GOETHE

REVIEWED AFTER SIXTY YEARS.
 

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GOETHE

REVIEWED AFTER SIXTY YEARS.

BY

J. R. SEELEY,

AUTHOR OF “‘ECCE HOMO,”’ “ ROMAN IMPERIALISM,” “LIFE AND
TIMES OF STEIN,” “A SHORT HISTORY OF NAPOLEON
THE FIRST,” “ NATURAL RELIGION,” “ THE

EXPANSION OF ENGLAND.”

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.

1893.
Pp
|

Copyright, 1898,
By RoBERTS BROTHERS.

Gniversity Press :

Joun WILson AnD Son, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
PREFACE.

 

I PUBLISHED three papers on Goethe in the
“Contemporary Review” for 1884. These are
now, with the kind consent of the Editor,
re-printed. They have been carefully revised
throughout, have received large alterations,
and, especially in the latter part, considerable
additions.

The number of persons among us who are
called upon to devote some time to the study
of Goethe’s writings must be large, for it
includes in the first place all who desire to
acquire a knowledge of modern literature, and
in the second place all those who desire to
master the German language. Now, of all
great writers there is scarcely one who more
imperatively requires than Goethe to be read
with some sort of companion or key. His
writings are extremely various in style; many
of them are abstract, some of them are mysteri-
ous. In the Second Part of Faust he positively
vi PREFACE.

plumes himself upon his own mysteriousness.
Throughout he deviates from the beaten track
of literature; he has an object of his own and
a style of his own, and is perhaps more difficult
to appreciate satisfactorily than any one of our
own leading writers.

But a key to Goethe would be no small book;
it would be a book three or four times as large
as that now offered to the public; it would
include some connected account of Goethe’s
life, and some sufficient explanation of his
principal writings, both in verse and prose.
And around all these principal writings,
Gotz, Werther, Tasso, Iphigenie, Hermann
and Dorothea, Wilhelm Meister, Faust, the
Elective Affinities, and the West-dstlicher
Divan, a literature has grown up, of which no
abridgment could be given in any short space.

But is there not room for a short and slight
book like this, which, without professing any
sort of completeness, might usefully accompany
the reader of Goethe in his studies? It is not
well to bury a great and delightful poet under
a weight of commentary; and Goethe-litera-
ture is in general too cumbrous. Yet a writer
who tries to write a small book on so largea
PREFACE. vil

subject encounters certain difficulties; he is
tempted in the first place to lose himself in
vague panegyric. How Goethe is the greatest
modern poet since Shakspeare, how he has a
certain breadth and serenity peculiar to him-
self, —on these texts it is only too easy to
enlarge through many chapters. Moreover,
the subject’ bristles with common-places, which
it is by no means easy to put on one side. It
could not be otherwise when we consider that
for the best part of a century German thorough-
ness inspired by German national pride has
been ceaselessly busy upon the life and writ-
ings of Goethe.

The Germans themselves are indeed abun-
dantly furnished with companions to Goethe of
every size and degree of thoroughness; but it
can scarcely be said that in English there are
as yet too many books on Goethe. Much valu-
able work has no doubt been done on him by
Englishmen, beginning with Carlyle and end-
ing with the Goethe Society. Nevertheless it
may be questioned whether after all Goethe
has been sufficiently domesticated among us.
I can therefore imagine that this volume may
be found useful, in spite of its slightness and
viii PREFACE.

incompleteness, if it is light enough to be read
without effort or fatigue, and at the same time
true enough and fresh enough to delineate
faithfully a great genius and a great personal-
ity, avoiding the common-places with which
the subject has been beset.
CONTENTS.

 

CHAPTER PAGE
I. ’T 3s Srxty YEARS SINCE is) oe “Ls See I
II. Some LIMITATIONS OF HIS GENIUS . . II

III. CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS 23
IV. GOETHE’s AGE AND CONTEMPORARIES . 49
V. LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE. .. ._ 60

VI. IMPORTANCE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE

BHASES (a6 8) S, dbo (Gy Sec ah le Sta! Se OB

VII. SELF-CULTURE. . ....... 99
VIII. WILHELM MEISTER . . . . . . . . 122
IX. THe Great HEATHEN. . . ,. . . . 138

X. ANOTHER RELIGION. . . . . . - 148
“a
GOETHE

REVIEWED AFTER SIXTY YEARS.

 

CHAPTER I.
*T IS SIXTY VEARS SINCE.

GOETHE died in 1832, on March 22d. That is,
he died sixty-one years ago; and he died in the
same year as Scott, two years before Coleridge,
eighteen years before Wordsworth; and on the
other hand, eight years after Byron, and twenty-
seven years after Schiller. When he died he
was recognized as the sovereign name in German
literature; nay, as being at the moment the
sovereign name in European literature.
Among ourselves Carlyle had already begun
to hymn his praise in the round-mouthed man-
ner characteristic of him. In Goethe, he said,
was to be found the cure for all the evils that
affected the modern mind. He was the prince

of modern letters and of modern thought.
I
2 GOETHE.

Young men whose views of life were not yet
settled, and who suffered from the disease of the
age, were bidden to take the simple prescription
which was conveyed in the words, “ Close thy
Byron; open thy Goethe.” It would be rash
to say that the English public accepted this
view. They recognized the impressive eloquence
of Carlyle, and in the main they recognized that
his exalted view of Goethe was shared by other
good authorities. Ever since that time Goethe
has been for us all the greatest of German
writers, and in the very front rank of the writers
of modern Europe. A few here and there have
followed Carlyle in giving him a transcendental
position quite above that of great poets in
general, as a few here and there have turned
from him with slight appreciation, — for instance
De Quincey, and more recently, Mr. Edward
Fitzgerald, who says that to him Goethe isa
critic and a philosopher, but not a poet.

So much of the past generation. Great writers
on their way to immortality pass through several
stages between death and that goal. The ques-
tion has to be answered, whether the generation
which follows their death will like them as well
as that which saw them die; and also the ques-
*T IS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 3

tion whether their works will prove equally
congenial to a world modified by new circum-
stances and revolutions in Church and State,
and preoccupied by new poets and authors who
have sprung up to take their place. Sometimes
it appears suddenly, some twenty or thirty years
after the great author’s death, that the new time
knows him no more ; that a new leaf of opinion
has been turned over, and that his ideas and
fancies have hopelessly lost their charm; so
that the author who seemed certainly on his way
to the stars returns suddenly to the earth and is
lost in the perishable crowd. But further than
this, if great authors are to be compared to stars,
we may say of them that in the earlier stages of
their posthumous existence they do not take
their place as fixed stars, but disappear and
reappear with periodicity like comets or like
planets. Their fame has eclipses and revivals
during many years, while the question of immor-
tality seems to remain pending. And so about
Goethe several questions now arise. Sixty years
since he seemed the undoubted sovereign of
German literature. Does he seem so still, now
that Germany has produced many other writers?
Sixty years since he seemed to us all among the
4 GOETHE.

greatest of modern writers. Does he seem so
still, after Victor Hugo has run his prodigious
career? Does he seem so to us who have seen
Tennyson retain his poetic inspiration in a great
old age? And now that the age has changed
so much, and that the disease of the age is so
different from what it was under the reign of
Byron, what are we to think of those magnificent
rhapsodies of Carlyle and of that ‘Close thy
Byron ; open thy Goethe ”?

These questions resolve themselves into two.
What do the Germans, themselves, think of
Goethe after sixty years; and what ought we to
think? Goethe’s fame suffered a little eclipse
in Germany in the early days of Liberalism ;
Borne spoke of him with passionate depreciation,
and Heine, too, dropped some petulant words.
But this is an affair of the past, and became
considerably easier to understand from the day
when Heine wrote, ‘“ As to the motive of these
attacks on Goethe, I know at least what it was
in my own case. It was envy.” But in these
later days a cause has been at work to raise the
fame of Goethe among his own countrymen
higher than ever. The immense rise of the
nation itself in power and self-respect, which
’TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 5

took place in 1870, carried with it a sort of
promotion of its great poet to a higher rank
among poets. In Hermann Grimm’s Lectures
on Goethe (1877) Goethe is praised with an
exaltation that had not, I think, been usual
among German writers before 1870. He is now
simply the greatest poet of all ages and nations
(II. p. 296).

And again, “ Antigone, Iphigenia, Ophelia,
Imogen, Juliet, must yield the gas to Gretchen.”
“By possessing Faust and Gretchen the Ger-
mans hold the first place in the poetry of all
ages and nations” (II. 266, 267). In short, the
Germans are the greatest nation (since 1870),
therefore their poet must be the greatest poet.
Gervinus had not held this tone a few years
before. Indeed, from Germany the latest cry is
that the tide of admiration cannot be resisted;
and that it is as vain now to exclaim impatiently
“Goethe und kein Ende!” as it was for Goethe
himself to exclaim ‘ Shakspeare und kein
Ende!” at the beginning of the century. But
his European fame is less settled than his na-
tional fame, and so the reappearance of Goethe
before our public in recent years is a sign
worth noting. It marks a new stage in his
6 GOETHE.

posthumous career. His English prophet,
Carlyle, is gone; the generation that listened to
Carlyle and studied Goethe under his advice is
passing away. “Another race hath been, and
other palms are won.” And now we ask again,
“Was it all true that Carlyle told us? Need we
still study this foreign Goethe?” It might be
some relief to be told that the fashion is past
and need not be revived; for it is not much in
our habits to study foreign literatures. There is
actually only one foreign poet who has in-
fluenced us at all profoundly or lastingly; that
is Dante. Are we bound to concede this very
exceptional honor to Goethe also?

Some obvious considerations might tempt us
to hold ourselves excused. Carlyle used to
hold up Goethe as a light in religion and philos-
ophy ; a guardian who marched before us as a
pillar of fire to show the way out of the scepti-
cism of the eighteenth century into faith and
serenity. But is not this a view difficult to
admit or to understand now that the eighteenth
century, with its Voltaires and Fredericks and
French revolutions, has receded so far into the
distance; now that so many new forms of
scepticism have appeared, and so many new
"TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 7

ways of dealing with scepticism have been
suggested? And if we are to grant that the
nimbus of prophecy has faded from about his
head; if we are to look at him again without
prepossessions, as Scott or Coleridge looked at
him in his own lifetime, and see in him only a
distinguished literary man, the author of cer-
tain plays, novels, songs, and epigrams, of certain
fragments of autobiography, criticism, and de-
scription, — does any ground remain for paying
him a homage different, not merely in degree
but in kind, from that which we render to other
great literary men who have adorned the nine-
teenth century, — to such men, for instance, as
Scott or Coleridge themselves, or as Byron, or
as Victor Hugo?

Assuredly there is no danger that the author
of ‘ Faust” will not take rank with the highest
of these men. But do his works justify us in
raising him far beyond that rank, into the
small first class of the select spirits of all time?
Why rank him, for instance, with Shakspeare?
It may be fair, perhaps, to say that “ Faust”
would deserve rank, and even high’ rank, among
the Shakspearian dramas; but then ‘“ Faust’”’
stands alone among Goethe’s works. What
8 GOETHE.

other compositions of the first class can he pro-
duce? Is it “Hermann und Dorothea”? That,
no doubt, is very pretty and perfect. “ Iphi-
genie” is very noble, ‘‘ Tasso” very refined,
“Gotz” very spirited, but “Egmont” is some-
what disappointing; and almost all the other
plays are unimportant, when they are not, like
“ Stella,” extravagant. The pathos of ‘‘ Werther”
is almost as obsolete as that of Richardson;
and is not “Wilhelm Meister” dull in a good
many parts, — nay, perhaps everywhere except
where it is redeemed by the exquisite invention
of Mignon, or by the vivacity of the disreputable
Philine? Do not even Germans sometimes
acknowledge that they cannot read the ‘ Elec-
tive Affinities” ? And who can make much
of the Second Part of “ Faust,’ or the Second
Part of ‘“ Meister” ? When we praise Shak-
speare, we are not obliged to make so many
abatements. Among his plays very few can
be called failures, and a dozen at least are un-
doubted masterpieces. But can Goethe hold
his own even against Scott in abundance of
imagination? To produce his few masterpieces
how much effort was bestowed? What a task
of self-culture did he impose upon himself?
"TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 9

How many large designs did he conceive and
abandon? What has become of his “ Cesar,”
of his “Mohammed,” of his “ Prometheus,” of
his ‘“ Ahasuerus,” of his ‘“ Iphigenie in Delphi,”
of his “ Nausicaa,” of his great religious epic,
“Die Geheimnisse,” of his national epic on
“Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar,” of his epic on
“Wilhelm Tell,” of his great trilogy of plays
illustrative of the French Revolution? Of the
trilogy we have a single play, ‘“‘ Die Natiirliche
Tochter,” of some of the other works more or
less considerable fragments, of some not a trace
remains. Meanwhile Scott, taking life easily and
making no parade of effort, pours out his poems,
ballads, romances, and novels without stint. He
does not indeed rise to the level of ‘ Faust; ”
but at least he finishes without delay whatever he
begins, scarcely ever fails to satisfy both himself
and the whole world; and though he had a life
shorter by twenty years, has left behind him a
greater mass of literature which is still amusing.

These reflections upon the posthumous vicissi-
tudes of a great author on his way to immor-
tality, lead perhaps naturally to the conclusion
that the time is come to revise altogether the
estimate of Goethe which we have received from
10 GOETHE.

the last generation. This, however, would bea
ponderous task, and one which at this moment
I have neither leisure nor health to undertake.
All I can do is to reprint with certain alterations
and additions some papers which I published
about eight years ago. Reprinted, they will
not make a complete book, but perhaps by
treating Goethe as a whole, and furnishing a
view of his literary performance which will at
least be connected, they may make a slight
essay towards that book on Goethe which seems
to be required by the lapse of sixty years since
his death.
CHAPTER II.
SOME LIMITATIONS OF HIS GENIUS.

I HAVE raised, as it were accidentally, the ques-
tion whether great writers are to be ranked
according to the number of the masterpieces
they produce; for it must be admitted of Goethe
that, though he lived long and produced much,
he by no means enjoyed an easy and continuous
triumph, and that we can scarcely rank a very
large number of his works among the master-
pieces of European literature. Nor is this to
be explained simply by untoward circumstances
in his life. Externally he was one of the most
fortunate of artists. Had he not long life, easy
circumstances, and most generous patronage?
But let us consider the parallel case of military
commanders. These are broadly distinguished
into two classes. Some find an army ready
made and disciplined; these are they who
win with ease a long succession of victories.
Those, on the other hand, who have their army
12 GOETHE.

to make advance on their course through diffi-
culties, have to balance defeat against victory,
nay, lose in certain cases most of the battles
they fight. We do not rank William III. or
Washington among commanders according to
the number of their victories. Is there not
room sometimes for a similar distinction in
literature?

It is often affirmed that a great poet is the
outgrowth and flower of a great age, and this
is true of a certain class of great poets. They
live in the midst of great men, and within the
rumor of great deeds; they use a language
which has been gradually moulded to poetic
purposes by poets who have been their precur-
sors and whose fame they absorb. Appearing
at the right moment, they reap the harvest
which has been sown by others. Subjects are
waiting for them, style and manner have been
prepared, and a public full of sympathy and
congeniality welcomes them. Such poets are
not like William III. or Washington, but rather
like Frederick, who inherited an unrivalled army
created by his father, or like Napoleon, who
wielded all the prodigious military force created
and trained by the Revolution. Shakspeare
SOME LIMITATIONS OF HIS GENIUS. 13

may be said to belong to this class. He is the
normal product of the Elizabethan age, which
had accustomed Englishmen to great men and
great deeds, and had filled them with great an-
ticipations. Scott too had, in the first place,
the advantage of models in whose steps it was
safe to follow, since Shakspeare himself and
the great novelists had created the style and
smoothed the path for him, and since in two
centuries of a flourishing English literature
there had grown up a common understanding
between the authors and the public. But this
name of Scott suggests to us that there may
be a heredity of a still more intimate kind in
literary genius. The inexhaustible imagination
which furnished out Scott’s poems and romances
was not the mere accident of a gifted nature or
a fortunate time; it was a kind of personal in-
heritance. In the brain of the Borderer the
wild life of his ancestors survived as a perennial
spring of ballad, poetry, and romance. That
brain was like a haunted house upon which the
strange deeds of a past generation have left their
mark. He said himself that he had “a head
through which a regiment of horse had been
exercising ever since he was five years old.”
14 GOETHE.

All the turmoil of the blood which is put to
rest by the security of a settled civilization, and
which had lasted longer on the Border than in
any other region so near the capital seats of
culture — all the intense passions, primitive feel-
ings, prejudices, and superstitions which make
the stock of the romancer and ballad-writer —
belonged to Scott, not simply because he was a
genius, but mainly because he was a Borderer,
because he was a Scott.

Often we can trace that in these cases poetry
is a survival of conviction, belief in the second
generation, hereditary sentiment. Some of those
who watched Rossetti at his work thought they
discovered that he did not regard his own im-
aginations seriously; and, indeed, what other
opinion can one form of the ‘“ Song of the
Beryl,” or the “ Ballad of Sister Helen”? Sim-
ilarly, Mr. Henry James remarks of Hawthorne
that it would be a great mistake to infer from
the constant recurrence in his romances of the
ideas of sin, retribution, and the stricken con-
science, that Hawthorne himself was under the
influence of such sombre ideas, the truth being
that he was an easy-going, contented, and com-
fortable man. But Hawthorne’s puritanic an-
SOME LIMITATIONS OF HIS GENIUS. 15

cestors took these ideas seriously, and Rossetti’s
Italian ancestors! in like manner furnished the
beliefs which in their secondary form suggested
Rossetti’s pictures and poems. Of all artists it
is Scott who is richest in this kind of inherited
sentiment. The shrewd, good-natured, sensible
Scotch lawyer lives privately in a world of gran-
diose thoughts, opinions, sentiments, convic-
tions, out of which he composes at his ease a
whole literature; and yet if you ask him what
he thinks of these thoughts, opinions, senti-
ments, and convictions, he can only smile and
evade the question. “Superstition,” he says,
candidly, “is very picturesque, and I make it
at times stand me in good stead; but I never
allow it to interfere with interest or conven-
ience.”’ They were serious enough to his an-
cestors, those ideas of clannish devotion, of
chivalry, of witchcraft, and demonology; but
to him they have come simply by inheritance.
All he knows is that when he unlocks the ample
chambers, of his imagination he finds them
there; that they work up into capital stories, if

1“ Such a man belonged to the sixteenth or perhaps
the thirteenth century; and in Italy, not in England.”
(“ Recollections of D. G. Rossetti,’ T. Hall Caine, p. 270.)
16 GOETHE.

hardly fit for practical use; that in short they
are the old furniture of the house in which Na-
ture has placed him.

