Goethe

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This son of a Frankfurt middle-class family once remarked upon the problems that so gifted a man as Byron had to face owing to his social environment, his high birth and great wealth. A certain middle station, Goethe says, would seem to be more conducive to the growth of talent, “which accounts for the fact that we find all great artists and poets in the middle strata of society.” This was not the only occasion on which he sang the praises of the middle class as a fertile soil of talent; there are countless passages in his conversations in which he ascribes to the bourgeoisie the steadfast human quality which pervades “Hermann und Dorothea,” or, as he himself calls it, “The beautiful, orderly Bildung by which this class is enabled to survive in peace and war.” Goethe tells us: “In Karlsbad somebody once referred to me as a sober poet. By this he meant to convey that for all my poetic activity I continued to be a sensible man according to bourgeois standards. Some regarded this as praise, others as censure. That is not for me to decide; my nature is as he described it, and it must be left to others to judge of its merits.” So we, too, may regard the comment as neither praise nor censure; we simply take it as the dispassionate statement of a critical observer who was certainly no fool. It may seem rather a humorous business, almost by way of a joke, to point out in a man of Goethe’s stature traits that one can call bourgeois in the common, ordinary sense of the word. Yet it is possible to carry the observation of the petty and the external to a higher level where even such trifles acquire significance. Take, for example, his outward manner of living, the attention he gave to dress, his taste for elegance, the neatness and cleanliness of everything that passed through his hands, as attested by his friends. These are the simplest and most natural habits of good breeding, formed in the nursery.

In the words of one of Goethe’s contemporaries, “he showed no sign of the eccentric behavior so often found in men of genius; he was simple and courteous.” There was nothing solemn or pompous about him, no pose of priestly dignity. He could make fun of himself, and provided nothing weighed on his mind, he was quite capable of a childlike or fatherly good nature. It gave him the most genuine pleasure to do people kind turns, and to show them little attentions. With sympathetic solicitude he came to the aid of those who found difficulty in adjusting themselves to life, and then he was wont to harp on his favorite idea of “well-being,” a thoroughly bourgeois idea, surely. This idea raised to a higher spiritual significance we find in “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” where Goethe analyzes the sense of well-being and finds it rooted in the periodic regularity of outward things—the interchange of day and night, the succession of the seasons, of flowers and fruit, and all else that comes at regular intervals. Where that even rhythm in nature and in life’s phenomena falters, Goethe feels there is actual disease and danger, and he regards this as the chief reason for suicide.

To this lighter side of the picture belongs also the bourgeois emphasis that Goethe laid upon good living, on both food and drink, taking offense when on occasion he felt himself neglected in such matters; and certainly his close friendship with Zelter owed part of its relish to the delicious young Teltow carrots that found their way to Goethe’s table. As business man and head of his household, he is keen, distrustful, and tenacious. For all that he is a poet, he drives a sharp bargain, and he exacts the maximum profit from his literary output.

We find in Goethe, too, a bourgeois love of order, inherited from his father, and, as in his father’s case, this degenerates, when he grows old, into decidedly pedantic habits and a whimsical mania for collecting. In “Dichtung und Wahrheit” he says that one of his father’s principles, which became a hobby, was to carry through at all costs anything once undertaken. When a book was selected for reading in the family circle, it had to be read to the bitter end, no matter how boring it turned out to be; and his father insisted in all other affairs that a thing once begun be completed, however arduous, or even pointless, the task. One must not underestimate the habit-forming effect of such discipline. It was Goethe’s nature to tire easily, to be restless and to pursue a diversity of interests; of these tendencies that ethical imperative to finish work begun certainly acted as a necessary corrective. From a point of view that is above practical and social considerations, it may not matter whether an artist possesses the middle-class virtues of patience, industry, and tenacity that make one carry through a project and put the final touches to it. But the egoism of the artist’s dream and self-gratification must be offset by social impulses or, if you like, by a bourgeois sympathy and desire to render service—if it is to result in a rounded work. And who knows whether “Faust,” infinite in its inner scope, would have reached even the stage of external completion that it has if the bourgeois father had not implanted in the boy’s mind the pedagogical imperative to finish things?

“The half-artist,” says Goethe to Eckermann, “is always in a hurry to have done and takes no pleasure in the work. Genuine, truly great talent, on the contrary, finds its highest happiness in the working out of the idea.” “One should not be concerned with the thought of getting through,” he says, “just as one travels, not for the sake of arriving, but for the sake of travelling.” “There are excellent people,” he remarks at another time, “who can do nothing extemporaneously or superficially. Their natures demand a state of calm and deep absorption in the thing under consideration. Such talents often provoke our impatience, in so far as they rarely satisfy our desires of the moment. However, it is in this way that the highest achievements come about.” Here he is speaking objectively of “excellent people”; but it is obvious that in large measure he belongs with them, and that his own highest achievements were attained in this manner.

