It is no wish or business of mine to introduce these maxims by adding
one more to the innumerable essays, some of them admirable, which have
been written on Goethe. I have found the translation of one of his works
a harder and certainly a more profitable task than a general discourse
on them all; and I profoundly believe that, rather than read what has
been written on Goethe, it is very much better to read Goethe himself.
It is in this belief that I hope the present translation may help in a
small way to increase the direct knowledge of him in this country. But
there are some remarks which I may be allowed to make on the nature and
use of maxims, and the peculiar value of those of Goethe; so far, at
least, as they deal with life and character and with literature. If
Professor Huxley could be induced to publish the comments which he made
to me as I read him the scientific maxims, besides being the best of
introductions to that section of the book, they would form a keen and
clear review of Goethe's scientific achievements, and an emphatic
testimony to his wonderful anticipations of later theories.
Between a maxim, an aphorism, and an apophthegm, and in a more obvious
degree, between these and an adage and a proverb, the etymologist and
the lexicographer may easily find a distinction. But they are, one and
all, fragments of the wisdom of life, treasured up in short, pithy
sentences that state or define some general truth of experience; and
perhaps with an adage and a maxim, enjoin its practice as a matter of
conduct. In the literature of every age there have been writers who,
instead of following a less severe method, thus briefly record the
lessons taught them by a wide view of the doings of men; from the dim,
far-off beginnings of Ptah Hotep the Egyptian to the authors of the
Proverbs of Solomon and the Book of Wisdom, from Theognis and Plutarch
downwards to our own time. They give us the shrewdest of their thoughts,
detached from the facts which gave them birth. But the professed writers
of maxims are not the only or always the best authors of them. There is
no great writer who is not rich in wise sentences; where we have the
advantage of seeing for ourselves the train of thought that induced and
the occasion that called them forth. Terse and pregnant sayings are
scattered innumerably through the pages of the finest poets, the great
orators, philosophers, and historians, wherever they touch the highest
level of truth and insight; be it in the lofty interpretation of life,
the defence of action or policy, the analysis of character and conduct,
or the record of progress; and then it is that large ideas and wide
observations take on imperceptibly the nature of maxim or aphorism,
illumining, like points of light, whole fields of thought and
experience. And the test of their value is that they lose little or
nothing by being deprived of their particular context and presented as
truths of general import. A collection of proverbs, shrewd sayings, and
pointed expressions, taken from the whole range of Greek and Latin
literature, was made by the industry of Erasmus in his great folio of
_Adagia_; and perhaps some future student, as diligent as he, may gather
up the aphoristic wisdom in the writings of modern times. Goethe himself
has in all his great works a wealth of aphorism unsurpassed by any other
writer whatever, even though it be Montaigne or Bacon or Shakespeare;
and sayings of his not to be found in this collection are some of the
best that he uttered.
The besetting sin of the maxim-writer is to exaggerate one side of a
matter by neglecting another; to secure point and emphasis of style, by
limiting the range of thought; and hence it is that most maxims present
but a portion of truth and cannot be received unqualified. They must
often be brought back to the test of life itself, and confronted and
compared with other sides of the experience they profess to embody. And
when a maxim stands this trial and proves its worth, it is not every one
to whom it is of value. To some it may be a positive evil. It makes the
strongest appeal to those who never see more than one aspect of
anything, hardening their hearts and blunting their minds; and even to
those who could make a good use of it, there are times when it may
mislead and be dangerous. Maxims in their application seem to need
something of the physician's art: they must be handled with care, and
applied with discretion. Like powerful drugs they may act with
beneficent effect on a hardy constitution; they may brace it to effort,
or calm the fever of a misguided activity; but great is the mischief
they work where the mind is weak or disorganised. As a medicine may save
a man at one time that would kill him at another, so the wise counsel of
to-day may easily become the poisonous suggestion of to-morrow.