Those poets create easily and abundantly who
have a great fund of such inherited sentiment.
But a poet is still more at his ease when the
fund of sentiment he inherits is not obsolete to
his reason, and when it is richly supplemented
by strong and fresh sensations furnished by his
own age. If to all this he add from his own
genius an original power of insight into Nature
and the universe — then we have the Shakspeare,
who, though, as Goethe says of him, the life of
whole centuries throbbed in his soul, yet is at
the same time himself, since he is inspired by
his own age as much as by the past and looks
forward with eagerness to the future, and since
he gives out from his original vitality as much
as he receives, whether from his ancestors or
from his contemporaries.

Now, Goethe had not good fortune of this
kind. He did not come into a great poetic
inheritance. When we inquire whence came
his imaginative wealth, we are obliged to con-
clude that, in the main, he must have collected
it himself. So far from being the growth and
SOME LIMITATIONS OF HIS GENIUS. 17

representative of a great age, or the result in
literature of the silent nobleness of many gener-
ations of his countrymen, this great artist grew
out of a people which had been sunk for a hunt
dred years in an imaginative impotence as well
as in a national and political nullity. The citi-
zen of a declining imperial town, in a country
where, as he himself complains, the citizen-class
universally wanted personal dignity, in an age
when Germany had fallen behind France and
England, was destitute of literature of any high
order, and had suffered its very language to fall
into decay, and among the upper classes into
disuse, — he found no poetical atmosphere about
him, but had to struggle with a reign of prosaic
mediocrity that reduced him to despair. The
stagnation was no mere temporary evil. An
Englishman who found, as Gray did, that he
had fallen on a prosaic age, could shut himself
up with Shakspeare and Milton, and forget the
poverty that surrounded him in “the pomp and
prodigality of Heaven!’ But in Germany the
poverty was of old standing; Goethe saw no
great poetic luminaries a century or two behind
him. For Milton he had only Hoffmanswaldau,
for Shakspeare only Gryphius. He rejects such

2
18 GOETHE.

models, and throughout his career we find him
leaning on no German predecessors but Hans
Sachs, whose merit he rediscovered, and the old
Middle German poet of Reineke Fuchs. And
as Germany furnished him with no models, so
she afforded few subjects. The Middle Ages
were then little explored and little relished.
With one vigorous effort Goethe rescues from
oblivion the heroic name of Gotz v. Berlichingen.
But he can do no more. He makes an attempt
to revive the memory of the hero of his patron’s
house, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar; but, as we
might expect, his imagination recoils in horror
from “the woful Iliad,” so he calls it, of the
Thirty Years’ War. And what could the later
period of Germany offer to him? That which
makes history poetical — namely, nationality —
was wanting there. Only in his own boyhood,
when Fritz beat the French at Rosbach, did
German history strike out a momentary spark
of the fire which warms the poet.

The strange course which German affairs had
taken for many centuries, and which had led to
the ruinous disaster of the Thirty Years’ War,
produced pitiable effects upon the manners and
ways of thinking of the people. There was a
SOME LIMITATIONS OF HIS GENIUS. 19

sort of dwarfishness — he himself calls it child-
ishness — in the generation before Goethe; and
in his own generation there was a painful con-
sciousness that almost all that constitutes man-
hood, —self-respect, independence, patriotism, —
had been lost and needed to be rediscovered.
They felt the loss most keenly when they tried
to write, for then they perceived that the true
and right style in literature would not come to
them. They could but helplessly imitate French
models, and their imitations wanted the draw-
ing-room elegance which made the chief charm
of those models. When they tried to throw off
the French yoke, and to speak with German
frankness and simplicity, they found that instead
of vigor they achieved only violence, and that
their pathos turned into a miserable whine. It is
this unfortunate style that our fathers ridiculed in
the ‘ Anti-Jacobin ” (where the Stella of Goethe
himself is ridiculed), and that still displeases us
when we read many of his early pieces. To throw
it off was all the more difficult, because of the
want of native models of a better style. We,
when we grew tired of Pope’s couplets, had only
to revive an earlier taste; but Goethe and his
contemporaries were forced to go to other
20 GOETHE.

countries for models. They began by calling
in Shakspeare; then they devoted themselves
to the imitation of the ancients; then came
the turn of Calderon, Hafiz, and the Sakontala.
German literature became rich beyond all other
literatures in translations and adaptations; but
these, however precious, seemed always foreign
and far-fetched acquisitions. We see the insur-
mountable difficulty that Goethe had to con-
tend with, the want of the proper soil for poetry
to grow in, and of the proper atmosphere to
nourish it, when we remark that after all that
he and others could do, German literature seems
still, in comparison with other great literatures,
somewhat pale, somewhat academic, and wanting
in marked character.

In these circumstances, it was impossible for
Goethe to rival Shakspeare in achieving, with
triumphant ease, masterpiece after masterpiece.
He had to begin by making his way out of the
slough to firm land. His first works could not
but be crude, as, in fact, they are in part over-
strained, mawkish, at times ridiculous. When
this stage was passed, he would run the risk of
seeming too little spontaneous, too much under
the influence of foreign models. And through-
SOME LIMITATIONS OF HIS GENIUS. 21

out he would be under the necessity of putting
forth great effort, of schooling himself with the
most assiduous vigilance; and it was to be ex-
pected that he would sometimes fail, and that
he would make many plans which he would
afterwards find himself unable to execute. On
the other hand, in this struggle with difficulties
he might achieve certain great results which are
not achieved by the happier genius. Peter the
Great was not a very successful general; he
was terribly beaten by Charles XII. at Narva,
terribly beaten by the Turks on the Pruth;
nevertheless, he created modern Russia. Some-
thing similar may be said of Goethe. “ Wer-
ther ” strikes us as morbid, the “ Gross-Cophta”
is tiresome; but modern German literature is
itself in a great degree the production of Goethe.
There is much felicity in the compliment which
Byron paid him when he dedicated “ Sardana-
palus” to ‘the illustrious Goethe, who has
created the literature of his country and _ illus-
trated that of Europe.” This may seem an
exaggerated expression; there are indeed few
even of the greatest writers of whom it can be
justly said that they created the literature of
their country. Yet avery recent critic speaks
22 GOETHE.

almost as strongly when he writes of the
publication of the first collected edition of
Goethe’s Works, of which the first five volumes
appeared while he was in Italy, — that is, between
1786 and 1788, — and the remaining three in the
following years.

“Tt is a mere historic fact that since its appearance
by far the greatest part of what till then had been con-
sidered, and at that time was still considered, genuine
poetry, has continually fallen more and more into oblivion,
and what poetry appeared afterwards, written by others,
stood so evidently under the influence of this new sunrise
of beauty, that even the most powerful and original of
the new poets, even Schiller, could not convey the full
impression of his greatness and individuality till he had
made a loving study of Goethe’s poetry and genius, and
so recognized his own difference from Goethe, and, at
the same time, his deep agreement with him.” !

But we begin at the wrong end when we
begin by speaking of the limitations which place
Goethe at a disadvantage in comparison with
one or two of the greatest names in the literature
of the world. For us the first question is, What
is the character of his genius? And the next,
What is the compass of it?

1 A. SCHOLL: “ Goethe,” p. 123.
CHAPTER III.
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS.

LET us try then to describe the kind and degree
of the merit which by every nation alike, and
not by the Germans only, has been recognized
in Goethe, and has been acknowledged to be
such that it can never be forgotten. It would
be possible to meet the lazy and superficial
objection which I have been combating by an
argument of the same superficial kind. By
simply reckoning up Goethe's literary achieve-
ments, and comparing them, as an examiner
might do, with those of other literary men, it'
may be shown that he is entitled, as it were
by marks, to a place very near the top of the
literary list. Besides the five or six consum-
mate works which the world has agreed to
admire, it may be affirmed that his lyrics, — that
is, his songs, ballads, and lyrical romances, —
are the best in the world. Heine at least, no
bad judge of songs and no_ over-indulgent
critic of Goethe, thought so. Further, he may
24 GOETHE.

be called the greatest of all literary critics.
And lastly, though he did not write formal
essays, yet in the qualities of the essayist, in
subtle and abundant observation of human
life, in the number and value of his wise
remarks and pregnant sentences, he is by far
the greatest writer since Montaigne and Bacon.
Even if we look no deeper, it is matter for
astonishment that the most tender of lyrists,
and one of the most inventive and sublime of
dramatists, should be found discussing in “ Wil-
helm Meister” the duties of landowners and
the details of the management of a theatre,
with a hard common-sense worthy of Johnson.
In truth, however much men may differ about
the merits of particular writings of Goethe, yet
his literary greatness in general is so striking
and so undeniable that his fame is not in any
way bound up with that of German literature.
Those who do not relish the German genius in
general, who find it wanting in clearness or
manliness, must and do make an exception in
Goethe’s favor.

But to get a clear view of Goethe’s genius we
must not compare him with others, nor show that
he is equal to this author in this, and superior
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 25

to that author in that; nor must we try him by
the common standard, and consider how often
by that standard he succeeds and how often he
fails. Rather we must understand how he
differs from other writers, what an exceptional
personality he has, and accordingly what an
unusual standard he sets up for himself, and
elects to be tried by. If the variety of his
works is remarkable, their unity is more re-
markable still; it is unique. And if his power
strikes us, if at times he is thrilling or over-
whelming, his reserve, his reticence, his absti-
nence are still rarer than his power, and the level
flats which at first disappoint us in his works are
found to have an interest of their own.

I have spoken of the hereditary sentiment
which makes so large a part of poetry, nay,
which almost exclusively composes the poetry
of many poets. A vast proportion of the poetry
that is in the world is not serious. It expresses
not what the writer really thinks and feels, but
what haunts his brain, the fancies that come to
him unbidden; and these are usually an echo
of former beliefs. The serious thoughts of one
age wa/k, as it were, as the poetry of the ages
that follow. Quite different and much less in
26 GOETHE.

quantity is the poetry that arises from a fresh
original contemplation of Nature,—the poetry
which, though perhaps symbolical in form, the
author is prepared to stand by as substantially
true. There is not much in any age of such
poetry, and it is seldom well received. For the
public is much more under the dominion of
hereditary sentiment than even the poets; the
public desires to find in poetry the old common-
places, and resents being cheated of them. But
it is incomparably more valuable, and in fact
is the vital element which alone keeps poetry
alive. Wordsworth supplied it to England in
Goethe’s age. Now, hereditary poetic sentiment,
I have remarked, was wanting in Goethe’s age
and country. He was driven to be original, and
being thus driven he became the avowed enemy
of the conventional style, — “ the mortal enemy,”
as he loves to say, ‘‘of all empty verbiage.”
He takes poetry very seriously indeed. It is
not enough for him that a poem is eloquent or
high-sounding, or that it is popular; not enough
even that it acts on the feelings, that it draws
tears or excites enthusiasm. “Touch the
heart!” he exclaims,—‘“‘any bungler can do
that!” (Ach! die zartlichen Herzen, ein
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 27

Pfiischer vermag sie zu riihren.) According to
him poetry must be ¢vwe,; and he presses this
principle with such rigor that he seems to
withdraw the art from popular judgment
altogether. In short, all the work of reforma-
tion that was done in England by Wordsworth
was done at the same time for Germany by
Goethe. It was done not indeed more faithfully
and in the face of less opposition; but it was
done with far wider intelligence, and with far
profounder results. But that it should have
been done at all, adds another great title to
those high and various pretensions which
Goethe puts forward. The Shakspeare was at
the same time the Wordsworth. The great
creator who imagined “ Faust ” and “ Gretchen,”
who certainly could not say with Wordsworth
“to freeze the blood I have no ready arts,” is
nevertheless as vigorous a reformer, and holds
“mere popularity in as sovereign contempt, as
Wordsworth himself.

Wordsworth went without popularity; and it
may strike us as natural that such a serious view
of poetry should fail to commend itself to the
multitude. To the multitude, indeed, it seems
pedantic and almost self-contradictory; for is
28 GOETHE.

not poetry a pleasure, a natural recreation of
the spirit, and what can be more perverse than
to sophisticate it with reasoning? Was Goethe
then unpopular also? The history of Goethe’s
reputation, and of his popularity in Germany,
is long and interesting. I shall return to it.
Meanwhile, it is to be said that certainly he
suffered no such neglect as Wordsworth. Some
of his works were vastly popular. He began
with the greatest popular triumph that has been
witnessed in German literary history. The re-
ception of “Gotz” and of ‘“ Werther,’ was
similar to that of the “ Lay of the Last Minstrel ”’
and the first canto of ‘Childe Harold ” in
England; and as Goethe was the author of both
books, his fame after their appearance was like
that of Scott and that of Byron taken together.
About 1775 he was by far the most popular
poet, not only living, but that had lived, in
Germany. Had Goethe been only a Scott, or
only a Byron, or only a Scott and Byron in one,
he would have taken his fortune at the flood,
and poured out during the next twenty years a
series of chivalrous romances, and another series
of domestic tales of love and suicide. Certainly
at that time it could hardly have been expected
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 29

that he would appear as a vigorous reformer of
taste. Again, in the middle of his career, his
“ Hermann und Dorothea” was enthusiastically
received, and of course the First Part of ‘‘ Faust”
(which, in its complete form, did not come be-
fore the world till Goethe was fifty-nine years of
age) had an unbounded popularity. But in the
long intervals between these great triumphs he
often passed into the background, was often
almost forgotten, or was believed to have been
spoiled for literature by the distractions of
court-life. Even when his fame was solidly
established it became the custom to say, and
Coleridge repeated it in England in one of the
few passages in which Coleridge ever spoke of
Goethe, that his writings did not, and never
would, go to the heart of the German people as
did those of Schiller, and that there was a cer-
tain coldness about them. Other critics outside
Germany have charged him not only with cold-
ness, but even with dulness, —M. Schérer for
example.

On this question of dulness we must dis-
tinguish. Goethe had a long old age. Perhaps
we ought to consider that the “ Westdstlicher
Divan,” 1818, 1819, marks the close of his really
30 GOETHE.

vigorous authorship. But he lived and labored
for twelve years after this date. In the pro-
ductions of those twelve years, no doubt much
is languid, and we can only say in apology that
the writer is old, and, especially when we speak
of the Second Part of “‘ Faust,” that admiration
and flattery have caused him to overrate the
importance of his own writings. But if we find
dulness in the writings of his vigorous period, it
must be due to another cause. Dulness, when
we attribute it to a writer, is after all a relative
term; it expresses only a want of correspond-
ence between the mind of the writer and that of
the reader. The writer finds something inter-
esting, and therefore enlarges upon it; but the
reader does not find it interesting. To that
reader therefore ¢hat writer is dull; but it is
equally true that the reader seems dull to the
writer. On which side the dulness actually
resides depends upon the question, whether the
matter which actually does not interest the
reader ought to interest him. When Words-
worth’s readers pish and psha at his stories of
humble life, and protest that they take no
interest in them, Wordsworth answers: But you
ought to take an interest! It is not quite nor
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 31

always, but itis partly and at times, the same
with Goethe. What you call dulness he calls
seriousness. Wilhelm’s interminable descrip-
tion of the puppet-show in the first book of
“Wilhelm Meister” puts Marianne, we are told,
to sleep; this must mean that the writer knows
well that he is writing what plain people will
find dull, but to himself, since he is seriously
inquiring into the philosophy of the drama,
these things are interesting and seem to deserve
close attention.

Of all imaginative writers Goethe is, perhaps,
the most serious, — not the most solemn, nor the
most passionate, nor the most earnest, but the
most serious. He is absolutely bent upon grasp-
ing and expressing the truth; he has no pleasure
in any imaginations, however splendid or im-
pressive, which he cannot feel to be true; on the
other hand, when he feels that he is dealing with
truth he seems to care little, and sometimes to
forget altogether, that it is not interesting. This
is highly characteristic of the man who took
almost as much interest in science as in poetry,
and could perform with infinite assiduity the
tasks of a practical administrator. When we
consider indeed the methodical and practical
32 GOETHE.

seriousness of his character, the quality in fact
which he believed himself to have inherited from
his father, ‘‘des Lebens ernstes Fiihren,’ what
surprises us is not so much that his writings
should here and there be heavy, as that he
should have continued through a long life to be
a poet, and a highly imaginative and brilliant
poet. What was rather to be predicted of such
a nature was, that after a poetic youth he would
find the serious business of his life either in
science or in administration.

Literature is perhaps at best a compromise
between truth and fancy, between seriousness
and trifling. It cannot do without something of
popularity, and yet the writer who thinks much
of popularity is unfaithful to his mission; on
the other hand, he who leans too heavily upon
literature breaks through it into science or into
practical business. Goethe was often in danger
of seeing his art thus give way under him ; when
he says that but for Schiller’s sympathy he
does not know what would have become of him,
he seems to mean that he was on the point, at
the moment when Schiller came to the rescue,
of abandoning poetry for science. He is always
so near to reality, and examines it with such
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 33

penetrating eyes, that it is a problem how he
can remain a poet; for is poetry possible without
something of illusion? Yet he remains a poet
to the last. Business could not make him dull,
nor science matter-of-fact; even when old age
was added to both, he might lose something of
his force, but his imagination remained warm
and glowing. The Second Part of “ Faust” may
show signs of decay, but assuredly it is not
prosaic. On the point of disappearance, this
great orb of song is surrounded by a fantastic
pomp of form and color. Nor, on the other
hand, does he ever become a mere cold realist.
If he accumulates details it is not in the spirit of
a Defoe, or for the mere pleasure of producing
illusion, — for the generalizing tendency, so far
from being weak, is almost excessive in him, —
but because, like the inductive philosopher, he is
eager for facts and desires to have the broadest
basis for his conclusions.