Deliberateness and slowness, a motherly patience, as it were, in the creative process—these are features inseparably bound up with his genius. Goethe is much more the laborious artist than the dashing improviser. The wonderful story which ultimately appeared under the plain title of “Novelle” he carried about in his head for thirty years. “Egmont” required twelve years between conception and completion, “Iphigenie” eight, “Tasso” nine. The work on “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” took sixteen years, that on “Faust” spanned almost four decades. In reality, the poetic activity of his entire life drew its sustenance from his youth. He was not the man of er new projects and inventions; essentially, his productive process consisted rather in working out themes which dated back to his early years, and which he carried about with him for decades, pouring the wealth of his whole experience into them, so that they took on a cosmic liberality. Thus “Faust” was in its origin a breezy student play, poking fun at faculties and professors and unfolding in doggerel verse the sweetly tragic story of a little middle-class girl’s seduction. But the germinating power of this slender sapling was so great, and the steadfast care and zealous nurture lavished upon it in secret proved so effective, that eventually its canopied crown overshadowed everything, so that it has set a standard for the poetry of Germany and mankind at large and is a work to which one turns as one turns to the Bible, to find a compelling and comforting rendering of all that is human. Similarly, “Wilhelm Meister” set out to be the novel of a young man with a passion for the theatre, with no larger aim than to portray the world of wild bohemianism more vividly than had ever been done before. But in the end the whole business of the stage proved to be only the starting-point for an epic cultural journey of such far-reaching and all-embracing proportions that a clever Romantic critic could sum up the significance of his epoch in these three phenomena: “The French Revolution, Fichte’s ‘Theory of Knowledge,’ and ‘Wilhelm Meister.’” This unforced, unambitious, quiet, and natural, almost vegetative, kind of growth from humble beginnings to something of universal scope, is the most lovable feature of Goethe’s impressive life work.

Goethe is reported to have said: “There are only two ways of reaching an important goal: violence or persistence.” The way of this great foe of violence and champion of peaceful processes was persistence, steadiness, endurance. We find in Goethe an element of care, of solicitude, that may be regarded as bourgeois in its ethical aspects. “The provident man is master of the day,” he says. He sings the praise of dawn, of morning, as the time when we are not only most intelligent but also most careful; “for care also,” he adds, “is an aspect of intelligence, even if only a passive one; stupidity does not bother about it.” And the praise of morning as the time of true creative vigor he chants in a festive strain:

Day before day, divine honor be thine!

Bound up with this carefulness is his sense of the value of time, amounting to a cult, a religion. He exploits every minute, and his life is one of the most industrious on record in the diversity of its activities. He never really relaxes.

Despite his saying that to be a man was to be a fighter, he was a great lover of peace, and he has himself told us that the attitude of heaven-storming Titanism was alien to his soul. His poetry drew no inspiration from any such mood of radical defiance. “It was more in keeping with my temperament,” he says, “to portray that pacific, plastic, long-suffering resistance that acknowledges the rule of the higher powers though it would meet them on a footing of equality.” His contemplative, dispassionate way of looking at life, of entering into all phenomena and rendering them articulate, his blanket pronouncement that life is good, excludes the tragic: were he to yield to that spell, he says, instead of dreading and shunning it, it would destroy him. There is a touch of sobriety and common sense in all this which was resented as anti-poetic by such seraphic visionaries as Novalis. “Goethe is an utterly practical poet,” Novalis writes. “He is in his works what the Englishman is in his wares: thoroughly simple, tasteful, well-adapted, and durable. He has done in the field of German literature what Wedgwood did in the field of English art. . . . It is more in line with his natural inclination to finish some trifle to the final touch, to give it the most perfect polish and adaptation, than to undertake something of cosmic scope and know in advance that it can never be executed to perfection.”