With writers who depend for effect on mere qualities of style and ignore
the weightier matters of depth and truth of observation, Goethe has
nothing in common; nor with those who vainly imagine that insight is a
kind of art, with a method that may be learned and applied. By constant
practice a man of literary talent may, it is true, attain a fair mastery
of language terse and attractive, and then set himself, if he will, to
the deliberate creation of aphoristic wisdom or a philosophy of
proverbs; mistaking the dexterous handling of a commonplace for the true
process of discovery. The popular literature of the last generation
supplies a terrible instance of the length to which the manufacture of
maxims can thus be carried, for a time with immense success; and we have
seen how a few years suffice to carry them and their author to
obscurity. How different is the true process! The maxim that increases
knowledge and enriches literature is of slow and rare appearance; it
springs from a fine faculty of observation which is in no one's
arbitrament, and only less rare than the gift of utterance which adds
charm to a thought that itself strikes home with the power of
impregnable truth. No amount or intensity of effort will alone produce
it; but to the mind of genius it comes like a sudden revelation,
flashing its light on a long course of patient attention. "What we call
_Discovery_," says Goethe, "is the serious exercise and activity of an
original feeling for truth. It is a synthesis of world and mind, giving
the most blessed assurance of the eternal harmony of things."
It is, then, depth and truth and sanity of observation which chiefly
mark these sayings of Goethe. It is no concern of his to dazzle the mind
by the brilliance of his wit; nor does he labour to say things because
they are striking, but only because they are true. He is always in
contact with realities, always aiming at truth; and he takes a kindly
and a generous view of the world. He has none of the despair that
depresses, none of the malice that destroys. There are writers who
profess to honour a lofty ideal by a cynical disparagement of everything
that falls short of it; who unveil the selfish recesses of the heart as
a mistaken stimulus to its virtues; who pay their tribute to great work
by belittling human endeavour. Goethe shows us a more excellent way.
Touched with a profound feeling of the worth of life, the wisdom of
order, the nobility of effort, he gives us an ideal to pursue and shows
us the means of pursuing it. Out of the fulness of a large experience,
unique in the history of literature, he unfolds the scheme of a
practicable perfection, and enforces the lessons he has learned from the
steady, passionless, and undaunted observation of human affairs.
To Goethe these sayings were merely _reflections_ or _opinions_; it is
his literary executors and his editors who called them by more ambitious
titles, so as to challenge a comparison with certain other famous books
of wise thought. They are the reflections of a long life rich in all the
intellectual treasures of the world, in its versatility amazing, in its
insight well-nigh fathomless; a life that, in his own words, approached
the infinite by following the finite on every side. Such a man need only
speak to utter something important; and we on our part need only
remember how wide was the range of his knowledge, how full and complete
his existence, to set the utmost value on his reflections at the end of
it. But that he knew nothing of the pinch of poverty and was spared the
horrors of disease, that he suffered no great misfortune, and basked in
the bright side of the world, free from the ills that come to most men,
there was no page of the book of life that was not thrown open to him.
The things of the mind, the things of art, the things of nature--in
their theory and in their practice he had worked at them all; regarding
them as so many varied manifestations of an eternal Idea in itself
inscrutable and here unattainable. There was no kind of literature with
which he was unfamiliar, whether it was ancient or modern, of the East
or of the West; and the great spiritual influences of the world,
Hebraism, Hellenism, Christianity, Mediævalism,--at one or another time
in his life he was in touch with them all, and found his account in them
all. In matters of learning he was occupied with nothing but what was
actual and concrete; it was only to abstract studies, to logic,
metaphysics, mathematics, that he was indifferent; in his own phrase, he
never thought about thinking. There was hardly any branch of the natural
science of his day that he did not cultivate, that he did not himself
practise; geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, anatomy, meteorology,
optics; and he made some remarkable discoveries and the strangest
prophecies. To Art he gave a life-long devotion. While still a youth, he
wrote an important essay on Gothic architecture; he engraved, drew,
painted, and for a time took up sculpture. In all the higher forms of
Art, with the single exception of music, he had so much practical
interest that he often doubted whether in following Literature he had
not mistaken, or at least unduly narrowed, the sphere of his activity.
