properly poetical with philosophical qualities, and crown both with a
certain robust sincerity and common sense. The sovereign poet must be
not merely a singer, but also a sage; to passion and music he must add
large ideas; he must extend in width as well as in height; but, besides
this, he must be no dreamer or fanatic, and must be rooted as firmly
in the hard earth as he spreads widely and mounts freely towards the
sky. Goethe, as we have described him, satisfies these conditions, and
as much can be said of no other man of the modern world but Dante and
Shakspeare.
Of this trio each is complete in all the three dimensions. Each feels
deeply, each knows and sees clearly, and each has a stout grasp of
reality. This completeness is what gives them their universal fame, and
makes them interesting in all times and places. Each, however, is less
complete in some directions than in others. Dante though no fanatic,
yet is less rational than so great a man should have been. Shakspeare
wants academic knowledge. Goethe, too, has his defects, but this is
rather the place for dwelling on his peculiar merits. In respect of
influence upon the world, he has for the present the advantage of being
the latest, and therefore the least obsolete and exhausted, of the
three. But he is also essentially much more of a teacher than his two
predecessors. Alone among them he has a system, a theory of life, which
he has thought and worked out for himself.
From Shakspeare, no doubt, the world may learn, and has learnt, much,
yet he professed so little to be a teacher, that he has often been
represented as almost without personality, as a mere undisturbed
mirror, in which all Nature reflects itself. Something like a century
passed before it was perceived that his works deserved to be in a
serious sense studied. Dante was to his countrymen a great example
and source of inspiration, but hardly, perhaps, a great teacher. On
the other hand, Goethe was first to his own nation, and has since
been to the whole world, what he describes his own Chiron, “the noble
pedagogue,”[32] a teacher and wise counsellor on all the most important
subjects. To students in almost every department of literature and art,
to unsettled spirits needing advice for the conduct of life, to the age
itself in a great transition, he offers his word of weighty counsel,
and is an acknowledged authority on a greater number of subjects
than any other man. It is the great point of distinction between him
and Shakspeare that he is so seriously didactic. Like Shakspeare
myriad-minded, he has nothing of that ironic indifference, that
irresponsibility, which has been often attributed to Shakspeare. He
is, indeed, strangely indifferent on many points, which other teachers
count important; but the lessons which he himself considers important,
he teaches over and over again with all the seriousness of one who
is a teacher by vocation. And, as I have said, when we look at his
teaching as a whole, we find that it has unity, that, taken together,
it makes a system, not, indeed in the academic sense, but in the sense
that a great principle or view of life is the root from which all the
special precepts proceed. This has, indeed, been questioned. Friedrich
Schlegel made it a complaint against Goethe, that he had “no centre;”
but a centre he has; only the variety of his subjects and styles is so
great, and he abandons himself to each in turn so completely, that in
his works, as in Nature itself, the unity is much less obvious than the
multiplicity. Now that we have formed some estimate of the magnitude
of his influence, and have also distinguished the stages by which
his genius was developed, and his influence in Germany and the world
diffused, it remains to examine his genius itself, the peculiar way of
thinking, and the fundamental ideas through which he influenced the
world.