For all their animus, these criticisms are keen and exact within certain limits. The bourgeois ideal, we note, is not lacking in their purport; and that Novalis felt the charm of what the term bourgeois connotes for him there, is attested by another passage where he declares: “‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’ is a powerful proof of that magic of delivery, that insinuating flattery to the ear inherent in a bright, pleasing, simple, yet variegated style. He who has this charm of diction can interest and entertain us with the most insignificant trifles. This spiritual unity is the very soul of a book, the secret of its personal appeal.” It is impossible to conceive a cooler and at the same time truer appraisal of the rational magic, the artlessly divine charm of Goethe’s style, than that of Novalis. All straining after effect, all poetic extravagance are indeed foreign to Goethe’s style, which, nevertheless, always goes to the limit, moving on a middle plane of discreet audacity, masterly boldness, and infallible artistic tact. Always supple and precise, even the dictated prose of Goethe’s old age retains that magic rhythm, a most perfect blend of Eros and Logos, that lures and leads us on irresistibly. There is no solemn pomp or priestly dignity about his tone—to one schooled in Goethe’s tradition and taste, language of that sort is repugnant and utterly boring to read or to listen to with the inner ear. With Goethe one is invariably conscious of a voice of middle pitch and intensity, a voice not raised above the level of prose utterance, even in the lyrics, yet of a serene boldness unheard of in prose. He has a way of recreating words—it is as if they had just sprung from the womb of language, absolutely fresh and radiant and unique. He seems to invest a word with new meaning, in such a way, moreover, that its meaning takes on a peculiarly transcendental hue, serene and uncanny at the same time, something that is both “golden” and sublime, at once well-bred and swashbuckling in the peculiar sense of Goethe’s saying that there is a trace of the buccaneer in every artist, and that talent is unthinkable without it. This holds good equally for “Faust,” the “Divan,” and the prose writings; and if the audacity in them must be credited to the artist, the element of temperate moderation may be set down as a bourgeois feature.

And does not Goethe’s realism fall under the same heading—his realism as opposed to Schiller’s poetical practice of making an idea his starting-point—a contrast such as exists between Tolstoi’s full-bodied, homeric figures and Dostoevsky’s shadowy visions? There was something that his friend Merck said to him when he was young, something he never forgot and in a sense adopted as his motto: “Your way, from which nothing can swerve you, is to endow reality with poetic form; the others start out with poetic preconceptions and then try to endow them with reality, a procedure resulting in arrant nonsense.” “It is the spirit of reality that constitutes genuine ideality,” says Goethe with pointed reference to Schiller, clothing his idealism in anti-idealistic language in a way that is characteristic of his whole attitude towards individual human matters and towards the problems of the race, notably in political questions. As he once crassly put it, the burning of a farmhouse is a genuine calamity and catastrophe, whereas “the destruction of the fatherland” is a mere phrase. This is a most radical expression of his unpolitical and anti-political cast of mind, and, what amounts to the same thing, his impatience with political democracy. Yet it does not brand him as an aristocrat. Goethe insisted that at bottom Schiller was far more of an aristocrat than he himself. Schiller represents the middle-class idea politically and democratically speaking, while Goethe represents it on the spiritual and cultural side. We are aware, of course, that it was as a bourgeois in the spiritual and cultural sense that Goethe abhorred the French Revolution as something gruesomely alien, something that sapped his vitality like a disease and came very near to ruining him as a poet.

It is hard to say to what extent the German bourgeois idea owes its introspective, cultural, anti-political impress to Goethe, and to what extent Goethe, as an exponent of these qualities, merely reflected the German bourgeois character. Perhaps it is a case of interaction and mutual confirmation, for nothing can rock the conviction that in spite of being a citizen of the world, or rather by virtue of it, Goethe was spiritually a bourgeois, a German bourgeois. The impassioned language of the political humanitarian struggle for freedom is foreign to him. That is why he found it necessary to emphasize that he too was a fighter, a fighter for human freedom. “You need not hesitate,” he said, “to erect a monument to me as well as to Blücher. He freed you from the French: I freed you from the nets of philistinism.” He was a fighter and liberator in the realm of morality, of thought, especially in matters of sex, but not in the realm of political and social organization. In Gretchen’s pitiful lot and Faust’s love and guilt, there is no attack on any law, any social state, any institution: in this “tragedy” a poet holds communion with the Eternal on the fate of man. Thus it was possible that when called upon as member of the state council of Weimar to sit in judgment on an actual case of a mother charged with infanticide, in which the other stern ministers invoked the death penalty, this same poet could put his signature on the warrant with the words “I too,” and this despite the fact that the Duke himself was inclined towards mercy. I am not the first to feel that this is in its way as moving as the whole Faust tragedy.