He was little abroad, but no one ever profited more by his travels than
Goethe. Twice he went to Italy, and what a change of mind was produced
by that change of sky! Rome was to him a new birth, a new conception of
life. And besides Literature, Science, and Art, he busied himself with
Administration, with the duties of the Court, with the practical details
of the Theatre; but out of them all he learned something himself and
taught something to others. He lived the fullest life granted to man. He
had a youth of the wildest enthusiasm and romance; a prime of a classic
austerity, of a calm earnestness; a majestic age of the ripest wisdom,
when there came to him, as it were a second youth, with something of the
fire of the old romantic feeling lighted up in him anew. And out of all
these prodigious efforts in so many directions, he passed unharmed, and
never lost himself. He steadily pursued his own task and refused to be
drawn aside. He stood aloof from the controversies of his time. The
battles of belief, philosophical systems, French Revolutions, Wars of
Liberation, struggles of democracy and nationality,--these things
moved him little or not at all. But he is not on that account to be
held, as some foolish critics have held him, indifferent, selfish, or
less serious, or less complete a man than his fellows. He did the best
in any one's power: he resolutely kept to his own business, and, neither
heating nor resting, worked at his own high aims, in the struggle not
merely to learn and to know, but to act and to do. He felt profoundly
that the best anyone can achieve for himself is often the best he can
achieve for others. The whole moral of _Wilhelm Meister_ is that a man's
first and greatest duty, whether to others or to himself, is to see that
his business in life is a worthy one and suited to his capacities. If he
discovers his vocation and pursues it steadily, he will make his outer
life of the greatest use and service to the world, and at the same time
produce the utmost harmony within. That was what Goethe tried to do in
his own person, and he laboured at his self-imposed task with a
perseverance, a real unselfishness, and a determination entirely
admirable.
It is almost the last fruit of this life of concentrated activity, the
final outcome of this indomitable character, that is here put before us.
And we shall find that to the complex phenomena of the world Goethe
applied no other measure but reason and the nature and needs of man.
With a full consciousness of the mysteries that surround our existence,
he never made the futile endeavour to pass beyond the bounds of present
knowledge and experience, or to resolve contradictions by manipulating
the facts. In these detached reflections he does, indeed, propound a
theory and sketch out a system of conduct; but they cannot, like the
_Thoughts_ of Pascal, for instance, be brought under a single and
definite point of view. They are a mirror of life itself, and the inner
and outer facts of life in all their diversity. The unity they possess
is the unity that is stamped upon them by the all-embracing personality
of their author, always and unweariedly striving to make his life
systematic, distinct, and fruitful; and to judge them as a whole, a man
must be able to fathom so great a genius. But to every one in every walk
of life Goethe has a word of wise counsel, as though he understood every
form of existence and could enter into its needs. In a fine passage in
the _Wanderjahre_, he likens the thought that thus in wondrous fashion
takes a thousand particular shapes, to a mass of quicksilver, which, as
it falls, separates into innumerable globules, spreading out on all
sides. And while these sayings may present thoughts in seeming
contradiction one with another, as the moment that called them forth
presented this or that side of experience, their inmost nature is a
common tendency to realise a great ideal of life. It is little they owe
to the form in which they are cast; they are not the elements of an
artistic whole which must be seized before we can understand the full
meaning of its parts. They are a miscellaneous record of the shrewdest
observation; and to read them as they should be read, a few at a time,
is like the opportunity of repeated converse with a man of extraordinary
gifts, great insight, and the widest culture, who touches profoundly and
suggestively now on this, now on that aspect of life and the world and
the progress of knowledge. It is the fruit of his own experience that
Goethe gives us; and we shall do well to think of it as he himself
thought of another book, and to bear in mind that "every word which we
take in a general sense and apply to ourselves, had, under certain
circumstances of time and place, a peculiar, special and directly
individual reference."
Goethe is no exception to the rest of mankind in not being equally wise
at all times, and in the maxims there are degrees of value: they do not
all shine with the like brilliance. Some of them are valuable only for
what they suggest; of some, again, it is easy to see that, they appear
as matters of speculation rather than as certainties. They raise
difficulties, ask for criticism, if possible, correction; or, it may be,
they call attention to the contrary view and invite a harmony of
opposites. Some of them make a great demand upon our ability "to
understand a proverb and the interpretation; the words of the wise and
their dark sayings." Their value sometimes depends on the way they are
viewed, the culture brought to their understanding, the temper in which
they are approached. We look at them, and at first admire; we change our
point of view, and find something to criticise and dispute. The
obscurity of maxims, as Goethe reminds us, is only relative; not
everything can be explained to the reader which was present to the mind
of the writer. Some of them seem at first to be of little interest; on
one side they may even repel, but from another they attract again, and
win perhaps a partial approval. They seem to move as we change our
position, and to be without fixed or certain character. But some, again,
are so clear and unmistakable, so immeasurably above criticism or
objection, that like the furthest of the stars they have no parallax:
whatever position we take, their light is steadfast.
