Maxims and Reflections
endeavours are met, so to speak, half-way by a moral order in the
universe, which comes to the aid of individual effort. And the sum and
substance of his teaching, whether in the maxims or in any other of his
mature productions, is that we must resign ourselves to this power, in
gratitude and reverence towards it and all its manifestations in
whatever is good and beautiful. This is Goethe's strong faith, his
perfect and serene trust. He finely shadows it forth in the closing
words of _Pandora_, where Eos proclaims that the work of the gods is to
lead our efforts to the eternal good, and that we must give them free
play:--
Was zu wünschen ist, ihr unten fühlt es;
Was zu geben sei, die wissen's droben.
Gross beginnet ihr Titanen; aber leiten
Zu dem ewig Guten, ewig Schönen,
Ist der Götter Werk; die lasst gewähren.
And so too in _Faust_: it is the long struggle to realise an Ideal,
dimly seen on life's labyrinthine way of error, that leads at last to
the perfect redemption:--
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen.
And throughout the perplexities of life and the world, where all things
are but signs and tokens of some inner and hidden reality, it is the
ideal of love and service, _das Ewig-Weibliche_, that draws us on.
But this assurance cannot be reached by a mere theory; and Goethe is not
slow to declare how he views attempts to reach it in that way. "_Credo
Deum!_ that," he reminds us here, "is a fine, a worthy thing to say; but
to recognise God when and where he reveals himself, is the only true
bliss on earth." All else is mystery. We are not born, as he said to
Eckermann, to solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the
problem begins, and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp.
The problem, he urged, is transformed into a postulate: if we cannot get
a solution theoretically, we can get it in the experience of practical
life. We reach it by the use of an "active scepticism," of which he says
that "it continually aims at overcoming itself and arriving by means of
regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty." But he would
have nothing to do with doctrinal systems, and, like Schiller, professed
none of the forms of religion from a feeling of religion itself. To see
how he views some particular questions of theology the reader may turn
with profit to his maxims on the Reformation and early Christianity, and
to his admirable remarks on the use and abuse of the Bible. The basis of
religion was for him its own earnestness; and it was not always needful,
he held, for truth to take a definite shape: "it is enough if it hovers
about us like a spirit and produces harmony." "I believe," he said to
Eckermann, "in God and Nature and the victory of good over evil; but I
was also asked to believe that three was one, and one was three. That
jarred upon my feeling for truth; and I did not see how it could have
helped me in the least." As for letting our minds roam beyond this
present life, he thought there was actual danger in it; although he
looked for a future existence, a continuation of work and activity, in
which what is here incomplete should reach its full development. And
whatever be the secrets of the universe, assuredly the best we can do is
to do our best here; and the worst of blasphemies is to regard this life
as altogether vanity; for as these pages tell us, "it would not be worth
while to see seventy years if all the wisdom of this world were
foolishness with God."
In Goethe we pass, as over a bridge, from the eighteenth century to the
nineteenth; but though he lived to see a third of the nineteenth
century, he hardly belongs to it. Of its political characteristics he
had few or none. He was no democrat. As the prophet of inward culture,
he took the French Revolution for a disturbance, an interruption, and
not a development in the progress of the world's history; and for all
its horrors and the pernicious demoralisation of its leaders, he had the
profoundest aversion. But afterwards he came to see that it had
beneficial results; that a revolution is ultimately never the fault of
the people, but of the injustice and incapacity of the government; and
that where there is a real necessity for a great reform, the old leaven
must be rooted out.[3] But he knew the danger of such a process, and he
indicates it here in an admirable saying: "Before the French Revolution
it was all _effort_; afterwards it all changed to _demand_"; and this
may be supplemented by his opinion on the nature of revolutionary
sentiments: "Men think they would be well-off if they were not ruled,
and fail to perceive that they can rule neither themselves nor others."
And if he, had thus no theoretical sympathy with democratic movements,
he had little feeling for that other great political tendency of our
time--nationality; convinced as he was that interest in the weal and woe
of another people is always a mark of the highest culture. But apart
from politics there is one characteristic of our own time in which he
fully and especially shares, if only for the reason that he did much
himself to produce it; and herein he has influenced us profoundly and is
influencing us still. The nineteenth century has this advantage over
every preceding age, that in it for the first time honest doubt, instead
of distinguishing a few, has become a common virtue. Goethe is one of
the surest and safest of those who have led the transition. "We praise
the eighteenth century," he writes, "for concerning itself chiefly with
analysis. The task remaining to the nineteenth is to discover the false
syntheses which prevail, and to analyse their contents anew." Of the aim
of analysis and the proper course of inquiry, no one has given a better
account than Goethe in what he says, in the words I have quoted, about
active scepticism; and in the sphere of morals and religion it will
perhaps be found hereafter that he has contributed, in some degree at
least, to the attainment of that "conditioned certainty," for which, as
we hope, all our efforts are made.
