Maxims and Reflections
of fancying that the world begins afresh with himself." What Goethe
means is that we shall do best to find out the truth of all things for
ourselves, for on one side truth is individual; and that we shall be
happy if our individual truth is also universal, or accords with the
wisest thought of the past. It is in this practical light that we must
view the maxims, and not as mere academic generalities. It is easy to
read them in an hour and forget them as soon; easy to view them with a
tepid interest as the work of a great author; but no one will fully
understand the value of any of them, who has not experience enough to
know its truth. Well is it for us if with the experience we also gain
the truth! If any one should say that some of these maxims are very
obvious, and so simply true as almost to be platitudes, I would bid him
remember that the best education is often to discover these very simple
truths for oneself, and learn to see how much there is in commonplaces.
For those who have grown old in the world are never weary of telling us
that the further we go, the more we shall find, in general, that the
same things will happen to us as have happened to others; and it will
then be our advantage if we have the same reflections, best of all if we
come of ourselves to the same conclusions, as the wisest of those who
have gone before us; next best, if we can really and intelligently
follow in the footsteps of their thought.
But although the matter of Goethe's sayings is not original in the sense
of being new to the world--while it was original for him, since he
discovered it for himself and on his own path, their manner is something
new, and their range is unparalleled. Take any other set of maxims you
will, nowhere is there so wide an outlook, nowhere so just an estimate
of human difficulties, nowhere an aim at once so lofty and so
practicable. Nowhere is there a larger, stronger, healthier, more
tolerant view of life and the world, or an atmosphere clearer of the
mists that too often obscure and distort our vision. And in their
expression, nowhere is there so little of the besetting sin to sacrifice
truth to effect. Goethe has none of the shallow malice and uncharitable
candour that with writers of an earlier age passed for the practical
wisdom of every day; and we need only contrast his maxims with the
similar work of La Rochefoucauld, Helvetius, and Chamfort, admirable as
they may be in their exposure of human selfishness, to determine on
which side is the greater service to mankind. How different the views of
the world taken by how many writers!--the secret of it all is that the
men themselves are different.
It was said of Goethe that his heart, which few knew, was as great as
his intellect, which all knew. Certainly his writings and not least his
maxims are a profound example of the truth that in the last resort it is
moral rather than intellectual qualities that make great literature. It
is not to be denied that much may be done by a mere facility of style, a
command of words, a fine taste, a wide acquaintance with the turns and
resources of language; but in the end the effect is produced by the man
himself, his character and his strength. To the strenuous, earnest man,
like Goethe, the world offers a stirring spectacle and provides a great
opportunity; and he grasps and uses them both to the best of his
peculiar capacity. It is diversity of temperament dealing with partial
knowledge that makes so many and such various doctrines. A man's views
of life are, in short, those which he deserves to have, and his writings
are cast in the mould of his character. It is no more strange that the
authors of books should give us such varied pictures of the humanity
around us, than that painters should conceive natural objects so
differently. Literature, too, is like a gallery of landscape and
portrait: it is the same world which is presented, the same men and
things; but the way of looking at it varies with the artist; who,
whatever his training may have been, will see in Nature what he brings
to it himself. _Ars est homo additus naturæ_. If this be truly to define
the essence and method of Art, it is equally true to say that Literature
is man added to life; and, here as there, everything depends on the
character and capacity of the man.
No one has as yet said that he doubts Goethe's capacity, although there
are many who have solemnly pronounced him uninteresting. The critic who
can read Goethe's works with real attention, and then venture to call
them dull, is simply showing that he has no call to the office he
assumes, or no interest in literature of the highest class. What is
true, of course, is that Goethe is profoundly serious, and he is,
therefore, not always entertaining; but that is enough to make him pass
for dull in the eyes of those who take literature only as a pastime,--a
substitute for a cigar, or something to lull them to sleep when they are
tired. But another and more formidable accusation is made against Goethe
which affects his character, and would go far to destroy the value of
his writings if it were true; but to many it is curiously inconsistent
with the other charge of being dull. It is that he is immoral. Now of
all the great writers of the world, Goethe is admittedly the greatest
teacher. He is essentially and frankly didactic; and nowhere is there so
large and worthy a body of literature from a single pen which is
informed with so high and so serious a purpose. Roundly to call its
author immoral is a charge which sufficiently refutes itself by its own
ignorance and absurdity. The charge comes, as a rule, from those who
judge life by the needs and duties of a young girl, and they confound
the whole of morality--character and conduct in all relations to one's
fellow-men--with one section of it. They forget that Goethe was a man of
the old _régime_; that his faults were those of his time and class. They
forget that an extreme repugnance to all monasticism, asceticism, and
Roman Catholicism in general, naturally led him to pay a diminished
regard to the one virtue of which the Christian world is sometimes apt
to exaggerate the importance, and on which it is often ready to hang all
the law and the prophets. To some, again, Goethe appears to be a
supremely selfish wizard, dissecting human passion in the coldest blood,
and making poetical capital out of the emotional tortures he caused in
others. This, too, is a charge which the merest acquaintance with his
life and work must of necessity refute: it is too simple a slander to be
seriously discussed. Since these are charges which have, however, kept
many estimable people from reading Goethe, it may be some consolation to
them to know that the maxims are entirely free from any possibility of
objection on this ground.
