GOETHE AND GERMANY.
ONE summer day, shortly after Waterloo, two great Germans found themselves within the mighty fabric of Cologne Cathedral. The great minster was the meeting place of Stein and Goethe. Arndt gives an account of this historic event :—" Stein greeted us in the most friendly manner, and whom saw we standing not far from him? There stood the other greatest German of the nineteenth century, Wolfgang Goethe, examining the Cathedral. And Stein said to us, 'Hush, children, hush ! no politics, he cannot abide it. We cannot, of course, go with him in this; still think how great he is.' It was strange to see two great Germans behaving towards each other as with a certain mutual reverence; and so it was in the hotel, also at the tea- table, where Goethe was, for the most part, very silent, and retired early." Rarely has a more interesting meeting been recorded. On the one hand, was the passionately patriotic statesman who not only abolished the old feudal regime in Prussia, but who also inspired with his indomitable courage the Prussian people in the life and death struggle with Napoleon. On the other hand, was the great modern poet, the Welt-kind, as he truly called himself, who said that he did not know what patriotism was, and was glad to be with- out it since it obscured those true views of the world and deflected from its right aims that human culture which Goethe thought more vital to human progress than all politics. One is reminded of the scene in Cologne Cathedral at this time, when in that old city of his birth, which he has described with such loving care in his " Dichtung and Wahrheit," the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the poet's birth is being celebrated. The comparison of Goethe and Stein suggests the old question, whether the patriot statesman or the great man of letters who stands apart from political life, and even looks askance on it, as Goethe did, should be regarded as the greater friend of his country.
It is not a question of who is the greater man. It would have taken the combined intellects of many Steins to make a Goethe. The intellect of Goethe was one of the loftiest ever known to man. It is not, we think, a typically German intellect, for the German mind tends to concentrate itself on some one definite problem, and to explore that problem in all its ramifi- cations. But Goethe surveyed the world as a whole; he saw life steadily, like the old Greek poet; nothing escaped those glorious eyes. He reminds one rather at times of those many-sided Italians of supreme genius in that he passes fromworld to world in the universe of human knowledge with the ease of a master. Yet his was not a superficial glance. He himself said that everything he had achieved had coat him infinite pain and sorrow, though few traces of it were visible on that noble face. We think of him as a kind of bright Olympian, the recipient of fairy gifts, the child of fortune ; some writers even ascribe to him a sort of selfish indifference and picture him sitting apart, as in Tennyson's "Palace of Art," holding no form of creed, but contemplating all. But the poet usually justifies his own way of existence, and the inner life of renunciation and intellectual conflict may be as heroic as the seemingly splendid career of the orator and the statesman who claims the willing homage of millions. It is again, we say, a question of which kind of influence is more potent for good in a nation's life. German national consciousness has hitherto found its expression in the slighter but more patriotic Schiller rather than in the greater man who, when Germany was at death- grips with Napoleon, stood aside from the struggle and even expressed admiration for the nation's mighty foe.
No serious student of Goethe's life will assume that because he did not work in an obviously patriotic temper, because he did not compose martial poetry like Korner, or urge young students to the field of battle like Fichte, therefore Goethe did not care for the great land that had given him birth. He was the last man to undervalue the importance of the influence of soil, of milieu, on the writer and the artist, as witness his luminous criticism of Burns and of Scott. That he did not care for Germany is disproved by countless con- versations with Eckermann. One recalls, for instance, his longing that Germany might find or develop as free and adequate expression for her culture and literature as France. It is impossible to charge such a writer and teacher with in- difference to his country. Were the charge true, Frankfort would be justified, no doubt, in celebrating to-day the birth of so wonderful a person, but it would be as a mysterious human product rather than as a great German poet that the old Imperial city would give expression to her feelings of admiration. We think it must be assumed that Goethe loved his native land as truly as did Stein. But the ground of difference between him and the patriot statesman is a point of vital importance, and is worth a little consideration.