This taste for facts is not only to be perceived
in the minuteness of particular descriptions, but
in the whole character of his plays, novels, and
poems; and it explains how they may often seem
dull, and sometimes may really be so. Serious-
ness and dulness may easily in literature be

3
34 GOETHE.

mistaken for each other. What is uninterest-
ing as fiction may be highly interesting when it
is regarded as fact; and in Goethe’s works
much more is fact and much less is mere fiction
than the reader is apt to assume. His most
famous work, “ Faust,” is not that which is most
characteristic of his genius. He there revels in
quaint and audacious invention, quite contrary
to the habit, contrary even to the cherished
principles, of his mature life. The truth is that
“Faust,” though it was finished and published
late, is in its conception a youthful work. He
was long disposed to regard the commencement
he had early made as among the crudities which
in his second period he had outgrown. For
many years it lay untouched, and when, in the
closing years of the eighteenth century, he
turned once more to “ these northern phan-
toms,” as he calls them, it is with misgiving and
repugnance. But a tide of medizevalism set in,
by which, in spite of himself, he was carried
away; and the First Part of “ Faust,” published
in 1808, was Goethe’s concession to the roman-
ticist fashion, — a sort of opportunist abandon-
ment of his mature convictions and return to an
earlier style which he had deliberately renounced.
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 35

Many misconceptions of Goethe have resulted
from the habit of estimating him by this ex-
ceptional work. In his other works it is a
general rule that they are founded in a remark-
able degree upon fact. “ Gétz” is a dramatized
memoir; so is “Clavigo.” “Werther” was
constructed by combining what had passed
between Goethe and Lotte Buff with the circum-
stances of Jerusalem’s suicide. “Tasso” is a
picture of court-life at Weimar; and in the
relations of Tasso to the Princess we see a
reflection of those of Goethe to Frau v. Stein.
In “ Wilhelm Meister,” it is known that the “Con-
fessions of a Beautiful Soul” are substantially the
memoirs of Fraulein v. Klettenberg, to which
Goethe has made some additions. Much of this
novel also is autobiographical. In the first
book there are many pages which might almost
as well have appeared in ‘‘ Dichtung und Wahr-
heit.” The very name of the hero is explained !
when we find Goethe in his early period, and
when his enthusiasm for Shakspeare was at its

1 Wilhelm says, ‘‘ His friend Shakspeare, whom he had
great pleasure in acknowledging also for his godfather,
and liked all the better to hear himself called Wilhelm.”
—L. J. book iv. chap. iii.
36 GOETHE.

height, harping upon William as the name of
his guardian genius. When we find his songs,
in like manner, suggested in almost every case
by some real incident and some real feeling, we
begin to perceive that Goethe regards poetry
and literature generally in a way peculiar to
himself. He brings it into a much closer con-
nection than other writers with actual life and
experience. We perceive the full force of his
own statement, that all his Works, taken to-
gether, made up a great confession. With this
clew in their hands, the commentators have
traced the origin of a vast number of incidents
and characters which otherwise would have been
held, as a matter of course, to have been in-
vented by Goethe. Thus in the little play,
“Die Geschwister,”’ we meet again with the
Frau v. Stein. The story of “Stella” has been
traced to the circle of Jacobi. In “Wilhelm
Meister” numberless identifications have been
made. The prince in whose honor the players
perform the masque of “ Peace” is Prince Henry
of Prussia, the pedantic count is Count Werther,
the countess is the sister of Minister Stein; and
so on without end. Such identifications are un-
important in themselves, but they throw light
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 37

upon the working of Goethe’s imagination;
they show us in what a singular degree real life
furnished him not only with material, but with
inspiration. He has himself told us that his
only way of getting rid of the experiences which
pressed upon him, was to put them ina book.
Many poets set a wide gulf between the real
world and the world of their imaginations;
most, perhaps, receive from life one or two
strong and fresh impressions, which they after-
wards mix with a large amount of traditional
commonplace; few but regard reality as an
influence more or less adverse, more or less
disenchanting. To Goethe, reality is almost
the sole source of poetry; in his works so much
poetry, so much experience.

Only a very great genius can venture thus to
attach himself to facts, and the greatest genius
will not always handle such a method success-
fully. He who habitually turns his own life into
poetry, who lays before the public whatever has
chanced to make a deep impression upon him-
self, will at times — especially when, like Goethe,
he is not writing for a livelihood — write what
cannot possibly be interesting to others; and
Goethe has written many pages tiresomely pre-
38 GOETHE.

cise, which no one, if they had been written by
any ordinary writer, would care to read, and
many more which, if not wholly unimportant,
seem at least not important enough. More
usually he is not in reality dull; but he is, in his
prose writings at least, what those who read
lightly and for mere amusement call dull. Such
readers can in general make little, for instance,
of “Wilhelm Meister,” a novel with few incidents
and only one or two strongly-marked characters,
— “a menagerie of tame cattle,’ Niebuhr called
it, — but full of discussion, strangely labored and
minute, on matters more or less practical. It is
as uninteresting to most plain people as Words-
worth’s “Prelude,” and much more prosaic.
Goethe has not in this instance made a mistake ;
he has only given the rein to his realistic and
serious genius. But the majority of mankind
are not serious; and if they enjoy realism, it is
not realism of this kind. He aims at no illusion,
and his minute descriptions are seldom humor-
ous. He appears as a philosophic realist, study-
ing life that he may become wise, and describing
it that he may make his readers wise. Alas, for
ninety-nine out of every hundred of them!

If he had not once or twice, especially in
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 39

“Faust,” had the good luck to light upon a
fable interesting to all the world, and so once or
twice charmed, like Shakspeare, the many and
the few at once,.Goethe would have remained,
at least outside Germany, a writer little known,
and only prized by a curious reader here and
there. As it is, his universal fame brings into
notice pieces which have no superficial attrac-
tions, and makes men study closely other pieces
which they would have passed over lightly.
Once admitted as a classic, he reaps all the
benefit of his seriousness. For his works bear
examination if only they can attract it. Those
who read them at all will read them over and
over. Here is literature which nourishes; here
are books which may become bosom friends.
Here are high views put forward modestly,
grand and large ideas, which will not disappoint
those who try to reduce them to practice; pre-
cepts which are not merely earnest, but, what is
so much rarer, serious.

He makes his Tasso say of Clorinda, Armida,
Tancred, and the rest, what sounds strangely
when applied to them, “I know they are im-
mortal, for they ave.” (Ich weiss es, sie sind
ewig, denn sie s¢zd.) Of Goethe’s own charac-
40 GOETHE.

ters this might very fairly be said, and it is a
remarkable saying. He, one of the great poetic
creators, hardly believes in what is called the
creative imagination at all. According to him,
if a character is to be such as will bear examina-
tion, it must not be invented, but transferred
from real life. The very play from which the
maxim is taken illustrates it. Tasso at Ferrara
is in reality Goethe at Weimar,— not indeed
Goethe as he was, for he had precisely the
balance of character which Tasso wants, but as
he was tempted to be, as he feared in the first
years of his court-life to become. How con-
sistently in all his works he acted on the same
maxim his commentators have shown, and those
who assume to be his critics should be careful
to remember. Perhaps Goethe does not im-
press us quite as Shakspeare does, whose plays
are so full of latent thought, who reveals so
much on close examination which is wholly
unsuspected by the ordinary reader that an ex-
perienced student of him gives up fault-finding
in despair. Goethe, on the other hand, seems
quite capable of making mistakes; still, there is
such a fund of reality and of actual fact in his
so-called fiction that criticism of it may easily
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 41

be rash. Thus Coleridge, in the curious passage
which is his sole manifesto on the subject of
the greatest writer of his age, finds fault with
the character of “Faust,” which he calls dull
and meaningless. It is indeed not quite easy
to understand ‘ Faust,” as it is not easy to
understand “Hamlet.” But Coleridge himself
more earnestly than any one forbids us to lay
the blame of the obscurity of Hamlet’s character
on Shakspeare. And there is at least a prob-
ability that Faust’s character too will bear
examination, because Faust is no mere imagi-
nary being, but is in fact Goethe himself. If in-
consistency has crept in, it is the consequence
of a questionable practice which Goethe had
of keeping his designs so long by him that
his hand altered during the progress of the
execution.

Goethe, then, is not in the same class as Scott,
first because he wants the rich fund of tradi-
tional sentiment which came to Scott by right
of birth; secondly, because he has a vastly
more abundant supply of what may be called
new poetry, —that is, poetry derived at first
hand from Nature, which is as a spring chillingly
cold, yet so pure and refreshing! He is, in-
42 GOETHE.

deed, not like Scott, but rather like Words-
worth and Shakspeare compounded together.
But before our conception of him can be com-
plete, even in outline, we must recognize an-
other great quality that he possesses.

Goethe is a perfect Solomon for proverbs;
they pour from him in floods. He has such an
abundance of them to communicate that he is
often at a loss where to'find room for them, and
puts them recklessly into the mouths of per-
sonages who cannot reasonably be credited with
such a rare talent for generalization, — the prac-
tical Therese, the tender and unhappy Ottilie.
The knack of coining pregnant sentences is so
remarkable in him, that when we see it so
strangely combined with a lyrical talent and a
love of natural science, we are irresistibly re
minded of the ancient description of Solomon,
which says that he “spake of trees, from the
cedar which is in Lebanon to the hyssop which
springeth out of the wall; also he spake three
thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thou-
sand and five.” He is a sage as truly as he is
a poet; and never, unless in Shakspeare, has
such another combination of the generalizing
with the imaginative faculty been witnessed.
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 43

But when we examine his wisdom, we find that
it is much more than a mere instinctive habit of
observation combined with an unrivalled power
of expression. His sentences are not mere
detached fragments, or momentary flashes of
insight. They are the coherent aphorisms of a
sort of practical philosophy. He is not merely
a sage, he is even a philosopher. His wisdom,
though it is not presented in scholastic form,
has unity about it, and is calculated to influence,
nay, has deeply influenced, philosophic students.
We have had in recent times several literary
men, who, without being philosophers in the
academic sense, yet claim to have something to
say and to contribute something original to
philosophic discussion. And the most special-
ized philosophers may well listen with re-
spect, as Mill listens to Wordsworth, to men
of exceptional sensibility, who see the universe
in a light peculiar to themselves, even when
such men are without learning, and cannot com-
mand the proper philosophic expression for
their thoughts. Goethe looks at the discussions
of the school from the outside, and regards
them rather with derision than respect, as the
readers of “‘ Faust” do not need to be reminded.
44 GOETHE.

He continued through life to regard the new
systems which sprang up around him with
something of the same sceptical indifference
which he had shown in youth to the Collegium
Logicum. Of all the great philosophers, per-
haps, only Spinoza produced really much im-
pression on him. Yet he is a philosopher ina
higher degree than any other literary man, and
has produced a deeper impression than any
literary man upon thinkers and_ students.
Though in the modern sense we hesitate to
call him a philosopher, yet in the old sense,
and in the highest sense of the name, few of
the recognized philosophers have nearly so good
a title to it as he. For to him philosophy is
not merely a study, but a life; it is not summed
up in thinking and classifying and constructing
systems, but extends to all departments of ac-
tivity. And it would be difficult to name the
philosopher who has devoted himself with more
methodical seriousness than Goethe to the prob-
lem of leading, and then of teaching, the best
and most desirable kind of life. He conceives
the problem in its largest possible extent. From
prudential maxims in the style of Johnson, he
rises to more general precepts on the choice of
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 45

a vocation, pouring out a fund of wisdom pecu-
liarly his own on the mistakes men make about
their own aptitudes; then he dwells more par-
ticularly on the life of the artist, —a subject till
then scarcely noticed by moralists, but treated
by Goethe with the greatest comprehensive-
ness; then he rises to morality and religion.
On all subjects alike he is serious, on all sub-
jects perfectly unfettered. He has the advan-
tage of a vast experience, for he has practised
many arts, tasted almost every literature, in-
formed himself about every science, turning
away only from quite abstract studies, mathe-
matics, logic, and metaphysics; and besides all
that can be acquired from study, society, and
travel, he has managed a theatre and governed
asmall State. He has the coolness and shrewd-
ness of the most practical men; but he has
none of the narrowness, none of the hardness,
to which practical men are liable. On the con-
trary, he is full of sympathy, and he has also
infinite good-humor.

Had Goethe appeared asa thinker and phi-
losopher only, he would have been similar to
Bacon. Can we say that he would have been
46 GOETHE.

at all inferior? His observation extends over
wider provinces of life; he is more honest, more
kindly. His faculty of style is at least equally
great. There is a certain similarity too in the
scientific pretensions of the two men. Both
professed to be discoverers, and the claims of
both have been denied; but what seems clear is
that both had a prophetic sense of the tendency
of science, a profound and just instinct of new
scientific developments at hand.

I do not speak here of what may be question-
able in Goethe’s speculations. I do not raise
the question whether his influence may not have
been in some respects harmful. The question
in this chapter is simply of the extent or mag-
nitude of his influence.

What an imposing total do we arrive at if we
add together all the qualities that have been
enumerated! How large an outline does his
picture require! The creator of the literature
of his country, the author of the freshest lyrics,
and of one of the grandest dramas; the high-
minded literary reformer, disdainful of popu-
larity, who kept his works free from rhetorical
falseness; the unrivalled critic and observer, —
this man is also the teacher, and at the same
CHARACTER AND COMPASS OF HIS GENIUS. 47

time the example, of a great system of practical
philosophy.

Scarcely any man has been to any nation all
that Goethe has been to Germany. When we
think what he did, we are irresistibly led to in-
quire what he was. He, himself, in ‘“‘ Dichtung
und Wahrheit,” showed that the key to his
writings is to be found in his biography. His
countrymen have taken the hint with German
docility, and followed it up with German indus-
try. It has been said that the life of Louis XIV.
might almost be written from day to day, and
we begin to know Goethe’s life with the same
minuteness. The revelation certainly heightens
our sense of his greatness. If we look merely
at the fulness of his life, at the quantity of action,
sensation, and thought comprised in it, if we
try merely to reckon up how much work he did,
we are lost in amazement, and admire more than
ever the rare quality, the freshness and ex-
quisiteness of so much of that work. Our con-
ception of Goethe is completed when we add to
all the numerous and various excellences shown
in his writings, that in the man himself, as he
lived and moved, there was a spring of vitality
so fresh (‘a heart as strong as a mountain
48 GOETHE,

river”), that the mere story of his life with-
out any help from strange adventures, the
mere narrative of his undertakings, travels,
plans, conversations, loves, and friendships, is
fascinating.
CHAPTER IV.
GOETHE’S AGE AND CONTEMPORARIES.

THERE has always been, and there is to this
day, in spite of the biography of Lewes, a cer-
tain vagueness in the English mind with respect
to the literary career of Goethe. His name and
fame were familiar to us for a remarkably long
time before we made any close acquaintance
with his personality. Though he lived almost
sixty years after his ‘‘ Werther” created a rage
all over Europe, yet our public scarcely formed
a distinct notion of him till after he was
dead. In English books of poetical criticism,
even those which we are only just ceasing to
regard as authorities, his name is strangely
absent where we might most expect to find
it. Macaulay and Hallam must have known
how it was regarded abroad, and certainly
Macaulay had read ‘“ Wilhelm Meister” and
“Faust; ” but both these critics are on very dis-
tant bowing terms with Goethe. When they
4
50 GOETHE.

make those solemn critical awards in which
that school delighted, arranging the poets of
all ages in order of merit, it is to be observed
that they silently exclude Goethe from the
competition. Thus, when Hallam pronounces
of Spenser that he is the third name among
the poets of England, and has been surpassed
by Dante alone among foreign poets, he may
indeed very possibly have meant to put the
author of the “Faery Queene” above the
author of “Faust,” as Lamb plainly prefers
Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus to the Faust of Goethe.
But it seems more likely that Goethe was not
in Hallam’s mind when he passed this judg-
ment. Macaulay, too, does, it is true, once
quote Goethe in passing, but he never dwells
upon him; nor is it easy to imagine Macaulay,
more than Hallam, giving Goethe a place
among the great poetic names of the past.
More remarkable than the silence of Macaulay
and Hallam is the silence of Coleridge, which
was, in fact, the main hindrance to Goethe’s
reputation in England. In all the writings of
Coleridge, I know only of a single passage in
which the merits of Goethe are discussed.
This is puzzling. It was the peculiar mis-
GOETHE'S AGE AND CONTEMPORARIES. 51

sion of Coleridge to make England acquainted
with German genius and thought. We can
scarcely suppose that he overlooked Goethe.
At the time when he first attended to German
literature he must have become acquainted with
Goethe’s writings. In 1798, when Coleridge
was in Germany, a large fragment of “ Faust”
had been before the public for several years,
and “Gotz” and “Werther” were already
nearly a quarter of a century old; nor was that
one of the moments in which Goethe was
inactive, or had suffered his name to pass out
of the public mind. On the contrary, at the
very time when the young Englishman was
curiously watching from Gottingen one of the
most singular fermentations recorded in literary
history, Goethe was reaching his zenith. His
alliance with Schiller had lately been formed.
“Wilhelm Meister” and “Hermann und Doro-
thea” were just launched, or being launched,
into the world. But even if by some accident
the phenomenon escaped Coleridge’s notice at
the time, yet, in the thirty years that followed,
did he never become alive to the imposing
greatness of it? In the mirror which he holds
up to Germany, Goethe’s figure is not to be
2 GOETHE.

seen. We see there Lessing, Kant, Schiller,
and Schelling, but not Goethe. And yet several
of Coleridge’s contemporaries outside Germany
saw what Coleridge could not see. Mme. de
Staél pronounced Goethe “le poéte de 1’ Alle-
magne, le philosophe, l’homme de lettres
vivant dont l’originalité et l’imagination sont
les plus remarquables.”’ Scott translated “Gotz
v. Berlichingen,” and he habitually spoke of
Goethe as his master. Ata later time Shelley
translated the “Prolog im Himmel.” Byron
paid him homage, “asa vassal to his liege lord.”
Only Coleridge, the professed literary critic,
the recognized authority on German literature,
knows nothing of him! He brings to us infor-
mation about several interesting and remark-
able writers; he can tell of the clear style
and masterly logic of Lessing, of the glowing
poetical eloquence of Schiller, of the great
philosophic genius of Kant. Has it escaped
his notice that in this throng of new writers
there is one to whom almost all the others look
up as to their Muszeus, one “whose fame over
his living head like heaven was bent,”— a man
of unique personality, belonging not to Germany
only, but to the world?
GOETHE'S AGE AND CONTEMPORARIES. 53

Certainly it did not escape his notice. It
would have been strange indeed if a Coleridge
had failed to appreciate the songs of Goethe;
or if he, of all our poets the most familiar with
the dangers of philosophic speculation, if he
who wrote “Dejection,” had been unable to
appreciate “Faust.” But the one passage in
which he does speak his mind about Goethe be-
trays in every line that he thought of him what
he could not but think. It has the character
of an apology, and is expressed in a constrained
style which marks embarrassment: “The style
of ‘Wilhelm Meister’ is excellent; the songs
in ‘Faust’ and the characters of Mephis-
topheles and Gretchen are excellent. He has
been advised to translate ‘ Faust,’ but has had
reasons for not doing so. One is that he
doubted whether it became his moral character
to translate what in parts is vulgar and blas-
phemous. Moreover, he has himself planned
a poem on a similar subject. Michael Scott
was to have been his Faust, and he had had
ideas and inventions, better, he thinks, than
anything in ‘ Faust.’” Probably Coleridge did
really feel that kind of dread which the Stol-
bergs in Germany felt of the so-called heathen-
54 GOETHE.

ism of Goethe. Probably he shrank from the
responsibility of introducing into England an
influence at once so powertul and so question-
able. Goethe’s thoughts had been originally
dropped into a soil ploughed up by scepticism,
both religious and moral, and Coleridge might
not unreasonably consider them ill-adapted for
England, where the current was at that very
time setting strongly towards a positive system
of belief. But a profound admiration, and
almost awe, curiously mixed with a kind of
envy, breaks through his reticence.