The element of moral teaching which runs through Goethe's mature works
like a golden thread, re-appears in the maxims free and detached from
the poetic and romantic environment which in such varied shapes is woven
around it in _Werther, Tasso, Meister_, above all in _Faust_. To do the
next duty; to meet the claims of each day; to persist with a single mind
and unwearied effort on a definite, positive, productive path;
cheerfully to renounce what is denied us, and vigorously to make the
best of what we have; to restrain vague desires and uncertain aims; to
cease bewailing the vanity of all things and the fleeting nature of this
our world, and do what we can to make our stay in it of lasting
use,--these are lessons which will always be needed, and all the more
needed as life becomes increasingly complex. They are taught in the
maxims with a great variety of application, and nowhere so concisely
summarised as in one of them. "The mind endowed with active powers," so
it runs, "and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies
nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth."
Goethe has been called, and with truth, the prophet of culture; but the
word is often misunderstood. We cannot too clearly see that what is here
meant is not a mere range of intellectual knowledge, pursued with
idolatrous devotion: it is moral discipline, a practical endeavour,
forming wise thought and noble character. And this is the product, not
of learning, but of work: if we are to know and realise what there is in
us, and make the best of it, our aim must be practical and creative.
"Let every man," he urges, "ask himself with which of his faculties he
can and will somehow influence his age." And again: "From this time
forward, if a man does not apply himself to some art or handiwork, he
will be in a bad way. In the rapid changes of the world, knowledge is no
longer a furtherance. By the time a man has taken note of everything, he
has lost himself." The culture of which he speaks is not mainly
intellectual. We use the word in a way that is apt to limit and conceal
its meaning, and we often apply it to a strange form of mental growth,
at once stunted and overfed, to which, if we may judge by its fruits,
any breath of real culture would be fatal. It has nothing to do with
learning in the general and narrow sense of the word, or with the often
pernicious effects of mere learning. In the language of the hour we are
wont to give the exclusive name of culture to a wide acquaintance with
books and languages; whether or not it results, as it has before now
resulted, in a want of culture in character and outward demeanour, in
airs of conceit, in foolish arrogance, in malice and acrimony.
A uniform activity with a moral aim--that, in Goethe's view, is the
highest we can achieve in life. "Character in matters great and small
consists," he says, "in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he
feels himself capable." It is the gospel of work: our endeavour must be
to realise our best self in deed and action; to strive until our
personality attains, in Aristotle's word, its entelechy; its full
development. By this alone can we resolve all the doubts and hesitations
and conflicts within that undermine and destroy the soul. "Try to do
your duty, and you will know at once what you are worth." And with all
our doing, what should be the goal of our activity? In no wise our own
self, our own weal. "A man is happy only when he delights in the
good-will of others," and we must of a truth "give up existence in order
to exist"; we must never suppose that happiness is identical with
personal welfare. In the moral sphere we need, as Kant taught, a
categorical imperative; but, says Goethe, that is not the end of the
matter; it is only the beginning. We must widen our conception of duty
and recognise a perfect morality only "where a man loves what he
commands himself to do." "Voluntary dependence is the best state, and
how should that be possible without love?" And just in the same sense
Goethe refuses to regard all self-denial as virtuous, but only the
self-denial that leads to some useful end. All other forms of it are
immoral, since they stunt and cramp the free development of what is best
in us--the desire, namely, to deal effectively with our present life,
and make the most and fairest of it.
And here it is that Goethe's moral code is fused with his religious
belief. "Piety," he says, "is not an end but a means: a means of
attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquillity of soul." This
is the piety he preaches; not the morbid introspection that leads to no
useful end, the state of brooding melancholy, the timorous
self-abasement, the anxious speculation as to some other condition of
being. And this tranquillity of soul, Goethe taught that it should be
ours, in spite of the thousand ills of life which give us pause in our
optimism. It is attained by the firm assurance that, somewhere and
somehow, a power exists that makes for moral good; that our moral