Maxims and Reflections
process of discovery. The popular literature of the last generation
supplies a terrible instance of the length to which the manufacture of
maxims can thus be carried, for a time with immense success; and we have
seen how a few years suffice to carry them and their author to
obscurity. How different is the true process! The maxim that increases
knowledge and enriches literature is of slow and rare appearance; it
springs from a fine faculty of observation which is in no one's
arbitrament, and only less rare than the gift of utterance which adds
charm to a thought that itself strikes home with the power of
impregnable truth. No amount or intensity of effort will alone produce
it; but to the mind of genius it comes like a sudden revelation,
flashing its light on a long course of patient attention. "What we call
_Discovery_," says Goethe, "is the serious exercise and activity of an
original feeling for truth. It is a synthesis of world and mind, giving
the most blessed assurance of the eternal harmony of things."
It is, then, depth and truth and sanity of observation which chiefly
mark these sayings of Goethe. It is no concern of his to dazzle the mind
by the brilliance of his wit; nor does he labour to say things because
they are striking, but only because they are true. He is always in
contact with realities, always aiming at truth; and he takes a kindly
and a generous view of the world. He has none of the despair that
depresses, none of the malice that destroys. There are writers who
profess to honour a lofty ideal by a cynical disparagement of everything
that falls short of it; who unveil the selfish recesses of the heart as
a mistaken stimulus to its virtues; who pay their tribute to great work
by belittling human endeavour. Goethe shows us a more excellent way.
Touched with a profound feeling of the worth of life, the wisdom of
order, the nobility of effort, he gives us an ideal to pursue and shows
us the means of pursuing it. Out of the fulness of a large experience,
unique in the history of literature, he unfolds the scheme of a
practicable perfection, and enforces the lessons he has learned from the
steady, passionless, and undaunted observation of human affairs.
To Goethe these sayings were merely _reflections_ or _opinions_; it is
his literary executors and his editors who called them by more ambitious
titles, so as to challenge a comparison with certain other famous books
of wise thought. They are the reflections of a long life rich in all the
intellectual treasures of the world, in its versatility amazing, in its
insight well-nigh fathomless; a life that, in his own words, approached
the infinite by following the finite on every side. Such a man need only
speak to utter something important; and we on our part need only
remember how wide was the range of his knowledge, how full and complete
his existence, to set the utmost value on his reflections at the end of
it. But that he knew nothing of the pinch of poverty and was spared the
horrors of disease, that he suffered no great misfortune, and basked in
the bright side of the world, free from the ills that come to most men,
there was no page of the book of life that was not thrown open to him.
The things of the mind, the things of art, the things of nature--in
their theory and in their practice he had worked at them all; regarding
them as so many varied manifestations of an eternal Idea in itself
inscrutable and here unattainable. There was no kind of literature with
which he was unfamiliar, whether it was ancient or modern, of the East
or of the West; and the great spiritual influences of the world,
Hebraism, Hellenism, Christianity, Mediævalism,--at one or another time
in his life he was in touch with them all, and found his account in them
all. In matters of learning he was occupied with nothing but what was
actual and concrete; it was only to abstract studies, to logic,
metaphysics, mathematics, that he was indifferent; in his own phrase, he
never thought about thinking. There was hardly any branch of the natural
science of his day that he did not cultivate, that he did not himself
practise; geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, anatomy, meteorology,
optics; and he made some remarkable discoveries and the strangest
prophecies. To Art he gave a life-long devotion. While still a youth, he
wrote an important essay on Gothic architecture; he engraved, drew,
painted, and for a time took up sculpture. In all the higher forms of
Art, with the single exception of music, he had so much practical
interest that he often doubted whether in following Literature he had
not mistaken, or at least unduly narrowed, the sphere of his activity.
He was little abroad, but no one ever profited more by his travels than
Goethe. Twice he went to Italy, and what a change of mind was produced
by that change of sky! Rome was to him a new birth, a new conception of
life. And besides Literature, Science, and Art, he busied himself with
Administration, with the duties of the Court, with the practical details
of the Theatre; but out of them all he learned something himself and
taught something to others. He lived the fullest life granted to man. He
had a youth of the wildest enthusiasm and romance; a prime of a classic
austerity, of a calm earnestness; a majestic age of the ripest wisdom,
when there came to him, as it were a second youth, with something of the
fire of the old romantic feeling lighted up in him anew. And out of all
these prodigious efforts in so many directions, he passed unharmed, and
never lost himself. He steadily pursued his own task and refused to be
drawn aside. He stood aloof from the controversies of his time. The
battles of belief, philosophical systems, French Revolutions, Wars of
Liberation, struggles of democracy and nationality,--these things
moved him little or not at all. But he is not on that account to be
held, as some foolish critics have held him, indifferent, selfish, or
less serious, or less complete a man than his fellows. He did the best
in any one's power: he resolutely kept to his own business, and, neither
heating nor resting, worked at his own high aims, in the struggle not
merely to learn and to know, but to act and to do. He felt profoundly
that the best anyone can achieve for himself is often the best he can
achieve for others. The whole moral of _Wilhelm Meister_ is that a man's
first and greatest duty, whether to others or to himself, is to see that
his business in life is a worthy one and suited to his capacities. If he
discovers his vocation and pursues it steadily, he will make his outer
life of the greatest use and service to the world, and at the same time
produce the utmost harmony within. That was what Goethe tried to do in
his own person, and he laboured at his self-imposed task with a
perseverance, a real unselfishness, and a determination entirely
admirable.
