THE TWO SIDES OF GOETHE.
SOME years ago the late Sir John Seeley wrote a very interesting criticism on Goethe, with the object of showing that he was essentially a man of the eighteenth century, and that he could not be understood except in the light of that fact. But at the great Goethe celebration at Frankfort last year this was by no means the chief aspect in which Goethe was viewed by his admiring countrymen. They regarded him with the fervour of a patriotism to which he was quite a stranger, as a present inspirer of existing German literature, and an active spiritual factor in contem- porary German life. In the current Quarterly Review an exceedingly well-informed, though not quite conclusive, " appreciation " of Goethe endeavonrs to set forth this side of Goethe's complex nature and many-sided activity. There is not one of the great writers of the world of the first rank about whom it is so difficult to make up one's mind, as this Quarterly reviewer shows, refer- ring, as he does, to the changes of opinion which have taken place with regard to Goethe's aims and work. But the whole truth of the matter and the answer to the riddle is given in this writer's words : "There are many Goethes." Whereas in Dante, e.g., we see all through the " Divine Commedia," the "Vita Nnova," the " Convito," the "De Monarchia," the same high, austere figure crowned with a halo not of this world, Goethe is a literary Protein, pre- senting numberless forms, each so elusive that we can scarcely grasp it, each living in its own milieu, careless of any definite conformity to an exact type, and whose unity is as hard to realise in imagination as is the unity of Nature herself. Such a grand human puzzle was never given mankind to read.
The Quarterly writer maintains that Goethe was only for one short period in the actual current of his time, and that was in the "Sturm und Drang " epoch of " Werther " and "Goetz." Then came the great Italian journey in which the latent Classicism of the poet, shared with Leasing and Winckelmann, welled up into full consciousness of itself, and a passionate ardour for the gods and men of Hellas became Goethe's most distinguishing characteristic. But if any ordinary critic thought that by saying this he had exhausted Goethe's mind, the next epoch in the poet's development un- deceived him. For, from 1796 to 1804, the Quarterly writer reckons, Goethe was the real head of the Romantic school, then in its initial inspiration. It is true that when that school revealed its later tendencies in the latter part of the first quarter of our century, Goethe condemned strongly its leading features ; but in the proper sense of the word, doubt- less the Quarterly is right in its judgment. We may there- fore say with the writer :—" In so far as Goethe was Classic as a thinker, as an artist, as a literary and moral force, he belonged to the eighteenth century ; but the Goethe who has exerted the most abiding influence upon the nineteenth century, the Goethe who still, at its close, is a vital intellec- tual force, is the Goethe of Romanticism." So that, while Sir John Seeley thinks mainly of Goethe as the calm, clear, cosmopolitan eighteenth-century philosopher, the Quarterly writer, sharing as he thinks he does the present German view, finds the dominant and more abiding element in Goethe that spirit which inspires German life, sustains existing German literature, and informs the Romantic movement in European letters.
For our own part we think each of these views true, and that each must be taken as the complement of the other if we are to realise to ourselves the extraordinary scale on which this remarkable man's nature was laid out. Goethe's mind, like his body, was perhaps the most sensitive ever known. He could not bear illness; he could not approach a dead body ; he was made sick in Schiller's room one day by the odour of some decaying apples ; he trembled all over when past eighty if approached by a handsome woman. His mind was similarly con- structed in that it was alive to every influence. In the "Dichtring und Wahrheit," he shows us how, through his powerful imagination, great aspects of his nature were constructed by the most simple incident or suggestion. A man of this type is not touched merely by what is, but by what is to come, by that which is still in the womb of time, by those unborn spiritual agencies, "die Mutter, die Mutter" of the second part of "Faust," that give birth to the subtle forces which in this world seize on and possess the soul. The "Sturm und Drang " period in which Goethe was "in the current" of the actual events seems to us the least important part of his life. It is Goethe the seer, Goethe the forerunner of the actual movement, who is really significant, whether as philosopher of the eighteenth century, or Roman- ticist of the nineteenth. Now this suggests to ns that there is a Goethe who synthesises the two Goethes, who has not abandoned either, who is able to unite and harmonise elements which at first sight appear dis- cordant. Goethe, it will be remembered, devoted nearly the whole of his active literary life to slow, leisurely, deliberate work on "Faust," which seems to us, when all is said, to be his great, characteristic, supreme work; and in the "Conver- sations with Eckermann" he has given the world the orphic sayings of his matured mind. In the "Faust," we think, can be traced all the many influences which operated on his soul, while in the "Conversations" we see the philosophic ground- work of his intellectual nature, but enriched with the buds and flowers of sentiment and spiritual passion which had been so long hidden to the world under the snows of life. We think him cold, but he tells us that every line he wrote cost him pain and sorrow; we think him'an organ of pure intelligence, but read the "Faust" dedication or those lines —" Who never ate his bread in sorrow "—quoted so patheti- cally by the ill-fated Queen Louise, and our eyes are filled with tears. Read especially that noble spiritual testimony at the close of the "Conversations," and the union of the two Goethes, the speculative thinker and the man of faith, is revealed.
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