Volume Xiii Part 13 (2/2)
How greatly Schiller erred in the supposition that they never could become intimate, how close the intimacy which grew up between them, what harmony of sentiment, how friendly and mutually helpful their co-operation, is sufficiently notorious.
But such was the first aspect which Goethe presented to strangers at this period of his life; he rather repelled than attracted, until nearer acquaintance learned rightly to interpret the man, and intellectual or moral affinity bridged the chasm which seemed to divide him from his kind. In part, too, the distance and reserve of which people complained was a necessary measure of self-defence against the disturbing importunities of social life. ”From Rome,” says Friedrich von Muller, ”from the midst of the richest and grandest life, dates the stern maxim of 'Renunciation' which governed his subsequent being and doing, and which furnished his only guarantee of mental equipoise and peace.”
His literary works. .h.i.therto had been spasmodic and lawless effusions, the escapes of a gus.h.i.+ng, turbulent youth. In Rome he had learned the sacred significance of art. The consciousness of his true vocation had been awakened in him; and to that, on the eve of his fortieth year, he thenceforth solemnly devoted the remainder of his life. He obtained release from the more onerous of his official engagements, retaining only such functions as accorded with his proper calling as a man of letters and of science. He renounced his daily intercourse with Frau von Stein, though still retaining and manifesting his unabated friends.h.i.+p for the woman to whom in former years he had devoted so large a portion of his time, and employed himself in giving forth those immortal words which have settled forever his place among the stars of first magnitude in the intellectual world.
Noticeable and often noted was the charm and (when arrived to maturity) the grand effect of his personal presence. Physical beauty is not the stated accompaniment, nor even the presumable adjunct, of intellectual greatness. In Goethe, as perhaps in no other, the two were combined. A wondrous presence!--on this point the voices are one and the witnesses many. ”Goethe was with us,” so writes Heinse to one of his friends; ”a beautiful youth of twenty-five, full of genius and force from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot; a heart full of feeling, a spirit full of fire, who with eagle wings _ruit immensus ore profundo_.” Jacobi writes: ”The more I think of it, the more impossible it seems to me to communicate to any one who has not seen Goethe any conception of this extraordinary creature of G.o.d.” Lavater says: ”Unspeakably sweet, an indescribable appearance, the most terrible and lovable of men.”
Hufeland, the chief medical celebrity of Germany, describes his appearance in early manhood: ”Never shall I forget the impression which he made as 'Orestes' in Greek costume. You thought you beheld an Apollo.
Never was seen in any man such union of physical and spiritual perfection and beauty as at that time in Goethe.” More remarkable still is the testimony of Wieland, who had reason to be offended, having been before their acquaintance the subject of Goethe's sharp satire. But immediately at their first meeting, sitting at table ”by the side,” he says, ”of this glorious youth, I was radically cured of all my vexation.... Since this morning,” he wrote to Jacobi, ”my soul is as full of Goethe as a dewdrop is of the morning sun.” And to Zimmermann: ”He is in every respect the greatest, best, most splendid human being that ever G.o.d created.” Goethe was then twenty-six. Henry Crabbe Robinson, who saw him at the age of fifty-two, reports him one of the most ”oppressively handsome” men he had ever seen, and speaks particularly as all who have described him speak, of his wonderfully brilliant eyes. Those eyes, we are told, had lost nothing of their l.u.s.tre, nor his head its natural covering, at the age of eighty.
Among the heroic qualities notable in Goethe, I reckon his faithful and unflagging industry. Here was a man who took pains with himself,--_liess sich's sauer werden,_--and made the most of himself. He speaks of wasting, while a student in Leipsic, ”the beautiful time;” and certainly neither at Leipsic nor afterward at Strasburg did he toil as his Wagner in ”Faust” would have done. But he was always learning. In the lecture-room or out of it, with pen and books or gay companions, he was taking in, to give forth again in dramatic or philosophic form the world of his experience.
