Representative Men: Seven Lectures
the story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate
that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristocratic convention:
they quit the society and habits of their rank; they lose their wealth;
they become the servants of great ideas, and of the most generous
social ends; until, at last, the hero, who is the center and fountain
of an association for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the
human race, no longer answers to his own titled name: it sounds foreign
and remote in his ear.
"I am only man," he says; "I breathe and work for man," and this in
poverty and extreme sacrifices. Goethe's hero, on the contrary, has
so many weaknesses and impurities, and keeps such bad company, that
the sober English public, when the book was translated, were disgusted.
And yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of the world, and
with knowledge of laws; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and
with such few strokes, and not a word too much, the book remains ever
so new and unexhausted, that we must even let it go its way, and be
willing to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only begun
its office, and has millions of readers yet to serve.
The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using
both words in their best sense. And this passage is not made in any
mean or creeping way, but through the hall door. Nature and character
assist, and the rank is made real by sense and probity in the nobles.
No generous youth can escape this charm of reality in the book, so
that it is highly stimulating to intellect and courage. The ardent and
holy Novalis characterized the book as "thoroughly modern and prosaic;
the romantic is completely leveled in it; so is the poetry of nature;
the wonderful. The book treats only of the ordinary affairs of men:
it is a poeticized civic and domestic story. The wonderful in it is
expressly treated as fiction and enthusiastic dreaming:"--and yet,
what is also characteristic, Novalis soon returned to this book, and
it remained his favorite reading to the end of his life.
What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers, is a property
which he shares with his nation,--a habitual reference to interior
truth. In England and in America there is a respect for talent; and,
if it is exerted in support of any ascertained or intelligible interest
or party, or in regular opposition to any, the public is satisfied.
In France, there is even a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy,
for its own sake. And, in all these countries, men of talent write
from talent. It is enough if the understanding is occupied, the taste
propitiated,--so many columns so many hours, filled in a lively and
creditable way. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness,
the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American
adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a
superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German
public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought;
but what is it for? What does the man mean? Whence, whence, all these
thoughts?
Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book;
a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines
there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not
otherwise; holding things because they are things. If he cannot rightly
express himself to-day, the same things subsist, and will open
themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind--the burden
of truth to be declared,--more or less understood; and it constitutes
his business and calling in the world, to see those facts through, and
to make them known. What signifies that he trips and stammers; that
his voice is harsh or hissing; that this method or his tropes are
inadequate? That message will find method and imagery, articulation
and melody. Though he were dumb, it would speak. If not,--if there be
no such God's word in the man,--what care we how adroit, how fluent,
how brilliant he is?
It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence, whether there
be a man behind it, or no. In the learned journal, in the influential
newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener
some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and
robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But, through every clause
and part of speech of a right book, I meet the eyes of the most
determined of men: his force and terror inundate every word: the commas
and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can
go far and live long.
In England and America, one may be an adept in the writing of a Greek
or Latin poet, without any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent
years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a presumption that he holds
heroic opinions, or undervalues the fashions of his town. But the
German nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these subjects:
the student, out of the lecture-room, still broods on the lessons; and
the professor cannot divest himself of the fancy, that the truths of
philosophy have some application to Berlin and Munich. This earnestness
enables them to out-see men of much more talent. Hence, almost all the
valuable distinctions which are current in higher conversation, have
been derived to us from Germany. But, whilst men distinguished for wit
and learning, in England and France, adopt their study and their side
with a certain levity, and are not understood to be very deeply engaged,
from grounds of character, to the topic or the part they
espouse,--Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not
speak from talent, but the truth shines through: he is very wise,
though his talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent his sentence
is, he has somewhat better in view. It awakens my curiosity. He has
the formidable independence which converse with truth gives: hear you,
or forbear, his fact abides; and your interest in the writer is not
confined to his story, and he dismissed from memory, when he has
performed his task creditably, as a baker when he has left his loaf;
but his work is the least part of him. The old Eternal Genius who built
the world has confided himself more to this man than to any other. I
dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which
genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is
incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler
strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer
in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart. Goethe can
never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but
to truth for the sake of culture. He has no aims less large than the
conquest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be his portion;
a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed; of a stoical self-
command and self-denial, and having one test for all men,--What can
you teach me? All possessions are valued by him for that only; rank,
privileges, health, time, being itself.
He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts, and sciences, and
events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist.
There is nothing he had not right to know; there is no weapon in the
army of universal genius he did not take into his hand, but with
peremptory heed that he should not be for a moment prejudiced by his
instruments. He lays a ray of light under every fact, and between
himself and his dearest property. From him nothing was hid, nothing
withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him, and the saint who saw the
daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form. "Piety itself is no
aim, but only a means whereby, through purest inward peace, we may
attain to highest culture." And his penetration of every secret of the
fine arts will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affections help
him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of
conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be,--if so
you shall teach him aught which your good-will cannot,--were it only
what experience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but
enemy on high terms. He cannot hate anybody; his time is worth too
much. Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds of
emperors, who fight dignifiedly across kingdoms.
His autobiography, under the title of "Poetry and Truth Out of My
Life," is the expression of the idea,--now familiar to the world through
the German mind, but a novelty to England, Old and New, when that book
appeared,--that a man exists for culture; not for what he can
accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him. The reaction of
things on the man is the only noteworthy result. An intellectual man
can see himself as a third person; therefore his faults and delusions
interest him equally with his successes. Though he wishes to prosper
in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man;
whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only interested
in a low success. This idea reigns in the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_,
and directs the selection of the incidents; and nowise the external
importance of events, the rank of the personages, or the bulk of
incomes. Of course, the book affords slender materials for what would
be reckoned with us a "Life of Goethe;"--few dates; no correspondence;
no details of offices or employments; no light on his marriage; and,
a period of ten years, that should be the most active in his life,
after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime, certain
love-affairs, that came to nothing, as people say, have the strangest
importance: he crowds us with detail:--certain whimsical opinions,
cosmogonies, and religions of his own invention, and, especially his
relations to remarkable minds, and to critical epochs of thought:--these
he magnifies. His "Daily and Yearly Journal," his "Italian Travels,"
his "Campaign in France" and the historical part of his "Theory of
Colors," have the same interest. In the last, he rapidly notices Kepler,
Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire, etc.; and the charm of this
portion of the book consists in the simplest statement of the relation
betwixt these grandees of European scientific history and himself; the
mere drawing of the lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Bacon,
from Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the line is for the time and
person, a solution of the formidable problem, and gives pleasure when
Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any cost of invention comparable
to that of Iphigenia and Faust. This law giver of art is not an artist.
Was it that he knew too much, that his sight was microscopic, and
interfered with the just perspective, the seeing of the whole? He is
fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems, and of an encyclopaedia of
sentences. When he sits down to write a drama or a tale, he collects
and sorts his observations from a hundred sides, and combines them
into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate:
this he adds loosely, as letters, of the parties, leaves from their
journals, or the like. A great deal still is left that will not find
any place. This the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to: and,
hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his works, we have
volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, xenien, etc.
I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations
of self-culture. It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who
loved the world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries,
architecture, laboratories, savants, and leisure, were to be had, and
who did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and nakedness.
Socrates loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said, she