All transcendentalists are preoccupied with the self, but not all
are egotists. Some regard as a sad disability this limitation of
their knowledge to what they have created; they are humble, and
almost ashamed to be human, and to possess a mind that must cut them
off hopelessly from all reality. On the other hand there are many
instinctive egotists who are not transcendentalists, either because
their attention has not been called to this system, or because they
discredit all speculation, or because they see clearly that the senses
and the intellect, far from cutting us off from the real things that
surround us, have the function of adjusting our action to them and
informing our mind about them. Such an instinctive egotist does not
allege that he creates the world by willing and thinking it, yet he is
more interested in his own sensations, fancies, and preferences than
in the other things in the world. The attention he bestows on things
seems to him to bathe in light their truly interesting side. What he
chiefly considers is his own experience--what he [Pg 44] cared
for first, what second, what he thinks to-day, what he will probably
think to-morrow, what friends he has had, and how they have lost
their charm, what religions he has believed in, and in general what
contributions the universe has made to him and he to the universe. His
interest in personality need not be confined to his own; he may have a
dramatic imagination, and may assign their appropriate personality to
all other people; every situation he hears of or invents may prompt him
to conceive the thrilling passions and pungent thoughts of some _alter
ego_, in whom latent sides of his own nature may be richly expressed.
And impersonal things, too, may fascinate him, when he feels that they
stir his genius fruitfully; and he will be the more ready to scatter
his favours broadcast in that what concerns him is not any particular
truth or person (things which might prove jealous and exclusive), but
rather the exercise of his own powers of universal sympathy.
Something of this sort seems to appear in Goethe; and although his
contact with philosophical egotism was but slight, and some of his wise
maxims are incompatible with it, yet his romanticism, his feeling for
development in everything, his private life, the nebulous character of
his religion, and some of his most important works, like _Faust_ and
_Wilhelm Meister_, are all so full of the spirit of German [Pg 45]
philosophy, that it would be a pity not to draw some illustration for
our subject from so pleasant a source.
There are hints of egotism in Goethe, but in Goethe there are hints of
everything, and it would be easy to gather an imposing mass of evidence
to the effect that he was not like the transcendentalists, but far
superior to them. For one thing he was many-sided, not encyclopædic; he
went out to greet the variety of things, he did not pack it together.
He did not even arrange the phases of his experience (as he did those
of Faust) in an order supposed to be a progress, although, as the
commentators on _Faust_ inform us, not a progress in mere goodness.
Hegel might have _understood_ all these moral attitudes, and described
them in a way not meant to appear satirical; but he would have
criticised and demolished them, and declared them obsolete--all
but the one at which he happened to stop. Goethe _loved_ them all;
he hated to outgrow them, and if involuntarily he did so, at least
he still honoured the feelings that he had lost. He kept his old age
genial and green by that perennial love. In order to hold his head
above water and be at peace in his own heart, he did not need to be a
Christian, a pagan, or an epicurean; yet he lent himself unreservedly,
in imagination, to Christianity, paganism, and sensuality--three
things [Pg 46] your transcendental egotist can never stomach: each in
its way would impugn his self-sufficiency.
Nevertheless the sympathies of Goethe were only romantic or æsthetic;
they were based on finding in others an interesting variation from
himself, an exotic possibility, rather than an identity with himself in
thought or in fate. Christianity was an atmosphere necessary to certain
figures, that of Gretchen, for instance, who would have been frankly
vulgar without it; paganism was a learned masque, in which one could be
at once distinguished and emancipated; and sensuality was a sentimental
and scientific licence in which the free mind might indulge in due
season. The sympathy Goethe felt with things was that of a lordly
observer, a traveller, a connoisseur, a philanderer; it was egotistical
sympathy.
Nothing, for instance, was more romantic in Goethe than his classicism.