Never, perhaps, was a more unfortunate formula invented than when, at
a moment of reaction against his ascendancy, it occurred to some one
to assert that Goethe had talent but not genius. No doubt the talent
is there; perhaps no work in literature exhibits a mastery of so many
literary styles as “Faust.” From the sublime lyric of the prologue,
which astonished Shelley, we pass through scenes in which the problems
of human character are dealt with, scenes in which the supernatural
is brought surprisingly near to real life, scenes of humble life
startlingly vivid, grotesque scenes of devilry, scenes of overwhelming
pathos; then, in the second part, we find an incomparable revival of
the Greek drama, and, at the close, a Dantesque vision of the Christian
heaven. Such versatility in a single work is unrivalled; and the
versatility of which Goethe’s writings, as a whole, gives evidence is
much greater still. But to represent him, on this account, as a sort
of mocking-bird, or ready imitator, is not merely unjust. Even if we
give this representation a flattering turn, and describe him as a being
almost superior to humanity, capable of entering fully into all that
men think and feel, but holding himself independent of it all, such
a being as is described (where, I suppose, Goethe is pointed at) in
the Palace of Art, again, I say, it is not merely unjust. Not merely
Goethe was not such a being, but we may express it more strongly and
say: such a being is precisely what Goethe was not. He had, no doubt,
a great power of entering into foreign literatures; he was, no doubt,
indifferent to many controversies which in England, when we began to
lead him, still raged hotly. But these were characteristic qualities,
not of Goethe personally, but of Germany in the age of Goethe. A sort
of cosmopolitan characterlessness marked the nation, so that Lessing
could say in Goethe’s youth that the character of the Germans was to
have no character. Goethe could not but share in the infirmity, but his
peculiarity was that from the beginning he felt it as an infirmity, and
struggled to overcome it. That unbounded intolerance, that readiness to
allow everything and appreciate every one, which was so marked in the
Germans of that time that it is clearly perceptible in their political
history, and contributed to their humiliation by Napoleon, is just
what is satirized in the delineation of Wilhelm Meister. Jarno says
to Wilhelm, “I am glad to see you out of temper; it would be better
still if you could be for once thoroughly angry.” This sentiment was
often in Goethe’s mouth; so far was he from priding himself upon serene
universal impartiality. Crabbe Robinson heard him say what an annoyance
he felt it to appreciate everything equally and to be able to hate
nothing. He flattered himself at that time that he had a real aversion.
“I hate,” he said, “everything Oriental” (“Eigentlich hasse ich alles
Orientalische”). He goes further in the “West-östlicher Divan,”
where, in enumerating the qualities a poet ought to have, he lays it
down as indispensable that he should hate many things (“Dann zuletzt
ist unerlässlich dass der Dichter _manches hasse_”). True, no doubt
that he found it difficult to hate. An infinite good nature was born
in him, and, besides this, he grew up in a society in which all
established opinions had been shaken, so that for a rational man it
was really difficult to determine what deserved hatred or love. What
is wholly untrue in that view of him, which was so fashionable forty
years ago—“I sit apart holding no form of creed, but contemplating
all”—is that this tolerance was the intentional result of cold pride
or self-sufficiency. He does not seem to me to have been either proud
or unsympathetic, and among the many things of which he might boast,
certainly he would not have included a want of definite opinions—he,
who was never tired of rebuking the Germans for their vagueness, and
who admired young Englishmen expressly because they seemed to know
their own minds, even when they had little mind to know. Distinctness,
character, is what he admires, what through life he struggles for,
what he and Schiller alike chide the Germans for wanting. But he
cannot attain it by a short cut. Narrowness is impossible to him,
not only because his mind is large, but because the German public
in their good-natured tolerance have made themselves familiar with
such vast variety of ideas. He cannot be a John Bull, however much he
may admire John Bull, because he does not live in an island. To have
distinct views he must make a resolute act of choice, since all ideas
have been laid before him, all are familiar to the society in which
he lives. This perplexity, this difficulty of choosing what was good
out of such a heap of opinions, he often expresses: “The people to be
sure are not accustomed to what is best, but then they are so terribly
well-read!”[33] But it is just the struggle he makes for distinctness
that is admirable in him. The breadth, the tolerance, he has in common
with his German contemporaries; what he has to himself is the resolute
determination to arrive at clearness.