The French writer Maurice Barrès has called “Iphigenie” a civilizing work because it champions the rights of society against the arrogance of the spirit. This remark is even more applicable to that other essay in self-education, in self-discipline amounting to self-castigation, “Tasso,” a play which is so often berated because of the fastidious seemliness of its atmosphere. There is a connection between this civilizing tendency and that awful “I too” by which Goethe forced himself to throw the weight of his official authority into the balance in defense of the rights of society against the spirit—this same Goethe who had so powerfully contributed to the liberation of the spirit, both as poet and man of letters, by releasing emotion and by his broad and searching analysis of human nature. He defended society in that conservative sense which is inherent in the concept of defense. A purely non-political attitude is an impossibility; one can at most be anti-political, that is to say, conservative, whereas the political spirit is humanitarian and revolutionary in its very essence. Richard Wagner had the same thing in mind when he declared: “The German is conservative.” It can happen, however, as in the case of Wagner and his spiritual disciples, that this German conservatism may turn into nationalistic agitation—an attitude that left Goethe, German citizen of the world as he was, cold to the point of scorn, even at a time when nationalism had so powerful a historical justification as in 1813. His horror of the Revolution was due to his abhorrence of political, democratic agitation, and its spiritual by-product, nationalism. And it is a significant fact, tending to show how little the German middle-class character has changed, that this same cultural dread of the inroads of political agitation reasserted itself in our own day, between 1916 and 1919, roughly speaking; and the instinctive and elemental vehemence with which makes this struggle had to be fought all over again makes it seem unlikely that the embattled spirits were fully aware how true to type the whole performance ran.

As to Goethe, an observation may be warranted concerning the human and personal implications of the anti-idealistic attitude, although the psychological ground is so uncertain that a hint will have to suffice. There can be no doubt about the fact that idealistic faith, although it may lead to martyrdom, tends to make for happiness in its possessor in a way that is not the case with a poet who takes a lofty and supremely ironical point of view and knows neither convictions nor preferential valuations but mirrors all things with the same impartial affection. Scanning Goethe more closely as he appears after the innocence of youth has left him, we notice in his face deep furrows of grief and of bitterness, a lack of zest that is related in an intimate and uncanny way to his skepticism regarding ideals, to his naturalistic impartiality—to what he called his “moral dilettantism.” There is a peculiar frigidity and viciousness about him, a humor suggestive of witches’ sabbaths, an eerie fitfulness that continues to arouse one’s curiosity and must be encompassed in one’s love if one loves Goethe. When we press into this phase of his nature, we realize that it is the children of the spirit who are more closely concerned with happiness and harmony than are the children of nature. Clearness and singlemindedness in the conscious pursuit of a goal, positive faith and fervor, everything, in short, that makes for peace of mind is much more easily accessible to the children of the spirit. Nature does not give peace, simplicity, singleness; she is equivocal, contradictory, negative; there is in her an element of radical skepticism. She does not bestow goodness, for she herself is not good. She does not permit of clean-cut judgments, for she is neutral. She endows her children with an indifferent and problematical disposition that is more akin to torment and viciousness than to happiness and serenity.

“Goethe’s tendency towards negation and his skeptical neutrality were strikingly in evidence once again,” wrote Chancellor von Müller. And many other contemporaries were struck by an elemental, obscure, malicious, confusing, even diabolical, strain in his make-up. One could collect a hundred statements attesting his moods of sardonic humor, his spirit of sophistry and contradiction. “In one of his eyes there is all angel, in the other lurks a devil,” wrote a fellow traveller. But the most sinister comment on record about him says: “He has tolerance without kindness.” “He would speak,” Charlotte von Schiller writes, “in sentences that all contained contradictions, so that one could draw any conclusion one pleased; but one had a painful feeling that the Master was twiddling his thumbs at the world.” Twiddling his thumbs! That sounds like nihilism—and, in all seriousness, what did Goethe believe in? Not in humanity; I mean, not in the possibility of mankind’s being purged and liberated by revolutionary means. “The see-saw will go on forever,” he says; “one class will suffer while the other thrives; egoism and envy, like evil demons, will always be pulling the strings, and the strife of factions will never end.” But did he at least believe in art? Was it sacred to him in any emotionally religious sense? Certain remarks point to the negative answer. I shall never forget my impression on reading for the first time his rejoinder to a young man who had enthusiastically declared that he intended to live and labor and suffer for art. Goethe answered coolly, “With art there can be no question of suffering.” He always kept a cold douche in readiness for people who gushed and raved about poetry. One day he upset the person he was talking to with the paradox that a poem amounts to nothing at bottom. “Every poem is in a sense a kiss bestowed upon the world, but mere kissing begets no children.” He then stopped abruptly and refused to take up the conversation again.