Let no one suppose that in the main Goethe's reflections on life had
never been made before; that it was not so, no one knew better than he.
As a preface and note of warning to them all, he reiterates the words of
the preacher: "there is no new thing under the sun." Yes! says Goethe,
there is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; _we must
only try to think it again_. "It is only when we are faithful," he says
elsewhere,[2] "in arresting and noting our present thoughts, that we
have any joy in tradition; since we find the best thoughts already
uttered, the finest feelings already expressed. This it is that gives us
the perception of that harmonious agreement to which man is called, and
to which he must conform, often against his will as he is much too fond
of fancying that the world begins afresh with himself." What Goethe
means is that we shall do best to find out the truth of all things for
ourselves, for on one side truth is individual; and that we shall be
happy if our individual truth is also universal, or accords with the
wisest thought of the past. It is in this practical light that we must
view the maxims, and not as mere academic generalities. It is easy to
read them in an hour and forget them as soon; easy to view them with a
tepid interest as the work of a great author; but no one will fully
understand the value of any of them, who has not experience enough to
know its truth. Well is it for us if with the experience we also gain
the truth! If any one should say that some of these maxims are very
obvious, and so simply true as almost to be platitudes, I would bid him
remember that the best education is often to discover these very simple
truths for oneself, and learn to see how much there is in commonplaces.
For those who have grown old in the world are never weary of telling us
that the further we go, the more we shall find, in general, that the
same things will happen to us as have happened to others; and it will
then be our advantage if we have the same reflections, best of all if we
come of ourselves to the same conclusions, as the wisest of those who
have gone before us; next best, if we can really and intelligently
follow in the footsteps of their thought.
But although the matter of Goethe's sayings is not original in the sense
of being new to the world--while it was original for him, since he
discovered it for himself and on his own path, their manner is something
new, and their range is unparalleled. Take any other set of maxims you
will, nowhere is there so wide an outlook, nowhere so just an estimate
of human difficulties, nowhere an aim at once so lofty and so
practicable. Nowhere is there a larger, stronger, healthier, more
tolerant view of life and the world, or an atmosphere clearer of the
mists that too often obscure and distort our vision. And in their
expression, nowhere is there so little of the besetting sin to sacrifice
truth to effect. Goethe has none of the shallow malice and uncharitable
candour that with writers of an earlier age passed for the practical
wisdom of every day; and we need only contrast his maxims with the
similar work of La Rochefoucauld, Helvetius, and Chamfort, admirable as
they may be in their exposure of human selfishness, to determine on
which side is the greater service to mankind. How different the views of
the world taken by how many writers!--the secret of it all is that the
men themselves are different.
It was said of Goethe that his heart, which few knew, was as great as
his intellect, which all knew. Certainly his writings and not least his
maxims are a profound example of the truth that in the last resort it is
moral rather than intellectual qualities that make great literature. It
is not to be denied that much may be done by a mere facility of style, a
command of words, a fine taste, a wide acquaintance with the turns and
resources of language; but in the end the effect is produced by the man
himself, his character and his strength. To the strenuous, earnest man,
like Goethe, the world offers a stirring spectacle and provides a great
opportunity; and he grasps and uses them both to the best of his
peculiar capacity. It is diversity of temperament dealing with partial
knowledge that makes so many and such various doctrines. A man's views
of life are, in short, those which he deserves to have, and his writings
are cast in the mould of his character. It is no more strange that the
authors of books should give us such varied pictures of the humanity
around us, than that painters should conceive natural objects so
differently. Literature, too, is like a gallery of landscape and
portrait: it is the same world which is presented, the same men and
things; but the way of looking at it varies with the artist; who,
whatever his training may have been, will see in Nature what he brings
to it himself. _Ars est homo additus naturæ_. If this be truly to define
the essence and method of Art, it is equally true to say that Literature
is man added to life; and, here as there, everything depends on the
character and capacity of the man.
