POLITICS IS FATE
We come now to one of the great intellects of modern times, a genius who
made the culture of Germany known to the rest of the world. He is cited,
along with Shakespeare, as an illustration of how great art holds itself
aloof from propaganda; so it will be worth our while to study him
carefully, and see how he lived and voiced the aristocratic ideals of
his age.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in Frankfort, his father being a wealthy
lawyer. Through his eighty-three years of life he never knew a moment’s
inconvenience or waste of time from poverty. He was sent to the
university, but was not interested in the study of law, which his father
tried to force upon him; he studied the things he cared for, and
incidentally gave himself to a life of pleasure, so that he came home at
the age of nineteen with a severe hemorrhage.
It was the period of “Storm and Stress” in German literature; Rousseau
and his wicked “Romanticism” had crossed the Rhine, and here was all the
youth of Germany revolting against writing poetry in French; they
insisted upon dealing with German heroes and experiencing unrestrained
German emotions. Goethe was reading Shakespeare; and, spurning the
classical forms, he wrote a drama about Goetz von Berlichingen, a
medieval German knight who was big and bold and turbulent. This made
Goethe a hero of the new insurgency. Also he wrote a story entitled “The
Sorrows of Werther,” about a young man who yearned agonizingly for the
wife of his friend, and finally committed suicide. Goethe himself did
not commit suicide, but lived to regret these youthful extravagances.
He fell in love more than once in these tumultuous days, his experience
being exactly the opposite to that of Beethoven; it was the poet who was
aristocratic and prudent, and it was the girl who suffered. Goethe had a
fear of marriage, because it would interfere with his genius; but it is
worth noting that the course he adopted brought him a great deal of
unhappiness and waste of time.
At the age of twenty-six his destiny was decided by a meeting with the
young Duke of Weimar. The duke was twenty, and conceived an intense
admiration for the poet, and besought him to come and live at his court.
To tempt him, and to keep him there, he gave him a beautiful home,
together with some acres of land for a garden, and made him a state
councilor with a salary, and before long gave him a title, enabling him
to put the magic word “von” before his name. Thus Goethe became a court
writer and a court man. You may call him the greatest of court writers
and the most dignified of court men; nevertheless, there is a whole
universe of difference between such a life, and that of an outsider and
rebel like Beethoven.
The only trace of his youthful revolt which Goethe kept was in matters
having to do with himself. He saved part of his time for his work, he
took to traveling to get away from court functions, and in his later
years, secure in his fame and power, he withdrew into his own home, and
the court had to come to him. Thus he maintained the dignity of the
intellectual man; but in his art ideals he became a strong conservative;
and as for political and social ideals, he solved the problem by having
nothing to do with them.
It would be easy to make Goethe less attractive, by mentioning that the
court lady who became his mistress for the next ten years had a husband
somewhere in the background. But that would not be fair, because it was
the custom of the time, and nobody in court saw anything wrong with
adultery. But when Goethe, somewhere around the age of forty, fell very
much in love with a daughter of the people and made her his mistress,
court circles were shocked; they were still more shocked, when, after
she had borne him a son, he brought her to his home; they were
speechless, when in the end he married her. She justified their worst
expectations by turning into a drunkard; and that was hard for a very
dignified and reserved man of letters.
Goethe traveled to Italy, and fell in love with the classical ideal of
art, and wrote an imitation Greek play. Coming back to Weimar, he took
up court duties, including the organizing of a fire brigade and going to
war. The French revolution had come, and King Louis of France was a
prisoner, together with his beautiful Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette,
who had asked why the people did not eat cake if they could not get
bread. The sovereigns of Europe hastened to rescue this brilliant wit,
and to overthrow the monster of revolution. Goethe’s duke went along,
with Goethe in his train. The poet showed his attitude toward the whole
matter by writing a musical comedy while at the training camp, and
gathering botanical specimens during the fighting.
This attitude he explained by saying that he had to shut his eyes to the
events of his time, because otherwise he would have been driven mad. And
I admit that it was painful to see the movement for freedom run wild in
the Terror, and to see it betrayed by Napoleon, and to see the French
people lured into a war of conquest, so that Voltaire’s “l’Infame” was
able to pose as a champion of national freedom, and thus to rivet its
power upon the peoples once again. But why did these things happen? It
was because men of genius and intellect had been indifferent to the
misery of the French people, their degradation and enslavement. It was
because when the people did rise and throw off their tyrants, there were
so few voices to explain the meaning of this event, and to defend the
revolution’s right to be. When Goethe went out with his duke, and lent
the sanction of his name to the counter revolution, it was he who was
making inevitable the Terror, it was he who was delivering the
revolution to Napoleon. Bloodshed and misery overwhelmed Europe for
twenty-five years; and Goethe, by withdrawing to his study and occupying
himself with poetry and scientific research, encouraged the worst
weakness of German philosophy and letters--the tendency to lull itself
with high-sounding, abstract words, while the real life of the nation
goes to the devil.