A frolicsome youth may leave something to regret in the way of time misspent; but Goethe the man was no dawdler, no easy-going Epicurean. On the whole, he made the most of himself, and stands before the world a notable instance of a complete life. He would do the work which was given him to do. He would not die till the second part of ”Faust” was brought to its predetermined close. By sheer force of will he lived till that work was done. Smitten at fourscore by the death of his son, and by deaths all around, he kept to his task. ”The idea of duty alone sustains me; the spirit is willing, the flesh must.” When ”Faust” was finished, the strain relaxed. ”My remaining days,” he said, ”I may consider a free gift; it matters little what I do now, or whether I do anything.” And six months later he died.
A complete life! A life of strenuous toil! At home and abroad,--in Italy and Sicily, at Ilmenau and Carlsbad, as in his study at Weimar,--with eye or pen or speech, he was always at work. A man of rigid habits; no lolling or lounging. ”He showed me,” says Eckermann, ”an elegant easy-chair which he had bought to-day at auction. 'But,'
said he, 'I shall never or rarely use it; all indolent habits are against my nature. You see in my chamber no sofa; I sit always in my old wooden chair, and never, till a few weeks ago, have permitted even a leaning place for my head to be added. If surrounded by tasteful furniture, my thoughts are arrested; I am placed in an agreeable but pa.s.sive state. Unless we are accustomed to them from early youth, splendid chambers and elegant furniture had better be left to people without thoughts.'” This in his eighty-second year!
A widely diffused prejudice regarding the personal character of Goethe refuses to credit him with any moral worth accordant with his bodily and mental gifts. It figures him a libertine,--heartless, loveless, bad. I do not envy the mental condition of those who can rest in the belief that a really great poet can be a bad man. Be a.s.sured that the fruits of genius have never grown, and will never grow, in such a soil. Of all great poets Byron might seem at first glance to const.i.tute an exception to this--I venture to call it--law of Nature. Yet hear what Walter Scott, a sufficient judge, said of Byron:--
”The errors of Lord Byron arose neither from depravity of heart--for nature had not committed the anomaly of uniting to such extraordinary talents an imperfect moral sense--nor from feelings dead to the admiration of virtue. No man had ever a kinder heart for sympathy, or a more open hand for the relief of distress; and no mind was ever more formed for enthusiastic admiration of n.o.ble actions.”
The case of Goethe requires no appeal to general principles. It only requires that the charges against him be fairly investigated; that he be tried by doc.u.mentary evidence, and by the testimony of competent witnesses. The mistake is made of confusing breaches of conventional decorum with essential depravity.
That Goethe was faulty in many ways may be freely conceded. But surely there is a wide difference between not being faultless and being definitely bad. To call a man bad is to say that the evil in him preponderates over the good. In the case of Goethe the balance was greatly the other way. It has been said that he abused the confidence reposed in him by women; that he encouraged affection which he did not reciprocate for artistic purposes. The charge is utterly groundless; and in the case of Bettine has been refuted by irrefragable proof. To say that he was wanting in love, heartless, cold, is ridiculously false. Yet the charge is constantly reiterated in the face of facts,--reiterated with undoubting a.s.surance and a certain complacency which seems to say, ”Thank G.o.d! we are not as this man was.” There is a satisfaction which some people feel in _spotting_ their man,--Burns drank; Coleridge took opium; Byron was a rake; Goethe was cold: by these marks we know them.
The poet found it necessary, as I have said, in later years, under social pressure, for the sake of the work which was given him to do, to fortify himself with a mail of reserve. And this, indeed, contrasted strangely with his former _abandon_, and with the customary gush of German sentimentality. It was common then for Germans who had known each other by report, and were mutually attracted, when first they met, to fall on each other's necks and kiss and weep. Goethe, as a young man, had indulged such fervors; but in old age he had lost this effusiveness, or saw fit to restrain himself outwardly, while his kindly nature still glowed with its pristine fires. He wrote to Frau von Stein, ”I may truly say that my innermost condition does not correspond to my outward behavior.” Hence the charge of coldness. Say that Mount Aetna is cold: do we not see the snow on its sides?