No one has as yet said that he doubts Goethe's capacity, although there
are many who have solemnly pronounced him uninteresting. The critic who
can read Goethe's works with real attention, and then venture to call
them dull, is simply showing that he has no call to the office he
assumes, or no interest in literature of the highest class. What is
true, of course, is that Goethe is profoundly serious, and he is,
therefore, not always entertaining; but that is enough to make him pass
for dull in the eyes of those who take literature only as a pastime,--a
substitute for a cigar, or something to lull them to sleep when they are
tired. But another and more formidable accusation is made against Goethe
which affects his character, and would go far to destroy the value of
his writings if it were true; but to many it is curiously inconsistent
with the other charge of being dull. It is that he is immoral. Now of
all the great writers of the world, Goethe is admittedly the greatest
teacher. He is essentially and frankly didactic; and nowhere is there so
large and worthy a body of literature from a single pen which is
informed with so high and so serious a purpose. Roundly to call its
author immoral is a charge which sufficiently refutes itself by its own
ignorance and absurdity. The charge comes, as a rule, from those who
judge life by the needs and duties of a young girl, and they confound
the whole of morality--character and conduct in all relations to one's
fellow-men--with one section of it. They forget that Goethe was a man of
the old _régime_; that his faults were those of his time and class. They
forget that an extreme repugnance to all monasticism, asceticism, and
Roman Catholicism in general, naturally led him to pay a diminished
regard to the one virtue of which the Christian world is sometimes apt
to exaggerate the importance, and on which it is often ready to hang all
the law and the prophets. To some, again, Goethe appears to be a
supremely selfish wizard, dissecting human passion in the coldest blood,
and making poetical capital out of the emotional tortures he caused in
others. This, too, is a charge which the merest acquaintance with his
life and work must of necessity refute: it is too simple a slander to be
seriously discussed. Since these are charges which have, however, kept
many estimable people from reading Goethe, it may be some consolation to
them to know that the maxims are entirely free from any possibility of
objection on this ground.
The element of moral teaching which runs through Goethe's mature works
like a golden thread, re-appears in the maxims free and detached from
the poetic and romantic environment which in such varied shapes is woven
around it in _Werther, Tasso, Meister_, above all in _Faust_. To do the
next duty; to meet the claims of each day; to persist with a single mind
and unwearied effort on a definite, positive, productive path;
cheerfully to renounce what is denied us, and vigorously to make the
best of what we have; to restrain vague desires and uncertain aims; to
cease bewailing the vanity of all things and the fleeting nature of this
our world, and do what we can to make our stay in it of lasting
use,--these are lessons which will always be needed, and all the more
needed as life becomes increasingly complex. They are taught in the
maxims with a great variety of application, and nowhere so concisely
summarised as in one of them. "The mind endowed with active powers," so
it runs, "and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies
nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth."
Goethe has been called, and with truth, the prophet of culture; but the
word is often misunderstood. We cannot too clearly see that what is here
meant is not a mere range of intellectual knowledge, pursued with
idolatrous devotion: it is moral discipline, a practical endeavour,
forming wise thought and noble character. And this is the product, not
of learning, but of work: if we are to know and realise what there is in
us, and make the best of it, our aim must be practical and creative.
"Let every man," he urges, "ask himself with which of his faculties he
can and will somehow influence his age." And again: "From this time
forward, if a man does not apply himself to some art or handiwork, he
will be in a bad way. In the rapid changes of the world, knowledge is no
longer a furtherance. By the time a man has taken note of everything, he
has lost himself." The culture of which he speaks is not mainly
intellectual. We use the word in a way that is apt to limit and conceal
its meaning, and we often apply it to a strange form of mental growth,
at once stunted and overfed, to which, if we may judge by its fruits,
any breath of real culture would be fatal. It has nothing to do with
learning in the general and narrow sense of the word, or with the often
pernicious effects of mere learning. In the language of the hour we are
wont to give the exclusive name of culture to a wide acquaintance with
books and languages; whether or not it results, as it has before now
resulted, in a want of culture in character and outward demeanour, in
airs of conceit, in foolish arrogance, in malice and acrimony.
