Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems.
always turning his powerful mind from side to side in search of
information, for the attainment of what are called accomplishments. The
mother was a delightful person in her way; open, genial, playful, full
of lively talent, but without earnestness of soul. She was one of those
charming, but not noble persons, who take the day and the man as they
find them, seeing the best that is there already, but never making the
better grow in its stead. His sister, though of graver kind, was social
and intellectual, not religious or tender. The mortifying repulse of his
early love checked the few pale buds of faith and tenderness that his
heart put forth. His friends were friends of the intellect merely;
altogether, he seemed led by destiny to the place he was to fill.
Pardon him, World, that he was too worldly. Do not wonder, Heart, that
he was so heartless. Believe, Soul, that one so true, as far as he went,
must yet be initiated into the deeper mysteries of Soul. Perhaps even
now he sees that we must accept limitations only to transcend them; work
in processes only to detect the organizing power which supersedes them;
and that Sphinxes of fifty-five volumes might well be cast into the
abyss before the single word that solves them all.
Now, when I think of Goethe, I seem to see his soul, all the
variegated plumes of knowledge, artistic form "und so weiter," burnt
from it by the fires of divine love, wingless, motionless, unable to
hide from itself in any subterfuge of labor, saying again and again, the
simple words which he would never distinctly say on earth--God beyond
Nature--Faith beyond Sight--the Seeker nobler than the _Meister_.
For this mastery that Goethe prizes seems to consist rather in the
skilful use of means than in the clear manifestation of ends. His
Master, indeed, makes acknowledgment of a divine order, but the temporal
uses are always uppermost in the mind of the reader. But of this, more
at large in reference to his works.
Apart from this want felt in his works, there is a littleness in his
aspect as a character. Why waste his time in Weimar court
entertainments? His duties as minister were not unworthy of him, though
it would have been, perhaps, finer, if he had not spent so large a
portion of that prime of intellectual life, from five and twenty to
forty, upon them.
But granted that the exercise these gave his faculties, the various lore
they brought, and the good they did to the community, made them worth
his doing,--why that perpetual dangling after the royal family? Why all
that verse-making for the albums of serene highnesses, and those pretty
poetical entertainments for the young princesses, and that cold setting
himself apart from his true peers, the real sovereigns of
Weimar--Herder, Wieland, and the others? The excuse must be found in
circumstances of his time and temperament, which made the character of
man of the world and man of affairs more attractive to him than the
children of nature can conceive it to be in the eyes of one who is
capable of being a consecrated bard.
The man of genius feels that literature has become too much a craft by
itself. No man should live by or for his pen. Writing is worthless
except as the record of life; and no great man ever was satisfied thus
to express all his being. His book should be only an indication of
himself. The obelisk should point to a scene of conquest. In the present
state of division of labor, the literary man finds himself condemned to
be nothing else. Does he write a good book? it is not received as
evidence of his ability to live and act, but rather the reverse. Men do
not offer him the care of embassies, as an earlier age did to Petrarca;
they would be surprised if he left his study to go forth to battle like
Cervantes. We have the swordsman, and statesman, and penman, but it is
not considered that the same mind which can rule the destiny of a poem,
may as well that of an army or an empire.[2] Yet surely it should be so.
The scientific man may need seclusion from the common affairs of life,
for he has his materials before him; but the man of letters must seek
them in life, and he who cannot act will but imperfectly appreciate
action.
The literary man is impatient at being set apart. He feels that monks
and troubadours, though in a similar position, were brought into more
healthy connection with man and nature, than he who is supposed to look
at them merely to write them down. So he rebels; and Sir Walter Scott is
prouder of being a good sheriff and farmer, than of his reputation as
the Great Unknown. Byron piques himself on his skill in shooting and
swimming. Sir H. Davy and Schlegel would be admired as dandies, and
Goethe, who had received an order from a publisher "for a dozen more
dramas in the same style as Goetz von Berlichingen," and though (in
sadder sooth) he had already Faust in his head asking to be written out,
thought it no degradation to become premier in the little Duchy of
Weimar.
"Straws show which way the wind blows," and a comment may be drawn from
the popular novels, where the literary man is obliged to wash off the
ink in a violet bath, attest his courage in the duel, and hide his
idealism beneath the vulgar nonchalance and coxcombry of the man of
fashion.