Nevertheless, he may seem indifferent even to those whose minds are
less contracted than was the English mind half a century ago, for this
reason, that his aim, though not less serious than that of others, is
not quite the same. He seldom takes a side in the controversies of the
time. You do not find him weighing the claims of Protestantism and
Catholicism, nor following with eager interest the dispute between
orthodoxy and rationalism. Again when all intellectual Germany is
divided between the new philosophy of Kant and the old system, and
later, when varieties show themselves in the new philosophy, when
Fichte and Schelling succeed to the vogue of Kant, Goethe remains
undisturbed by all these changes of opinion. He is almost as little
affected by political controversy. The French Revolution irritates him,
but not so much because it is opposed to his convictions as because it
creates disturbance. Even the War of Liberation cannot rouse him. Was
he not then a quietest? Did he not hold himself aloof, whether in a
proud feeling of superiority or in mere Epicurean indifference, from
all the interests and passions of humanity? If this were the case, or
nearly the case, Goethe would have no claim to rank in the first class
of literature. He might pass for a prodigy of literary expertness and
versatility, but he would attract no lasting interest. Such quietism
in a man upon whom the eyes of a whole nation were bent, could never
be compared to the quietism of Shakspeare, who belonged to the
uninfluential classes, and to whom no one looked for guidance.
But in truth the quietism of Goethe was the effect not of indifference
or of selfishness, but of preoccupation. He had prescribed to himself
in early life a task, and he declined to be drawn aside from it by the
controversies of the time. It was a task worthy of the powers of the
greatest man; it appeared to him, when he devoted himself to it, more
useful and necessary than the special undertakings of theologian or
philosopher. At the outset he might fairly claim to be the only
earnest man in Germany, and might regard the partisans alike of Church
and University as triflers in comparison with himself. The French
Revolution changed the appearance of things. He could not deny that
the political questions opened by that convulsion were of the greatest
importance. But he was now forty years old, and the work of his life
had begun so early, had been planned with so much care and prosecuted
with so much method, that he was less able than many men might have
been to make a new beginning at forty. Hence he was merely disturbed by
the change which inspired so many others, and to the end of his life
continued to look back upon the twenty odd years between the Seven
Years’ War and the Revolution as a golden time, as in a peculiar sense
his own time.[34] The new events disturbed him in his habits without
actually forcing him to form new habits; he found himself able, though
with less comfort, to lead the same sort of life as before; and so he
passed into the Napoleonic period and arrived in time at the year of
liberation, 1813. Then, indeed, his quietism became shocking, and he
felt it so himself; but it was now really too late to abandon a road on
which he had travelled so long, and which he had honestly selected as
the best.
What, then, was this task to which Goethe had so early devoted
himself, and which seemed to him too important to be postponed even
to the exigencies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods? It
was that task about which, since Goethe’s time, so much has been
said—self-culture. “From my boyhood,” says Wilhelm, speaking evidently
for Goethe himself, “it has been my wish and purpose to develop
completely all that is in me.” Elsewhere he says, “to make my own
existence harmonious.” Here is the refined form of selfishness of which
Goethe has been so often accused. And undoubtedly the phrase is one
which will bear a selfish interpretation, just as a Christian may be
selfish when he devotes himself to the salvation of his soul. But in
the one case, as in the other, it is before all things evident that
the task undertaken is very serious, and that the man who undertakes
it must be of a very serious disposition. When, as in Goethe’s case it
is self-planned and self-imposed, such an undertaking is comparable
to those great practical experiments in the conduct of life which
were made by the early Greek philosophers. Right or wrong, such an
experiment can only be imagined by an original man, and can only be
carried into effect by a man of very steadfast will. But we may add
that it is no more necessary to give a selfish interpretation to this
formula than to the other formulæ by which philosophers have tried
to describe the object of a moral life. A harmonious existence does
not necessarily mean an existence passed in selfish enjoyment. Nor is
the pursuit of it necessarily selfish, since the best way to procure
a harmonious existence for others is to find out by an experiment
practised on oneself in what a harmonious existence consists, and by
what methods it may be attained. For the present, at least, let us
content ourselves with remarking that Goethe, who knew his own mind
as well as most people, considered himself to carry disinterestedness
almost to an extreme. What especially struck him in Spinoza, he says,
was the boundless unselfishness that shone out of such sentences as
this, “He who loves God must not require that God should love him
again.” “For,” he continues, “to be unselfish in everything, especially
in love and friendship, was my highest pleasure, my maxim, my
discipline, so that that petulant sentence written latter, ‘If I love
you, what does that matter to you?’ came from my very heart.”