A uniform activity with a moral aim--that, in Goethe's view, is the
highest we can achieve in life. "Character in matters great and small
consists," he says, "in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he
feels himself capable." It is the gospel of work: our endeavour must be
to realise our best self in deed and action; to strive until our
personality attains, in Aristotle's word, its entelechy; its full
development. By this alone can we resolve all the doubts and hesitations
and conflicts within that undermine and destroy the soul. "Try to do
your duty, and you will know at once what you are worth." And with all
our doing, what should be the goal of our activity? In no wise our own
self, our own weal. "A man is happy only when he delights in the
good-will of others," and we must of a truth "give up existence in order
to exist"; we must never suppose that happiness is identical with
personal welfare. In the moral sphere we need, as Kant taught, a
categorical imperative; but, says Goethe, that is not the end of the
matter; it is only the beginning. We must widen our conception of duty
and recognise a perfect morality only "where a man loves what he
commands himself to do." "Voluntary dependence is the best state, and
how should that be possible without love?" And just in the same sense
Goethe refuses to regard all self-denial as virtuous, but only the
self-denial that leads to some useful end. All other forms of it are
immoral, since they stunt and cramp the free development of what is best
in us--the desire, namely, to deal effectively with our present life,
and make the most and fairest of it.
And here it is that Goethe's moral code is fused with his religious
belief. "Piety," he says, "is not an end but a means: a means of
attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquillity of soul." This
is the piety he preaches; not the morbid introspection that leads to no
useful end, the state of brooding melancholy, the timorous
self-abasement, the anxious speculation as to some other condition of
being. And this tranquillity of soul, Goethe taught that it should be
ours, in spite of the thousand ills of life which give us pause in our
optimism. It is attained by the firm assurance that, somewhere and
somehow, a power exists that makes for moral good; that our moral
endeavours are met, so to speak, half-way by a moral order in the
universe, which comes to the aid of individual effort. And the sum and
substance of his teaching, whether in the maxims or in any other of his
mature productions, is that we must resign ourselves to this power, in
gratitude and reverence towards it and all its manifestations in
whatever is good and beautiful. This is Goethe's strong faith, his
perfect and serene trust. He finely shadows it forth in the closing
words of _Pandora_, where Eos proclaims that the work of the gods is to
lead our efforts to the eternal good, and that we must give them free
play:--
Was zu wünschen ist, ihr unten fühlt es;
Was zu geben sei, die wissen's droben.
Gross beginnet ihr Titanen; aber leiten
Zu dem ewig Guten, ewig Schönen,
Ist der Götter Werk; die lasst gewähren.
And so too in _Faust_: it is the long struggle to realise an Ideal,
dimly seen on life's labyrinthine way of error, that leads at last to
the perfect redemption:--
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen.
And throughout the perplexities of life and the world, where all things
are but signs and tokens of some inner and hidden reality, it is the
ideal of love and service, _das Ewig-Weibliche_, that draws us on.
But this assurance cannot be reached by a mere theory; and Goethe is not
slow to declare how he views attempts to reach it in that way. "_Credo
Deum!_ that," he reminds us here, "is a fine, a worthy thing to say; but
to recognise God when and where he reveals himself, is the only true
bliss on earth." All else is mystery. We are not born, as he said to
Eckermann, to solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the
problem begins, and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp.