Seeley, whose work on Stein is so useful to the student of German politics, has also studied Goethe, and in his sugges- tive monograph has laid down the fact that Goethe was essentially a man of the eighteenth century,—a doctrine which must have surely made poor Carlyle stir and ejaculate an ay de rni in his grave. The greater part of Goethe's physical existence was, of course, passed in the eighteenth century ; but it has been naturally assumed that he was to be taken out of the categories of space and time, and to be dealt with as though he were an unrelated being in the infinities and immensities. We think perhaps of Plato and of Shake- speare in such a way, and from one point of view we are right in so doing. Age cannot wither these masters of human life nor custom stale their infinite variety. Yet we know that even they were a part of their environment, that Plato was sold as a slave, that Shakespeare was jostled by the throng on his way to the Globe Theatre. Seeley, it seems to us, was right in his idea that Goethe was not only a child of his century after the flesh, but after the mind also. The spirit of nationalism has grown to such huge, we might almost say, to such abnormal proportions at the end of our century, that we are apt to forget that a hundred years ago the great majority of the intellectual men of the world held no such creed as that with which we are familiar to-day. Nationalism in our intense form is a product of the general rising against Napoleon, who himself, without intending it, had sown the seeds of the movement by his liberation of the small States of Germany and Italy from their rather contemptible, but not very tyrannical, grand dukes. The movement has been strengthened and idealised by the rising for independence of Greece, Italy, and Hungary, with which we all sympathised. This movement of nationalism has been necessary, but we
must not hide from ourselves that it has been bought at a price. That price is a Europe in arms, animated by preternatural suspicion. Now the feeling which was enter- tained not only by Goethe, but by Kant and Leasing, and in our own country by Gibbon, Priestley, and other distinguished men, was that a given country was not a mere isolated com- munity, but that it was a member of a larger community, that is of the European family, in whose culture it shared. It appeared stupid to Kant to attach supreme importance to any series of events simply because they happened in one's own country, and his interest, as students of his life are aware, were far more closely bound up with the events of the French Revolution than with home affairs. France was to him not so much a foreign country as another part of the one European home. So it was to Goethe, He saw that France and England had many contributions of importance to the growth of German culture, and since his interest was in culture, by which he meant, with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the development of the human spirit in its richest diversity, and, since he found extreme absorption in war and politics interfered with this aim, he left war and politics to other people and devoted himself to those things which are generally neglected because they are not so obviously essential to human welfare as are the things which are temporal. Goethe's aim, in short, was world culture, and be thought himself as good a friend to Germany by pursuing that high aim as if he shouldered a musket or made patriotic speeches.
We hold that there is room for both a Stein and a Goethe in the complex life of a great nation. So far as is possible there should be no attempt to create antagonism between the two classes. Keats and Shelley, removed from all national interests, were creating new forms of immortal poetic loveli- ness while Wellington was reposing on his laurels and Canning was doing battle with the Holy Alliance ; and England is able to absorb and appraise both forms of human activity. That Stein enabled Sadowa, Sedan, and the German Empire to become actualities is certain, but did Goethe and the philosophers do nothing towards the making of modern Ger- many? As well ask whether the greater Popes and doctors of the Church did nothing towards the making of modern Europe. The most obvious forms of external energy are ultimately re- ferable to the mind, to the temper, to the soul. No great poet can touch the soul deeply without in the long run touch- ing the whole man and leading to the growth of powers un- suspected by himself. Goethe was the great founder of German culture, and that means that he, of all others, stimulated the spirit of knowledge, of research, of compre- hensive inquiry into the truth of things. This unquestionably is the spirit which, in spite of some patent defects in the German mind and temper, has made Germany great in these latter years and has sent her sons into all lands to spread industry and invention. This is the spirit which has developed German art and music, and which has enabled German science to achieve such triumphs. Little minds and a great Empire, said Burke, do not go together, and Goethe, by helping to develop a great intellect in Germany, has, we think, done more for merely political Germany than superficial minds would suppose. As a man as well as a poet, as a German as well as a philosopher, Frankfort is justified in celebrating the memory of her greatest son.
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