It is almost the last fruit of this life of concentrated activity, the
final outcome of this indomitable character, that is here put before us.
And we shall find that to the complex phenomena of the world Goethe
applied no other measure but reason and the nature and needs of man.
With a full consciousness of the mysteries that surround our existence,
he never made the futile endeavour to pass beyond the bounds of present
knowledge and experience, or to resolve contradictions by manipulating
the facts. In these detached reflections he does, indeed, propound a
theory and sketch out a system of conduct; but they cannot, like the
_Thoughts_ of Pascal, for instance, be brought under a single and
definite point of view. They are a mirror of life itself, and the inner
and outer facts of life in all their diversity. The unity they possess
is the unity that is stamped upon them by the all-embracing personality
of their author, always and unweariedly striving to make his life
systematic, distinct, and fruitful; and to judge them as a whole, a man
must be able to fathom so great a genius. But to every one in every walk
of life Goethe has a word of wise counsel, as though he understood every
form of existence and could enter into its needs. In a fine passage in
the _Wanderjahre_, he likens the thought that thus in wondrous fashion
takes a thousand particular shapes, to a mass of quicksilver, which, as
it falls, separates into innumerable globules, spreading out on all
sides. And while these sayings may present thoughts in seeming
contradiction one with another, as the moment that called them forth
presented this or that side of experience, their inmost nature is a
common tendency to realise a great ideal of life. It is little they owe
to the form in which they are cast; they are not the elements of an
artistic whole which must be seized before we can understand the full
meaning of its parts. They are a miscellaneous record of the shrewdest
observation; and to read them as they should be read, a few at a time,
is like the opportunity of repeated converse with a man of extraordinary
gifts, great insight, and the widest culture, who touches profoundly and
suggestively now on this, now on that aspect of life and the world and
the progress of knowledge. It is the fruit of his own experience that
Goethe gives us; and we shall do well to think of it as he himself
thought of another book, and to bear in mind that "every word which we
take in a general sense and apply to ourselves, had, under certain
circumstances of time and place, a peculiar, special and directly
individual reference."
Goethe is no exception to the rest of mankind in not being equally wise
at all times, and in the maxims there are degrees of value: they do not
all shine with the like brilliance. Some of them are valuable only for
what they suggest; of some, again, it is easy to see that, they appear
as matters of speculation rather than as certainties. They raise
difficulties, ask for criticism, if possible, correction; or, it may be,
they call attention to the contrary view and invite a harmony of
opposites. Some of them make a great demand upon our ability "to
understand a proverb and the interpretation; the words of the wise and
their dark sayings." Their value sometimes depends on the way they are
viewed, the culture brought to their understanding, the temper in which
they are approached. We look at them, and at first admire; we change our
point of view, and find something to criticise and dispute. The
obscurity of maxims, as Goethe reminds us, is only relative; not
everything can be explained to the reader which was present to the mind
of the writer. Some of them seem at first to be of little interest; on
one side they may even repel, but from another they attract again, and
win perhaps a partial approval. They seem to move as we change our
position, and to be without fixed or certain character. But some, again,
are so clear and unmistakable, so immeasurably above criticism or
objection, that like the furthest of the stars they have no parallax:
whatever position we take, their light is steadfast.
Let no one suppose that in the main Goethe's reflections on life had
never been made before; that it was not so, no one knew better than he.
As a preface and note of warning to them all, he reiterates the words of
the preacher: "there is no new thing under the sun." Yes! says Goethe,
there is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; _we must
only try to think it again_. "It is only when we are faithful," he says
elsewhere,[2] "in arresting and noting our present thoughts, that we
have any joy in tradition; since we find the best thoughts already
uttered, the finest feelings already expressed. This it is that gives us
the perception of that harmonious agreement to which man is called, and
to which he must conform, often against his will as he is much too fond