In the maxims on Literature there is some excellent criticism on
literary methods, and much that may well be taken to heart by certain
writers of our own day. Goethe had little but rebuke for the whole of
the romantic movement, which began in his old age. The German form of it
he thought unnatural, and at best a conventional imitation of an earlier
period; and the French form, of which Victor Hugo was then the rising
star, he thought a perversion of naturalism, an exaggeration of it until
it became insipid or merely revolting. To Byron alone he gave the
tribute of the most ungrudging admiration: in the opposition between
classicism and romanticism, he declined to take him for a follower of
either, but as the complete representative of his own time. The maxim
that "the classical is health, and the romantic, disease," may not
altogether commend itself to us now; but with wonderful insight Goethe
foresaw the direction in which the romantic movement would lead. "The
romantic," he says here, "is already fallen into its own abysm. It is
hard to imagine anything more degraded than the worst of the new
productions." If he could have said this two generations ago, what would
he have said now? How could he have spoken without contempt of those who
make all that is common and unclean in itself a subject with which
literature may properly be occupied? These are the writers who profess
to be realists, under a completely mistaken notion of what realism
means, as applied to art; and to them the chief realities seem to be
just the very things that decent people keep out of sight. They forget
that in literature, as in all art, the dominating realities are the
highest Ideals. As an antidote to this poison of corruption Goethe
pointed to the ancient world, and bid us study there the types of the
loftiest manhood. "Bodies which rot while they are still alive and are
edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who
remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the
living--to this," he exclaimed, "have come our makers of literature.
When the same thing happened in antiquity, it was only as a strange
token of some rare disease; but with the moderns the disease has become
endemic and epidemic." Akin to these pseudo-realists, and coming under
the same ban, are some of our modern novel-writers who do, indeed, avoid
the depth of degradation, but try to move the feelings by dwelling in a
similar fashion on matters which are not, and never can be, fit subjects
of literary treatment; such as painful deaths by horrible distempers, or
the minute details of prolonged operations. It is poor skill that cannot
find material enough in the moral sufferings of men and women, and is
driven to seek effect in descriptions of disease and surgery. Surely in
any literature worthy of the name these are topics which a richer
imagination and a more prolific art would have found unnecessary, and
better taste would have left undescribed.
To another class of writers--those who handle a pretty pen without
having anything definite to present, or anything important to say,
Goethe has also an applicable word. It is a class which is always
increasing in number, and tends to increase in talent. We may admit that
second- or third-rate work, especially in poetry, was never before done
so well as it is done now; and still we may find some useful truth in a
distinction which Goethe drew for the benefit of the minor poets and the
minor prose-writers of his own age. "Productions are now possible," he
said, "which, without being bad, have no value. They have no value,
because they contain nothing; and they are not bad, because a general
form of good workmanship is present to the author's mind." In one of the
many neglected volumes of his miscellaneous writings Goethe has a series
of admirable notes for a proposed work on _Dilettantism_; and there the
reader, if he is interested in Goethe's literary criticism, will find
some instructive remarks in close connection with this aphorism, and
also certain rules for discriminating between good and indifferent work
which ought to receive the most attentive study. And the stylists who
neglect plain language for a mosaic of curious phrase and overstrained
epithet, may profitably remember that, as Goethe here says, "it is not
language in itself which is correct or forcible or elegant, but the mind
that is embodied in it."
"Translators," he tells us, "sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty
and rouse an irresistible longing for the original." To them also he
gives a piece of excellent advice: "The translator must proceed until
he reaches the untranslatable." This is a counsel of exhortation as well
as of warning. It bids the translator spare no effort, but tells him
that at a certain point his efforts are of no avail. But none the less,
Goethe might have added, the faithful translator must strive as if this
hindrance to perfection did not exist; for it is thus only that he, or
any one else, can do anything worth doing. On methods of translation
much may be said, and it is sometimes urged, in a given case, that it is
not literal or that it is too free. A distinguished writer has recently
laid down that a translation should reproduce every word and phrase and
sentence of the original as accurately as a delicate tracing reproduces
the lines of a drawing. This is advice which may hold in the
school-room, but, I venture to maintain, nowhere else. In so far as
every language has a peculiar genius, a literal translation must
necessarily be a bad one; and any faithful translation will of its
nature be free. In other words, a translator will err if he slavishly