seeks is not passive enjoyment, but an occupation, a pursuit adapted
to his inborn capacities. It follows that a principal condition of
happiness is a just self-knowledge. He will be happy, who knows what
he wants and what he can do. Here again Goethe gives importance
to a doctrine which in itself is obvious enough by the persistent
energy with which he applies it. He has been himself bewildered by
the multiplicity of his own tastes and aptitudes. He has wanted to
do everything in turn, and he has found himself capable to a certain
extent of doing everything. Hence the question—What is my true
vocation? has been to him exceptionally difficult. In studying it
he has become aware of the numberless illusions and misconceptions
which hide from most men the true nature of their own aptitudes, and
therefore the path of their happiness. He finds that the circumstances
of childhood, and especially our system of education, which “excites
wishes, instead of awakening tastes,” have the effect of creating a
multitude of unreal ambitions, deceptive impulses and semblances of
aptitudes. He finds that most men have been more or less misled by
these illusions, have more or less mistaken their true vocation, and
therefore missed their true happiness. On this subject he has collected
a vast mass of observations, and, in fact, added a new chapter to
practical morality. This is the subject of “Wilhelm Meister,” not
the most attractive nor the most perfect, but perhaps the most
characteristic, of Goethe’s works and, as it were, the text-book
of the Goethian philosophy. It is said not to be widely popular in
Germany. Most English readers lay it down bewildered, wondering what
Goethe’s admirers can see in it so extraordinary, and astonished at
the indifference to what we have agreed to call morality—that is, the
part of morality that concerns the relations of the sexes—which reigns
throughout it. I shall touch on this latter point later. Meanwhile, let
me remark, that few books have had a deeper influence upon modern
literature than this famous novel. It is the first important instance
of a novel which deals principally and on a large scale with opinions
or views of life. How Wilhelm mistook his vocation, and how this
mistake led to many others; how a secret society, the Society of the
Tower, taught a doctrine on the subject of vocations, and of the
method by which men are to be assisted in discovering their true
vocations; how Wilhelm is assisted and by what stages he arrives at
clearness—this is the subject of a long and elaborate narrative. It
is throughout most seriously instructive; it is seldom very amusing;
and we may add that the moral of the story is not brought out with very
convincing distinctness. But it has been the model upon which the novel
of the present day is formed. Written twenty years before the Waverley
Novels, which are in the opposite extreme, since they make no serious
attempt to teach anything and dwell upon everything which Goethe
disregards, adventure, surprise, costume, it began to produce its
effect among us when the influence of the Waverley Novel was exhausted.
The idea now prevalent, which gives to the novel a practical as well
as an artistic side, the idea which prompts us, when we wish to preach
any kind of social or moral reform, to write a novel about it, seems to
have made way chiefly through Goethe’s authority.
But the substance of “Wilhelm Meister” is even more important than the
form. It presents the whole subject of morality under a new light, and
as in this respect it is only the fullest of a number of utterances
to the same effect made by Goethe, it can never be fully appreciated
when it is considered by itself, but must be judged in the closest
connection with his other works and with his life. Every attempt to
treat such a subject as morality in an original manner has something
alarming about it. Such attempts ought to be laid only before minds
strong enough to consider them calmly, and yet of necessity they
come to the knowledge of “the weak brethren,” who are frightened
or unsettled by them. Moreover, such attempts are always likely to
be one-sided. As it is usually an intense perception of something
overlooked into the orthodox morality that prompts them, the innovator
is apt to be hurried into the opposite extreme, and to overlook in his
turn what the orthodox morality has taught rightly. Goethe laid himself
open to the charge of immorality. “Wilhelm Meister” was received
with horror by the religious world; it was, if I remember right,
publicly burnt by Count Stolberg. In England, Wordsworth spoke of it
with disgust, and it still remains the book which chiefly justifies
the profound distrust and aversion with which Goethe has been and is
regarded among those who are Christian either in the dogmatic or in the
larger sense. Not unnaturally it must be confessed.
But I do seriously submit that Christians should learn to be less timid
than they are. In their absorbing anxiety for “the weaker brethren”
they often seem to run the risk of becoming “weak brethren” themselves.
We ought not to come to the consideration of moral questions under the
influence of panic and nervous fright. It is true that few books seem
at first sight more directly opposed than “Wilhelm Meister” to that
practical Christianity which we love to think of as beyond controversy,
that spirit which, as it breathes from almost all Christian churches
and sects alike, strikes us as undoubtedly the essential part of
religion. At first sight the book seems secular, heathenish in an
extraordinary degree. Let us, then, if we will, warn young people
away from it; but let us ask ourselves at the same time how a man so
gifted, so serious and also so good natured—for there is no appearance
of rancor in the book, which even contains a picture, tenderly and
pleasingly drawn, of Christian pietism—could come to take a view so
different from that commonly accepted of questions about which we are
all so anxious. Such a course may lead us to see mistakes made by
modern Christianity, which may have led Goethe also into mistakes by
reaction; whereas the other course, of simply averting our eyes in
horror, can lead to no good.
We may distinguish between the positive and the negative part of this
moral scheme. All that “Wilhelm Meister” contains on the subject of
vocations seems valuable, and the prominence which he gives to the
subject is immensely important. In considering how human life should be
ordered, Goethe begins with the fact that each man has an occupation,
which fills most of his time. It seems to him, therefore, the principal
problem to secure that this occupation should be not only worthy, but
suited to the capacity of the individual and pursued in a serious
spirit. What can be more simple and obvious? And yet, if we reflect, we
shall see that moralists have not usually taken this simple view, and
that in the accepted morality this whole class of questions is little
considered. Duties to this person and to that, to men, to women, to
dependents, to the poor, to the State—these are considered; but the
greatest of all duties, that of choosing one’s occupation rightly, is
overlooked. And yet it is the greatest of duties, because on it depend
the usefulness and effectiveness of the man’s life considered as a
whole, and, at the same time, his own peace of mind, or, as Goethe
calls it, his inward harmony. Nevertheless, it is so much overlooked
that in ordinary views of life all moral interest is, as it were,
concentrated upon the hours of leisure. The occupation is treated as a
matter of course, a necessary routine about which little can be said.
True life is regarded as beginning when work is over. In work men may
no doubt be honest or dishonest, energetic or slothful, persevering or
desultory, successful or unsuccessful, but that is all; it is only in
leisure that they can be interesting, highly moral, amiable, poetical.
Such a view of life is, to say the least, unfortunate. It surrenders to
deadness and dulness more than half of our existence.
In primitive times, when the main business of life was war, this was
otherwise. Then men gave their hearts to the pursuit to which they
gave their time. What was most important was also most interesting,
and the poet when he sang of war sang of business too. Hence came the
inimitable fire and life of Homeric and Shakspearian poetry. But when
war gave place to industry, it seemed that this grand unity of human
life is gone. Business, the important half of life, became unpoetical,
from the higher point of view uninteresting—for how could the
imagination dwell on the labors of the office or the factory?—and all
higher interest was confined to that part of life in which energy is
relaxed. Goethe’s peculiar realism at once prompts and enables him to
introduce a reform here. He denies that business is uninteresting, and
maintains that the fault is in our own narrowness and in our slavery
to a poetical tradition. It is the distinction of “Wilhelm Meister”
that it is actually a novel about business, not merely a realistic
novel venturing to approach the edge of that slough of dulness which
is supposed to be at the centre of all our lives, but actually a novel
about business as such, an attempt to show that the occupation to which
a man gives his life is a matter not only for serious thought, but that
it is a matter also for philosophy and poetry. That such a novel must
at first sight appear tame and dull is obvious; it undertakes to create
the taste by which it can be enjoyed, and will be condemned at once by
all who are not disposed to give it a serious trial. But the question
it raises is the fundamental question of modern life. Comprehensive and
practical at once, Goethe’s mind has found out that root of bitterness
which is at the bottom of all the uneasy social agitations of the
nineteenth century. We live in the industrial ages, and he has asked
the question whether industry must of necessity be a form of slavery,
or whether it can be glorified and made into a source of moral health
and happiness.
It is commonly said that “Wilhelm Meister,” seems to make Art the one
object of life; but this is not Goethe’s intention. He was himself an
artist, and, as the work is in a great degree autobiographical, art
naturally comes into the foreground, and the book becomes especially
interesting to artists, but the real subject of it is vocations in
general. In the later books, indeed, art drops into the background, and
we have a view of feminine vocations. The “Beautiful Soul” represents
the pietistic view of life; then Therese appears in contrast,
representing the economic or utilitarian view; finally, Natalie hits
the golden mean, being practical like Therese but less utilitarian,
and, ideal like her aunt, the pietist, but less introspective. On the
whole, then, the lesson of the book is that we should give unity to
our lives by devoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and
that the pursuit is assigned to us by Nature through the capacities
she has given us. It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of
pleasure that of the satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different
in each individual. His system treats every man as a genius, for it
regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which
it claims the same sort of tender consideration that is conceded to
genius. But in laying down such rules Goethe thinks first of himself.
He has spent long years in trying to make out his own vocation. He has
had an opportunity of living almost every kind of life in turn. It was
not till he returned from Italy that he felt himself to have arrived at
clearness. What was Goethe’s vocation? Or, since happiness consists in
faithful obedience to a natural vocation, what was Goethe’s happiness?
His happiness is a kind of religion, a perpetual rapt contemplation, a
beatific vision. The object of this contemplation is Nature, the laws
or order of the Universe to which we belong. Of such contemplation he
recognizes two kinds, one of which he calls Art and the other Science.
He was in the habit of thinking that in Art and Science taken together
he possessed an equivalent for what other men call their religion.
Thus, in 1817, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Reformation,
he writes a poem in which he expresses his devout resolution of showing
his Protestantism, as ever, by Art and Science.[37] It was because
his view of Art was so realistic, that he was able thus to regard
Art as a sort of twin-sister of Science. But the principle involved
in this twofold contemplation of Nature is the very principle of
religion itself, and in one sense it is true that no man was ever more
deliberately and consciously religious than Goethe. No man asserted
more emphatically that the energy of action ought to be accompanied by
the energy of feeling. It is the consistent principle of his life that
the whole man ought to act together, and he pushes it so far that he
seems to forbid all division of labor in science. This is the position
taken up in “Faust” which perhaps is seldom rightly understood.
Science, according to “Faust,” must not be dry analysis pursued at a
desk in a close room; it must be direct wondering contemplation of
Nature. The secrets of the world must disclose themselves to a loving
gaze, not to dry thinking (_trocknes Sinnen_), man must converse with
Nature “as one spirit with another,” “look into her breast as into
the bosom of a friend.” How we should _not_ study is conveyed to us
by the picture of Wagner, who is treated with so much contempt. He is
simply the ordinary man of science, perhaps we may think the modest
practical investigator, of the class to which the advance of science
is mainly due. But Goethe has no mercy on him—why? Because his nature
is divided, because his feelings do not keep pace with his thoughts,
because his attention is concentrated upon single points. Such a man
is to Goethe “the dry creeper,” “the most pitiable of all the sons of
earth.”
Thus it is, then, that Art and Science taken together, the living,
loving, worshipping contemplation of Nature, out of which comes the
knowledge of Nature, are to Goethe religion. But is not such a religion
wholly different from religion as commonly understood, wholly different
from Christianity?
It was, indeed, very different from such Christianity as he found
professed around him. In his youth Goethe was acquainted with several
eminently religious persons, Fräulein von Klettenberg, the Frankfurt
friend of his family, Jung Stilling, and Lavater. He listened to
these not only with his unfailing good humor, but at times with more
conviction than “Dichtung und Wahrheit” would lead us to suppose. In
some of his early letters he himself adopts pietistic language. But
as his own peculiar ideas developed themselves, they separated him
more and more from the religious world of his time. At the time of his
Italian journey and for some years afterwards, we find him speaking
of Christianity not merely with indifference, but with a good deal of
bitterness. This hostility took rather a peculiar form. As the whole
disposition of his mind leads him towards religion, as he can no more
help being religious than he can help being a poet, he does not reject
religion but changes his religion. He becomes, or tries to become,
a heathen in the positive sense of the word; for the description of
Goethe as the Great Heathen is not a mere epithet thrown at him by
his adversaries. He provoked and almost claimed it in his sketch of
Winckelmann, where, after enthusiastic praise of the ancients and of
Winckelmann as an interpreter of the ancient world, he inserted a
chapter entitled, “Heidnisches,” which begins thus: “This picture of
the antique spirit, absorbed in this world and its good things, leads
us directly to the reflection that such excellences are only compatible
with a heathenish way of thinking. The self-confidence, the attention
to the present, the pure worship of the gods as ancestors, the
admiration of them, as it were, only as works of art, the submission
to an irresistible fate, the future hope also confined to this world,
since it rests on the preciousness of posthumous fame; all this belongs
so necessarily together, makes such an indivisible whole, creates a
condition of human life intended by Nature herself, that we become
conscious, alike at the height of enjoyment, and in the depth of
sacrifice and even of ruin, of an indestructible health.” Clearly when
he wrote this (about 1804) Goethe wished and intended to pass for a
heathen. And, indeed, the antique attracts him scarcely at all from the
historical side—he is no republican, no lover of liberty—but almost
exclusively because it offers a religion which is to him the religion
of health and joy.
Is it, then, true that Christianity is a system of morbid and
melancholy introspectiveness, sacrificing all the freshness and glory
of the present life to an awful future? He makes this assumption, and
had almost a right to make it, since the Christianity of his time had
almost exclusively this character. He was, however, himself half aware
that there was all the difference in the world between the Christianity
of his time and original Christianity or Christianity as it might be.
And even at the time of his greatest bitterness he drops expressions
which show that he does not altogether relinquish his interest in
Christianity, but keeps open for himself the alternative of appearing
as a reformer rather than an assailant of it. In the third period and
the old age his tone is a good deal more conciliating than in the
passage above quoted. In the Autobiography he appears, on the whole, as
a Christian, and even makes faint attempts here and there to write in
a style that Christians may find edifying. He tells us expressly that
he had little sympathy with the Encyclopædists, and, in a passage of
the “West-östlicher Divan,” he declares with real warmth that he “has
taken into his heart the glorious image of our sacred books, and, as
the Lord’s image was impressed on St. Veronica’s cloth, he refreshes
himself in the stillness of the breast in spite of all negation and
hindrance with the inspiring vision of faith.” Again, when in the
“Wanderjahre” he grapples constructively, but somewhat too late, with
the problems of the nineteenth century, we find him assuming a reformed
Christianity[38] as the religion of the future.
May we then regard Goethe as one who in reality only opposed the
corruptions of Christianity even when he seemed to oppose Christianity
itself? Certainly _other worldliness_ does not now appear, at
least in England, as a necessary part of Christianity. Surely that
contrast between the healthy spirit of antiquity and the morbidness
of Christianity, which was like a fixed idea in the mind of Goethe’s
generation, need not trouble us now. Those sweeping generalizations
belonged to the infancy of the historical sciences. Mediævalism does
not now seem identical with Christianity. The sombre aspect of our
religion is clearing away. Christian self-denial now appears not as
the aimless, fruitless mortification of desire which Goethe detested,
but as the heroic strenuousness which he practiced. The world which
Christians renounce now appears to be, not the universe nor the present
life, but only conventionalism and tyrannous fashion. With such a
religion, Goethe’s philosophy is sufficiently in harmony. According to
these definitions the spirit even of “Wilhelm Meister” is not secular.
Even his avowal of heathenism comes to wear a different aspect, when
we find him writing thus of the religion of the old Testament: “Among
all heathen religions, for to this class belongs that of Israel as much
as any, this one has great points of superiority,” &c. (he mentions
particularly its “excellent collection of sacred books”). So that,
after all, Goethe may only have been a heathen as the prophet Isaiah
was a heathen!
Thus hindrance after hindrance to our regarding Goethe as a great
prophet of the higher life and of the true religion disappears. There
remains one which is not so easily removed. What surprises the English
reader in “Wilhelm Meister” is not merely the prominence given to Art,
or the serious devotion to things present and to the present life, but
also the extraordinary levity with which it treats the relations of men
and women. The book might, in fact, be called thoroughly immoral, if
the use of that word which is common among us were justifiable. More
correctly speaking, it is immoral throughout on one point; immoral, in
Goethe’s peculiar, inimitable, good-natured manner. The levity is the
more startling in a book otherwise so remarkably grave. Every subject
but one is discussed with seriousness; in parts the solemnity of the
writer’s wisdom becomes quite oppressive; but on the relations of men
and women he speaks in a thoroughly worldly tone. Just where most
moralists grow serious, he becomes wholly libertine, indifferent, and
secular. There is nothing in this novel of the homely domestic morality
of the Teutonic races; a French tone pervades it, and this tone is more
or less perceptible in the other writings of Goethe, especially those
of the second period, with the exception of “Hermann und Dorothea.” On
this subject, the great and wise thinker descends to a lower level; he
seems incapable of regarding it with seriousness; or if he does treat
it seriously, as in the Elective Affinities, he startles us still more
by a certain crude audacity.
It seems possible to trace how Goethe fell into this extraordinary
moral heresy. Starting from the idea of the satisfaction of desire,
and with a strong prejudice against all systems of self-denial,
he perceived, further, that chastity is the favorite virtue of
mediævalism, that it is peculiarly Catholic and monastic. Then, as
his mind turned more and more to the antique, he found himself in
a world of primitive morals, where the woman is half a slave. He
found that in the ancient world friendship is more and love less
than in the modern—to this point, too, Winckelmann had called his
attention—and, since he had adopted it as a principle that the
ancients were healthy-minded and that the moderns are morbid, he
jumped to the conclusion that the sentimental view of love is but a
modern illusion. He accustomed his imagination to the lower kind of
love which we meet with in classical poetry, the love of Achilles for
Briseis, of Ajax for Tecmessa. In his early pamphlet against Wieland
(“Götter, Helden und Wieland,” 1773), we find him already upon this
train of reasoning, and his conclusions are announced with the most
unceremonious plainness. How seriously they were adopted may be seen
from the “Roman Elegies,” written fifteen years later. Among the many
reactions which the eighteenth century witnessed against the spirit of
Christianity, scarcely any is so startling and remarkable as that which
comes to light in these poems. Here the woman has sunk again to her
ancient level, and we find ourselves once more among the Hetaeræ of old
Greek cities. After reading these wonderful poems, if we go through the
list of Goethe’s female characters we shall note how many among them
belong to the class of Hetaeræ—Clärchen. Marianne, Philine, Gretchen,
the Bayadere. And if we turn to his life, we find the man, who shrank
more than once from a worthy marriage, taking a Tecmessa to his tent.
The woman who became at last his wife was spoken of by him in a letter
to the Frau von Stein, as “that poor creature.” She is the very beauty
celebrated in the “Roman Elegies.”