However this may be, when a man, so richly gifted otherwise, displays
the rarest of all manly qualities—viz., the power and persistent will
to make his life systematic, and place all his action under the control
of a principle freely and freshly conceived, he rises at once into the
highest class of men. It is the strenuous energy with which Goethe
enters into the battle of life, and fights there for a victory into
which others may enter, that makes him great, that makes him the
teacher of these later ages, and not some foppish pretension of
being above it all, of seeing through it and despising it. But just
because he conceived the problem in his own manner, and not precisely
as it is conceived by the recognized authorities on the conduct of
life, he could take little interest in the controversies which those
authorities held among themselves, and therefore passed for indifferent
to the problem itself. He did not admit that the question was to form
an opinion as to the conditions of the life after death, though he
himself hoped for such a future life, for he wanted rather rightly to
understand and to deal with the present life; nor did he want what is
called in the schools a philosophy, remarking probably that the most
approved professors of philosophy lived after all much in the same way
as other people. It seemed to him that he was more earnest than either
the theologians or the philosophers, just because he disregarded their
disputes and grappled directly with the question which they under
various pretexts evaded—how to make existence satisfactory.
He grasps it in the rough unceremonious manner of one who means
business, and also in the manner which Rousseau had made fashionable.
We have desires given us by God or Nature, convertible terms to him;
these desires are meant to receive satisfaction, for the world is not
a stupid place, and the Maker of the world is not stupid. This notion
that human life is not a stupid affair, and that the fault must be ours
if it seems so, that for everything wrong there must be a remedy,[35]
is a sort of fundamental axiom with him, as it is with most moral
reformers. Even when he has death before his mind he still protests.
“‘He is no more!’ Ridiculous! Why ‘no more?’ ‘It is all over.’ What
can be the meaning of that? Then it might as well never have existed.
Give me rather an eternal void.” And this way of thinking brings him at
once, or so he thinks, into direct conflict with the reigning system
of morality, which is founded not on the satisfaction, but on the
mortification of desire. He declares war against the doctrine of
self-denial or abstinence. “Abstain, abstain!—that is the eternal
song that rings in every ear. In the morning I awake in horror, and am
tempted to shed bitter tears at the sight of day, which in its course
will not gratify one wish, not one single wish.” So speaks Faust, and
Goethe ratifies it in his own person, when he complains that, “we are
not allowed to develop what we have in us, and are denied what is
necessary to supply our deficiencies; robbed of what we have won by
labor or has been allowed us by kindness, and find ourselves compelled,
before we can form a clear opinion about it to give up our personality,
at first in instalments, but at last completely; also that we are
expected to make a more delighted face over the cup the more bitter it
tastes, lest the unconcerned spectator should be affronted by any thing
like a grimace.” He adds that this system is grounded on the maxim
that “All is vanity,” a maxim which characteristically he pronounces
false and blasphemous. That “all is _not_ vanity” is indeed almost the
substance of Goethe’s philosophy. “His faith,” so he tells the Houri
who, at the gate of Paradise, requires him to prove his orthodoxy, “has
always been that the world, whichever way it rolls, is a thing to love,
a thing to be thankful for.”[36]
This doctrine again, is not in itself or necessarily a doctrine of
selfishness, though it may easily be represented so. It may be true
that all virtue requires self-denial; but for that very reason we may
easily conceive a system of senseless and aimless self-denial setting
itself up in the place of virtue. It is not every kind of self-denial
that Goethe has in view, but the particular kind by which he has found
himself hampered. His indignation is not moved when he sees absistence
practised in order to attain some great end; it is the abstinence which
leads to nothing and aims at nothing that provokes him. He has given
two striking dramatic pictures of it. There is Faust, who cannot
tolerate the emptiness of his secluded life; but does it appear that he
rebels against it simply because it brings no pleasure to himself, even
though it confers benefit upon others and upon the world? The burden
of his complaint is that his abstinence does no good to anybody, that
the studies for which he foregoes pleasure lead to no real knowledge;
and expressly to make this clear, Goethe introduces the story of the
plague, which Faust and his father had tried to cure by a drug, which
did infinitely more harm than the plague itself. The other picture is
that of Brother Martin in “Götz,” the young monk who envies Götz his
life so full of movement and emotion, while he is himself miserable
under the restraint of his vows. Here, again, the complaint is that no
good comes of such abstinence. The life of self-denial is conceived as
an utter stagnation, unhealthy even from a moral point of view. It is
contrasted with a life not of luxury, but of strenuous energy, at once
wholesome and useful to the world.
