synthesis this, of France and Luther; how unprejudiced
by national feeling! It is all one to him whether the unrest, the
distraction, come from this side or that of the Rhine. No matter
whence it comes, it is his enemy, the enemy of nature and culture,
of the _ruhige Bildung_ which is at the bottom of his idea of
humanity. The distich shows clearly--shows it despite all _Lust
am Protestieren_--where he would have stood, say, in the sixteenth
century. In the name of that lofty conception of _Bildung_, in
which nature and culture unite, he would have been for Rome against
the Reformation--or else he would have taken up an ambiguous and
irresponsible position, as Erasmus did, of whom Luther said that repose
was dearer to him than the Cross. “The Cross”--a couple of centuries
later, that was the Revolution. Revolution was the spirit--and to
Goethe his _ruhige Bildung_ was dearer.
Here, for a moment, Erasmus and Goethe meet, in an atmosphere of
patrician quietism, humanistic love of peace. But the parallel does
not long hold--there is too much difference in the scale, and, after
all, men’s character, the essence of their being, is greatly affected
by their proportions. Tolstoy’s “folkishness,” for instance--is it not
the expression and apanage of his bearlike bulk? Are they not one and
the same thing? And may we not draw from Goethe’s greatness the _a
priori_ conclusion that his humanistic cosmopolitanism must contain a
good-sized racial core? Erasmus, the subtle, was not “folkish.” It was
Luther who was that. And truly, in scale, in essence, as an embodiment
of Germanic greatness, Goethe belongs more with Luther than with the
humanists--yes, more even with Bismarck, to whom he is much closer than
a certain antithesis, beloved abroad, would seem to show.
Dangerous, perhaps, to say so--as giving aid and comfort to the
cave-bears of nationalism the world over--but sometimes it is hard
not to feel sceptical about the genuineness and validity of Goethe’s
humanism. A godlike man, like Tolstoy. But is it possible that the
antique, humanistic, Jovelike attributes of his godhead were more a
convention than we think; that they did not go very deep, and that he
himself, all the time, like Tolstoy, the Russian god under the golden
lime-tree, was an ethnic divinity, an eruption of that Germanic and
aristocratic paganism which claims both Luther and Bismarck as its
sons, and which, on both sides, played a rôle in the ideology of the
late war?
An open hostility, against Goethe as well as against Bismarck, is at
work in certain literary, humane, and radical circles, a demand for
his dethronement. It cannot be without all sense or justification.
Goethe, as a follower of Spinoza, conceived of all natural final causes
and purposes as anthropomorphic fictions; thus he was disinclined
to an anthropocentric, emancipatory conception of humanity, which
teleologically refers everything to itself and looks upon art
as a servant of mankind. His synthesis of art and nature is not
humanitarian. An approach by the route of the senses is natural to him:
it makes him see the burning of a peasant house as real and appealing
to his sympathies, whereas “the Fall of the Fatherland” he would find
an empty phrase. All which, frankly and flippantly spoken, is never
very far removed from the brute.
There is in him a feeling for power, for the struggle “until one proves
stronger than the other”; in such sentiments the pacifism of spirit
would find it impossible to rejoice. It “makes him sad to be friends
with everybody.” He “needs anger.” Certainly, that is not Christian
love of peace--though Lutheran it may be, and Bismarckian to boot.
One might say much--and much has been said--in evidence of his love of
strife, his fondness for “pitching in and punishing,” his readiness
to close the mouth of opposed opinions by a show of power and to
“remove such people from society.” But best of all I love--if here too
only because it is so amusing--the tale of Kotzebue and the Schiller
celebration which Kotzebue got up with the sole and single purpose of
annoying Goethe and playing Schiller off against him. That low-minded
Kotzebue! He _knows_ that the plan will annoy the old man; he also
knows that Goethe can forbid the celebration by virtue of his office.
So he puts the choice squarely before him: he can forbid it, and
thereby betray his jealousy and despotism; or, if he hesitates to go so
far, he can pocket up the annoyance. With majestic simplicity Goethe
chooses to exercise his power. He _forbids the celebration_. Bismarck
would have done the same.