I cannot help linking these traits with a phenomenon that has struck and put off a great many observers. All his life Goethe never got over a certain constraint and embarrassment in his relations with people; this, which was especially singular in a man of the world and a courtier, he would try unsuccessfully to hide under ceremonious stiffness. On one occasion, when notice was taken of the aloof formality which Goethe assumed towards curious visitors and admirers, Ottilie von Goethe declared that it was a fact, however incredible in a man of his social experience and savoir-vivre, that this seemingly haughty bearing was in reality a mask to cover up genuine embarrassment. By way of explanation she added that Goethe was at heart truly modest and humble. I do not doubt it. The greater a man’s range, the further is he removed from conceit, which is always a sign of limitation. But Goethe himself has said: “Only rogues are modest,” and he was certainly not without a sense of his greatness, of his incomparable superiority over all the people he met. There must have been deeper grounds for his constraint: it is a sign of that ironic nihilism of which I have spoken, that eerie absence of innermost conviction characteristic of the poet, that lack of enthusiasm and faith in ideals such as animated Schiller.

It is certain that all the hatred that Goethe had to endure, all the reproaches and complaints about his egoism, his haughtiness, his want of moral sense, his “vast obstructive power,” are due to his coldness towards idealistic political enthusiasm in the form of militant nationalism or the humanitarian revolutionary gospel; and also to the fact that his life was directly opposed to the dominant trend of the age, the idea of democracy and nationalism. In their criticism and complaints people forgot that Goethe’s indifference to the political order by no means signified a lack of love for mankind. Indeed, it was he who said that the mere sight of a human face could cure him of melancholy, and he endorsed the humanist’s words that “The proper study of mankind is man.” Nor can he have been indifferent to the future of the race. For man, love, the future, these are all one—one emotional complex of sympathy with life. And despite Goethe’s unpolitical bent, sympathy with life was part of his very being. To express it he even coined a term that seemed to me both paradoxical and strikingly bold when I grasped its import. It was as a young man who took his pessimism very seriously, having found its philosophical sanction in Schopenhauer, that I recall coming upon Goethe’s word “lebenswürdig,” worthy of life, in a line of his Epilogue to Schiller’s “Bell”: “Shall death snatch one so worthy of life?” This was an association that had not existed before, to my knowledge; it was a brand-new term bearing Goethe’s personal signature. The idea of life being enthroned on a pedestal and empowered to bestow on those who made themselves worthy of it the highest award of merit—an award that should rightfully exempt one from personal annihilation—this clashed with my juvenile notion of nobility, which I was accustomed to connect with a sublime unfitness and maladjustment to earthly life. And, in truth, Goethe’s strange term is the expression of a defiant positivism, of an affirmation of life that rises above pessimism and constitutes, to my mind, a very high and abstract form of the bourgeois idea. This aristocratic bourgeois idea of being in partnership with life, of having one’s feet solidly planted on the earth, is the prerogative of those whom nature has endowed with special privileges; and there is something not far from brutality in their contempt for “starveling souls that hanker after the unattainable.”

In view of the gifts which nature lavished upon this favored child of hers, it may seem strange that Goethe met all attempts, of envious critics and the enthusiasts alike, to extol his life as singularly happy with a clean-cut denial. Calm yourselves, he says, I was not happy; if all the good hours of my life were added together, they would not amount to four weeks. “It was an endless task of rolling a rock uphill that always had to be done over again.” And then follows the impressive statement that really explains everything: “The demands upon my activity, outer as well as inner, were too many.” So he was not happy—as a result of the tasks which his genius set while the importunings of the world constantly got in the way of his performing them. And how about the relations of this marvel of vitality to health and disease? Genius, as we know, can never be normal in the banal, narrowly bourgeois sense; no matter how favored by nature, it cannot be natural, healthy, regular in the sense of the philistine. Physically, there is always about it much that is delicate, irritable, precariously balanced; psychically, much that is uncanny, alien to the normal, and almost psychopathic. Goethe knew this and stated it for Eckermann’s benefit: “The extraordinary achievement of such people” (such people as I, we may interpolate for him) “presupposes a very delicate organization, more sensitively tuned than is usual and capable of hearkening to celestial voices. Such an organization is easily upset and dislocated when it comes into conflict with the world and its elements, and unless this abnormal sensibility is combined with an extraordinary tenacity, chronic ill health is likely to result.” In this combination of sensibility and tenacity the peculiar vitality of genius is once and for all defined. All this makes us realize what a tenacious will to live, in the higher sense of the word, what a vital ethos, as one might say, must have been needed to keep such a constitution as Goethe’s from deserting its post in the service of life, to make it endure to the end of the full biblical span and hold out until the age of eighty-two. That was no child’s play, either physically or spiritually “He who wrote ‘Werther’ at twenty,” Goethe exclaims on one occasion, “how is he to live at seventy!”