So far, then, Goethe’s position is identical with that which
Protestants take up against monasticism, when they maintain that
powers were given to be used, desires implanted in order that they
might be satisfied. He does not, any more than they, assert that
when some great end is in view it may not be nobler to mortify
the desire than to indulge it. But he applies the principle more
consistently, and to a greater number of cases than they had applied
it. Not against celibacy or useless self-torture only, but against
all omission to satisfy desire, against all sluggishness or apathy
in enjoyment—understood always that no special end is to be gained
by the self-denial—he protests. In his poem, called the “General
Confession” (“Generalbeichte”) he calls his followers to repent of the
sin of having often let slip an opportunity of enjoyment, and makes
them solemnly resolve not to be guilty of such sins in future. Here, at
least, the reader may say, selfishness is openly preached; and perhaps
this is the interpretation most commonly put upon the poem. Yet it is
certainly unjust to pervert in this way an intentional paradox, and, in
fact, in that very poem Goethe introduces the most elevated utterance
of his philosophy; for the vow which the penitents are required to
take is that they will “wean themselves from half-measures and live
resolutely in the Whole, in the _Good_, and the Beautiful!” Goethe, in
short, holds, as many other philosophers have done, that an elevated
morality may be based on the idea of pleasure not less than on the idea
of duty.
This principle, not new in itself, led to very new and important
results when it was taken up not by a mere reasoner but by a man of
the most various gifts and of the greatest energy. By “pleasure”
or “satisfaction of desire” is usually meant something obvious,
something passive, merely a supply of agreeable sensations to each of
the five senses. In Goethe’s mouth the word takes quite a different
meaning. He cannot conceive pleasure without energetic action, and
the most necessary of all pleasures to him is that of imaginative
creation. The desires, again, for which he claims satisfaction—what
are they? Chief among them is the desire to enter into the secret of
the universe, to recognize “what it is which holds the world together
within.” Such desires as these might be satisfied, such pleasures
enjoyed, without any very culpable self-indulgence. And existence
would be satisfactory, or, as he calls it, harmonious, if it offered
continually and habitually food for desire so understood, which is
almost the same thing as capacity. But there are hindrances. The chief
of these is the supposition of self denial. Of course every practical
man knows that self-denial of a certain kind must be constantly
practised in life. The small object must be foregone for the sake of
the greater, the immediate pleasure for the sake of the remote, nay,
the personal pleasure for the sake of the pleasure which is generous
and sympathetic. But the timid superstition which sets up self-denial,
divorced from all rational ends, as a thing good and right in itself,
which makes us afraid of enjoyment as such, this is the chief
hindrance, and against this Goethe launches his chief work “Faust.”
There is another hindrance, less obvious and needing to be dealt with
in another way, which Goethe therefore attacks usually in prose rather
than in poetry.