In the soul-economy of this breed of giants are certain parallel
traits. There is violence and there is sentimentality: crude words
both to describe what I mean, crude and naturalistically derogatory;
yet it is my humour to use them; for even if I wanted to I could not
ignore the hidden irony--quite objective, quite unsuspected irony,
of course--involved in their gigantic loyalties, their aristocratic
servitude. They were both “faithful German servants of their Lord” (oh,
my God!): the “civilian Wallenstein” and the despot of _Kultur_; they
were German “_Edelknechte_” both; and there was nothing hypocritical
about it all, only their giant-sensibilities functioning at full
height. The similarity of the character and situation is so strong
as to bewilder one: Karl August and the simple old man whom Bismarck
“served” blend into one single symbolic figure. In the year 1825 he of
Saxe-Weimar celebrated the fiftieth jubilee of his reign, which was at
the same time the fiftieth year of Goethe’s residence in Weimar. On
this day Goethe calls himself “his master’s most enraptured servant.”
He is the first with his congratulations, at six o’clock at the Roman
villa in the park. The emotion is great and genuine. “Together to our
latest breath!” We see the venerable Wilhelm going to meet Bismarck on
the landing with just such another embrace; while a fugitive red mounts
in the cheeks of Roderich von Posa, who turns away with the words: “I
cannot be a courtier!”
I confessed in the beginning my tendency to make a matter of intrinsic
value out of the matter of size. The greatest German poet must
also be the most German one--that is an association more immediate
and inevitable than even the causal, it is temporal, it is simply
the future tense. And it was sanctioned by a source which will be
universally accepted as authoritative. It was Father Jahn, who, _motu
proprio_, in the year 1810 declared that Goethe was the most German of
poets--quite unperturbed by the fact that Goethe behaved at all times
as distantly and unsympathetically toward _deutsche Bruderschaften_
as Tolstoy toward Slavic. And then, in 1813, when he had very nearly
succeeded in bringing himself into bad odour as a man without a
country, Barnhagen von Ense cried out: “Goethe not a patriotic German?
All the freedom of Germania early found a home in his breast, there
to become, to our never-sufficiently-to-be-acknowledged advantage,
the pattern, the example, and the root of our culture. In the shade
of this tree we all live and move. Never did roots thrust firmer and
deeper into the soul of our Fatherland, never did shoots more lustily
suck strength from its breast. That our youth feel pride in their arms,
loftiness in their spirits, hath more reference to him than to many
another who may lay claim to great activity therein.”
Good, fine, powerful words. They proceed from the truth that in
national matters very little depends on what a man says or the opinions
he holds; on what he does, on the other hand, everything. When a man
has written _Götz_, _Faust_, _Wilhelm Meister_, the _Sprüche in Reimen_
and _Hermann und Dorothea_--a poem which Schlegel honoured with the
epithet “_vaterländisch_”--he can indulge in a bit of cosmopolitan
irresponsibility, just as the “great writer of Russia” could indulge
in the rationalizing Christian pacifism of his latter period. The
national is so much second nature that one may address oneself to the
mind without running the risk of literary unrealism; and as nature
Goethe always felt the national--we see it, among others, in the famous
remark to Eckermann: “National hatred is a queer thing after all. You
will always find it keenest and most violent _in the lowest stages
of culture_. But there is a stage where it quite disappears, and one
stands in a way above the nations and feels the well- or ill-being of
a neighbouring people as though it were one’s own. This stage was
conformable to my nature, and I had confirmed myself in it long before
I reached my sixtieth year.”
Spiritual regeneration. This summons to achieve the spirit is the
sentimental imperative of the favourites of nature; just as that
of the sons of spirit is the summons to achieve the form. And they
respond to it--with more or less of aptitude. Tolstoy’s self-imposed
task of shaking off the natural man was but spiritualizing the savage;
yet a touching and honourable sight, even alongside of Goethe’s
majestic culture. The main thing is that nothing should come too easy.