But he was unpatriotic; he occupied himself with poetry, and did not cry out while his country was in the death-throes--so it seemed--of the struggle with France! But what should he have done? What _could_ he have done? What would his single arm or declamation have availed? No man more than Goethe longed for the rehabilitation of Germany. In his own way he wrought for that end; he could work effectually in no other. That enigmatical composition,--the ”Marchen,”--according to the latest interpretation, indicates how, in Goethe's view, that end was to be accomplished. To one who considers the relation of ideas to events, it will not seem extravagant when I say that to Goethe, more than to any one individual, Germany is indebted for her emanc.i.p.ation, independence, and present political regeneration.[6]
[Footnote 6: (The following interpretation of the ”Marchen” is condensed from a later portion of this essay, and used here as a foot-note for the light it throws upon Goethe's political career.)
In the summer of 1795 Goethe composed for Schiller's new magazine, ”Die h.o.r.en,” a prose poem known in German literature as _Das Marchen,_--”
_The_ Tale;” as if it were the only one, or the one which more than another deserves that appellation....
Goethe gave this essay to the public as a riddle which would probably be unintelligible at the time, but which might perhaps find an interpreter after many days, when the hints contained in it should be verified.
Since its first appearance commentators have exercised their ingenuity upon it, perceiving it to be allegorical, but until recently without success.... I follow Dr. Herman's Baumgart's lead in the exposition which I now offer.
”The Tale” is a prophetic vision of the destinies of Germany,--an allegorical foreshowing at the close of the eighteenth century of what Germany was yet to become, and has in great part already become. A position is predicted for her like that which she occupied from the time of Charles the Great to the time of Charles V.,--a period during which the Holy Roman Empire of Germany was the leading secular power in Western Europe. That time had gone by. Since the middle of the sixteenth century Germany had declined, and at the date of this writing (1795) had nearly reached her darkest day. Disintegrated, torn by conflicting interests, pecked by petty rival princes, despairing of her own future, it seemed impossible that she should ever again become a power among the nations. Goethe felt this; he felt it as profoundly as any German of his day ... and he characteristically went into himself and studied the situation. The result was this wonderful composition,--”Das Marchen.” He perceived that Germany must die to be born again. She did die, and is born again. He had the sagacity to foresee the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire,--an event which took place eleven years later, in 1806.
The Empire is figured by the composite statue of the fourth King in the subterranean Temple, which crumbles to pieces when that Temple, representing Germany's past, emerges and stands above ground by the River. The resurrection of the Temple and its stand by the River is the _denouement_ of the Tale. And that signifies, allegorically, the rehabilitation of Germany.]
It is true, his writings contain no declamations against tyrants, and no tirades in favor of liberty. He believed that oppression existed only through ignorance and blindness, and these he was all his life long seeking to remove. He believed that true liberty is attainable only through mental illumination, and that he was all his life long seeking to promote.
He was no agitator, no revolutionist; he had no faith in violent measures. Human welfare, he judged, is not to be advanced in that way; is less dependent on forms of polity than on the life within. But if the test of patriotism is the service rendered to one's country, who more patriotic than he? Lucky for us and the world that he persisted to serve her in his own way, and not as the agitators claimed that he should. It was clear to him then, and must be clear to us now, that he could not have been what they demanded, and at the same time have given to his country and the world what he did.
As a courtier and favorite of Fortune, it was inevitable that Goethe should have enemies. They have done what they could to blacken his name; and to this day the shadow they have cast upon it in part remains. But of this be sure, that no selfish, loveless egoist could have had and retained such friends. The man whom the saintly Fraulein von Klettenberg chose for her friend, whom clear-sighted, stern-judging Herder declared that he loved as he did his own soul; the man whose thoughtful kindness is celebrated by Herder's incomparable wife, whom Karl August and the d.u.c.h.ess Luise cherished as a brother; the man whom children everywhere welcomed as their ready playfellow and sure ally, of whom pious Jung Stilling lamented that admirers of Goethe's genius knew so little of the goodness of his heart,--can this have been a bad man, heartless, cold?
II. THE WRITER.
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