Had Coleridge translated ‘“ Faust,” “ Her-
mann und Dorothea,” and the songs; had he
seen his way to bring Goethe’s chief works as a
whole before the English public, which he could
have done with more subtilety and discrimi-
nation than Carlyle, and twenty years ear-
lier, — we should have been further advanced in
the knowledge of Goethe now than we actually
are. In particular, we should have escaped
an illusion which is caused by the fact that his
writings were first studied by us so long after
they were written. It was near the cente-
nary of his birth when we first fell under his
influence. Not only did we see his works, as
GOETHE’S AGE AND CONTEMPORARIES. 55

we see all foreign works, divorced from the
circumstances which produced them, but we
listened to him for the first time almost in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and scarcely
remarked that the voice to which we listened
spoke to us from the eighteenth. The speaker
seemed to be the old man of Weimar, the old
man who had so lately occupied the literary
throne. It was in the later thirties and in the
forties that we studied him; and then it was
fresh in our remembrance that he had noticed
Carlyle and written verses to Mrs. Carlyle, that
he had flattered Scott and translated passages
from Byron. His name was associated with
the literary celebrities of the time of our
George IV. He seemed almost a later poet
than Byron, since he not only outlived Byron,
but in his poetical philosophy was held to have
gone beyond him, so that those who suffered
from the Byronic fever were advised to take
Goethe as an antidote. Moreover, the Second
Part of “Faust,” in mere compass the greatest
of his poems, and not so manifestly a failure
that it could not be represented by some critics
as the greatest also in importance, was actually
not finished till 1831, and not published till
56 GOETHE.

later still; so that Goethe appeared, in some
sense, as an active contemporary of Tennyson,
Bulwer, and Macaulay.

This was an illusion. Goethe was not really
a writer of that age, nor even of the age before.
He is not properly a contemporary even of
Scott, much less of Tennyson. The roll of his
really important works was made up soon
after Scott began his career. He is in fact,
properly speaking, a writer of the eighteenth
century. But even this statement is not strong
enough. It requires an effort fully to realize
at once the great length of his career and the
great influence and fame of his earliest works.
As I have said, Goethe was not at his rising,
but about at his noon, when Coleridge was in
Germany, and that was earlier by seven years
than the first great success of Scott. If his
zenith was so far back, how far must we travel
to find his commencement? We must go
beyond the first appearance of Cowper and
Crabbe, beyond the publication of Johnson’s
“Lives of the Poets” (1781), or Miss Burney’s
“Evelina” (1778). This brings us to the age
of Goldsmith; and it is in this period that we
find the first astonishing successes of Goethe.
GOETHE’S AGE AND CONTEMPORARIES. 57

Goldsmith died in 1774, which is the year in
which all Germany was shedding tears over
“Werther.” But “Gétz” had appeared the
year before that, and had also created a great
sensation. Even “Werther” and “Gotz” are
not absolutely the earliest writings of Goethe;
they are only the writings which first made his
name celebrated. His essay on German archi-
tecture had appeared in 1772, and among the
poems now included in his works some were
‘written as early as 1765.

It excites astonishment that a writer who
finished a great and imposing poetical work
three years after Lord Tennyson’s name came
before the public, should have written the
most successful book of the year which wit-
nessed the death of Goldsmith. But of this
long period, if Goethe’s fame belongs princi-
pally to the latter half, his character and genius
belong principally to the former. He has
influenced the nineteenth century and is influ-
encing it, but he belongs to the eighteenth;
and not even to the last years of the eigh-
teenth. He is not one of those great men
whom we often suppose, rather mistakenly
perhaps, to have been inspired and formed by
58 GOETHE,

the impulse of the French Revolution. The
French Revolution fell in the middle of his
career, when his apprenticeship (Lehrjahre)
was over, when his principal works were
planned and half written. It disturbed instead
of inspiring him. Asa subject for poetry, he
could never handle it successfully, except when
in “Hermann und Dorothea” he uses, as it
were, the remote thunder of it to heighten the
idyllic serenity of the scene. Of the success-
ful works which he published in the nineteenth
century, the chief-—namely, the First Part of
“Faust ’?— was not only planned and in great
part written in the eighteenth, but in concep-
tion it is one of the earliest of his works, almost
as early as “Gotz.” We sometimes hear
“Faust” spoken of as the great characteristic
poem of the nineteenth century, but the ideas
most characteristic of the nineteenth century
are somewhat strangely absent from it.
Goethe himself, in the impressive dedication,
describes the effort which he made in complet-
ing “Faust” to revive the feelings and fancies
of his earliest youth. That effort carried him
tack to days when the French Revolution was
undreamed of,— far back into the old régime of
GOETHE’S AGE AND CONTEMPORARIES. 59

Europe, the days of Maria Theresa, Frederick,
and Louis XV.; the days when Voltaire and
Rousseau were still reigning in the world of
literature. And generally in his later works,
with the exception of “Wilhelm Meister’s
Wanderjahre,” the peculiar spirit of the nine-
teenth century is studiously excluded, and the
train of thought is imperturbably pursued which
would have been natural to us all if no French
Revolution and no nationality movement had
occurred to alter the aspect of everything.
CHAPTER V.
LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE.

Tuus our conception of Goethe is distorted
by the illusion which makes him seem to us
more modern than he is; but it is also ren-
dered indistinct by our imperfect knowledge
of the development which his genius under-
went. Few writers passed through so many
phases. He did not write in his old age as he
had written in the Napoleonic time, nor in the
Napoleonic time as he had written at the close
of the eighteenth century, nor after his visit
to Italy as he had written before it, nor after
he settled at Weimar as he had written in his
native city of Frankfurt. Of this succession
of phases we have no doubt some notion; we
know that the Second Part of “ Faust” belongs
to the old age, and “ Werther” to the period of
immaturity; but our notion is not sufficiently
distinct. Yet Goethe is an artist; and to say
this is to say that a true knowledge of him, as
LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE. 61

of other artists, consists mainly in an accurate
discrimination of the phases or periods of his
genius.

Let us begin this discrimination of periods
by marking off the period of old age. A col-
lected edition of his Works appeared between
1806 and 1808, and this collection caused the
want of a biography of the poet to be felt. He
undertook to be his own biographer, and the
chief part of “Dichtung und Wahrheit ”
appeared between the years 1811 and 1814.
We may regard this as the winding up of his
literary life, since the works which appeared
later, with the exception of the “ West-ostlicher
Divan,” contained little that was valuable
which had not been composed at an earlier
time. When a period of nearly twenty years
has thus been assigned to the old age, there
remain about forty years for the period of
active genius. It is this period which it is
important properly to subdivide.

There is this difference between the periods
of a painter and of a writer such as Goethe was,
— that the painter is always painting, whereas
the writer is often otherwise employed, and
may even for long years abandon writing alto-
62 GOETHE.

gether. Goethe to be sure was almost always
producing, but he was by no means always pub-
lishing; he was not dependent on his author-
ship. He began life as Doctor Goethe, an
advocate at the Frankfurt bar, where he actu-
ally practised for about three years. After-
wards he became an official in the service of the
Duke of Weimar, and may be said to have been
for about ten years his Prime Minister. In
1786, when he was thirty-seven years old, he
obtained a long leave of absence and spent two
years in Italy. On his return to Weimar he
did not resume general administrative busi-
ness, but reserved to himself the department of
culture, and was from this time forward Edu-
cation Minister. These cares were enough to
fill the life of an ordinary man, even of an ordi-
nary able man. It was, as it were, out of office
hours that he played the part of the greatest,
most original, most various, and most consum-
mate writer of his time. Accordingly his liter-
ary life falls into short periods of activity
separated by longer periods of comparative in-
action, reappearances, as it were, after intervals
of retirement. The plan of it is less simple
than that of Shakspeare or Scott. We have
LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE. 63

to deal not with an uninterrupted series of
plays, as in the case of Shakspeare, nor with
a series of poems followed by a series of
romances and novels, as in the case of Scott.
Goethe makes several pauses and several new
departures; there are, as it were, several
Goethes, who are separated from each other by
intervals of time.

Perhaps we may distinguish three appear-
ances of Goethe in German literature.

First, there is that early appearance, now
more than a century behind us, when he wrote
“Gotz” and “Werther.” This appearance
comes to an end when he is summoned in 1775
to Weimar, when he passes into a new world,
and undertakes new duties. For about a
dozen years from this time he is comparatively
inactive in literature, and might seem to have
lost ground; at least he had not followed up,
as a bookseller would have advised him to do,
the astonishing hits he had made at the begin-
ning of his career. But about the year 1788,
at the time when he was in Italy, he began
a new period of activity and success, which
may be said to have lasted till the end of the
eighteenth century. This second Goethe is
64 GOETHE.

extremely different from the first. He does
not now take the public by storm. He is
called artificial and cold; sometimes he is
called by even worse names; only one of the
works of this period, ‘““Hermann und Doro-
thea,” was received with general enthusiasm.
But upon thinking men this second Goethe pro-
duces gradually an effect more profound than
was perhaps ever produced in any age by a
contemporary poet.

Just at the close of the eighteenth century
he falls once more into the background.
Schiller steps forward, and for some years occu-
pies the stage in such a striking manner as to
draw attention away from every other actor.
There is at this time no rivalry, but the most
intimate accord, between him and Goethe;
but in these years he pours forth his dramas in
such rapid succession, and these dramas are so
imposing, so much more calculated to impress
the general public than the works of the second
Goethe had been, that he could not but have,
and had a right to have, the stage to himself
for a time. When he passed away, in 1805,
much was altered. Under a number of powerful
influences which all worked together, the infly-
LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE. 65

ences of Kant and Fichte, and those of Goethe
and Schiller themselves, new literary move-
ments had begun, and the fashion of literature
was changing. Romanticism had set in, which,
though it had started with a great profession of
reverence for Goethe, yet led the public taste
away from the severe principles of his second
period. He becomes aware of a certain degree
of reaction against his influence.

Goethe, however, was able in some measure
to reconcile himself to this reaction. He now
makes a third appearance, and this time in
some sense as a romanticist writer. To this
period belong the “Elective Affinities,” the
“West-dstlicher Divan,’ and another work
more important than either. There was a cer-
tain resemblance between Romanticism and
that earlier movement. in which the first Goethe
had taken the lead. To become a Romanticist,
therefore, Goethe had only to go back to his
youth. It happened that of the designs which
had occupied him in that now remote period,
one had never been completed. It was medi-
eval, like “ Gétz,” and as mystically, as awfully
sombre as any of those plays of Calderon which
the new school was now reviving. This was

5
66 GOETHE.

“Faust.” And when thus he returned for a
moment to the style of his youth, he had again
the astonishing success that had hailed his
youthful efforts. “Faust” stood out at once
as the great work of Goethe, and the fame of it
went round the world.

We may almost consider the Autobiography,
which followed so soon, as belonging in some
degree to Goethe’s romanticist works; for it
tells only of the first Goethe. It does not
describe the austere, cold, second period, but
only the enthusiastic days which Romanticism
seemed to have brought back again, — the days in
which he wrote “ Gotz” and planned “ Faust.”

Such, roughly, are the three Goethes. The
first is best described as a Shakspearian; for
Goethe in the seventies of the eighteenth cen-
tury was mainly under the influence of Shak-
speare, and appeared to his countrymen as the
leader of the Shakspearian school. The second
is a rigid classicist, writes plays and idyls on the
Greek model, narrative poems in hexameters,
and elegiacs after Propertius and Martial. The
third is, to some extent, a romanticist. He has
dropped his classical models, and wanders after
Calderon and Hafiz. He adapts to the ro-
LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE. 67

manticist fashion the Shakspearian sketches of
his youth.

But though in this latter period there was
some concession to a reigning fashion, yet it is
not to be supposed that Goethe abandoned that
devotion to the Greek ideal upon which, in the
second period, he had based his art. ‘‘ Faust”
itself proves his fidelity to it, if we bear in mind
how that work may naturally have been re-
garded by Goethe himself. Our minds dwell al-
most exclusively on the First Part; and because
we take little interest in the Second Part, which
strikes us as prolix and fantastic, we uncon-
sciously assume that in Goethe’s mind, too, it
was of secondary interest, — one of those after-
thoughts by which an artist, who has had a happy
idea, hopes to make it serve him a second time.
But the old story which Goethe had undertaken
to dramatize said that Faust’s compact with
the fiend was for Helen of Greece. Now, as
Helen does not appear in the First Part, and
does appear in the Second; moreover, as the
Second Part is more than half as long again as
the First, and is a regular play in five acts,
whereas the First is only a series of scenes, — it
would seem that to Goethe the First Part ap-
68 GOETHE.

peared rather as the introduction to a work
than as the work itself. And if we think of
the two parts together, as Goethe thought of
them, we see that Helena is intended to be, as it
were, the central figure, — the Beatrice of this
new Divine Comedy. Now, Helena is none
other than the Greek ideal; and thus we see
that the whole work treats of the return of the
modern mind to ancient classical ways of think-
ing. Even in his third period then, though he
appeared partly as a romanticist, Goethe is at
heart a classicist. In this instance, indeed, it was
not any compromise that made him appear other-
wise, but only the accident that the introduc-
tion to his work was infinitely more successful
than the work itself. The introduction — that is,
the First Part — contains some of the brightest
inventions of his youth, treated when his style
was absolutely at the height of its distinction
and felicity. It is throughout the work of his
vigorous period, while at the same time it spoke
to the popular mind. The Second Part is a
compound of the languor of his old age with
the coldness of his second period, and thus
speaks in a drowsy tone of things which only
the few understand.
LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE. 69

As I have remarked, Goethe sometimes kept
designs so long by him that when the work
appeared it was difficult to say to what period
it belonged, since it bore the marks of several
periods. This remark applies especially to
“Faust.” Of this work some scenes may have
been written as early as 1773, but the whole
was not completed till the middle of 1831. In
other words, he had the poem in hand not much
less than sixty years. Even the First Part
took him more than thirty years. In “ Faust,”
therefore, every phase of Goethe is to be
traced somewhere. It is only in general and
roughly that we can say that the First Part
belongs to the first and third periods, and the
Second Part to the second period, and to the
old age..

“Wilhelm Meister” is another work to which
the same remark applies. He kept it by him
(I speak only of the Lehrjahre) more than
twenty years. By observing this fact we dis-
cover how to place it in our classification. By
the date of its publication it belongs to the
second period, of which indeed it is the prin-
cipal work; and yet it is not in classical form.
The truth is, it is the work of transition, —the
70 GOETHE.

work in which Goethe records in what way and
through what stages he passed out of his first
into his second period. The earlier part of the
novel may almost be said to belong to the first
period; and, throughout, the prominence which
is given to Shakspeare is a note of the first
period. But Mignon’s figure and Mignon’s
song draw our thoughts more and more towards
Italy; Greek statues float before us; and at
last, in the eighth book, we are introduced to
the Hall of the Past, where Goethe himself,
disguised as the Uncle, stands in the midst of
a world of Greek art. Here we are in the
midst of the classicism of the second period.
Here is preached to us the culture-gospel, of
which’ the principal maxim is gedenke zu leben
(study to live), instead of memento mori (study to
die). ,

Thus, “Wilhelm Meister” runs parallel to
“ Faust,” if we think of the two Fausts together.
Wilhelm’s apprenticeship corresponds in prose
to the course of Faust as depicted in poetry.
Both move out of what is described as a Gothic
confusion into the antique world. The one
rests in the culture-gospel, the other marries
Helen of Greece. We have here a sort of clew
LITERARY PHASES OF GOETHE. 71

to the vast and various labyrinth of Goethe’s
writings. What may be the value of this funda-
mental Goethian maxim I do not inquire in
this chapter, which deals with the classification
of Goethe's writings, not with the substance
of them.

So far, then, Goethe’s progress appears to
consist in a gradual estrangement from every”
thing Gothic, — or, as he expresses it, northern,
—and ina conversion to classicism. It is a pro-
gress which causes him to part company with
the public for which he writes. They like what
is Gothic, and are cold to what is Hellenic.
They receive with enthusiasm his youthful
works, but are cold to “ Tasso,” and not more
than respectful to “Iphigenie;” they like
“Faust” so far as it is Gothic, but turn away
from it when it begins to become Hellenic.
But is this a complete account of the matter?
We know that Goethe in his later life smiled at
“Werther.” Did he simply and merely repent
of all that he had written in his first period, and
wish it unwritten? Or did he only modify his
early views, and perhaps add something to
them? It is the more important to arrive ata
clear view on this head, because the first period
72 GOETHE.

of Goethe, upon which he would seem to have
afterwards turned his back, is in its effect upon
the literature both of Germany and the world
scarcely less great and striking than the
second,
CHAPTER VI.

IMPORTANCE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE
PHASES.

WHEN we speak of Goethe as having created
the literature of Germany, do we mean that he
brought it back from wildness to Greek shapeli-
ness and decorum? And in the general move-
ment of European literature does Goethe stand
among the correct and cold, and not rather
among the audacious and inspiring masters?
There is surely much confusion in the ordinary
view which is taken of him outside Germany.
He is commonly named among the great literary
leaders who exploded the classicism of the
stage, who wrote the name of Shakspeare on
their flag, and conquering under that sign, in-
troduced a richer, bolder, more imaginative
style of literature. Asa specimen of this new
style we point to “ Faust.” The best proof that
Goethe really had this kind of influence is af-
forded by the career of Scott. Though Eng-
74 GOETHE.

lish writers in general were slow to feel the
influence of Goethe, as I have remarked espe-
cially in the case of Coleridge, yet there was
one exception. Scott, the very incarnation of
Romanticism — Scott, of all great modern poets
the most completely a stranger to the whole
Hellenic world —read and imitated Goethe
when as yet no other Englishman did. He
translated ‘ Gotz v. Berlichingen ” in 1799; and
the influence of that play is traceable in ‘ Ivan-
hoe,” as ‘“‘ Mignon” is imitated in “ Peveril of
the Peak,” and perhaps also the harper of
“Wilhelm Meister” in the ‘“ Lay of the Last
Minstrel.” He spoke of Goethe as his master,
and does not this naturally lead us to think of
Goethe as a great light of the romantic school?
Scott’s biographer thinks that but for ‘ Gotz”
the idea might never have flashed upon Scott's
mind that his own legendary lore might be
worked up into poems and romances. There-
upon he takes occasion to speak of Goethe as
if he were undoubtedly a writer of the same
order as Scott; and of ‘ Gotz” he says that it is
“the first-fruits of that passionate admiration
for Shakspeare to which all that is excellent in
the recent imaginative literature of Germany
must be traced.”
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 75

How are these undoubted facts, that Goethe
wrote romantic works which had a powerful influ-
ence all over Europe, that he appeared before
Germany as an enthusiastic Shakspearian, that
a great part of “ Wilhelm Meister,” not one of
his earlier works, is occupied with the praise
of Shakspeare, and that “ Faust” is Shakspear-
ian, to be reconciled with another set of facts
equally undoubted, — namely, that Goethe was a
decided classicist, who was censured for his cold-
ness, and has to defend himself against the
charge that he “refused to leave the ancients
behind him;”’ that he writes plays and poems in
antique form, ceases to imitate Shakspeare (ex-
cept in the single case of ‘‘ Faust”), and that he
represents the abandonment of Gothic for Greek
models as all-important, — as no mere matter
of taste, but as a kind of moral conversion or
salvation.

This is partly explained by the distinction I
have marked between the first and the second
Goethe. It was the first Goethe, the contem-
porary of Goldsmith, who was Scott’s mas-
ter; of the second Goethe Scott knew nothing,
nor, apparently, did Scott's biographer. If
“Faust” is Shakspearian, this is because the
76 GOETHE.

plan of it was conceived by the first Goethe,
and because it was finally executed, not by the
second Goethe, but by a third, who was in
some degree an echo of the first. If “ Wilhelm
Meister,” a work of the second period, is full of
the name of Shakspeare, this is because it was
begun in the first period, and has many charac-
teristics of the first period, especially in its
earlier parts. But when we have recognized
so much, we must still crave to understand
more distinctly the nature of the difference
between the first and second Goethe; for it is
rather shocking to find the young genius who
at four-and-twenty warmed German literature
into life by the fire of his first writings, and by
the same writings later inspired Scott, disown-
ing in a manner those writings, becoming as
remarkable for coldness as he had been for
warmth, and going over, as it might seem, to
the very school over which he had triumphed.
It is perplexing as well as shocking; for to say
simply that Goethe missed his way, and, having
begun well, yielded, as many others have done,
to the seductions of a conventional art, is easy,
but it is almost equivalent to pronouncing his
whole career a failure. This change of opinion
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 77

is the great occurrence of his life,—it is the
great subject of his writings. If we treat it as
an unfortunate bewilderment, we reduce Goethe’s
rank incalculably. He is regarded by his coun-
trymen as one who through a long life struggled
victoriously forward to the light; whose clear-
ness and instinct for truth were almost more
remarkable than his imagination. It is for this
reason that they are never weary of contemplat-
ing and studying him. But all his reputation
for wisdom is involved with his change of opin-
ion. If that be treated as an aberration, we have
before us quite another sort of Goethe. It is
the Goethe we meet with in many French and
English criticisms, — a brilliant poet of the same
family as Byron, Moore, and Scott, and having
some of the qualities of each of these. It is the
author who in “ Gotz” and the “ Erlkonig” led
the way for Scott; in “Faust” gave Byron the
model for ‘‘ Manfred; ’’ while in his “ West-dst-
licher Divan” he ran a race with the poet of
“Lalla Rookh.” But this Goethe must be con-
ceived as dying young, like Byron; not indeed
literally, but in the sense that we must deny him
all qualities but those of youth, sensibility, imag-
ination, and passion.
78 GOETHE.

Let us look then a little closer at this change
of opinion. The first Goethe, as has been said,
is best described as a Shakspearian. Just when
Lessing had brought the French plays into
discredit, and had called attention to Shak-
speare, appeared “Gotz v. Berlichingen,” and
the nation felt that they had in the young
Goethe the man who could realize: all that
Lessing had taught them to desire. For some
time Goethe himself took the same view of his
vocation. With what enthusiasm at this time
he regarded Shakspeare we may read in “ Wil-
helm Meister.”” Of all the testimonies to Shak-
peare’s genius which have been rendered by
great judges, this of Goethe’s is almost the most
emphatic: —

“These precious pieces seem to be the work of some
heavenly genius who mixes with mankind to give it in
the gentlest manner the knowledge of itself. They are
not poems! I seem to stand before the monstrous books
of fate thrown wide open, a whirlwind of restless life
rushing through them and flapping the leaves now this
way, now that. The strength and tenderness, the power
and repose, astonish me so, they disturb me with such
agitation, that I can only wait longingly for the time when
I may find myself in a situation to read further.”
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 79

It might have been expected that he who felt
thus, and who had already written ‘“‘ Gotz,” would
now proceed to write many other plays in the
same taste. He does proceed to write “Eg-
mont;” but even in this play the inspiration
seems on the ebb, and after this he writes no
Shakspearian play until, thirty-five years after
“Gotz,” he launches “ Faust” into the world.

We do not find him ceasing to admire Shak-
speare, still less beginning to see merit in those
French pieces which had reigned on the stage
before Shakspeare came into vogue. He does
not precisely change any opinion. Still, it ap-
pears that before what I have called his second
appearance, Shakspeare has ceased to have an
active influence over him. He has passed under
the influence of another set of writers, and these,
it so happens, are the classics. From this time
he begins to stand before the public in a new
character, — no longer as the darling and idol of
the reading world, but as an unpopular, unap-
preciated writer, appealing to the Muses in the
approved fashion against the unjust judgment
of the multitude. His manifesto is the preface
to “Hermann und Dorothea,” written in elegi-
acs, where he begins thus: “So it is a sin that I
80 GOETHE.

am inspired by Propertius, and that the rogue
Martial keeps company with me; that I did not
leave the ancients behind me in the school, but
took them with me to Latium,” etc.

And then he goes.on to put his new poem
under the protection of two of the great classicists,
— F. A. Wolf, whose “ Prolegomena” were just
then occupying the learned world, and Voss,
the great authority on German hexameters. It
is to be observed that during this second period,
as a sort of badge of adhesion to classicism, he
adopts classical metres or a highly classical form
of blank verse. The epigrams of this period
for example are in hexameters and pentameters ;
whereas in those of a later period, the “ Zahme
Xenien” for example, dactyls and spondees have
vanished, and the rhyme has reappeared. Of
this later type is, —

“Noch ist es Tag, da riihre sich der Mann,
Die Nacht tritt ein, wo Niemand wirken kann.”

This change looks superficially like reaction,
like a sort of apostasy ; but it is in reality some-
thing much less and something much more.
There is in it, indeed, a certain element of re-
action. The disappearance of the French con-
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 81

ventional rules had introduced confusion. Both
Goethe, and in the later years of his life Schiller,
were impatient of the formlessness which had
begun to reign in literature. It was not enough
that Germany should throw off the foreign style ;
she was now to substitute a style of her own.
Having breathed life into the literature of his
country twenty years before, Goethe now found
himself called upon to give it form. Warmth
and sentiment it had in abundance, but it wanted
character. Canons were needed, standards had
to be set up; for Goethe perceived with distress
how readily the Teutonic genius reconciles itself
to a certain vague, rich confusion, how lightly
it dispenses with outlines, how tolerant and
helplessly good-natured is its taste. It is the
burden of the correspondence between Goethe
and Schiller that the public have no judgment,
no character ; and both alike see the only remedy
in giving greater regularity, greater firmness of
outline, to literary work. That they should
agree so decidedly on this head is a great proof
that they were right in relation to their time
and country, however in the abstract we may
be surprised to find poets of that order lay-
ing so much stress on rule. Both alike, too,
6
82 GOETHE.

agree in going to the antique for models; it
may surprise those who regard modern German
literature as founded on Shakspeare to observe
how seldom in this correspondence Shakspeare,
and how continually the antique, is referred to.
Moreover, though the charge of coldness, of
artificiality, has fallen principally upon Goethe,
yet we see that Schiller is quite as much open
to it, — nay, is, in literary criticism, almost more
rigorously classicist than Goethe.

So far then Goethe, in his second period, may
be called a reactionist, though we can easily
imagine that the reaction in which he led the
way was wise and necessary. There are times
when liberty is the good cause; but there are
other times when law, or restriction of liberty,
is the thing most urgently needed. In Ger-
many, at that moment, scarcely anything in the
art of literary composition was fixed. We find
Goethe himself anxiously studying books on
prosody in order to find out how to write verses.
To him, too, the hexameter, — which he now
adopts, and which he strangely uses even where,
as in ** Reineke Fuchs,” both the fable and the
tone of thought are Teutonic, — is no mere exotic
which he takes a pedantic pleasure in naturaliz-
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 83

ing. German literature had no recognized metre
for long narrative poems; but Klopstock’s
“Messiah” was in hexameters. The conserva-
tive course therefore, on the whole, was to write
in hexameters, and all that remained for decision
was how to write good ones.

But, after all, this formal and_ technical
aspect of Goethe's classicism is only one side
of it. The great change of opinion of which
he makes so much, the initiation of Wilhelm,
the marriage of Faust to Helen of Greece, is
not a mere literary change, not a mere recog-
nition of the importance of rules in literature.
Goethe professes to have undergone a complete
transformation, a sort of regeneration, through
his visitto Italy. The sight of Greek sculpture
and Italian life under an Italian sky suggests
to his mind, not merely certain new rules of
composition and versification, but a new con-
ception of life. It transforms in the first
instance his opinions about literature, in the
next his opinions about art in general, but also
his whole manner of regarding human life, and
therefore his morality and his religion. A
visit to Italy has often produced some such
effect upon painters and sculptors, but they
84 GOETHE.

have been only half conscious of it, or have
but inarticulately striven to communicate it
to others. A great event happened when the
southern world of art was reflected for the first
time in the mirror of a mind large enough to
contain it all, and clear enough to give it back
faithfully, —a great event, and an event which
would have been unique, if Goethe had - not
had a precursor in Winckelmann.

Goethe becomes a classicist in the sense
that he begins to see the world with the eyes
of an ancient artist, and therefore begins to
have the instincts and to adopt the views of
an ancient artist. Classicism in this sense is
widely different from the classicism of the
French period, against which this same Goethe
led the rebellion. It might be an illusion, or
illusion might mix with it, or the notion that
it was possible or desirable to revive an obsolete
view of the world might be erroneous; in any
case, it was wholly different from French clas-
sicism. That was a conventional classicism.
It rested on a blind reverence for the ancient
world as superior to the modern; or, if on
reason, on a cold prosaic reason. Against it
every warm feeling, every fresh recognition of
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 85

the truth of Nature, every new movement of
the human heart, every stirring of genius, was
always in rebellion. This, on the other hand,
was anatural classicism. It was all on the side
of genius and Nature; but it affirmed, at the same
time, that genius and Nature were on the side
of the ancients. It began, we are to remark,
by altering somewhat the terms of the discus-
sion; for instead of merely the drama or merely
literature, it spoke of art in general. By this
means it brought Greek sculpture, architecture,
and painting to the help of Greek poetry.
Phidias and Apelles were called in to help
Euripides. Then it went on to affirm that art,
the name of the comprehensive conception to
which so much importance was now for the
first time attached, was the result of a peculiar
view of the universe and of human life which
had prevailed among the ancients, but had been
for the most part lost among the moderns. In
the modern world, indeed, there had been germs
of art, impulses towards it, — nay, exception-
ally, there had been great and striking artistic
creations. But, on the whole, the antique was
the school, not only of sculpture, as every one
admitted, but of art as such, and therefore of
86 GOETHE.

every art, including poetry and literature.
Nay, culture itself (Bz/dung, the word which is
repeated with such iteration in “Wilhelm
Meister’), a conception more comprehensive
still than art, is in the main only a journey
southward. It begins in the yearning cry,
“Kennst dudas Land?” It proceeds by purg-
ing the mind of “northern phantoms,” northern
bewilderments, and making it clear, cheerful,
and sunny, as was the mind of an ancient
Greek.

This view was not gradually excogitated by
Goethe, but came upon him as a revelation
while he lived in Italy. Under that sun, in
that climate, so it seemed to him, art was
natural, inevitable. On the northern side of
the Alps it was not so natural, and if it was to
thrive there, it must strive as an _ exotic.
Thirty years after his Italian journey, — when
he had been half disenchanted by a second
tour, when he had witnessed the partial failure
of his classicizing experiments, and had made
large concessions to the opposite school, — he
still says that he takes courage when he thinks -
that he too “has lived and loved in the sun-
bright land” (Hab’ doch auch im sonnenhellen
Land gelebt, geliebt).
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 87

This theory, it is to be observed, does not
break with Shakspeare, — rather, it classes
Shakspeare along with the ancients; for it
lays stress upon that one feature in which
Shakspeare is so remarkably an ancient, — his
naturalism, his enjoyment of the world as it is,
his freedom from the disease which has been
called other-worldliness.

But why, it may be asked, should Goethe
look to models at all? Had not he, above all
other men, shown that genius can depend on
its own inherent powers? He had found a
nation of temperament richly imaginative, but
perhaps somewhat too passive, slavishly devoted
to foreign models. He had broken the yoke,
flung aside conventions, and produced in
“ Gotz” an original work, full of warmth, vigor,
and genuine German feeling. How disap-
pointing to find this Prometheus, before twenty
years have expired, dangling in Roman studios,
talking the cant of the dilettante, and vainly
endeavoring to force the consonantal syllables
of his native German into the frame of the
hexameter and the pentameter!

“So hab’ ich von Herzen
Rothstrumpf immer gehasst und Violetstriimpf dazu.”
88 GOETHE.

If the shade of Virgil read this line, would
it treat Goethe as affectionately as it did
Dante? Would it not remark that in that last
dactyl the second syllable, which should be
short, is assuredly long, if ever a syllable was
long, by position? Indeed, it does not seem
certain that so much trouble bestowed on the
naturalization of classical metres was well
spent. Heinrich Heine, it has been observed,
would never use them; and I find a very recent
critic of “Hermann und Dorothea” remarking
that the poem is not really so popular in Ger-
many as might be supposed, and that the obsta-
cle to its popularity is its metre, which the
multitude do not understand, so that they read
the verses as prose. But when we blame
Goethe for wandering after foreign models,
perhaps we do not rightly understand his posi-
tion, and perhaps also we err when we suppose
that even the greatest poet can dispense with
models. At any rate, Goethe’s early works
cannot be cited in proof of such aview. In
several of those early works he had shewn
himself unable to rise out of the element that
surrounded him. “Stella” is as extravagant,
“Clavigo” as poor and mean, as other German
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 89

works of that time. “Werther” is a wonder-
ful literary performance; but it can scarcely be
called healthy in tone. Of all those composi-
tions of the first Goethe only “Gotz” can be
called healthy. Only of “Gotz” can we say
that, after a century has passed over it, it may
still be read with delight. And to what does
“Gotz” owe this superiority? To the fact that
here Goethe had models, by the contemplation
of which he could raise himself above and out
of his time. He had the ancient memoir, and
for dramatic style and tone he had Shakspeare.
So far in fact from leaning only on himself,
the peculiar characteristic of the young Goethe
is that he lives in the writings of the great
primitive poets. Thus his Werther always
carries a Homer, and in his last despair reads
Ossian. Here, as usual, Goethe’s fiction is
only fact slightly disguised. The classical
models which he followed in his second period
were not really more foreign than the Homer,
the Ossian, and the Shakspeare who were his
models in the first.

It must be confessed that he could not do
without models of some kind; but if he looked
abroad and not at home for models, this was
90 GOETHE.

not from perverseness or pedantry, but simply
because they were not to be found at home.
Germany had indeed the popular song, and no
one will deny that Goethe did full justice to
this. But what had Germany besides? There
was the old puppet-show, and there were the
rough-hewn verses of honest Hans Sachs.
Goethe does not neglect these. He makes far
more out of them than would have been thought
possible. He almost revived the fame of Hans
Sachs by that most delightful poetical sketch
of him. And he wrote in his first period a
great quantity of popular doggerel (Kuzttel-
verse), in which satire, humor, and pathos, the
grave and the gay are freely blended together.
Such hearty enjoyment had he of the popular
element in poetry! In this free-and-easy pop-
ular style the First Part of “Faust” itself is
for the most part written.

But Germany could furnish no more. It
was not from pedantry that Goethe turned
his back on the German literature of recent
generations. There were no German Miltons
and Shakspeares against whose examples it
would have been an impiety to rebel. But
could he not have gone back to the Minnesin-
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. OI

ger? He answers us himself: “The Minne-
singer lay too far from us, we should have
had to begin by learning their language; and
that was not in our way, — we wanted to live,
not to learn.” These, then, were the circum-
stances which drove Goethe to seek for foreign
models. He could not find at home poets who
could teach him how to speak in the great
style. He was forced to look abroad. Shak-
speare attracted him first; there he found, even
in the heart of the cold north, the vigor, fresh-
ness, freedom, natural passion, and natural
grace of which he was in search. But later
he thought he saw that what was to be found
in Shakspeare alone among the moderns was
to be found everywhere among the ancients;
and that the true home of the artist is not
where an exceptional genius triumphs over
the gloom of Nature, but where Nature itself
is sunny and where men have a religion of joy.

It is to be observed that this discovery of
Goethe’s was not made quite so suddenly,
and was not quite such an original discovery,
as we might be inclined to suppose. His
father had made a tour in Italy, which he
regarded as the great event of his life, and
92 GOETHE.

which he recorded in Italian; so that the song
of Miguon, the vague yearning towards Italy,
was a household word to the young Goethe.
Thus predisposed, he watched in the most
impressible years of his life the career of
Winckelmann; he has described it in language
which shows how deeply it has interested him.
The transformation he himself underwent in
Italy was after all, we discover, the same trans-
formation that Winckelmann had undergone in
Italy twenty years earlier. Goethe went to
Italy prepared to undergo it, and he underwent
it accordingly. The feelings he describes
were no doubt real, but he would scarcely have
experienced them had not Winckelmann expe-
rienced and described them a few years before.
Out of this transformation there came forth
a new Goethe, the author of “Iphigenie,”
“Tasso,” “Hermann und Dorothea,” the
Roman Elegiacs, and a multitude of less strik-
ing compositions, all alike antique in form.
Here was a Goethe whom assuredly Scott
would never have called his master; indeed it
is difficult to imagine Scott reading any of these
poems with patience. It was a Goethe whom
the German public itself could not at first
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 93

recognize. They became estranged from their
old idol. They said he was altered, that he
had become cold, a sensualist, a heathen.
They thought that his court-life must have
spoiled him. So, for instance, said Niebuhr.
This was a Goethe clad in soft raiment, and
living in kings’ courts; it was not the Goethe
they had gone out into the wilderness to
see. He was deeply hurt, and began to fall
into despondency; he was in a fair way to
abandon poetry, when Schiller came to the
rescue. Schiller had succeeded to something
of the popularity of the first Goethe; his
“Robbers ” and “ Don Carlos”’ were now what
“Gotz” and “Werther” had been twenty years
earlier. To him men pointed in triumph
when they spoke of the melancholy decline
of Goethe’s genius; for in him they found still
all the warmth, the glowing sentiments, the
enthusiastic eloquence which Goethe had had
before he sank into sensualism. It was there-
fore an extraordinary surprise, and almost the
beginning of a new life for Goethe, when this
Schiller, whom he had for some time avoided
as a rival, showed himself a devoted disciple.
In his letters to Goethe, especially those in
94 GOETHE.

which he reviews “ Wilhelm Meister,” he uses
such language of admiration as perhaps no man
of equal mark ever used to a contemporary;
and what was more surprising, he did not, even
by the faintest hint, allege any of the objections
that were fashionable against Goethe’s new
style. His admiration is unqualified and un-
bounded. Thus encouraged, Goethe remained
a poet, and fought the battle of classicism man-
fully as long as Schiller lived. By Schiller’s
help, by the help of the rising Schlegels, and
by the support of Rahel’s salon, Goethe retains
in this second period, in spite of all opposition,
his pre-eminent place, which is further assured
to him by the concessions he makes and the
new successes he wins in the third period.
Thus, there are two Goethes, — one of world-
wide popularity, the great sentimentalist and
romancer, the poet of Gretchen, Clarchen, Mig-
non, and Zuleikha; the other, little known to
the multitude either in Germany or abroad, but
the master of a school, the great practical phi-
losopher of culture and the artistic life. In
the first character Goethe stands by the side of
Byron and Scott, or at some point between
them and Shakspeare. In particular, his songs
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 95

are unrivalled, and no one has surpassed him
in the delineation of female character.

But he is also, above and beyond Scott and
Byron, a great mover of modern thought, one
of the principal makers of modern opinion.
That Hellenic view of life, which passed from
Winckelmann to him, does not now appear,
when the centenary of his Italian tour is be-
hind us, to have been a mere illusion, a mere
passing crotchet. Goethe’s adhesion to classi-
cism appears now as a leading event in the
later stages of the Renaissance. In the main
the nineteenth century has been moved by
impulses in which he had little share. He is
in the main a man of the old régzme, with lit-
tle sympathy either for popular or for national
movements. Occasionally we are startled at
the obsoleteness of the opinions he expresses,
as when he told a young admirer of Dante at
Rome that “he had never been able to conceive
how a man could choose to busy himself with
such poems.” That certainly is the true voice
of the eighteenth century. And, in like man-
ner, a recent worshipper of Goethe (Friedrich
Vischer) detects the old régime in the moral
laxity of “Wilhelm Meister,” and declares that
96 GOETHE.

on this account the German nation has never
cared for or understood “Wilhelm Meister.”
Nevertheless the Renaissance of the nineteenth
century, which is not less victorious than that
of the fifteenth and sixteenth, has taken, on
the whole, the form’which it assumed in
Goethe’s mind. We do not regard the ancients
now with any superstitious veneration; we do
not dream of contrasting them either favorably
or unfavorably with Shakspeare; but we do
homage to the Hellenic genius, because we
find in it the same clearness and health, the
same cheerful enjoyment and bold grasp of
Nature, that we find in Shakspeare. This
latest Renaissance is a doctrine that has a
deep and wide application, and Goethe is the
great teacher of it.

It is worth while to notice in concluding this
chapter another misconception which may be
made by those who try to fix Goethe’s place,
and to estimate his work, in European litera-
ture. He has evidently his share in a move.
ment of reform in poetry which went on in
many countries at once. It is easy therefore to
imagine that movement to have had more. unity
in the different countries than it actually had.
IMPORTANCE OF THE PHASES. 97

In this way we may come to attribute to Goethe
a sovereign leadership in the European literary
transition, and to say that he did for Germany,
though with wider intelligence, substantially
the same service that Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and others did for England. It is indeed
striking to see that in both countries alike the
idea prevailed of renewing poetry, and of bring-
ing to an end the poetic tradition of the eigh-
teenth century. In England that tradition was
almost abandoned to Rogers and Campbell;
the more powerful poets, — Wordsworth, Cole-
ridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, —how-
ever they might differ among themselves,
agreed for the most part in being reformers
or transformers of poetry. In like manner we
have seen Goethe about the same time not so
much transforming as actually creating the
poetry of Germany.

But if so far there is resemblance, let us now
remark that there is nothing parallel in Eng-
land to the classicism of Goethe. Not one of
those daring English reformers, if we put
aside the attempt of Keats to revive Greek
mythology by the aid of Lempriere, had a
thought of seeking models in antiquity. Much

7
98 GOETHE.

less did any one of them dream of absolutely
identifying the spirit of poetry with the spirit
of antiquity, or lay it down with Schiller that
he who would be a poet must be born again
under a distant Grecian sky.

So wide was the difference behind the resem-
blance between the movement in the two coun-
tries. And the peculiar form of Renaissance
which was wanting in England sprang up in
Germany in many forms at once. As we have
seen, Winckelmann prepared the way for
Goethe. Somewhat later appeared F. A. Wolf,
who not only founded the great German school
of philology, but also propped up classical ed-
ucation by expanding it into a comprehensive
Alterthumswissenschaft, or Life in Antiquity,
and thus, as it were, laid it down that not
merely the poet but every school-boy must be
born again under the Grecian sky.

But perhaps as much has been said as suits
the size of this volume to show how important,
both for estimating Goethe’s works and for
establishing his place in literature, is the
discrimination of the periods through which
his genius passed,
CHAPTER VII.
SELF-CULTURE.

THERE is a kind of first or supreme class in
literature which consists of those who combine
the properly poetical with philosophical quali-
ties, and crown both with a certain robust sin-
cerity 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
and abundant knowledge,— he must extend in
width as well as in height. But, besides this,
he must be no dreamer or fanatic; he 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 perhaps as much can be
said of no other men 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
100 GOETHE.

their universal fame, and makes them interest-
ing 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. Shak-
speare has one deficiency, — he 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
combines with a sovereign imagination a great
range of knowledge and a capacity and habit
of taking practical views.

From Shakspeare, no doubt, the world may
learn and has learned much; yet he professed
so little to be a teacher that he has often been
represented as almost without personal opin-
ions, 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
SELF-CULTURE. IOI

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,” 1 —a teacher
and wise counsellor on all the most important
subjects. To students in almost every depart-
ment of literature and art, to unsettled spirits
needing advice for the conduct of life, to the
age itself ina great transition, he offers his word
of weighty counsel, and is probably the wisest
of all the men whom we denominate poets.
It is the gredt point of distinction between him
and Shakspeare that he is so seriously didactic.
Like Shakspeare myriad-minded, he has no-
thing of that ironic indifference, that irrespon-
sibility, which has been often attributed to
Shakspeare. He is, indeed, strangely indiffer-
ent 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

1“ Der grosse Mann, der edle Pedagog,
Der, sich zum Ruhm, ein Heldenvolk erzogen.”
102 GOETHE,

find that it has unity; that, taken together, it
makes a system, — not indeed in the academic
sense, but in the sense that one or two great
and far-reaching ideas pervade it. There may
be some difficulty in distinguishing which
these ideas are. The variety of his subjects
and styles is so great, and he abandons him-
self 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 magni-
tude of his influence, and have also distin-
guished 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 influ-
enced the world.

Never, perhaps, was a more unfortunate
formula invented than when, at a moment of
reaction against his ascendency, it occurred to
some one to assert that Goethe had talent but
not genius. No doubt the talent is there; per-
haps no work in literature exhibits a mastery
of so many literary styles as “Faust.” From
the sublime lyric of the prologue, which aston-
SELF-CULTURE. 103

ished Shelley, it leads us 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 Chris-
tian 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 him-
self 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
104 GOETHE.

great power of entering into foreign litera-
tures; he was, no doubt, indifferent to many
controversies which in England, when we
began to read 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 character-
lessness 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 begin-
ning he felt it as an infirmity, and struggled
to overcome it. That unbounded tolerance,
that readiness to allow everything and appre-
ciate every one, which was so marked in the
Germans of that time that it is clearly percep-
tible 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
SELF-CULTURE. 105

Robinson heard him say what an annoyance
he felt it to appreciate everything equally and
to be able to hate nothing. He flattered him-
self at that time that he had a real aversion.
“T hate,” he said, “everything Oriental”
(“Eigentlich hasse ich alles Orientalische”’ ).
He goes further in the “ West-éstlicher 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 unerlasslich 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 description of him which was so
fashionable forty years ago — “I sit apart hold-
ing 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
106 GOETHE.

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 strug-
gles for, what he and Schiller alike chide the
Germans for wanting; but he cannot attain it
by a shart 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 a 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 acccustomed to what is best,
but then they are so terribly well read!” ! But

1 “Zwar sind sie an das Beste nicht gewhént,
Allein sie haben schrecklich viel gelesen.”
SELF--CULTURE. 107

it is just the struggle he makes for distinct-
ness that is admirable in him. The breadth,
the tolerance, he has in common with his Ger-
man 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 contro-
versies 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 rational-
ism. 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 little disturbed 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
108 GOETHE.

as because it creates disturbance. Like Lu-
theranism in past times, as he says, it is un-
favorable to quiet culture. Even the War of
Liberation cannot rouse him. Was he not then
a quietist? 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 lite-
rature. 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 uninfluen-
tial 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 him-
self 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
SELF-CULTURE. 109

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 in Church and University as triflers in
comparison with himself. The French Revolu-
tion 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 prose-
cuted 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 con-
tinued to look back upon the twenty odd years
between the Seven Years’ War and the Revolu-
tion as a golden time, — as in a peculiar sense
his own time.!
1 “Zwanzig Jahre liess ich gehn

Und genoss was mir beschieden ;

Eine Reihe vollig schon

Wie die Zeit der Barmeciden.” — West. Div.

Diintzer comments thus on this passage: “ Es bezieht

sich auf die Zeit vom siebenjahrigen Kriege bis zur
franzdsischen Umwalzung.”
110 GOETHE.

The new events disturbed him in his habits
without actually forcing him to form new hab-
its; 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 perhaps at times 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 Napo-
leonic periods? It was that task about which,
since Goethe’s time, so much has been said, —
self-culture. “From my boyhood,” says Wil-
helm, 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 un-
doubtedly the phrase is one which will bear a
SELF-CULTURE. IIl

selfish interpretation, — just as a Christian may
be selfish when he devotes himself to the salva-
tion 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 philoso-
phers. 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 interpreta-
tion to this formula than to the other formula
by which philosophers have tried to describe
the object of a moral life. A harmonious
existence does not necessarily mean an exist-
ence 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 con-
sists, and by what methods it may be attained.
112 GOETHE.

For the present, at least, let us content our-
selves with remarking that Goethe, who knew
his own mind as well as most people, consid-
ered himself to carry disinterestedness almost
to an extreme. What especially struck him in
Spinoza, he says,/ was the boundless unselfish-
ness 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 later, ‘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, — namely, the power and per-
sistent will to make his life systematic, and
place all his action under the control of a prin-
ciple 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

1 Aus meinem Leben, Book xiv.
SELF-—CULTURE. 113

makes him great, that makes him the teacher
of these later ages, — this, 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 prob-
lem 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 philoso-
phy 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 ques-
tion which they under various pretexts evaded,
— how to make existence satisfactory.

He grasps it in the rough, unceremonious
8
114 GOETHE.

manner of one who means business, and also
in the manner which Rousseau had made fash-
ionable. 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,!—is a sort of
fundamental axiom with him, as it is wjth
most moral reformers. Even when he has
death before his mind, he still protests. “ ‘He
isno 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.”
“Faust,” Part ii, Act 5. 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! —

1 “ Sicherlich es muss das Beste
Irgendwo zu finden sein.”
SELF-CULTURE. 115

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
the day, which in its course will not gratify
one wish, not one single wish.” So speaks
Faust, and Goethe ratifies it in his own per-
son when he complains that “we are not
allowed to develop what we.have in us, and are
denied what is necessary to supply our defi-
ciences; 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 person-
ality, at first in instalments, but at last com-
pletely; 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 anything like a grimace.” He
adds that this system is grounded on the maxim
that ‘ Allis vanity,’ — a maxim which character-
istically he pronounces false and blasphemous.
That “all is not vanity,” is indeed almost the
substance of Goethe’s philosophy. Pessimism
was perhaps hardly invented in his time; at any
rate his doctrine is that human life is precious,
and that we can never value highly enough
every passing hour of it.
116 GOETHE.

“ Jenes siisse Gedrange der leichtesten irdischen Tage
Ach! wer schatzt ihn genug, diesen vereilenden
Werth ? ” — EUPHROSYNE.
Which seems to be echoed by our own Tenny-
son, when in Will Waterproof, addressing his
pleasant hour, he writes: —
“ So mix for ever with the past,
Like all good things on earth,

For should I prize thee, could’st thou last
At half thy real worth?”

This doctrine, again, is not in itself or neces-
sarily 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 abstinence 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
SELF-CULTURE. 117

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 “ Gotz,’ —the young
monk who envies Gotz his life so full of move-
ment 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
118 GOETHE.

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
—vunderstood always that no special end is to
be gained by the self-denial — he protests. In
his poem, called the “General Confession”
C‘‘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 in the Beautiful.” Goethe, in
SELF—CULTURE. II9Q

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 sensa-
tions 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, har-
monious, if it offered continually and habitually
food for desire so understood, which is almost
120 GOETHE.

the same thing as capacity. But there are
hindrances. The chief of these is the supersti-
tion 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 an-
other hindrance, less obvious, and needing to
be dealt with in another way, which Goethe
therefore attacks usually in prose rather than
in poetry.

Meanwhile the world became gradually aware
that one of the most splendidly gifted of men
was engaged with indefatigable industry in
“ developing all that was in him.” The remark-
able spectacle gradually attracted the attention
of all Europe. What was to be thought of it
was a question on which opinions differed. Few
SELF-—CULTURE. 121

thought with Goethe himself that such a plan
of life was consistent with boundless unselfish-
ness. The opinion rather prevailed that he had
invented a new form of selfishness, had brought
into the world a new moral monster. And so
Tennyson depicted ‘‘a glorious devil, large in
heart and brain, That did love beauty only, or
if good, good only for its beauty.” And John
Sterling scandalized his friend Carlyle by de-
scribing Goethe in a similar way in the “ Onyx
Ring.” But Goethe never, I think, either aban-
doned his plan of life or ceased to believe
himself unselfish. What he said in the early
years of his life at Weimar remained true to the
end. ‘ The desire to rear as high as possible in
the air the pyramid of my existence, of which
the base is given and placed for me, predomi-
nates over every other, and scarcely allows
itself for a moment to be forgotten. I must not
neglect myself; I am already pretty well ad-
vanced in years, and my destiny may break
in the middle and leave the Tower of Babel
unfinished. At least men shall say, It was
boldly planned.”
CHAPTER VIII.
WILHELM MEISTER.

MAN, as Goethe conceives him, is essentially
active. The happiness he seeks is not passive
enjoyment, but an occupation, a pursuit adapted
to his inborn capacities. It follows that a prin-
cipal condition of happiness is a just self-know-
ledge. He will be happy who knows what he
wants and what he cando. Here, again, Goethe
gives importance to a doctrine which in itself is
obvious enough by the persistent energy with
which he applies it. He had been himself be-
wildered by the multiplicity of his own tastes
and aptitudes. He had wanted to do every-
thing 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 study-
ing 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
WILHELM MEISTER. 123

finds that the circumstances of childhood, and
especially our system of education, which “ ex-
cites 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 char-
acteristic, 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 indiffer-
ence to what we have-agreed to call morality —
that is, the part of morality that concerns the
relations of the sexes — which reigns through-
out it. Nevertheless, few books have had a
deeper influence upon modern literature than
this famous novel. It is the first important
124 GOETHE,

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 dis-
covering their true vocations; how Wilhelm is
assisted, and by what stages he arrives at clear-
ness, — this is the subject of a long and elabo-
rate 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 pro-
duce its effect among us when the influence of
the Waverley Novel was exhausted. The idea
now prevalent, which gives to the novel a prac-
tical as well as an artistic side; the idea which
prompts us, when we wish to preach any kind
WILHELM MEISTER. 125

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 isanovel
with a purpose; for the different characters
which it introduces to us are evidently introduced
in order that we may understand Goethe’s prac-
tical philosophy, — how he regards human life
and human duties. At the same time he does
not state with much distinctness what doctrines
he wishes to preach. He passes in a bewilder-
ing manner from pictures of theatrical life and
‘discussions of the genius of Shakspeare to
delineations of the Christian religious life, upon
which evidently no pains have been spared,
though the reader is left quite uncertain how
much religious belief the author himself may
have. There is something alarming about
attempts to treat morality in a manner at once

‘so original and so irresponsible. We need not
therefore be surprised to learn that Goethe laid
himself open to the charge of immorality, and
that ‘“ Wilhelm Meister’ was received with horror
by the religious world; it was, if I remember
right, publicly burnt by Count Stolberg.
126 GOETHE.

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 promi-
nence 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 occupa-
tion 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
WILHELM MEISTER. 127

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 sur-
renders to deadness and dulness more than half
of our existence.

It is thus the distinction of ‘“ Wilhelm
Meister” that it is actually a novel about busi-
ness; 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
128 GOETHE.

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 ita
serious trial.

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, as I hold, 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
WILHELM MEISTER. 129

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 happi-
ness? 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 be-
long. 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
9
130 GOETHE.

tercentenary of the Reformation, he writes a
poem in which he expresses his devout resolu-
tion of showing his Protestantism, as ever, by
Art and Science.1 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 con-
templation 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 under-
stood. Science, according to ‘‘ Faust,” must not
be dry analysis pursued at a desk in a close
room; it must be direct wondering contempla-
tion of Nature. The secrets of the world must
disclose themselves to a loving gaze, not to
dry thinking (trocknes Sinnen); man must con-

1“ Will ich in Kunst und Wissenschaft,
Wie immer, protestiren.”
WILHELM MEISTER. 131

verse 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 first in Faust’s long despairing soliloquy,
and then by the picture of the Famulus
Wagner, who is treated with so much contempt.
He is simply the ordinary man of science, per-
haps we may think the modest practical inves-
tigator, 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 con-
centrated upon single points. Such a man is
to Goethe “the dry creeper,” “the most pitia-
ble of all the sons of earth.”

In this singular doctrine of an immediate,
living, worshipping contemplation of Nature
as the only method by which true knowledge
can be attained,—a doctrine, by the way, upon
which the whole plot of ‘‘ Faust” is based, — we
seem to trace the influence of Hamann, an
eccentric writer of the time of Goethe’s youth,
who was known as the Magus of the North.
He had a great influence upon Herder, but also
upon Goethe, who for a long time entertained
132 GOETHE.

the design of superintending an edition of ‘his
works, and who, in the 12th Book of ‘‘ Dichtung
und Wahrheit,” has dwelt upon him in a man-
ner which shows how deeply he felt himself
indebted to him. Hamann’s style was so
enigmatic that many of his readers might have
been at a loss to say what precisely he meant
to teach. Goethe, however, knew well what
he at least had learned from Hamann. He
says, The principle to which all his utterances
may be referred is this: whatever the human
being undertakes to do, whether by way of deed
or word or otherwise, must be done with all
his powers acting in combination; whatever is
isolated is objectionable. On this Goethe
remarks, “A glorious maxim, but difficult to
carry into effect.” Upon this principle he
bases his reverence for the antique world, for
he writes (Winckelmann, p. 10), “We can do
much by a judicious use of single powers, and
extraordinary things by the combination of
several powers, but supreme, utterly unex-
pected things only by a harmonious union of
all our powers. The last was the happy lot of
the ancients, especially the Greeks in their
best time; we moderns are reduced by our
fate to the two former,”
WILHELM MEISTER. 133

But so long as we discuss Goethe’s practical
philosophy, or his conception of culture, it
will be well to fix our attention principally
upon “Wilhelm Meister.”

One of the most serious hindrances to the
universal reputation of Goethe is the difficulty
of forming a distinct opinion about this novel.
After “Faust,” it is the most elaborate of
Goethe's Works; but whereas “ Faust’ over-
powers public opinion as_if it were one of the
greater master-pieces of Shakspeare, * Wilhelm
Meister” is, I think, in general very faintly
appreciated. Inthe first place it is a prose work;
and as Goethe distinguished literary styles with
great clearness, his prose is always real prose,
and we are therefore not to look in “ Wilhelm
Meister” for any poetic charm. We have before
us simply a novel, and even as such it does not
fall under any of the classes of novel with which
we are familiar. It is not in the least likea
Waverley Novel. On the other hand it is not
humorous, and reminds us neither of Jane Austen
nor of the eighteenth century novel, though in
“Werther ” Goethe had reproduced some of the
principal characteristics of Richardson ; nor does
it at all anticipate the modern French novel or
134 GOETHE.

Thackeray. We look for an interesting story,
and we do not find it; we look in vain for a
series of life-like and amusing scenes; we look
for characters freshly conceived and vividly
drawn, and we find only one or two such. In
these circumstances we are driven to content
ourselves with finding matter of admiration in
particular passages, though Goethe, in general,
more than any other great writer, attaches im-
portance to the zsthetic whole. There is a
delicate charm in the story of Mignon and in
some of the songs of Mignon and the Harper,
that incomparable lyrical dream, “Kennst du
das Land,” and that piece which consoled the
last hours of Queen Louise of Prussia, ‘‘ Wer
nie sein Brod mit Thranen ass.”’ The elaborate
critique of “ Hamlet,” which occupies so large
a space, will be interesting at least to English
people; and when we remember the old contro-
versy whether Coleridge or August Schlegel
led the way to a really deep appreciation of
Shakspeare’s genius, we may be inclined to
decide that it was neither one nor the other,
but Goethe in “Wilhelm Meister.’’ Many too
will read with a profound interest the ‘“ Confes-
sions of a Beautiful Soul.” But what concep-
WILHELM MEISTER. 135

tion of the book, as a whole, can we form by
putting together criticisms on “ Hamlet,” the
memoirs of a pietist, the songs of a wandering
harper, and the homesickness of an Italian
exile? Has the book, we ask, any subject,
any unity at all? At least it seems to break
asunder in the middle. Throughout the first
and larger half, the reader makes no doubt that
he has before him a novel on the theatre, such
as it was easy to imagine Goethe, a playwright
and the director of a theatre, conceiving; and
his only complaint perhaps is that the subject
is treated in a style too thorough and too
minute to be amusing. But, as Scherer re-
marks, “We are astonished to find this appa-
rent theatre-novel taking quite another turn,
and the hero entering a new and professedly
higher region. Was it necessary to discuss
Shakspeare’s “ Hamlet” in such a detailed man-
ner, to handle theatrical life as a whole, and
solemnly to lay down principles such as Goethe
later inculcated in his capacity of Director, if
all this was only to illustrate an aberration on
the part of the hero?” It is clear that all this
does not naturally introduce the “Confessions
of a Beautiful Soul,” nor all the serious inquiries
136 GOETHE,

which occupy the latter part of the novel; nor
does it attach itself naturally to the pathetic
tale of the last days of Mignon. Scherer him-
self does not attempt to justify these defects
in the design of the novel, but holds that
Goethe hurried the conclusion of his book in
order to get it off his hands. But we shall find
much more unity in “Wilhelm Meister” if we
regard it not as a theatrical novel, but as a
novel of culture and education, and if we con-
sider it in close connection with Goethe’s Life.
The story of Mignon, as we have remarked,
expresses that yearning after the ancient world
which was perhaps the deepest of all his feel-
ings. The devotion to Shakspeare was his
strongest feeling at a particular period of his
life, — the period when he undertook “ Wilhelm
Meister.” That it should disappear at a par-
ticular point of the novel, answers to that
change in his views on which we have enlarged,
and which is represented in his life by his
Italian journey. The “Confessions of a Beauti-
ful Soul” taken together with the philosophy of
the Uncle and his Hall of the Past, represent
the struggle which went on in Goethe’s mind
through the greater part of his life between
WILHELM MEISTER. 137

two forms of religion, — between certain Chris-
tian ideas from which he would never consent
to part, and a sort of Heathenism which at
times he avowed with the utmost frankness.
And all this various material he has united in
“Wilhelm Meister ’’ by means of his practical
philosophy of culture, which taught him that a
man should study to develop all that is in
him, that a man should spare no pains to dis-
cover his true vocation, and that in doing so
he will receive little help from the reigning
system of education, which excites wishes
instead of awakening aptitudes. Looked at
then in this way, the book sets before us more
fully than any other book of Goethe’s, and in
a highly remarkable, if not in a perfectly satis-
factory way, what we may call the Goethian
philosophy of culture.

But besides the general view of religion
which identifies it with Art and Science, we
may discover in Goethe many more or less
definite statements of religious doctrine. The
most startling of these I now proceed to
discuss.
CHAPTER IX.
THE GREAT HEATHEN.

In his youth Goethe was acquainted with sev-
eral eminently Christian persons, — Fraulein
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 him-
self adopts pietistic language; but as his own
peculiar ideas developed themselves, they sepa-
rated 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 bitter-
ness. This hostility took rather a peculiar
form. As the whole disposition of his mind
leads him towards religion in a certain sense,
THE GREAT HEATHEN. 139

as he can no more help being religious than he
can help being a poet, he does not reject reli-
gion 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” (Heathen-
ism), 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-confi-
dence, the attention to the present, the pure
worship of the gods as ancestors, the admira-
tion 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 con-
dition of human life intended by Nature her-
140 GOETHE.

self, that we become conscious, alike at the
height of enjoyment and in the depth of sacri-
fice and even of ruin, of an indestructible
health.” Clearly when he wrote this (in 1805)
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.

This curious passage is perhaps the funda-
mental text on the subject of Goethe’s heathen-
ism. By heathenism he understands a healthy
way of thinking; and this he considers to con-
sist in a devotion to what is before us, to such
happiness as is offered by the present life
supplemented by the hope of fame after death.
But we may ask whether this system is to be
taken seriously, and whether elsewhere in
Goethe’s Works we find it pursued in detail.
Not, I think, in any systematic manner.
Goethe is no writer of systematic treatises.
In the vast mass of his epigrams and detached
reflections there are no doubt many which deal
with morals and religion, and there is evena
distinct section entitled ““Ethisches.” But all
THE GREAT HEATHEN. I4i

this is fragmentary. He never yielded his
mind to the inspiration of any moral system,
heathen or Christian. Nor does he resemble
our George Eliot, who, after she had broken
with Christianity, remained possessed by moral
ideas, and wrote novel after novel to illustrate
them. Still, we may trace here and there the
form which the heathenism avowed in the
above passage took in his mind. He preaches
at times with great emphasis what may be
called a religion of healthy action, which is to
have for its heaven posthumous renown.

The “religion of the deed” comes before us
in a well-known passage of “Faust” where,
brooding over the New Testament, Faust quar-
‘rels with the text, “In the beginning was the
Word,” and after several attempts to emend it,
decides that the true reading must be, In the
beginning was the deed. The laconism which
characterizes the First Part of “ Faust ” does not
allow him there to explain himself further. But
let us now turn to those stanzas which might
be called the Psalm of Goethe, and which
Carlyle has made familiar to us by his rough
translation of them in “Past and Present.”

“Silently,” he sings, —
142 GOETHE.

“Rest the stars above us
And the graves beneath us,
But from yonder world
Cry the voices of the spirits
And the voices of the Masters,
(Geister, Meister, a favorite jingle of Goethe’s)
Neglect not to put in exercise
The forces of goodness.”

We may venture to ask, in passing, why
does Carlyle translate this, —

“Choose well; your choice is brief and yet endless”?

Yet why not, seeing that Carlyle alters ina
similar manner, and apparently to suit his
private taste, a still more important passage, the
famous “Whole, Good, and Beautiful’ itself.
At the end of his paper on the Death of Goethe
this is printed, so as actually to efface the
rhyme, Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu
leben. Here “wahren” is substituted for
“schénen,” “true” for “beautiful.”

But, to return, the exhortation is Be up and
doing; if anything good shows itself make the
most of it, see that it does not run to waste.
That he has here in view the “religion of the
deed” appears from the next stanza, which runs
thus, —
THE GREAT HEATHEN. 143

“Here in the eternal stillness
Crowns are weaving,
Which are destined richly
To reward those who are active,
(Die sollen mit Fille, die 7a¢igen lohnen).

And then the psalm closes with the sharp,
sudden thunderpeal, “ Wir heissen euch hoffen.”
(We bid you hope.)

But it is in the Second Part of “ Faust” that
Goethe, who commonly abstains from dogma-
tism, does in a manner pledge himself to
deliver a religious doctrine. We may here
remark that though he lived and wrote beyond
his eightieth year, Goethe is by no means a
perfect example of a poetic genius resisting
the effects of old age. On the contrary, in
him especially we may study the symptoms of
senile decay upon the poetic imagination.
Even in the “ West-éstlicher Divan” we remark
with surprise how much the poet is altered,
who in his youth had been so fascinating by
his freshness and spontaneity that he had given
the nation an example of genius incarnated.
Quite other is the poet who now studies artifi-
cially and by the help of learning to describe
what is most remote from all his own thoughts
144 GOETHE.

and feelings, the life of the East. Still in
some parts of this work, published when he
was about seventy, — for instance, in the
series of love-songs which make up the Book
of Zuleikha, in the Book of Hafiz, and in the
brilliant picture of the Mohammedan Paradise
at the close, — he shows freshness enough to
justify Heine’s judgment that “the magic of
this book is indescribable.” But it is by compar-
ing the Second with the First Part of “ Faust”
that we measure most easily the ravages of old
age upon his powerful imagination. The First
Part is by universal consent Goethe’s crown-
ing literary achievement, an unparalleled series
of inimitable scenes and unforgetable lines.
The Second Part must be admitted, even by
those who admire it most in parts, to be as a
whole almost unreadable. The First Act and
the Fourth Act of it will be too much for all
but the toughest readers. In the other three
acts there is indeed much that is astonishing
and not a little that is admirable, but perhaps
even here not much that is satisfactory. It is
in the Fifth Act that Goethe finds himself
driven to offer some solution of the question
which he has proposed in the First Part, the
THE GREAT HEATHEN. 145

problem of life itself or of happiness. Faust
has entered into his contract with Mephisto-
pheles in order that he may live to be able to
say to the moment, “Stay, thou art fair;” in
other words, to feel for a moment his life sat-
isfactory to him and so far to solve the prob-
lem of life. In the Fifth Act of the Second
Part the time arrives for this promise to be
redeemed. I do not believe, in spite of the
German commentators, that any completely
consistent explanation can be given of the con-
tract of Faust with Mephistopheles. Goethe
has, in fact, undertaken more than he can per-
form. We cannot expect a satisfactory solu-
tion, but from observing the form which the
solution takes we may follow the course of
Goethe’s ideas on these great subjects. And
what do we find? Faust, now in extreme old
age, devotes himself to a life of practical be-
neficent energy; he obtains from the Emperor
a grant of a large piece of sea coast, which it
becomes his pride to convert into a seat of
prosperous cultivation and of happy busy life
for mulitudes of men. When he has accom-
plished this he becomes aware of the approach
of death and of the moment when he must set-

10
146 GOETHE.

tle with Mephistopheles. When that moment
arrives he exults in his beneficent achieve-
ments, and adds, “This is the last conclusion
of wisdom; he alone deserves for himself
freedom and life who has to conquer them
every day.” In short a daily course of strenu-
ous action, this alone is satisfactory life. And
what is his hope in death? This: “It cannot
be that the trace of my days on earth will pass
away in cons of time.” Here again appears
the preciousness of posthumous fame which
was one of the doctrines which, as we saw
above, made up what Goethe was pleased to
call heathenism. It is true that in a still later
scene of “Faust” we find ourselves once more
in the midst of Christian imagery, surrounded
by visions of hell and paradise, by devils and
angels who contend for Faust’s immortal part.
But even here the “religion of the deed” is
reaffirmed, for the angels sing “The noble
spirit is saved, for we have the power to redeem
him who labors ceaselessly striving.”

There is much in these last scenes that
is bewildering and intentionally mysterious.
Nevertheless, if we compare Faust in these
scenes with the Faust whose acquaintance we
THE GREAT HEATHEN. 147

made at the opening of the First Part, we see
as the total result of the development of the
play that the former is as Gétz, and the latter
as Brother Martin. A strenuous energetic man,
delighting in action from which practical good
results, has taken the place of a sedentary, self-
dissatisfied man, secluded from his kind and
oppressed by senseless vows of renunciation.

So far we may trace in Goethe a religious
system which, if somewhat vague, is consis-
tent both with itself and with the classicism of
his artistic views. But there are also traces
in his writings of another and a very different
system.
CHAPTER X.
ANOTHER RELIGION.

WuaAt has been said above of the heathenism
of Goethe is based entirely, it will be remem-
bered, upon Goethe’s own declaration given on
p. 139. That declaration, however, if it were
taken too literally, might convey to us a very
false notion of Goethe’s way of thinking and
character; for it might be taken to mean that
Goethe meant to place himself in a position of
deliberate and active hostility to Christianity,
that he meant to labor for its destruction and
for the establishment of another religion upon
its ruins. And this might seem not quite
incredible when we remember that he lived to
see the period when such deliberate attempts
to destroy Christianity and to found new reli-
gions were actually made, for he lived to see
Saint Simonianism. With his immense repu-
tation and influence it would not have been
strange if he had tried to assume such a posi-
tion as Saint Simon, or as Auguste Comte after
ANOTHER RELIGION. 149

him assumed, and a Neo-heathenism would
after all not have been much stranger than
many other revivals and experiments in religion
which the nineteenth century has witnessed.

But Goethe was the last man in the world to
undertake such an experiment. He had not
the ambition nor quite the talents which would
have been needed by the leader of a school or
sect which might have aimed at universal
dominion. His knowledge extended, indeed,
beyond literature into science, but he had by
no means the universal knowledge of a dicta-
tor in the realm of thought. In particular we
may remark that he always treated with indif-
ference philosophic method. Every one re-
members the contempt he pours upon this in
“Faust,” and scarcely less famous is the
epigram written in his old age, in which,
undertaking to explain how he has been able
to rise so high, he says, “My child, I have
been very discreet, I have always abstained
from thinking about thinking,”

“ Mein Kind, Ich habe es klug gemacht;
Ich habe nie uber’s Denken gedacht.”

But this, perhaps, is the last thing which the
sovereigns of thought, who have usually begun
150 GOETHE.

by being masters of method, have been able to
say.

But neither, I think, did Goethe ever con-
ceive the ambition of occupying such a posi-
tion; his ambition, indeed, was by no means
confined to literature. He would, perhaps,
have felt more pleasure could he have been
acknowledged as a great scientific discoverer
than in feeling himself the author of the great
poem of the age, and he did travel a good way
out of literature into practical administration.
But he had no taste for the position of a party
leader, whether in thought and philosophy or
in politics. His disposition was towards con-
ciliation and a peaceful life. Thus he passed
through one of the most stormy periods in the
history of the world without attaching himself
to any party. He admitted no contentious
elements into his life, not even so much as is
found unavoidable by almost every English-
man, and that though the most extreme party
disputes were always raging about him, though
he could well remember the days of Frederick
the Great and Voltaire, and though the battle
of Jena was fought in his neighborhood. Yet
even in his old age he received with verfect
ANOTHER RELIGION. I51

indifference the news of the revolution of July,
he who had treated with almost equal indiffer-
ence so many revolutions more violent still.
Of a man so inclined we may feel that it is
absurd to suppose that he can ever have seri-
ously contemplated leading a deadly attack
upon Christianity in order to set up heathen-
ism in its place. We are obliged, therefore,
to suppose that after all it was only a kind of
constructive heathenism that he contemplated,
and we must be prepared also to find that it
was not actually Christianity, but perhaps only
a certain view of Christianity, to which he was
so mortally opposed.

It must be admitted that the belief that the
Christian way of thinking is essentially un-
healthy does very widely pervade his works.
He hates asceticism, or what he calls “absti-
nence,” in every form; he has no patience with
what Carlyle calls “the worship of sorrow,”
and refuses even to let his mind dwell on
images of pain or grief. The very thought,
for instance, of pictures of the crucifixion or of
martyrdoms infuriates him; he pronounces
them to be odious and profane. By heathenism
on the other hand he means what Heine calls
152 GOETHE.

“ Lebensherrlichkeit,” a splendid and glorious
or harmonious view of life, in which pain and
evil are in a manner suppressed. To call this
heathenism is evidently a very lax use of lan-
guage; but we have said enough already of the
train of thought by which Goethe justified it.
He imagines such a harmonious existence to
have existed in the Hellenic world. It is
neither the age of Plutarch we are to observe,
nor the age of Pericles which he thus idealizes.
It is scarcely even the Homeric age, but rather
the age of heroes and demigods, or the life of
the gods on Olympus. Perhaps he may have
regarded it as the great deficiency in his own
literary career, and so may his admirers now
well regard it, that he never added to his
divine Iphigenie other plays conceived in a
similar spirit and on a similar subject, that for
instance he never wrote his “Iphigenie” in
Delphi nor that “ Nausicaa” which occupied his
imagination so much at the time when he
visited Sicily. But this turn of mind, this
impatience of contemplating evil, this horror
of abstinence and asceticism produces other
effects which are visible in his writings. This,
perhaps, it is which prevents him from being a
ANOTHER RELIGION. 153

great tragic poet. A very great lyric poet he
is, and he has an extraordinary talent for epic
narration; but he can scarcely be said to have
produced in the strict sense of the word a great
tragedy. “Iphigenie” is scarcely a tragedy, and
still less can the title be given to “ Faust.” How
can a man write a tragedy who will not allow
his mind to dwell on sorrow? His female
characters also, at least those which are most
characteristic of his pen, bring to mind the
Tecmessas, Deianiras, Cassandras, of Attic
tragedy. Suchare Clirchen, Marianne, Philine,
above all Gretchen. They are unfortunates,
who suggest to him many reflections upon the
inferior lot of woman and her sadly restricted
happiness. Yet these he paints with far more
success than the woman of modern civilization,
the woman elevated by Christianity, who in
his hands, as in the case of the two Leonores
of Tasso, acquires no such wonderful individu-
ality. The form of life that fascinates him is
expressed when he says, —
“In der heroischen Zeit, da Gétter und Géttinnen liebten,
Folgte Begierde dem Blick, folgte Genuss der Begier.”

In the heroic age when gods and goddesses loved, desire
followed hard on sight and enjoyment on desire.
154 GOETHE,

Would we understand how he worked out
such an extremely primitive theory, we had
better perhaps read the satirical attack on
Wieland, which he wrote in 1773, and entitled
“Gotter, Helden und Wieland.”

Nor does Goethe commonly speak with any
rancorous hostility of Christianity; that tone
is indeed to be found in some parts of his
writings. I notice among the Venetian epi-
grams, for instance, several which show sucha
feeling; but in general he is too good-natured
and too averse to party contention to take such
atone. He prefers on the whole to paradea
large-minded appreciation, rather conservative
than pious, of Christianity. He appears, indeed,
always strongly interested in the subject, and
is capable at times of treating it in a highly
reverential manner. In “Wilhelm Meister”
we havea picture of Christian pietism, tenderly
and pleasingly drawn, in which, if belief is not
actually professed, at least disbelief is not
even hinted at. In the celebrated passage of
“Faust,” where Gretchen catechizes her lover
about his religious belief, it will be remarked,
indeed, that he remains absolutely silent when
she names Christianity directly, “Denn du
ANOTHER RELIGION. 155

hast kein Christenthum;” but the eloquent
protest with which he answers her agonized
question “Glaubst du an Gott?” if it may be
thought vague, has at least the tone of belief,
and is certainly not heathenish. The age of
Voltaire and of the French Revolution had in
fact passed away; with the nineteenth century
a revival of Christianity set in everywhere, and
it became more difficult than it had been for a
man who was bent upon keeping himself clear
of parties, and whose inclination was conserva-
tive, to talk the wild language of the revolu-
tionary period.

Goethe had early associations with the reli-
gious world, and in one respect he had always
been religious, for he had always been an
earnest student and an ardent admirer of the
Bible. He has an enthusiastic description of
the class of people whom he remembered in
the Germany of the eighteenth century to have
earned the title of dzbelfest (West. Div. Noten
und Abhandlungen, in the chapter on Hafiz),
and in the second book of the poem (Hafis
Namen) he claims this title for himself, and
goes so far as to write, after saying that Hafiz
derived his name from his profound knowledge
156 GOETHE.

of the Koran, “I am just like thee, since I
have taken to myself the glorious image of our
sacred books, as the Lord’s image impressed
itself upon that cloth of cloths, and have
refreshed myself in the silence of the breast,
in spite of all denial, hindrance, deprivation,
with the enlivening image of faith.”

We expect to find that in his long life
Goethe made some more decided declaration
on the subject of religion. And, indeed, in
one of his later works, “Wilhelm Meister’s
Wanderjahre,” we find such a declaration.
The work in general is somewhat desultory
and confused; it is not one of Goethe’s inter-
esting works, but the first chapters of the
second book of it made the profoundest impres-
sion upon Carlyle. Here he speaks of religion
not merely in the sense of the view we ought
to take of the highest questions, but in the
narrower sense of Heiligthumer, the best cere-
monies, ritual or form of worship. We are
here told that for the complete development of
the human being one all-important thing is
needed, which nevertheless nature does not
give us. This is reverence, and there are three
kinds of it. The first is reverence for that
ANOTHER RELIGION. 157

which is above us, for the God who reveals
Himself in parents and teachers. The second
is reverence for that which is below us. The
first reverence he desires to see expressed
symbolically by arms crossed over the breast
and eyes fixed joyfully upon the sky; the
second by hands folded behind and looks fixed
on the ground to mark that from the earth we
derive infinite joys but also sorrows out of pro-
portion. This second reverence leads on toa
third which is directed towards equals and
comrades. The religion which is compounded
of these three reverences, adds Goethe, is
already professed by a great part of mankind,
though unconsciously. It is contained in the
Creed, of which the first article is ethnic, and
belongs to all nations; the second Christian,
and belongs to those who struggle with sorrows
and are made perfect in suffering; and the
third teaches an inspired communion of saints.
May not then the three divine Persons under
whose image and name such convictions and
promises are expressed, be rightly regarded as
the highest unity? And thus we find Goethe
in his old age proclaiming a sort of Neo-
Christianism.
158 GOETHE.

He then conducts us into a hall adorned with
pictures. Here the ethnical religion is illus-
trated by scenes from the history of Israel,
with which, however, scenes from other histo-
ries are intermixed. There are one or two
indications given by the way that Goethe has
not really changed his earlier opinion so much
as might appear. He had called himself a
heathen, and now we find him saying, “ Among
all heathen religions, for such a religion is
that of Israel, this one has great advantages.”
He had always been a lover of the Bible, and
here we have a magnificent eulogy of the
“excellent collection of the sacred books” of
Israel.

We are next conducted into an inner hall,
in which the story of the Gospels with their
miracles and parables is unrolled before us in
like manner. But the story ends with the last
supper, for Goethe remembers here too his old
convictions. Of the sufferings and death of
the divine man, we are told by the administra-
tors of the system, no mystery is made, but we
draw a veil over them just because we revere
them so much. We count it a culpable pro-
fanity to expose the cross and the Holy One
ANOTHER RELIGION. 159

suffering on it to the gaze of the sun, who
turned his face away when an impious age
forced the spectacle upon him, and with all
those deep mysteries in which the divine abyss
of sorrow lies hidden, to play, to sport and
trifle, and not to rest until what is most vener-
able has been made to appear common and
absurd.

We do not linger here upon this singular
invention, though it is a good example, as
Carlyle felt, of Goethe’s unrivalled dexterity
in style. But it belongs to a period when his
utterances had lost much of their old weight
and seriousness. Nevertheless, we cannot but
be struck by the pains he takes in this work,
to express the profound reverence he has
gradually learned to feel for Christianity. He
who in earlier life had found no answer to
those who said to him, “Du hast kein Chris-
tenthum,” now tells us, “Humanity cannot
take a retrograde step, and we may say that
the Christian religion, now that it has once
appeared, can never again disappear, now that
it has once found a divine embodiment cannot
again be dissolved.”

In these last years of Goethe the world was
160 GOETHE.

once more assuming a revolutionary aspect;
the nations seemed to be recovering from the
shock of the downfall of Napoleon. 1830
seemed to promise a Second Part of the drama
of the French Revolution. A new outbreak of
the armies of France, a new attack upon Mon-
archy, and a new attack upon Christianity
seemed to be at hand. The thinkers of this
new time were called upon not merely to reject
Christianity, but to furnish a new religion
which might better suit the modern time.
Saint Simonianism was abroad, and the ideas
which soon afterwards took the names of Posi-
tivism and Religion of Humanity were in the
air. These circumstances give additional sig-
nificance to these last utterances of Goethe.
He seems deliberately to refuse his adhesion
to all movements of this kind. Thus in
chapter xi. of book iii. of the “ Wanderjahre ”
we find him returning to the subject of religion.
“All religions,” he writes, “ press men to rec-
oncile themselves to the inevitable: each fur-
nishes its own solution to this problem. The
Christian lends a gracious help by means of
faith, love, and hope. Out of these springs
patience, a sweet feeling what a precious gift
ANOTHER RELIGION. 161

existence continues to be [this is the Goethian
optimism which we noticed above], even when
in place of the desired enjoyment the most
intolerable misery is heaped upon it. By this
religion we abide steadfastly, though in a
peculiar manner.”

To sum up then, by the side of the Neo-
Heathenism, which Goethe in comparatively
early life adopts from Winckelmann, we dis-
cover in him other elements of religion.
Throughout his life he is a rapt adorer of the
God in Nature. He sings, —

“Was kann der Mensch im Leben mehr gewinnen
Als dass ihm Gott-Natur sich offenbare?”

“What can human being attain in life beyond this, that
God-Nature should reveal itself to him?”

Again, at all periods, alike. in youth and in
age, we find him a devoted reader of the Bible,
of “the excellent collection of sacred books
left us by the Hebrews.” Nor is he now con-
tent, as in his heathenish time, with a future
hope confined to this world. In his last years
at least he appeared as a believer in immorta-
lity. That profound optimism, that assurance
that nature must have provided for man what-

II
162 GOETHE.

ever is necessary for his well-being, influenced
him here. Thus in the “Zahme Xenien” we
find him writing, “You ask what are my
grounds for this belief; the weightiest is this,
that we cannot do without it.” But he is also
a conservative, one who all along was bewil-
dered and repelled by the French Revolution.
Accordingly, in his old age, when it threatened
to break out again and he saw a new period
beginning, in which its rashest experiments
seemed likely to be renewed, he deliberately
dissuaded us from any attempt to found a new
religion. Thus we find him writing to Carlyle,
as Mr. Froude prints his words, “Von der
Société Saint Simonien bitte Dich fern zu
halten.”” And he counselled us in founding our
future society to make Christianity a principal
element in its religion.

If we try to sum up the general view which
has been given of Goethe’s philosophy, we
shall see that on the one hand he has treated
two or three topics with great originality and
thoroughness, and also that he has been the
author of a vast mass of pregnant sentences,
some one of which usually rewards the student
ANOTHER RELIGION. 163

who gives an odd half hour to Goethe’s Works.
But he is rather the greatest moralist, the most
pregnant thinker among poets, than indepen-
dently a great moralist or philosopher. His
contempt for philosophic method deprived his
thought of all systematic character, while at
the same time he wanted the temperament of a
reformer, which is almost necessarily more or
less combative. His greatness is therefore,
after all, in the main literary.

We cannot help reflecting here how much
‘his reputation among ourselves has been the
work of Mr. Carlyle. And yet it may surprise
us that Mr. Carlyle of all men should conceive
such an unbounded admiration for Goethe.
Mr. Carlyle had no desire to revive the ancient
world; he was in no degree a Hellenist. He
was somewhat impatient of Art in any shape,
and he grew to be altogether intolerant of
metrical composition. He was devoted to
history, a study in which Goethe never much
interested himself. He was an ardent admirer
of Puritanism, which Goethe, we may safely
say, would have regarded, if he had ever
regarded it at all, with intense repugnance.
His unbounded grandiloquence makes his style
164 GOETHE.

precisely such as Goethe, who calls himself
“the mortal enemy of all empty noise in lan-
guage,” could have least endured. Was it
then by mere caprice, we ask, that Carlyle
heaped on Goethe such eulogies, as to any one
but Carlyle would have seemed fulsome if
applied to the greatest name in all poetry?
The truth is first that in Goethe’s Works
Carlyle fixes his attention upon comparatively
few passages, to which he refers again and
again. The “religion of the deed” has pro-
duced a profound impression upon him, and
has suggested all that is to be found in
Carlyle’s writings about the supreme noble-
ness and sacredness of work. He has also been
deeply struck by Goethe’s habit of identifying
God and Nature. He is never tired of quoting
the epigram which begins: —

“Was war’ ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse.””

““What should we think of a God who only gave an
impulse from without?”

And whenever we meet in Carlyle with the
phrase, “The awful Unnameable of this Uni
verse,’’ we are to consider that we have a refer-
ANOTHER RELIGION. 165

ence to the passage in “ Faust,” Wer darf Ihn
nennen?— Who may name Him?

But, secondly, it is scarcely as a poet or as
a literary man at all that Carlyle, whatever he
may say, principally regards Goethe. Carlyle’s
homage is reserved for heroes, and it is as a
hero, a spiritual hero, that he does homage to
Goethe. He does not think mainly of his
writings, but of his personality and of his
relation to the period in which they both lived.
His worship of Goethe must be considered in
connection with his apocalyptic vision of that
age, of the celestial-infernal portent of the
French Revolution, which had consummated
the long decline of Europe through the eigh-
teenth century, and had made necessary a com-
plete reconstruction both of institutions and
ways of thought. The eighteenth century, he
told us, had ended in bankruptcy, having un-
dermined by means of Voltaire all faith, and
having destroyed by its mechanical philosophy
all worthy and noble views of the Universe.
He himself arrived on the morrow of this catas-
trophe, and the problem for his generation, as
it approached the middle of the nineteenth
century, was to reconstruct a world that had
166 GOETHE.

been destroyed, and to revive an idealism that
had long been slowly perishing. It was
Carlyle’s belief that such work as this could
be done only in one way, — namely, by heroes
sent and commissioned for the purpose.

He seems to have been disappointed in
general by the distinguished men of his age;
but if we admit his premises, we shall hardly
be surprised at his finding in Goethe the spirit-
ual hero commissioned more than any other
man to do that part of the necessary work
which was concerned with thought, speech, and
literature. For who else in that age, or we
may say, in any age, represented the higher
literature with such a magnificent pose?

In general, the word hero, which Carlyle
applies to his historical favorite, seems exag-
gerated; but Goethe was elevated enough in
his way of thinking, in the persistence with
which through sixty years he continued to
write and think without regard to popular
opinion, putting behind him all commonness
as resolutely as he said Schiller did; he was
elevated enough to deserve the title hero. In
him Carlyle might see fulfilled the dream
which haunted him of a man sent down with
ANOTHER RELIGION. 167

direct divine commission to deliver mankind in
its difficulties. His very appearance excited
admiration, and so Lockhart, who had known
him, remarked to Scott, “how much any one
must be struck with the majestic beauty of
Goethe’s countenance, the noblest certainly
by far that I have ever yet seen.” (Life of
Sir Walter Scott, p. 384.)

If now we consider, in conclusion, what his
literary greatness amounts to, we shall remark
first that in “ Faust,” however open the Second
Part of it may be to criticism, he produced the
greatest poetic work of the nineteenth century;
and yet the nineteenth in respect of poetry
stands pretty high among the centuries.
Secondly, in Germany he achieved a work,
and attained a literary pre-eminence, which
has not been paralleled in any other country.
He may be said to have created modern German
literature; he ruled it while he lived; and if by
literature we understand poetry, it is hardly
yet clear that he did not take it away with
him. At least there has been no German poet
since, with the exception of Heinrich Heine,
who has commanded the attention of all
Europe.
168 GOETHE.

He has, I think, a third distinction. Be-
fore him poetic genius of the highest order
was a kind of mystery, concerning which we
had little information. We knew nothing of
Homer; we had scarcely any detailed infor-
mation about Dante; our knowledge of the
biography of Shakspeare was confined to two
or three unimportant facts. Goethe took us
behind the scenes and showed us in the fullest
detail howa great poetic genius thinks and
feels. He left in the first place a consider-
able mass of autobiography, for if ‘“ Dichtung
und Wahrheit” covers only his first period he
left also a more summary narrative, which,
under the title of “ Annalen und Jahreshefte,”’
carries the story down tothe year 1822. He
also wrote under the title of “Italienische
Reise” a full account of what was to him the
most important chapter of his life, his visit
to Italy.

He recorded also other passages of his life,
—for instance his experiences in the French
Campaign of 1792. Yet what Goethe himself
has told us is but a small part of our knowl-
edge of his life. We have also the vast mass
of his correspondence, and the information we
ANOTHER RELIGION. 169

obtain from all these sources is particularly
copious on the subject of his genius. He tells
us of the moods through which his mind
passed, of the literary plans he formed, of the
changes he perceived in himself, of all the
movements of the consciousness of a great
genius through a long life. The mystery is
here divulged, the more completely because
Goethe more than most poets combines the
power and habit of conscious reflection with
the spontaneity of genius. So that we may
almost say that Goethe has compensated to
mankind for its almost total loss of the bio-
graphy of Shakspeare.

THE END.
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JUN Dh 19g

JuL 26 1902
SEP 28 1902?

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