Effortless nature--that is crude. Effortless spirit is without root--or
substance. A lofty encounter of nature and spirit as they mutually
yearn toward each other--that is man.
* * * * *
Gorky says of Tolstoy a quite extraordinary and startling thing: he
suggests the possibility that Tolstoy, despite the strength of his
reason, sometimes hoped, or at least the thought occurred to him,
that possibly nature would make an exception, and grant him physical
immortality. “The whole broad earth looks toward him: from China, from
India, from America, from everywhere stretch hither living, vibrating
threads, his soul is for all and for always. Why should not nature
break her law, and grant one man physical immortality--why not?” What
madness! But even if it is not true, even if the sensible old man
never came on such a monstrously presumptuous thought--even so, it is
very telling that Gorky should have come on it for him. It shows what
seemed to a competent observer to be Tolstoy’s relation to nature and
life.--And Goethe? Is it likely that the grey-haired lover of Fraulein
von Levetzof never rebelled against the limitations of human life, as
Napoleon did at the limitations of human power, when he complained that
men had become unbelievers, unwilling to acknowledge him a god, as they
had his brother Alexander? Shall we imagine him utterly incapable of
the thought which Gorky ascribes to the old Tolstoy: that nature might
conceivably hesitate to destroy him, her darling son, as she did all
ordinary humankind?
Yet die he did, without warning, at the age of eighty-three. Nature, as
it were, tenderly got round him. He had been ailing; he settled down
in his arm-chair for a rest and a nap, and he was gone. The passage
in which Eckermann describes the appearance of the corpse is famous.
“The body lay naked, folded in a white sheet; they had put large
pieces of ice round, to keep it fresh as long as possible. Friedrich
(the servant) unwrapped the sheet, and I was astounded at the godlike
splendour of those limbs. The chest exceedingly powerful, broad and
deep; the arms and thighs full and gently muscular; the feet slender
and very chaste in form; and nowhere on the body a trace of fat or
shrinking or decay. A perfect human being lay in great beauty there
before me; and the delight I felt made me forget for a moment that the
immortal spirit had forsaken such a frame.”
Let there be no misunderstanding. Nobody asserts that Goethe and
Tolstoy were, so to speak, four-square; that by contrast with the
morbid geniuses Schiller and Dostoyevsky they were “normal” in the
common acceptation of the word. Even the genius most endowed by nature
is never natural in the philistine sense; that is to say, normal,
healthy, and according to rule. In his physical there must always be
something high-strung and irritable, prone to crises and disease, in
his psychical always something foreign to the average man, affecting
him uncannily--something almost psychopathic; though the philistine
must not be allowed to put it like that.... No; what I refer to here
is that _sense-endowment_ possessed by the noble race of Antæus
and celebrated by Goethe’s Faust in the words he addresses to the
Earth-Spirit:
_Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich,
Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu geniessen. Nicht
Kalt staunenden Besuch erlaubst du nur,
Vergönnest mir, in ihre tiefe Brust
Wie in den Busen eines Freunds, zu schauen_....
“Power to feel and to enjoy nature.” Tolstoy’s sense-endowment, as an
individual, must have been that of a noble, highly sensitive animal,
most perfectly equipped by nature and strengthened and sublimated
by the contemplative power and awareness of the human being. His
eyes, the small, keen grey eyes under the bushy brows, were like
a falcon’s. They saw everything. They were capable of analysis so
penetrating as sometimes to seem fantastic. A critic once wrote
of him: “You are sometimes capable of saying ‘such and such things
about the constitution of a certain man indicated that he wanted
to travel to India.’” His sense of smell, it seems, was especially
penetrating. The fact plays no small part in the sensuous atmosphere
of his writing, and appears to have conflicted at times with his own
human feeling. “However much I dislike to speak of it,” he says in
his _Recollections_, “I can still remember the characteristic sharp
odour which was personal to my aunt, probably in consequence of some
carelessness in dress.”
I have already spoken of Goethe’s sensitiveness to weather conditions.
It was due to his almost exaggerated sense-endowment; and became
positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar he felt the
earthquake of Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment which enables
them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The
animal in us transcends; and all transcendence is animal. The highly
irritable sense-equipment of a man who is nature’s familiar goes beyond
the bounds of the actual senses and issues in the suprasensual, in
natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and proudly
justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His
mood was sometimes priapic--a thing which of course does not happen
with Tolstoy, in whose nature the element of antique culture was
missing. In him the voice of sexual desire spoke in no classic accents;
it revelled Russianly in its strength; yet at the same time it always
had a moral cast, was at all times followed, probably even accompanied,
by profound remorse. Tolstoy’s comrades from his Sebastopol period
bear witness to the fury with which even at that time the battle
between sensual and spiritual impulses raged within him. According to
them young Count Tolstoy was a glorious comrade, the life and soul of
his battery, overflowing with high spirits. When he was away, they
were disconsolate. “We would hear nothing of him,” says the narrator,
“for a whole day, for two or three days. At last he would come back,
the very picture of the prodigal son; gloomy, knocked up, out of sorts
with himself. He would take me aside and begin to confess. He confessed
everything, simply everything, his gambling, his carousing, where he
had spent his days and nights--and, would you believe it, his remorse
and suffering were as deep as though he had committed some great crime.
His despair went so beyond all bounds that it was painful to behold.
That was the sort of man he was. He was, in a word, very remarkable,
and, to tell the truth, I never did quite understand him.”
That we can well believe. The remorse and suffering to which the young
officer was a witness sprang of course from that conflict within
Tolstoy’s own breast which afterwards gave him such unrivalled power
to stir the conscience and prick man’s fear of God awake. But the
depth of his moral necessity is a precise measure of the violence of
his instincts; and though his natural man bore heavier and heavier on
his Christianity as time went on, so that he craved surcease from its
stings, yet he never, up till the end, attained to peace. Tolstoy in
sex matters held out as long as Goethe, who mocked himself thus:
_Alter, hörst du noch nicht auf?
Immer, Mädchen!_
But his state of mind toward woman, whom he had early learned to
regard, after the manner of the Fathers, as _instrumentum diaboli_, had
long since assumed such a form that an experience like that of Goethe
with Ulrike was unthinkable. Stranger still--or no, in a man of his
parts and magnificence it is only what we should expect--we find not
a trace of cant or prudishness or even delicacy in all his recorded
utterances on this subject. On the contrary, they are all of a pagan
frankness that borders on the cynical. He goes walking by the sea with
Gorky and Anton Tschekof, and suddenly he levels at Tschekof a question
about the latter’s youth, using a crude Biblical word with rather
startling effect. Anton Pavlovich is confused; he pulls at his little
beard and mutters something in reply. The old man lets him stammer
awhile, then, looking out to sea, delivers himself in four words, of a
confession of his own, in good round terms, ending with a very low and
vulgar peasant word. “When they come from his rugged lips,” says Gorky,
“words like that lose their barrack-room flavour and sound quite simple
and natural.”
Again, he says: “If Leo Nikolaevich were a natural scientist, he
would certainly evolve the most ingenious hypotheses, and make the
greatest discoveries.” Gorky has not here in mind Tolstoy’s remarkable
sense-equipment; but I am inclined to associate the two ideas. Nor,
it would appear, has he Goethe in mind when he ascribes to Tolstoy a
latent genius for the natural sciences; but I have. To me it seems a
pertinent fact that Goethe, in Venice--this was in 1790, at the time
of those amorous adventures celebrated in the _Epigrams_--saw a broken
sheep-skull on the Lido, and had that morphological insight into the
development of all the bones of the skull out of the vertebræ which
shed such important illumination upon the metamorphosis of the animal
body. When Gorky says that Tolstoy, if he had gone in for it, would
have made brilliant discoveries in the field of natural science, there
can be no doubt of his meaning. He has in mind that initiated sympathy
with organic life which those must possess who are her favoured sons--a
sympathy not far from Eros, and in which Goethe’s biologic intuitions
have their source; for example, his incredibly sure-footed anticipation
of the cell theory.