Reality broke in harshly enough upon this poet. Sixteen years after his
military foray into France, the tables were turned, and Napoleon’s
cannon-balls came tumbling through the beautiful gardens at Weimar. Here
were French troopers, flushed with the victory of Jena, pillaging the
town, robbing the poet of both his wine and his money, and threatening
to kill him in his bed. Two years later came the peace negotiations, and
the poet lent his presence to balls and fetes, and was summoned to an
audience with the master of Europe. He was then fifty-nine years old, a
world genius, and Napoleon was thirty-nine years old, a world conqueror;
the older man went, and permitted himself to be inspected by the
younger. Goethe had a handsome presence, and Napoleon was pleased. “You
are a man!” he exclaimed. “How old are you?” he demanded; and then: “You
are very well preserved”--as if this were a Grecian scholar being
purchased as a slave by a Roman proconsul!
“You have written tragedies?” demanded Napoleon; and a courtier hastened
to mention that the poet had written several--also he had translated
Voltaire’s tragedy, “Mahomet.” “It is not a good piece,” said Napoleon,
and went on to disapprove of dramas in which fate played a part, “What
are they talking about with their fate? La politique est la fatalité.”
Here was an utterance that Goethe might well have applied through all
the rest of his life. I could take it as a motto for this book.
“Politics is fate!” Hardly could one pack more wisdom into five words of
French or three of English!
But Goethe chose to keep his salary and position in the court, and to
overlook the power of organized society over the individual soul. When
the time came for the German people to revolt against Napoleon he had no
word of encouragement--quite the contrary, he pronounced it folly. Nor
had he any word of protest against the cruelties of the Holy Alliance.
Yet, see the inconsistency! His greatest work is “Faust,” a study of the
problem of duty and happiness. Faust tries pleasure, he tries learning
for learning’s sake, and it brings him nothing. In the end he accepts
useful service as the only ideal, and the draining of swamps and
cultivating of land as a moral occupation. But what is the use of such
work, if statesmen are permitted to make war, and to destroy in a few
hours all that generations have built up? You may believe in
aristocratic politics or in democratic politics; but how can you believe
in the possibility of human happiness without wisdom in statesmen?
There is a better side to Goethe, which must not be overlooked. He was
magnanimous, open-minded, and a friend to all men of genius. He met the
poet Schiller, ten years younger than himself, ill in health and
struggling with cruel poverty. Schiller was a poet of freedom, and
stayed that to the end of his life. His first successful drama was “The
Robbers,” a glorification of revolt against medieval tyranny; his last
was “William Tell,” whose hero set Switzerland free from the Austrian
yoke. The fact that Schiller was of humble origin made no difference to
Goethe; he brought the young poet to Weimar, and got him a pension from
the duke, and became his intimate friend.
And that was the best thing that happened in Goethe’s life, for Schiller
with his fine sincerity and idealism drove the older man to work. We are
accustomed to see these two great names coupled together, and the
critics point out that Schiller was the enthusiast, the “propagandist,”
while Goethe, the serene Olympian temperament, was the greater poet. The
critics do not mention that Schiller had to waste most of his life doing
wretched hack work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-six. If
Goethe, with all his leisure and independence, had died at that age, his
greatest work would have been lost.
Can anyone deny that we get a world view from the writings of Goethe;
that he has definite conclusions as to every aspect of human life? Can
anyone deny that his dramas and his novels, even his lyric poems, are
saturated with philosophy? It so happens that his point of view is that
which has been accepted by tradition and critical authority through all
the ages; therefore it slides down easily, it does not taste like
medicine, and we do not think of it as propaganda.
What is this point of view? The world is a place of blind and generally
aimless strife, and scholars and men of genius are powerless to control
it, and can only keep out of its way. “Renounce,” said Goethe; and what
is the first of all things you must renounce? Manifestly, the dream that
you can manage your own time. Live simply, develop your highest
faculties, leave a message and an example to the world; and somehow, at
some future date--you do not attempt to say when or how--this message
and this example may take effect, and truth and justice and mercy may
prevail. Meantime, since you must live, and since the ruling classes own
all the means of life, you must be polite to them, you must fit yourself
into their ways, you must be a gentleman, a courtier, a man of property.
Thus by your example and daily practice you become a prop to the
established order; and by the automatic operation of economic forces you
become less and less tolerant of all rebels and disturbers of the peace.
Because you know only the wealthy and the noble, you come to deal with
them exclusively in your art works, you interpret their feelings, and
behold life from their point of view. All critics unite in declaring
that this is Reality, this is Nature, this is Art; while to object to
this, and voice any other point of view, is Idealism, Preaching, and
Propaganda.