He feared this little book, filled with destructive sentimentality, which had once plunged the world into a delirious ecstasy of dying; and as an old man he confessed that since its appearance he had read it only once, carefully avoiding it afterwards. “It is all combustibles,” he says, “it has an uncanny effect on me, and I am afraid of experiencing again the pathological state from which it sprang.” In his maturity he insists, in theory, that art should offer what is healthy and full of zest. He rails at what he calls the “field-hospital poetry” of his day. Over against such perverted art he sets the Spartan poetry which not only sings battle songs but also inspires men with the courage to face life’s struggles. But did he always act accordingly? Certainly not in “Werther”; and for a poet of harmony and inspiriting Spartan exhortation, it appears strange that in his most intimate emotional revelation he identifies himself with an earlier fellow poet, whose career leads to the madhouse and the monastery.

The bourgeois sense of partnership with life would seem to require strictness in morals, an unconditional affirmation of morality; for reason and morality are the pillars of life. Yet, in a very un-bourgeois way, Goethe defends passion and what people call “over-intensity and morbidity,” insisting that over-intensity and morbidity are also natural states of mind and that so-called “health” can exist only as an equilibrium of opposing forces. And he contradicts a disciple who ventured the opinion that there was nothing positive to be gained for man’s higher spiritual development from Byron’s writings because of their questionable morality. “But why not?” answers Goethe. “Byron’s courage, his boldness, his grandeur—doesn’t all that make for higher development? We must guard against trying to find this solely in what is strictly pure and moral.” That is what I call speaking in a way that transcends the middle-class manner.

Be that as it may, an artist of Goethe’s creative genius contrives somehow to smile upon life and keep faith with it. Despite his conservatism and negative attitude towards politics, there is not the slightest trace of the reactionary about him, and this is indicative of his sympathy with life. The versatility, the infinite dilettantism of his nature, has made it easy for people on opposite sides to fall back upon Goethe for support; one thing, however, is impossible—to invoke his name in the cause of any spiritual reaction. He was no “prince of midnight,” no Metternich who mutilated life because of his sinister fear of the future. Goethe loved order, but he expressly placed reason and light at its service, and he despised stupidity and darkness. “The human pack,” he says in “Wilhelm Meister,” “fear nothing so much as reason; they ought to fear stupidity if they had the sense to know what is really to be feared.” Against reaction and obscurantism in art Goethe stood his ground at all times, as when he opposed a certain fashionable affectation of primitivism in painting. He is a champion of the free and the strong in art. He admires Molière for his truthful, ruthless exposure of man’s foibles; and he would like to bar young girls from the theatre in order to leave the stage free for an absolutely unhampered portrayal of life before mature men and women.

In spite of his being constantly attacked with a venom which almost strains our powers of belief to-day, he addressed himself to the whole nation. It was a far cry from the middle-class boy, bending over his sketches and exercises by the window in the mansard roof of his house on the Hirschgraben, to the man of seventy who makes the moving confession that he had “learned greatness painfully.” It meant learning to adjust his activity to an ever-widening range, both nationally and historically. And he learned range, both nationally and historically. And he learned more. The older he grew, the stronger became his desire to make the world his forum, as we can well understand when we remember that his literary career began with so widely known a success as “Werther.” The idea grew upon him that poetry is a gift to all mankind, and that Germans particularly must look beyond the narrow confines of their environment in order to avoid the pitfalls of pedantic conceit both as individuals and as a nation. “For that reason I like to glance around among foreign nations,” he adds, “and I advise everybody to do likewise. Literature that is merely national is now no longer of much account; the epoch of world literature is about to dawn, and everyone must work to hasten the coming of this epoch.” This term “world literature” is a new conception of Goethe’s; he puts it as half fact and half challenge. World literature in Goethe’s sense, it scarcely need be said, does not signify simply the sum total of all the recorded expression of the human spirit; he has in mind rather its rarest and finest flower, which, wherever it grows, is felt and recognized to be the possession of mankind at large, by virtue of its excellence and universality. Goethe’s new term is based upon recognition of the fact that the time has come when only what has world capacity is of genuine significance; the day is gone for what is limited in its appeal to the sphere of its origin.