If this tendency of his time had some influence in making Goethe find
pleasure in tangible power and decided relations with society, there
were other causes which worked deeper. The growth of genius in its
relations to men around must always be attended with daily pain. The
enchanted eye turns from the far-off star it has detected to the
short-sighted bystander, and the seer is mocked for pretending to see
what others cannot. The large and generalizing mind infers the whole
from a single circumstance, and is reproved by all around for its
presumptuous judgment. Its Ithuriel temper pierces shams, creeds,
covenants, and chases the phantoms which others embrace, till the lovers
of the false Florimels hurl the true knight to the ground. Little men
are indignant that Hercules, yet an infant, declares he has strangled
the serpent; they demand a proof; they send him out into scenes of labor
to bring thence the voucher that his father is a god. What the ancients
meant to express by Apollo's continual disappointment in his loves, is
felt daily in the youth of genius. The sympathy he seeks flies his
touch, the objects of his affection sneer at his sublime credulity, his
self-reliance is arrogance, his far sight infatuation, and his ready
detection of fallacy fickleness and inconsistency. Such is the youth of
genius, before the soul has given that sign of itself which an
unbelieving generation cannot controvert. Even then he is little
benefited by the transformation of the mockers into worshippers. For the
soul seeks not adorers, but peers; not blind worship, but intelligent
sympathy. The best consolation even then is that which Goethe puts
into the mouth of Tasso: "To me gave a God to tell what I suffer." In
"Tasso" Goethe has described the position of the poetical mind in its
prose relations with equal depth and fulness. We see what he felt must
be the result of entire abandonment to the highest nature. We see why he
valued himself on being able to understand the Alphonsos, and meet as an
equal the Antonios of every-day life.
But, you say, there is no likeness between Goethe and Tasso. Never
believe it; such pictures are not painted from observation merely. That
deep coloring which fills them with light and life is given by dipping
the brush in one's own life-blood. Goethe had not from nature that
character of self-reliance and self-control in which he so long appeared
to the world. It was wholly acquired, and so highly valued because he
was conscious of the opposite tendency. He was by nature as impetuous,
though not as tender, as Tasso, and the disadvantage at which this
constantly placed him was keenly felt by a mind made to appreciate the
subtlest harmonies in all relations. Therefore was it that when he at
last cast anchor, he was so reluctant again to trust himself to wave and
breeze.
I have before spoken of the antagonistic influences under which he was
educated. He was driven from the severity of study into the world, and
then again drawn back, many times in the course of his crowded youth.
Both the world and the study he used with unceasing ardor, but not with
the sweetness of a peaceful hope. Most of the traits which are
considered to mark his character at a later period were wanting to him
in youth. He was very social, and continually perturbed by his social
sympathies. He was deficient both in outward self-possession and mental
self-trust. "I was always," he says, "either _too volatile or too
infatuated_, so that those who looked kindly on me did by no means
always honor me with their esteem." He wrote much and with great
freedom. The pen came naturally to his hand, but he had no confidence in
the merit of what he wrote, and much inferior persons to Merck and
Herder might have induced him to throw aside as worthless what it had
given him sincere pleasure to compose. It was hard for him to isolate
himself, to console himself, and, though his mind was always busy with
important thoughts, they did not free him from the pressure of other
minds. His youth was as sympathetic and impetuous as any on record.
The effect of all this outward pressure on the poet is recorded in
Werther--a production that he afterwards under-valued, and to which he
even felt positive aversion. It was natural that this should be. In the
calm air of the cultivated plain he attained, the remembrance of the
miasma of sentimentality was odious to him. Yet sentimentality is but
sentiment diseased, which to be cured must be patiently observed by the
wise physician; so are the morbid desire and despair of Werther, the
sickness of a soul aspiring to a purer, freer state, but mistaking the
way.
The best or the worst occasion in man's life is precisely that misused
in Werther, when he longs for more love, more freedom, and a larger
development of genius than the limitations of this terrene sphere
permit. Sad is it indeed if, persisting to grasp too much at once, he
lose all, as Werther did. He must accept limitation, must consent to do
his work in time, must let his affections be baffled by the barriers of
convention. Tantalus-like, he makes this world a Tartarus, or, like
Hercules, rises in fires to heaven, according as he knows how to
interpret his lot. But he must only use, not adopt it. The boundaries of
the man must never be confounded with the destiny of the soul. If he
does not decline his destiny, as Werther did, it is his honor to have
felt its unfitness for his eternal scope. He was born for wings; he is
held to walk in leading-strings; nothing lower than faith must make him
resigned, and only in hope should he find content--a hope not of some
slight improvement in his own condition or that of other men, but a hope
justified by the divine justice, which is bound in due time to satisfy
every want of his nature.
Schiller's great command is, "Keep true to the dream of thy youth." The
great problem is how to make the dream real, through the exercise of the
waking will.
This was not exactly the problem Goethe tried to solve. To _do_
somewhat, became too important, as is indicated both by the second motto
to this essay, and by his maxim, "It is not the knowledge of what _might
be_, but what _is_, that forms us."
Werther, like his early essays now republished from the Frankfort
Journal, is characterized by a fervid eloquence of Italian glow, which
betrays a part of his character almost lost sight of in the quiet
transparency of his later productions, and may give us some idea of the
mental conflicts through which he passed to manhood.