The problem, he urged, is transformed into a postulate: if we cannot get
a solution theoretically, we can get it in the experience of practical
life. We reach it by the use of an "active scepticism," of which he says
that "it continually aims at overcoming itself and arriving by means of
regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty." But he would
have nothing to do with doctrinal systems, and, like Schiller, professed
none of the forms of religion from a feeling of religion itself. To see
how he views some particular questions of theology the reader may turn
with profit to his maxims on the Reformation and early Christianity, and
to his admirable remarks on the use and abuse of the Bible. The basis of
religion was for him its own earnestness; and it was not always needful,
he held, for truth to take a definite shape: "it is enough if it hovers
about us like a spirit and produces harmony." "I believe," he said to
Eckermann, "in God and Nature and the victory of good over evil; but I
was also asked to believe that three was one, and one was three. That
jarred upon my feeling for truth; and I did not see how it could have
helped me in the least." As for letting our minds roam beyond this
present life, he thought there was actual danger in it; although he
looked for a future existence, a continuation of work and activity, in
which what is here incomplete should reach its full development. And
whatever be the secrets of the universe, assuredly the best we can do is
to do our best here; and the worst of blasphemies is to regard this life
as altogether vanity; for as these pages tell us, "it would not be worth
while to see seventy years if all the wisdom of this world were
foolishness with God."
In Goethe we pass, as over a bridge, from the eighteenth century to the
nineteenth; but though he lived to see a third of the nineteenth
century, he hardly belongs to it. Of its political characteristics he
had few or none. He was no democrat. As the prophet of inward culture,
he took the French Revolution for a disturbance, an interruption, and
not a development in the progress of the world's history; and for all
its horrors and the pernicious demoralisation of its leaders, he had the
profoundest aversion. But afterwards he came to see that it had
beneficial results; that a revolution is ultimately never the fault of
the people, but of the injustice and incapacity of the government; and
that where there is a real necessity for a great reform, the old leaven
must be rooted out.[3] But he knew the danger of such a process, and he
indicates it here in an admirable saying: "Before the French Revolution
it was all _effort_; afterwards it all changed to _demand_"; and this
may be supplemented by his opinion on the nature of revolutionary
sentiments: "Men think they would be well-off if they were not ruled,
and fail to perceive that they can rule neither themselves nor others."
And if he, had thus no theoretical sympathy with democratic movements,
he had little feeling for that other great political tendency of our
time--nationality; convinced as he was that interest in the weal and woe
of another people is always a mark of the highest culture. But apart
from politics there is one characteristic of our own time in which he
fully and especially shares, if only for the reason that he did much
himself to produce it; and herein he has influenced us profoundly and is
influencing us still. The nineteenth century has this advantage over
every preceding age, that in it for the first time honest doubt, instead
of distinguishing a few, has become a common virtue. Goethe is one of
the surest and safest of those who have led the transition. "We praise
the eighteenth century," he writes, "for concerning itself chiefly with
analysis. The task remaining to the nineteenth is to discover the false
syntheses which prevail, and to analyse their contents anew." Of the aim
of analysis and the proper course of inquiry, no one has given a better
account than Goethe in what he says, in the words I have quoted, about
active scepticism; and in the sphere of morals and religion it will
perhaps be found hereafter that he has contributed, in some degree at
least, to the attainment of that "conditioned certainty," for which, as
we hope, all our efforts are made.
In the maxims on Literature there is some excellent criticism on
literary methods, and much that may well be taken to heart by certain
writers of our own day. Goethe had little but rebuke for the whole of
the romantic movement, which began in his old age. The German form of it
he thought unnatural, and at best a conventional imitation of an earlier
period; and the French form, of which Victor Hugo was then the rising
star, he thought a perversion of naturalism, an exaggeration of it until
it became insipid or merely revolting. To Byron alone he gave the
tribute of the most ungrudging admiration: in the opposition between
classicism and romanticism, he declined to take him for a follower of
either, but as the complete representative of his own time. The maxim
that "the classical is health, and the romantic, disease," may not
altogether commend itself to us now; but with wonderful insight Goethe
foresaw the direction in which the romantic movement would lead. "The
romantic," he says here, "is already fallen into its own abysm. It is
hard to imagine anything more degraded than the worst of the new
productions." If he could have said this two generations ago, what would
he have said now? How could he have spoken without contempt of those who
make all that is common and unclean in itself a subject with which
literature may properly be occupied? These are the writers who profess
to be realists, under a completely mistaken notion of what realism
means, as applied to art; and to them the chief realities seem to be
just the very things that decent people keep out of sight. They forget
that in literature, as in all art, the dominating realities are the
highest Ideals. As an antidote to this poison of corruption Goethe
pointed to the ancient world, and bid us study there the types of the
loftiest manhood. "Bodies which rot while they are still alive and are
edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who
remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the
living--to this," he exclaimed, "have come our makers of literature.
When the same thing happened in antiquity, it was only as a strange
token of some rare disease; but with the moderns the disease has become
endemic and epidemic." Akin to these pseudo-realists, and coming under
the same ban, are some of our modern novel-writers who do, indeed, avoid
the depth of degradation, but try to move the feelings by dwelling in a
similar fashion on matters which are not, and never can be, fit subjects
of literary treatment; such as painful deaths by horrible distempers, or
the minute details of prolonged operations. It is poor skill that cannot
find material enough in the moral sufferings of men and women, and is
driven to seek effect in descriptions of disease and surgery. Surely in
any literature worthy of the name these are topics which a richer
imagination and a more prolific art would have found unnecessary, and
better taste would have left undescribed.
To another class of writers--those who handle a pretty pen without
having anything definite to present, or anything important to say,
Goethe has also an applicable word. It is a class which is always
increasing in number, and tends to increase in talent. We may admit that
second- or third-rate work, especially in poetry, was never before done
so well as it is done now; and still we may find some useful truth in a
distinction which Goethe drew for the benefit of the minor poets and the
minor prose-writers of his own age. "Productions are now possible," he
said, "which, without being bad, have no value. They have no value,
because they contain nothing; and they are not bad, because a general
form of good workmanship is present to the author's mind." In one of the
many neglected volumes of his miscellaneous writings Goethe has a series
of admirable notes for a proposed work on _Dilettantism_; and there the
reader, if he is interested in Goethe's literary criticism, will find
some instructive remarks in close connection with this aphorism, and
also certain rules for discriminating between good and indifferent work
which ought to receive the most attentive study. And the stylists who
neglect plain language for a mosaic of curious phrase and overstrained
epithet, may profitably remember that, as Goethe here says, "it is not
language in itself which is correct or forcible or elegant, but the mind
that is embodied in it."
"Translators," he tells us, "sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty
and rouse an irresistible longing for the original." To them also he
gives a piece of excellent advice: "The translator must proceed until
he reaches the untranslatable." This is a counsel of exhortation as well
as of warning. It bids the translator spare no effort, but tells him
that at a certain point his efforts are of no avail. But none the less,
Goethe might have added, the faithful translator must strive as if this
hindrance to perfection did not exist; for it is thus only that he, or
any one else, can do anything worth doing. On methods of translation
much may be said, and it is sometimes urged, in a given case, that it is
not literal or that it is too free. A distinguished writer has recently
laid down that a translation should reproduce every word and phrase and
sentence of the original as accurately as a delicate tracing reproduces
the lines of a drawing. This is advice which may hold in the
school-room, but, I venture to maintain, nowhere else. In so far as
every language has a peculiar genius, a literal translation must
necessarily be a bad one; and any faithful translation will of its
nature be free. In other words, a translator will err if he slavishly
adheres to mere expression; he must have complete liberty to give his
author's meaning and style in the manner which he holds to be truest to
the original; and so, in translating from a foreign tongue, it will be
well for him to have some knowledge of his own. But he must guard
against the abuse of his position: his liberty may become license, and
his translation instead of being faithful may be phantastic. The
translator's first and last duty is, then, to efface himself. His first
duty is to stand entirely at the point of view of his author's thought;
his last, to find the clearest and nearest expression in his own
language both for that thought and for whatever is characteristic in the
way of conveying it; neither adding anything of his own nor taking away
anything from his author. The best translation is thus a re-embodiment
of the author's spirit, a real metempsychosis. Nothing can be done
without ideals, and this is the ideal at which the present translation
aims. That it fails of its aim and has many defects, no one knows better
than the translator himself; and he can only cherish the hope that where
he falls short he is sometimes close to the confines of what cannot be
translated.
December 2, 1892.
[1] _Goethe's Sprüche in Prosa_: zum ersten Mal erläutert und auf ihre
Quellen zurückgeführt von G. v. Loeper, Berlin, 1870. This forms the
text of the translation.
[2] _Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre_, Bk. I. ch. 10.
[3] _Gespräche mit Eckermann_, III. 4 January, 1824.