As a matter of fact, what he himself gave us had, in the opinion of connoisseurs, long taken its place in this world literature; and not only that part of it which shows Mediterranean influence in its classical-humanistic spirit and form, but also that which is pre-eminently Nordic and German—such works as the first part of “Faust” and the cultural novel “Wilhelm Meister.” In his old age Goethe had the satisfaction of receiving from the hand of the Scotsman Carlyle the English translation of ‘Wilhelm Meister,” accompanied by a letter full of fervent filial affection and devotion. He turned the pages of a French edition of his Faust poem, adorned with drawings by Eugène Delacroix. He read solemn treatises on the newly published Helena episode of that poem in the journals of Edinburgh, Paris, and Moscow; and it is well to dwell upon this world-wide echo of his work as a satisfaction to him that must have helped make up for many a sneering detractor’s voice at home. “No nation,” he says, “is qualified to judge of its own deeds and its own literature. One could also say this of an age.” A clever Frenchman has coupled these two sentences in the phrase: “L’étranger, cette postérité contemporaine.”

Undoubtedly Goethe’s term world literature was in large measure an anticipation. The developments of the ten decades that have elapsed since his death, the perfection of communications, the stimulation of literary exchange that followed in its wake, the movement of Europe, indeed of the whole world, in the direction of greater intimacy—a movement actually accelerated rather than retarded by the Great War—all this was necessary to bring fully into being the epoch which Goethe saw ahead. So much is this epoch now upon us that there is grave danger of our confusing what merits world-wide acclaim with inferior productions that happen to have international currency—a fact which intellectual provincials delight to exploit with a view to bringing into disrepute at home accomplishments that have found the approval of the outside world. This possibility did not exist in Goethe’s time, or was much smaller than to-day. It was never feasible to use the honors that came to him from foreign countries as evidence against him of an unGerman mediocrity.

The thing that interests me about Goethe’s strong leaning towards all that is large and world-wide is the bourgeois and super-bourgeois nature of this trait. It comes out strikingly in certain phrases that he uses. He speaks of a “free-trade in ideas and feelings,” a characteristic transference of the language of economic liberalism to the spiritual life. And this leaning towards freedom and expansion appears in connection not only with space but also with time. “In wide epochal circles,” as Goethe puts it, he sought scope for his activity. He is a citizen not of one century alone. I have already referred to his intimate affiliations with earlier centuries, but it is important to emphasize his present and future status, and to suggest the direction in which his life force is moving upon us and beyond us.

In this regard, the personal relations of the great lover of life with Schopenhauer are to me symbolic. One evening in his later years, Goethe, who had seen Mozart in his youth, attended a social gathering, and, without looking around went straight up to the young philosopher whose doctoral dissertation on the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason he had just read, and congratulated him on this magnificent piece of work. He took the hand of the man who was preparing to write “The World as Will and Idea,” the classic mainstay of European pessimism during the second half of that pre-eminently bourgeois age, the nineteenth century, a work which had a decisive influence on the life of Wagner, and also of Nietzsche. This scene suggests a wonderful conjunction in the spiritual heavens. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche—they were the great fixed stars of our youth, for both Germany and Europe: our spiritual ancestry, of which we are proud; for all ancestry, all consciousness of spiritual ancestry, is aristocratic. “The artist must have ancestry, he must know whence he comes,” Goethe said. Here is the great spiritual home in which we were reared, the world of the bourgeois spirit. It has within it a certain transcendental element, by which it uplifts and transforms itself. “From what should the highest culture spring if not from bourgeois stock?” Goethe says; and this saying has a deeper meaning than the word culture seems capable of conveying to-day. I have asked, and I ask again: From what did the great liberating achievements of the revolutionary spirit spring “if not from bourgeois stock”?—the will and the call to effect the most radical emancipation from limitations of class, to embark upon the most dangerous adventures in the realm of thought—that is the charter of liberty which the Spirit has granted to the middle class. As for Nietzsche, child and grandchild of protestant parsons, in whom nineteenth-century Romanticism achieved its own conquest, where he was rooted if not in the soil of the middle class? And just such a self-conquest of the bourgeois character through the Spirit we find in the novel of Goethe’s old age, the “Wanderjahre.”