His _Iphigenie_ and his _Helena_ and his whole view of antiquity were
full of the pathos of distance. That pompous sweetness, that intense
moderation, that moral somnambulism were too intentional; and Goethe
felt it himself. In _Faust_, after Helen has evaporated, he makes
the hero revisit his native mountains and revert to the thought of
Gretchen. It is a wise home-coming, because that craze for classicism
which Helen symbolised alienated the mind from real life and led [Pg
47] only to hopeless imitations and lackadaisical poses. Gretchen's
garden, even the _Walpurgisnacht_, was in truth more classical. This
is only another way of saying that in the attempt to be Greek the
truly classical was missed even by Goethe, since the truly classical
is not foreign to anybody. It is precisely that part of tradition
and art which does not alienate us from our own life or from nature,
but reveals them in all their depth and nakedness, freed from the
fashions and hypocrisies of time and place. The effort to reproduce
the peculiarities of antiquity is a proof that we are not its natural
heirs, that we do not continue antiquity instinctively. People can
mimic only what they have not absorbed. They reconstruct and turn into
an archæological masquerade only what strikes them as outlandish. The
genuine inheritors of a religion or an art never dream of reviving it;
its antique accidents do not interest them, and its eternal substance
they possess by nature.
The Germans are not in this position in regard to the ancients. Whether
sympathetic like Goethe, or disparaging like Burckhardt, or both
at once, like Hegel, they have seen in antiquity its local colour,
its mannerisms, its documents, and above all its contrasts with the
present. It was not so while the traditions of antiquity were still
living and [Pg 48] authoritative. But the moderns, and especially the
Germans, have not a humble mind. They do not go to school with the
Greeks unfeignedly, as if Greek wisdom might possibly be true wisdom,
a pure expression of experience and reason, valid essentially for us.
They prefer to take that wisdom for a phase of sentiment, of course
outgrown, but still enabling them to reconstruct learnedly the image of
a fascinating past. This is what they call giving vitality to classical
studies, turning them into _Kulturgeschichte_. This is a vitality lent
by the living to the dead, not one drawn by the young and immature from
a perennial fountain. In truth classical studies were vital only so
long as they were still authoritative morally and set the standard for
letters and life. They became otiose and pedantic when they began to
serve merely to recover a dead past in its trivial detail, and to make
us grow sentimental over its remoteness, its beauty, and its ruins.
How much freer and surer was Goethe's hand when it touched the cord of
romanticism! How perfectly he knew the heart of the romantic egotist!
The romantic egotist sets no particular limits to the range of his
interests and sympathies; his programme, indeed, is to absorb the
whole world. He is no wounded and disappointed creature, like Byron,
that takes to sulking and naughtiness because things [Pg 49] taste
bitter in his mouth. He finds good and evil equally digestible. The
personal egotism of Byron or of Musset after all was humble; it knew
how weak it was in the universe. But absolute egotism in Goethe, as in
Emerson, summoned all nature to minister to the self: all nature, if
not actually compelled to this service by a human creative fiat, could
at least be won over to it by the engaging heroism of her favourite
child. In his warm pantheistic way Goethe felt the swarming universal
life about him; he had no thought of dragooning it all, as sectarians
and nationalists would, into vindicating some particular creed or
nation. Yet that fertile and impartial universe left each life free and
in uncensored competition with every other life. Each creature might
feed blamelessly on all the others and become, if it could, the focus
and epitome of the world. The development of self was the only duty, if
only the self was developed widely and securely enough, with insight,
calmness, and godlike irresponsibility.
Goethe exhibited this principle in practice more plainly, perhaps,
than in theory. His family, his friends, his feelings were so many
stepping-stones in his moral career; he expanded as he left them
behind. His love-affairs were means to the fuller realisation of
himself. Not that his love-affairs were sensual or his infidelities
callous; far from it. They [Pg 50] often stirred him deeply and
unsealed the springs of poetry in his heart; that was precisely their
function. Every tender passion opened before him a primrose path into
which his inexorable genius led him to wander. If in passing he must
tread down some flower, that was a great sorrow to him; but perhaps
that very sorrow and his inevitable remorse were the most needful and
precious elements in the experience. Every pathetic sweetheart in
turn was a sort of Belgium to him; he violated her neutrality with a
sigh; his heart bled for her innocent sufferings, and he never said
afterwards in self-defence, like the German Chancellor, that she was
no better than she should be. But he must press on. His beckoning
destiny, the claims of his spiritual growth, compelled him to sacrifice
her and to sacrifice his own lacerated feelings on the altar of duty
to his infinite self. Indeed, so truly supreme was this vocation that
universal nature too, he thought, was bound to do herself some violence
in his behalf and to grant him an immortal life, that so noble a
process of self-expansion might go on for ever.
Goethe's perfect insight into the ways of romantic egotism appears
also in _Faust_, and not least in the latter parts of it, which are
curiously prophetic. If the hero of that poem has a somewhat incoherent
character, soft, wayward, emotional, yet at the same [Pg 51] time
stubborn and indomitable, that circumstance only renders him the fitter
vehicle for absolute Will, a metaphysical entity whose business is to
be vigorous and endlessly energetic while remaining perfectly plastic.
Faust was at first a scholar, fervid and grubbing, but so confused
and impatient that he gave up science for magic. Notwithstanding
the shams of professional people which offended him, a private and
candid science was possible, which might have brought him intellectual
satisfaction; and the fact would not have escaped him if he had been a
simple lover of truth. But absolute Will cannot be restricted to any
single interest, much less to the pursuit of a frigid truth in which
it cannot believe; for the Will would not be absolute if it recognised
any truth which it had to discover; it can recognise and love only the
truth that it makes. Its method of procedure, we are told, consists in
first throwing out certain assumptions, such perhaps as that everything
must have a cause or that life and progress must be everlasting; and
the truth is then whatever conforms to these assumptions. But since
evidently these assumptions might be utterly false, it is clear that
what interests absolute Will is not truth at all, but only orthodoxy.
A delightful illustration of this is given by Faust when, emulating
Luther for a moment, he undertakes to translate the [Pg 52] first
verse of Saint John--that being the Gospel that impresses him
most favourably. The point is not prosaically to discover what the
Evangelist meant, but rather what he must and shall have meant. _The
Word_ will never do; _the Sense_ would be somewhat better; but _In the
beginning was Force_ would have even more to recommend it. Suddenly,
however, what absolute Will demands flashes upon him, and he writes
down contentedly: _In the beginning was the Deed_:
Auf einmal seh' ich Rat
Und schreibe getrost: Im Anfang war die That!
Yet even in this exciting form, the life of thought cannot hold him
long. He aches to escape from it; not that his knowledge of the
sciences, as well as his magic, will not accompany him through life;
he will not lose his acquired art nor his habit of reflection, and in
this sense his career is really a progress, in that his experience
accumulates; but the living interest is always something new. He turns
to miscellaneous adventures, not excluding love; from that he passes to
imperial politics, a sad mess, thence to sentimental classicism, rather
an unreality, and finally to war, to public works, to trade, to piracy,
to colonisation, and to clearing his acquired estates of tiresome
old natives, who insist on ringing church bells and are impervious
to the new _Kultur_. These public [Pg 53] enterprises he finds more
satisfying, perhaps only because he dies in the midst of them.
Are these hints of romantic egotism in Goethe mere echoes of his youth
and of the ambient philosophy, echoes which he would have rejected if
confronted with them in an abstract and doctrinal form, as he rejected
the system of Fichte? Would he not have judged Schopenhauer more
kindly? Above all, what would he have thought of Nietzsche, his own
wild disciple? No doubt he would have wished to buttress and qualify in
a thousand ways that faith in absolute Will which they emphasised so
exclusively, Schopenhauer in metaphysics and Nietzsche in morals. But
the same faith was a deep element in his own genius, as in that of his
country, and he would hardly have disowned it.
[Pg 54] CHAPTER V