The theme of this book is the self-conquest of individualistic humanity. With a prophetic boldness Goethe here sets his face against it, in order to embrace human and educational principles and aspirations which properly belong to our own day and have but lately begun to permeate the general consciousness. In its pages one feels a tremor of the distant thunder of ideas that lead far away from all that classical bourgeois concept of culture that Goethe himself had been so eminently active in fostering and formulating. The ideal of individual universality is dropped, and an age of specialization proclaimed. Our present-day sense of the individual’s inadequacy is there: it takes the sum total of men to make mankind; the individual becomes a function; the idea of community and co-operation asserts itself; and the rigid discipline of the “Pedagogical Province” depicted in the “Wanderjahre,” for all its concessions to the Muses, leaves little room for the individualistic, the “liberal,” bourgeois ideal.

This bold, dream-like anticipation of a new society to succeed the bourgeois order is as remarkable, as impressive, as the old man’s growing interest in engineering projects of utopian scope, his enthusiasm for undertakings like the cutting through of the Isthmus of Panama. He talks of these things insistently and goes into detail as if they were of more importance to him than all the poetry in the world, and that is true, in the last analysis. His optimistic delight in the scientific side of civilization, affecting communications particularly, need cause no surprise in view of the end of Faust, who experiences his highest moment in the realization of a utilitarian dream, the draining of a swamp—a peculiar affront, indeed, to the one-sidedly aesthetic and philosophical trend of the age! In the same way, Goethe was astonishingly indefatigable in his old age in discussing the possibilities of joining the Gulf of Mexico with the Pacific, and in expatiating on the incalculable effects of such a feat upon the whole world, civilized and uncivilized alike. He wanted the United States to undertake the work, and his fancy dwells upon the prosperous cities that would spring up one after another along the Pacific coast, where nature had so felicitously prepared the ground for man by making good harbors. He could hardly wait for that to come about—that and the joining of the Danube and the Rhine, a perfectly staggering project, to be sure, along with a third very great project, the Suez Canal for the English. “To see all that,” he exclaims, “might make it worth while to hold out on this earth for another fifty years.” He cast his eyes over the earth, refusing to stop short at the borders of his own country; his enthusiasm for the future was vast enough to take in the whole world; and the quickening of life, the joys and sorrows, of foreign nations affected him as did those of his own people. His was an imperialism of love—the imperialism of an august mind risen above barriers of nationality, a mind that cherished liberty particularly under its aspect of greatness. It is the same trait that we have already seen in his heralding of a world literature.

In setting itself to create a utopia of applied science, the bourgeois outlook expands to world-wide proportions; it turns into “communism,” taking that word in a sufficiently broad, undogmatic sense. This is an enthusiasm of a sober sort. But what we need to-day is the sobering of a world that is dying from the strangle-hold of emotional survivals. Who was it who said that the Germans should be prohibited from using the word “Gemüt” for fifty years? It was Germany’s greatest poet. The middle-class man is lost and is doomed to be swept aside in the era that is approaching unless he can succeed in ridding himself of the fatal sentiment and life-sapping principles that still govern his thinking. He must bravely espouse the future. It is idle to scorn reason and hold to a stubborn cult of atavistic feeling which, in present conditions, appears utterly blind and senseless—a kind of desperate, malignant, murderous sentimentalism.

The new, socialized world, the world of planning and co-operation, will come; humanity will get rid of unnecessary sufferings that are a disgrace to intelligence; and this will be achieved by a great and sober effort that has already enrolled under its banner all who have turned their backs upon a cult of musty, obscurantist, petty bourgeois sentiment. It will come; for a rational outward order of things in keeping with the present stage of human enlightenment must be created, or, if the worst happens, will be produced by violent convulsions. Only then can the heart reassert its rights with good conscience. The great sons of the bourgeois age, those whose capacity for spiritual growth raised them above the level of their class, are living proof of the fact that there are in the bourgeois nature infinite potentialities, unlimited potentialities for self-liberation and self-conquest. Our time summons the middle class to remember these innate powers and to take their stand upon them intellectually and ethically. The right to power is contingent upon the conviction that one has a historic mission to perform. If any class refuses to do this, or is too weak, it will have to step aside, abdicate power, and make way for a type that knows none of the inhibitions and ties of atavistic sentiment, which, one cannot but fear at times, may render the European middle class unfit to guide the body politic and economic into a new world.

Without doubt, the credit that history is still willing to accord to the bourgeois republic to-day—a short-term credit, indeed—rests upon the faith not yet lost that democracy also has that ability which its increasingly powerful enemies claim as their own: the ability to undertake our guidance into the new age. It is not by staging celebrations for its great sons that the middle class proves itself worthy of them. The greatest of these, Goethe, hails it: