Humanity, as Voltaire said, had lost
its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth century was to recover
them.
its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth century was to recover
them.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v11 - Fro to Gre
6377 (#354) ###########################################
6376
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
society which we are able to extract from history, is that the
more intelligent and thoughtful of the race shall inherit the earth.
and have the best time, and that all others shall find life on the
whole dull and unprofitable. Socialism is an attempt to contra-
vene this law and insure a good time to everybody, independently
of character and talents; but Nature will see that she is not
frustrated or brought to naught, and I do not think educated
men should ever cease to call attention to this fact; that is, ever
cease to preach hopefulness, not to everybody, but to good people.
This is no bar to benevolence to bad people or any people; but
our first duty is loyalty to the great qualities of our kind, to the
great human virtues which raise the civilized man above the
savage.
There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable
as that of the United States. The chief advantage of democratic
government is, in a country like this, the enormous force it can
command on an emergency. By "emergency" I mean the sup-
pression of an insurrection or the conduct of a foreign war. But
it is not equally strong in the ordinary work of administration.
A good many governments, by far inferior to it in strength, fill
the offices, collect the taxes, administer justice, and do the work
of legislation with much greater efficiency. One cause of this
inefficiency is that the popular standard in such matters is low,
and that it resents dissatisfaction as an assumption of superiority.
When a man says these and those things ought not to be, his
neighbors, who find no fault with them, naturally accuse him of
giving himself airs. It seems as if he thought he knew more
than they did, and was trying to impose his plans on them. The
consequence is that in a land of pure equality, as this is, critics.
are always an unpopular class, and criticism is in some sense an
odious work. The only condemnation passed on the governmental
acts or systems is apt to come from the opposite party in the
form of what is called "arraignment," which generally consists in
wholesale abuse of the party in power, treating all their acts,
small or great, as due to folly or depravity, and all their public
men as either fools or knaves. Of course this makes but small
impression on the public mind. It is taken to indicate not so
much a desire to improve the public service as to get hold of the
offices, and has as a general rule but little effect. Parties lose
their hold on power through some conspicuously obnoxious acts or
failures; never, or very rarely, through the judgments passed on
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EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6377
them by hostile writers or orators. And yet nothing is more
necessary to successful government than abundant criticism from
sources not open to the suspicion of particular interest. There is
nothing which bad governments so much dislike and resent as
criticism, and have in past ages taken so much pains to put
down. In fact, a history of the civil liberty would consist
largely of an account of the resistance to criticism on the part
of rulers. One of the first acts of a successful tyranny or des-
potism is always the silencing of the press or the establishment
of a censorship.
Popular objection to criticism is however senseless, because
it is through criticism—that is, through discrimination between
two things, customs, or courses that the race has managed to
come out of the woods and lead a civilized life. The first man
who objected to the general nakedness, and advised his fellows to
put on clothes, was the first critic. Criticism of a high tariff
recommends a low tariff; criticism of monarchy recommends a
republic; criticism of vice recommends virtue. In fact, almost
every act of life, in the practice of a profession or the conduct
of a business, condemns one course and suggests another. The
word means judging, and judgment is the highest of the human
faculties, the one which most distinguishes us from the animals.
There is probably nothing from which the public service of
the country suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
cated class; that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
from the disinterested and competent sources. It is a very rare
thing for an educated man to say anything publicly about the
questions of the day. He is absorbed in science, or art, or liter-
ature, in the practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his
business; and if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is
a languid one. He is silent because he does not much care, or
because he does not wish to embarrass the administration or
"hurt the party," or because he does not feel that anything he
could say would make much difference. So that on the whole,
it is very rarely that the instructed opinion of the country is ever
heard on any subject. The report of the Bar Association on the
nomination of Maynard in New York was a remarkable excep-
tion to this rule. Some improvement in this direction has been
made by the appearance of the set of people known as the "Mug-
wumps," who are, in the main, men of cultivation. They have
been defined in various ways. They are known to the masses
―
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6378
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
mainly as "kickers"; that is, dissatisfied, querulous people, who
complain of everybody and cannot submit to party discipline. But
they are the only critics who do not criticize in the interest of
party, but simply in that of good government. They are a kind
of personage whom the bulk of the voters know nothing about
and find it difficult to understand, and consequently load with
ridicule and abuse. But their movement, though its visible rec-
ognizable effects on elections may be small, has done inestimable
service in slackening the bonds of party discipline, in making
the expression of open dissent from party programmes respect-
able and common, and in increasing the unreliable vote in large
States like New York. It is of the last importance that this un-
reliable vote-that is, the vote which party leaders cannot count
on with certainty-should be large in such States. The mere
fear of it prevents a great many excesses.
But in criticism one always has hard work in steering a
straight course between optimism and pessimism. These are the
Scylla and Charybdis of the critic's career. Almost every man
who thinks or speaks about public affairs is either an optimist or
a pessimist; which he is, depends a good deal on temperament,
but often on character. The political jobber or corruptionist is
almost always an optimist. So is the prosperous business man.
So is nearly every politician, because the optimist is nearly al-
ways the more popular of the two. As a general rule, people
like cheerful men and the promise of good times. The kill-joy
and bearer of bad news has always been an odious character.
But for the cultivated man there is no virtue in either optimism
or pessimism. Some people think it a duty to be optimistic, and
for some people it may be a duty; but one of the great uses of
education is to teach us to be neither one nor the other. In the
management of our personal affairs, we try to be neither one
nor the other. In business, a persistent and uproarious optimist
would certainly have poor credit. And why? Because in busi-
ness the trustworthy man, as everybody knows, is the man who
sees things as they are: and to see things as they are, without
glamor or illusion, is the first condition of worldly success. It
is absolutely essential in war, in finance, in law, in every field.
of human activity in which the future has to be thought of and
provided for. It is just as essential in politics. The only reason
why it is not thought as essential in politics is, the punishment
for failure or neglect comes in politics more slowly.
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EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6379
The pessimist has generally a bad name, but there is a good
Ideal to be said for him. To take a recent illustration, the man
who took pessimistic views of the silver movement was for nearly
twenty years under a cloud. This gloomy anticipation of 1873
was not realized until 1893. For a thousand years after Marcus
Aurelius, the pessimist, if I may use the expression, was "cock
of the walk. " He certainly has no reason to be ashamed of his
rôle in the Eastern world for a thousand years after the Moham-
medan Hegira. In Italy and Spain he has not needed to hang
his head since the Renaissance. In fact, if we take various na-
tions and long reaches of time, we shall find that the gloomy
man has been nearly as often justified by the course of events as
the cheerful one. Neither of them has any special claim to a
hearing on public affairs. A persistent optimist, although he may
be a most agreeable man in family life, is likely, in business or
politics, to be just as foolish and unbearable as a persistent pes-
simist. He is as much out of harmony with the order of nature.
The universe is not governed on optimistic any more than on
pessimistic principles. The best and wisest of men make their
mistakes and have their share of sorrow and sickness and losses.
So also the most happily situated nations must suffer from inter-
nal discord, the blunders of statesmen, and the madness of the
people. What Cato said in the Senate of the conditions of suc-
cess, "vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo, prosperê omnia cedunt,"
is as true to-day as it was two thousand years ago. We must
remember that though the optimist may be the pleasantest man to
have about us, he is the least likely to take precautions; that is,
the least likely to watch and work for success. We owe a great
deal of our slovenly legislation to his presence in large numbers
in Congress and the legislatures. The great suffering through
which we are now passing, in consequence of the persistence.
in our silver purchases, is the direct result of unreasoning opti-
mism. Its promoters disregarded the warnings of economists and
financiers because they believed that somehow, they did not
know how, the thing would come out right in the end. The
silver collapse, together with the Civil War over slavery, are
striking illustrations to occur in one century, of the fact that
if things come out right in the end, it is often after periods of
great suffering and disaster. Could people have foreseen how the
slavery controversy would end, what frantic efforts would have
been made for peaceful abolition! Could people have foreseen
## p. 6380 (#358) ###########################################
6380
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
the panic of last year, with its wide-spread disaster, what haste
would have been made to stop the silver purchases! And yet
the experience of mankind afforded abundant reason for antici-
pating both results.
This leads me to say that the reason why educated men should
try and keep a fair mental balance between both pessimism and
optimism, is that there has come over the world in the last
twenty-five or thirty years a very great change of opinion touch-
ing the relations of the government to the community. When
Europe settled down to peaceful work after the great wars of the
French Revolution, it was possessed with the idea that the free-
dom of the individual was all that was needed for public pros-
perity and private happiness. The old government interference.
with people's movements and doings was supposed to be the
reason why nations had not been happy in the past. This became
the creed, in this country, of the Democratic party, which came
into existence after the foundation of the federal government.
At the same time there grew up here the popular idea of the
American character, in which individualism was the most marked
trait. If you are not familiar with it in your own time, you may
remember it in the literature of the earlier half of the century.
The typical American was always the architect of his own for-
tunes. He sailed the seas and penetrated the forest, and built
cities and lynched the horse thieves, and fought the Indians and
dug the mines, without anybody's help or support. He had even
an ill-concealed contempt for regular troops, as men under con-
trol and discipline. He scorned government for any other pur-
poses than security and the administration of justice. This was
the kind of American that Tocqueville found here in 1833. He
says:
"The European often sees in the public functionaries simply force;
the American sees nothing but law. One may then say that in
America a man never obeys a man, or anything but justice and law.
Consequently he has formed of himself an opinion which is often
exaggerated, but is always salutary. He trusts without fear to his
own strength, which appears to him equal to anything. A private
individual conceives some sort of enterprise. Even if this enterprise
have some sort of connection with the public welfare, it never occurs
to him to address himself to the government in order to obtain its
aid. He makes his plan known, offers to carry it out, calls other
individuals to his aid, and struggles with all his might against any
25. 501
***
Ind
74
3.
2. 4
1. A PS
# 7 8 1 23 1
57
## p. 6381 (#359) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6381
obstacles there may be in his way. Often, without doubt, he suc-
ceeds less well than the State would in his place; but in the long
run the general result of individual enterprises far surpasses anything
the government could do. "
Now there is no doubt that if this type of character has not
passed away, it has been greatly modified; and it has been mod-
ified by two agencies- the "labor problem," as it is called, and
legislative protection to native industry. I am not going to make
an argument about the value of this protection in promoting
native industry, or about its value from the industrial point of
view. We may or we may not owe to it the individual progress
and prosperity of the United States. About that I do not pro-
pose to say anything. What I want to say is that the doctrine.
that it is a function of government, not simply to foster indus-
try in general, but to consider the case of every particular in-
dustry and give it the protection that it needs, could not be
preached and practiced for thirty years in a community like this,
without modifying the old American conception of the relation
of the government to the individual. It makes the government,
in a certain sense, a partner in every industrial enterprise, and
makes every Presidential election an affair of the pocket to every
miner and manufacturer and to his men; for the men have for
fully thirty years been told that the amount of their wages would
depend, to a certain extent at least, on the way the election
went. The notion that the government owes assistance to indi-
viduals in carrying on business and making a livelihood has
in fact, largely through the tariff discussions, permeated a very
large class of the community, and has materially changed what I
may call the American outlook. It has greatly reinforced among
the foreign-born population the socialistic ideas which many
bring here with them, of the powers and duties of the State
toward labor; for it is preached vehemently by the employing
class.
What makes this look the more serious is, that our political
and social manners are not adapted to it. In Europe, the State
is possessed of an administrative machine which has a finish,
efficacy, and permanence unknown here. Tocqueville comments
on its absence among us; and it is, as all the advocates of civil-
service reform know, very difficult to supply. All the agencies
of the government suffer from the imposition on them of what
I may call non-American duties. For instance, a custom-house
## p. 6382 (#360) ###########################################
6382
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
organized as a political machine was never intended to collect the
enormous sum of duties which must pass through its hands under
our tariff. A post-office whose master has to be changed every
four years to "placate" Tammany, or the anti-Snappers, or any
other body of politicians, was never intended to handle the huge
mass which American mails have now become. One of the
greatest objections to the income tax is the prying into people's
affairs which it involves. No man likes to tell what his income
is to every stranger, much less to a politician, which our col-
lectors are sure to be. Secrecy on the part of the collector is in
fact essential to reconcile people to it in England or Germany,
where it is firmly established; but our collectors sell their lists to
the newspapers in order to make the contributors pay up.
In all these things, we are trying to meet the burdens and
responsibilities of much older societies with the machinery of a
much earlier and simpler state of things. It is high time to halt
in this progress until our administrative system has been brought
up to the level even of our present requirements. It is quite
true that, with our system of State and federal constitutions
laying prohibitions on the Legislature and Congress, any great
extension of the sphere of government in our time seems very
unlikely. Yet the assumption by Congress, with the support of
the Supreme Court, of the power to issue paper money in time
of peace, the power to make prolonged purchases of a commod-
ity like silver, the power to impose an income tax, to execute
great public works, and to protect native industry, are powers.
large enough to effect a great change in the constitution of so-
ciety and in the distribution of wealth, such as, it is safe to say,
in the present state of human culture, no government ought to
have and exercise.
One hears every day from educated people some addition to
the number of things which "governments" ought to do, but for
which any government we have at present is totally unfit. One
listens to them with amazement, when looking at the material
of which our government is composed,- for the matter of that,
of which all governments are composed; for I suppose there is no
question that all legislative bodies in the world have in twenty
years run down in quality. The parliamentary system is appar-
ently failing to meet the demands of modern democratic society,
and is falling into some disrepute; but it would seem as if there
was at present just as little chance of a substitute of any kind as
## p. 6383 (#361) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6383
of the dethronement of universal suffrage. It will probably last
indefinitely, and be as good or as bad as its constituents make
it. But this probable extension of the powers and functions of
government makes more necessary than ever a free expression
of opinion, and especially of educated opinion. We may rail at
"mere talk" as much as we please, but the probability is that
the affairs of nations and of men will be more and more reg-
ulated by talk. The amount of talk which is now expended on
all subjects of human interest -and in "talk" I include contri-
butions to periodical literature-is something of which no previ-
ous age has had the smallest conception. Of course it varies
infinitely in quality. A very large proportion of it does no good
beyond relieving the feelings of the talker. Political philosophers
maintain, and with good reason, that one of its greatest uses is
keeping down discontent under popular government. It is un-
doubtedly true that it is an immense relief to a man with a
grievance to express his feelings about it in words, even if he
knows that his words will have no immediate effect. Self-love is
apt to prevent most men from thinking that anything they say
with passion or earnestness will utterly and finally fail. But still
it is safe to suppose that one half of the talk of the world on
subjects of general interest is waste. But the other half certainly
tells. We know this from the change in ideas from genera-
tion to generation. We see that opinions which at one time
everybody held became absurd in the course of half a century —
opinions about religion and morals and manners and government.
Nearly every man of my age can recall old opinions of his own
on subjects of general interest, which he once thought highly
respectable, and which he is now almost ashamed of having ever
held. He does not remember when he changed them, or why,
but somehow they have passed away from him.
In communities these changes are often very striking. The
transformation, for instance, of the England of Cromwell into the
England of Queen Anne, or of the New England of Cotton
Mather into the New England of Theodore Parker and Emerson,
was very extraordinary, but it would be very difficult to say in
detail what brought it about or when it began. Lecky has some
curious observations in his "History of Rationalism" on these
silent changes in new beliefs, apropos of the disappearance of the
belief in witchcraft. Nobody could say what had swept it away;
but it appeared that in a certain year people were ready to burn
-
## p. 6384 (#362) ###########################################
6384
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
old women as witches, and a few years later were ready to laugh
at or pity any one who thought old women could be witches.
"At one period," says he, "we find every one disposed to believe
in witches; at a later period we find this predisposition has
silently passed away. " The belief in witchcraft may perhaps be
considered a somewhat violent illustration, like the change in
public opinion about slavery in this country. But there can be
no doubt that it is talk somebody's, anybody's, everybody's talk
-by which these changes are wrought, by which each generation
comes to feel and think differently from its predecessor.
-
No one ever talks freely about anything without contributing
something, let it be ever so little, to the unseen forces which carry
the race on to its final destiny. Even if he does not make a posi-
tive impression, he counteracts or modifies some other impression,
or sets in motion some train of ideas in some one else, which
helps to change the face of the world. So I shall, in disregard
of the great laudation of silence which filled the earth in the
days of Carlyle, say that one of the functions of an educated man
is to talk; and of course he should try to talk wisely.
## p. 6384 (#363) ###########################################
## p. 6384 (#364) ###########################################
THE GOETHE HOUSE
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## p. 6384 (#365) ###########################################
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## p. 6385 (#367) ###########################################
6385
GOETHE
(1749-1832)
BY EDWARD DOWDEN
OHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main
on August 28th, 1749, and died at Weimar on March 22d,
1832. His great life, extending over upwards of fourscore
years, makes him a man of the eighteenth century and also of the nine-
teenth. He belongs not only to German but to European literature.
And in the history of European literature his position is that of suc-
cessor to Voltaire and Rousseau.
Humanity, as Voltaire said, had lost
its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth century was to recover
them. Under all Voltaire's zeal for destruction in matters of religious
belief lay a positive faith and a creative sentiment,- a faith in human
intellect and the sentiment of social justice. What indefatigable toil!
what indefatigable play! Surely it was not all to establish a nega-
tion. Voltaire poured a gay yet bitter élan into the intellectual move-
ment of his time. Yet amid his various efforts for humanity he
wanted love; he wanted reverence. And although a positive tend-
ency underlies his achievements, we are warranted in repeating the
common sentence, that upon the whole he destroyed more than he
built up.
Voltaire fought to enfranchise the understanding. Rousseau
dreamed, brooded, suffered, to emancipate the heart. A wave of pas-
sion, or at least of sentiment, swept over Europe with the Nouvelle
Héloise,' the 'Émile,' the 'Confessions. It was Rousseau, exclaims
Byron, who "threw enchantment over passion," who "knew how to
make madness beautiful. " Such an emancipation of the heart was felt,
in the eighteenth century, to be a blessed deliverance from the
material interests and the eager yet too arid speculation of the age.
But Byron in that same passage of Childe Harold' names Rousseau
"the self-torturing sophist. " And a sophist Rousseau was. His intel-
lect fed upon fictions, and dangerous fictions,-fictions respecting
nature, respecting the individual man, respecting human society.
Therefore his intellect failed to illuminate, clarify, tranquilize his
heart. His emotions were turbid, restless, and lacking in sanity.
Here then were Goethe's two great predecessors: one a most viva-
cious intelligence, the other a brooding sensibility; one aiming at an
emancipation of the understanding, but deficient in reverence and in
XI-400
## p. 6386 (#368) ###########################################
6386
GOETHE
love; the other aiming at an emancipation of the affections, but defi-
cient in sanity of thought. In what relation stood Goethe to these
great forces of the eighteenth century?
In his old age Goethe, speaking of Voltaire, uses the words a
universal source of light. " But as a young man he was repelled by
"the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and his perversion of so many
worthy subjects. " "He would never have done," says Goethe, "with
degrading religion and the sacred books, for the sake of injuring
priestcraft, as they called it. " Goethe, indeed, did not deny a use to
the spirit of negation. Mephistopheles lives and works. Yet he lives
and works as the unwilling servant of the Lord, and the service he
renders is to provoke men from indolence to activity.
Into the influence of Rousseau, on the contrary, and into the gen-
eral movement of feeling to which Rousseau belonged, Goethe in his
youth was caught, almost inevitably; and he abandoned himself to it
for a time, it might seem without restraint.
Yet Goethe differed from Rousseau as profoundly as he differed
from Voltaire. Rousseau's undisciplined sensibility, morbidly excited
by the harshness or imagined harshness of his fellows, by bodily tor-
ment, by broodings in solitude, became at last one quivering mass of
disease.
"No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. " What a con-
trast to the closing scenes of Goethe's life in that house of his, like
a modest temple of the Muses, listening to Plutarch read aloud by
his daughter-in-law, or serenely active, "ohne Hast aber ohne Rast»
(without haste, but without rest), in widening his sympathies with
men or enlarging his knowledge of nature.
How was this? Why did the ways part so widely for Rousseau
and for Goethe ?
The young creator of 'Werther' may seem to have started on his
career as a German Rousseau. In reality, Werther' expressed only
a fragment of Goethe's total self. A reserve force of will and an in-
tellect growing daily in clearness and in energy would not permit
him to end as Rousseau ended. In Götz von Berlichingen' there
goes up a cry for freedom; it presents the more masculine side of
that spirit of revolt from the bonds of the eighteenth century, that
"return to nature," which is presented in its more feminine aspects
by Werther. ' But by degrees it became evident to Goethe that the
only true ideal of freedom is a liberation not of the passions, not of
the intellect, but of the whole man; that this involves a conciliation
of all the powers and faculties within us; and that such a concilia-
tion can be effected only by degrees, and by steadfast toil.
And so we find him willing during ten years at Weimar to under-
take work which might appear to be fatal to the development of his
genius. To reform army administration, make good roads, work the
## p. 6387 (#369) ###########################################
GOETHE
6387
mines with energetic intelligence, restore the finances to order,- was
this fit employment for one born to be a poet? Except a few lyrics
and the prose Iphigenie,' these years produced no literary work of
importance; yet Goethe himself speaks of them as his "zweite Schrift-
stellerepoche,❞—his second epoch as a writer. They were needful to
make him a master in the art of life, needful to put him into posses-
sion of all his powers. Men of genius are quick growers; but men of
the highest genius, which includes the wisdom of human life, are not
speedily ripe. Goethe had entered literature early; he had stormed
the avenues. Now at six-and-twenty he was a chief figure in Ger-
man, even in European, literature; and from twenty-six to thirty-
seven he published, we may say nothing. But though he ceased to
astonish the world, he was well employed in widening the basis of
his existence; in organizing his faculties; in conciliating passions, in-
tellect, and will; in applying his mind to the real world; in endeavor-
ing to comprehend it aright; in testing and training his powers by
practical activity.
A time came when he felt that his will and skill were mature;
that he was no longer an apprentice in the art of living, but a master
craftsman. Tasks that had grown irksome and were felt to be a dis-
traction from higher duties, he now abandoned. Goethe fled for a
time to Italy, there to receive his degree in the high school of life,
and to start upon a course of more advanced studies. Thenceforward
until his closing days the record is one of almost uninterrupted labor
in his proper fields of literature, art, and science. "In Rome," he
wrote, "I have for the first time found myself, for the first time come
into harmony with myself, and grown happy and rational. " He had
found himself, because his passions and his intellect now co-operated;
his pursuit of truth had all the ardor of a first love; his pursuit of
beauty was not a fantastic chase, but was subject to rational law; and
his effort after truth and his effort after beauty were alike supported
by an adult will.
His task, regarded as a whole, was to do over again the work
of the Renascence. But whereas the Renascence had been a large
national or European movement, advancing towards its ends partly
through popular passions and a new enthusiasm, the work which
Goethe accomplished was more an affair of intelligence, criticism,
conscious self-direction. It was less of a flood sweeping away old
dikes and dams, and more of a dawn quietly and gradually drawing
back the borders of darkness and widening the skirts of light. A
completely developed human being, for the uses of the world,- this
was the ideal in which Goethe's thoughts centred, and towards which
his most important writings constantly tend. A completely developed
State or commonwealth should follow, as an ideal arising out of the
## p. 6388 (#370) ###########################################
6388
GOETHE
needs and demands of a complete individual. Goethe knew that
growth comes not by self-observation and self-analysis, but by exer-
cise. Therefore he turned himself and would turn his disciples to
action, to the objective world; and in order that this action may be
profitable, it must be definite and within a limited sphere. He
preaches self-renunciation; but the self-renunciation he commends is
not self-mortification; it is the active self-abandonment of devotion to
our appropriate work. Such is the teaching of Wilhelm Meister':
it traces the progress of a youth far from extraordinary, yet having
within him the capacity for growth, progress through a thousand
errors and illusions, from splendid dreams to modest reality. Life is
discovered by Wilhelm to be a difficult piece of scholarship. The
cry for freedom in Götz,' the limitless sigh of passion heard in
'Werther,' are heard no more. If freedom is to be attained, it can
only be through obedience; if we are to "return to nature," it cannot
be in Rousseau's way but through a wise art of living, an art not at
odds with nature, but its complement:-
"This is an art which does mend nature - but
The art itself is nature. »
If we ask,- for this, after all, is the capital question of criticism. —
What has Goethe done to make us better? the answer is: He has
made each of us aspire and endeavor to be no fragment of manhood,
but a man; he has taught us that to squander ourselves in vain
desires is the road to spiritual poverty; that to discover our appro-
priate work, and to embody our passion in such work, is the way to
true wealth; that such passion and such toil must be not servile, but
glad and free; that the use of our intelligence is not chiefly to
destroy, but to guide our activity in construction; and that in doing
our best work we incorporate ourselves in the best possible way in
the life of our fellows. Such lessons may seem obvious; but they
had not been taught by Goethe's great predecessors, Voltaire and
Rousseau. Goethe, unlike Voltaire, inculcates reverence and love;
unlike Rousseau, he teaches us to see objects clearly as they are, he
trains us to sanity. And Europe needed sanity in the days of Revo-
lution and in the days which followed of Reaction.
Sanity for the imagination Goethe found in classical art. The
young leader of the Romantic revival in Germany resigned his
leadership; he seemed to his contemporaries to have lost the fire.
and impulse of his youth; his work was found cold and formal. A
great change had indeed taken place within him; but his ardor had
only grown steadier and stronger, extending now to every part of his
complex nature. The change was a transition from what is merely
inward and personal to what is outward and general. Goethe cared
## p. 6389 (#371) ###########################################
GOETHE
6389
less than formerly to fling out his private passions, and cared more
to comprehend the world and human life and to interpret these
through art. He did not go into bondage under the authority of the
ancients; but he found their methods right, and he endeavored to
work as they had worked. For a time the reaction carried him too
far: in seeking for what is general, he sometimes passed on to what
is abstract, and so was forced into the error of offering symbols to
represent these abstractions, instead of bodying forth his ideas in
imaginative creations. But in the noble drama of 'Iphigenie,' in the
epic-idyll of 'Hermann und Dorothea,' and in many of the ballads
written during his period of close companionship with Schiller, we
have examples of art at once modern in sentiment and classical in
method.
Goethe's faith in the methods of classical art never passed away,
but his narrow exclusiveness yielded. He became, with certain guid-
ing principles which served as a control, a great eclectic, appropriat-
ing to his own uses whatever he perceived to be excellent. As in
'Hermann und Dorothea' he unites the influences of Greek art with
true German feeling, so in his collection of short lyrics, the West-
Östlicher Divan' (West-Eastern Divan), he brings together the genius
of the Orient and that of the Western world, and sheds over both
the spiritual illumination of the wisdom of his elder years. Gradu-
ally his creative powers waned, but he was still interested in all-
except perhaps politics-that can concern the mind; he was still the
greatest of critics, entering with his intelligence into everything and
understanding everything, as nearly universal in his sympathies as a
human mind can be. The Goethe of these elder years is seen to
most advantage in the 'Conversations with Eckermann. '
The most invulnerable of Goethe's writings are his lyrical poems;
against the best of these, criticism can allege nothing. They need no
interpreter. But the reader who studies them in chronological order
will observe that as time went on, the lyric which is a spontaneous
jet of feeling is replaced by the lyric in which there is constructive
art and considerate evolution. In the poems of the West-Östlicher
Divan' Goethe returns to the lyric of spontaneity, but their inspira-
tion is rather that of a gracious wisdom, at once serious and playful,
than of passion.
His period of romance and sentiment is best represented by 'The
Sorrows of Werther. ' His adult wisdom of life is found most abun-
dantly in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. ' The world has long
since agreed that if Goethe is to be represented by a single work, it
shall be by 'Faust. ' And even those who perceive that 'Faust' is
best understood by being taken along with Goethe's other writings--
his early 'Prometheus,' his autobiography, his travels in Italy, his
## p. 6390 (#372) ###########################################
6390
GOETHE
classical dramas, his scientific studies, his work as a critic, his vast
correspondence, his conversations in old age- cannot quarrel with
the judgment of the world.
'Faust,' if we include under that name the First and the Second
Parts, is the work of Goethe's whole life. Begun and even far ad-
vanced in early manhood, it was taken up again in his midmost
years, and was completed with a faltering hand in the closing season
of his old age.
What it loses in unity, or at least in harmonious
development as a piece of art, it gains in autobiographical interest.
All his works, Goethe said, constituted a great confession. More than
any other of his writings, Faust' is the confession of his life.
There are two ways in which a reader may deal with 'Faust. '
He may choose for his own delight a fragment, detach it and disre-
gard the rest; he may view this fragment, if he pleases, as a whole,
as a rounded work of art. Such a reader will refuse to pass beyond
the First Part of the vast encyclopædic poem. To do this is legiti-
mate. The earliest form in which we possess the drama, that of the
transcript made by Fräulein von Göchhausen, is a tragedy which
might be named 'The Tragedy of Margaret. ' Possibilities of further
development lay in the subject, were indeed required by the subject,
and Goethe had probably already conceived certain of them; yet the
stadium in the progress of Faust's history included in 'The Tragedy
of Margaret' had a unity in itself. But a reader may approach
'Faust' otherwise; he may view it as expressing the complete mind
of Goethe on some of the deepest problems of human life. Viewing
it thus, he must accept the whole work as Goethe has given it; he
must hold in abeyance, at least for a time, his own particular likings
and dislikes. While keeping his mind open to all the poetry of Faust,
he will soon discover that here is something more than a poem. It
may be unfortunate for the work of art that it belongs, certainly in
its execution, possibly even in the growth of its conception, to far
sundered periods of its author's career, when his feelings respecting
art were different, when his capacity for rendering his ideas was now
more and now less adequate. Such a reader, however, would part
with nothing: in what is admirable he finds the master's hand; in
what is feeble he discovers the same hand, but faltering, and pathetic
in its infirmity. He is interested in 'Faust' not solely or chiefly as
"The Tragedy of Margaret': he finds in it the intellect, the charac-
ter, the life of Goethe; it is a repository of the deepest thoughts and
feelings concerning human existence of a wise seer, a repository in
which he laid by those thoughts and feelings during sixty years of
his mortal wayfaring.
-
From early manhood to extreme old age 'Faust' was with Goethe,
receiving now and again, in Frankfort, in Weimar, in Rome, some
## p. 6391 (#373) ###########################################
GOETHE
6391
new accession. We can distinguish the strata or formations of youth,
of manhood, and of the closing years. We recognize by their diver-
sities of style those parts which were written when creation was
swift and almost involuntary, a passion and a joy, and those parts
through which Goethe labored at an old man's pace, accomplishing
to-day a hand's-breadth, to-morrow perhaps less, and binding blank
pages into his manuscript, that the sight of the gaps might irritate
him to produce. What unity can such a work possess, except that
which comes from the fact that it all proceeded from a single mind,
and that some main threads of thought-for it would be rash to
speak of a ground idea-run through the several parts and bind
them together? 'Faust' has not the unity of a lake whose circuit
the eye can contemplate, a crystal set among the hills. Its unity is
that of a river, rising far away in mountain solitudes, winding below
many a mirrored cliff, passing the habitations of men, temple and
mart, fields of rural toil and fields of war, reaching it may be dull
levels, and forgetting the bright speed it had, until at last the dash of
waves is heard, and its course is accomplished; but from first to last
one stream, proceeding from a single source. Tourists may pick out
a picturesque fragment of its wanderings, and this is well; but per-
haps it is better to find the poetry of its entire career, from its cloudy
cradle to the flats where it loses itself in the ocean.
one.
The first part of 'Faust' is itself the work of more periods than
The original conception may belong to Goethe's student days
at Strassburg. He had grown weary of the four Faculties, - alas,
even of theology; he had known a maiden as fair and sweet and
simple as Gretchen, and he had left her widowed of her first love;
and there in Strassburg was the presence of that old Cathedral, which
inspired so terrible a scene in the 'Faust. ' From Strassburg he
returned to Frankfort, and no moments of his career of authorship
were more fruitful than these which preceded the first Weimar years.
It was in the heart of the Storm and Stress; it was the time of
'Götz' and 'Mahomet' and the Wandering Jew' and 'Werther'
and Prometheus. ' Here in Faust was another and a nobler Werther
seeking the infinite; here was another Prometheus, a Titan shackled
yet unsubduable. By Goethe's twenty-sixth year the chief portions
of the 'Faust, a Fragment,' published when he was forty-one, had
been written. But two scenes were added in Rome,- one of these
strange in its fantasy, the Witches' Kitchen,—as if to show that the
poet of the North was not quite enslaved by the beauty of classic
art. It was in the last decade of the eighteenth century that
Schiller succeeded in persuading Goethe to open his Faust papers,
and try to recover the threads of his design. Not until 1808, Goethe's
fifty-ninth year, was the First Part published as we now possess it.
## p. 6392 (#374) ###########################################
6392
GOETHE
It is therefore incorrect to speak of this Part as the work of the
author's youth; even here a series of strata belonging to different
periods can be distinguished, and critics have contended that even in
this Part may be discovered two schemes or plans not wholly in
harmony each with the other.
The first Fragment was written, as has been said, in the spirit of
the Storm and Stress. Goethe was weary of the four Faculties. The
magic work of the time which was to restore vigor and joy to men
was Nature. This is the theme of the opening scene of 'Faust. '
Among old instruments and dusty folios and ancestral lumber and
brute skeletons, away from Nature and her living founts of inspira-
tion, the old scholar has found neither joy nor true knowledge. He
opens the book of Nostradamus and gazes upon the sign of the Macro-
cosm; here in a symbol he beholds the life and energy of nature:-
"Where shall I grasp thee, infinite Nature, where?
Ye breasts, ye fountains of all life whereon
Hang heaven and earth. »
--
He cannot grasp them; and then turning from the great Cosmos, he
thinks he may at least dare to invoke the spirit of our own mother
planet Earth. But to Faust, with eyes bleared with the dust of the
study, to Faust, living in his own speculations or in dogmatic sys-
tems, the aspect of the Earth Spirit- a living fire. is terrible. He
falls back upon himself almost despairing, when the famulus Wagner
enters. What Werner was to the idealist Wilhelm Meister, Wagner is
to the idealist Faust: the mere scraping together of a little hoard of
barren facts contents Wagner; such grief, such despair as Faust's, are
for this Philistine of learning impossible. And then the fragment of
1790 passes on to Mephistopheles. Whether or not Goethe found the
features of his critical demon in Herder (as Grimm supposes), and
afterwards united these to the more pronounced likeness in his friend
Mephistopheles Merck, matters little. Whether Herder and Merck had
been present or not, Goethe would have found Mephistopheles in his
own heart. For the contrast between the idealist Faust and the real-
ist Mephistopheles exists in some form or other in almost every great
creation of Goethe. It is the contrast between Werther and Albert,
between Tasso and Antonio, between Edward and the Captain. Some-
times the nobler spirit of worldliness is dwelt on, as in the case of
Antonio; sometimes the cold, hard, cynical side, as in the case of
Mephistopheles. The theme of Faust as originally conceived was the
turning of an idealist from his own private thoughts and dreams to
the real world; from all that is unnatural,-systems, speculations, bar-
ren knowledge,- to nature and the founts of life; from the solitary
cell to the company of men; to action, beauty, life, and love. If he
―
## p. 6393 (#375) ###########################################
GOETHE
6393
can really succeed in achieving this wisely and well, Faust is saved.
He is delivered from solitude, the inane of speculation, the vagueness
of idealism, and made one with the band of his toiling fellows. But
to accompany him there is the spirit of base worldliness, the realist,
the cynic, who sees the meaner side of all that is actual, who if pos
sible will seduce Faust into accepting the world apart from that ele-
vating spirit which ennobles actual life, who will try to baffle and
degrade Faust by degrading all that he now seeks,-action and beauty
and life and love.
It is Goethe himself who is at odds with himself,- the realist
Goethe set over against the idealist Goethe; and Mephistopheles is
the base realist, the cynic whose endeavor is to mar the union of
high poetry and high prose in human life, which union of high poetry
with high prose Goethe always looked upon as the true condition of
man's activity. In the Prologue in Heaven, written when Schiller
had persuaded Goethe to take up the threads of his play, the Lord
speaks of Faust as his servant. Mephistopheles wagers that he will
seduce Faust from his allegiance to the Highest. The Lord does not
wager; he knows:-
"Though now he serve me in a maze of doubt,
Yet I will lead him soon where all is clear;
The gardener knows, when first the bushes sprout,
That bloom and fruit will deck the riper year. »
These vague passionate longings of Faust after truth and reality
and life and love are not evil; they are good: they are as yet indeed
but the sprouting of the immature leaf and bud, but the Lord sees
in these the fruit that is to be. Therefore let Mephistopheles, the
spirit of negation, try his worst, and at the last discover how an
earnest striver's ways are justified by God. Faust may wander, err,
fall, grievously offend,-"as long as man lives, man errs;" but for
him who ever strives upward, through all his errors, there is redemp-
tion in the end.
The poem belongs to its epoch. Faust is the idealist, Mephis-
topheles is the realist, of the eighteenth century. Faust aspires to
nature and freedom like one who had drunk deeply of Rousseau.
Mephistopheles speaks like a degraded disciple of Voltaire, who has
lost his master's positive faith in the human reason. Goethe can ac-
cept as his own neither the position of Voltaire nor that of Rous-
seau; but actually he started in life as an antagonist of Voltaire and
a disciple of Rousseau, and in like manner his Faust starts on his
career as one who longs for a "return to nature. " While from merely
negative criticism nothing virtuous can be born, the vague longings
of one who loves and hopes promise measureless good.
## p. 6394 (#376) ###########################################
6394
GOETHE
Faust's vast aspirations, then, are not sinful; they only need to be
limited and directed to suitable ends. It is as God's servant that he
goes forth with the Demon from his study to the world. And Meph-
istopheles's first attempt to degrade Faust is a failure. In the orgy
of Auerbach's cellar, while the boisterous young bloods clash their
glasses, the old scholar sits silent, isolated, ashamed. It is only by
infecting his blood with the witch's poison that Mephistopheles can
lay hold of the spirit of Faust even for a time; and had he not seen
in the mirror that vision of Helena, whom he rightly loves, and whom
indeed he needs, he could not have put to his lips the filthy brewage
of the witch. But now indeed he is snared; the poison rages in his
veins; for one hour he is transformed into what the world basely calls
a man of pleasure. Yet Faust is not wholly lost: his better self, the
untrained, untamed idealist, begins to reassert its power; the fumes
of the poison dissipate themselves. Guilty though he be, his love of
Margaret is not what Mephistopheles requires that it should be: it is
not calculating, egoistic, cynical, nor dull, easeful, and lethargic. It
is not the crime of an experienced worldling nor of a dull, low liver:
it is the crime of one whose unwise heart and untaught imagination
delude him; and therefore though his fall be deep, it is not fatal.
The wrong he has wrought may be blind and terrible as that of
Othello to Desdemona; but it is not the serpentine stinging of an
Iago or a Mephistopheles.
So through anguish and remorse Faust is doing off the swathe-
bands of delusion, learning to master his will, learning his own heart,
learning the meaning of existence: he does not part from his ideal
self, his high aspirations, his ardent hopes; he is rather transforming
these into realities; he is advancing from dreams to facts, so that in
the end, when his life becomes a lofty prose, it may be interpene-
trated by a noble poetry.
It were long to trace the history of Faust through the ever puri-
fying and ascending scale of energies exhibited in the Second Part
of the drama. Affairs of State, science, art, war-all that Goethe
had known by experience-appear in this encyclopædic poem. One
word, however, must be said respecting the 'Helena. ' It is a mistake
to view this central portion of the Second Part as solely or chiefly
an allegory of the wedlock of classic and romantic art. As science is
shown to form a needful part of Faust's turning from the inane of
metaphysics to the positive world, so from the Greek spirit he learns
sanity and strength; the deliverance of the ideal man in Faust is
aided by the beauty and the healthfulness of classic art. Through
beauty, as Schiller tried to show in his letters on 'Esthetic Culture,'
we attain to freedom. Faust is not an artist, but a man; Helena is
but one of the spirits whose influence is needed to make him real
## p. 6395 (#377) ###########################################
GOETHE
6395
and elevated. It is she who qualifies him for achieving practical
work in a high, ideal spirit.
The Fourth Act of the Second Part is wholly concerned with prac-
tical work. What is this which engages the student of the metaphysic
cell, who had gone through the four Faculties, and is now once again
grown old? What is this? Only well-defined and useful activity. He
has rescued some acres of arable land from the rage of the bar-
ren sea.
But Faust is not yet wholly delivered from evil; his activity is use-
ful, indeed, but it lacks the finer grace of charity. He commissions
Mephistopheles to destroy the cottage of old Philemon and Baucis,
which stands in the way of his territorial improvements. It is the
last crime of the unregenerate will. The four gray women-Care
and Blame and Want and Crime-now assail him; but there is vir-
tue in him to the last. However it may be with himself, grant only
that ages hence the children of men, free and happy, may dwell upon
the soil which he has saved for their place of labor and of love,-
grant but this, and even in the anticipation of it he is made pos-
sessor of the highest bliss.
6376
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
society which we are able to extract from history, is that the
more intelligent and thoughtful of the race shall inherit the earth.
and have the best time, and that all others shall find life on the
whole dull and unprofitable. Socialism is an attempt to contra-
vene this law and insure a good time to everybody, independently
of character and talents; but Nature will see that she is not
frustrated or brought to naught, and I do not think educated
men should ever cease to call attention to this fact; that is, ever
cease to preach hopefulness, not to everybody, but to good people.
This is no bar to benevolence to bad people or any people; but
our first duty is loyalty to the great qualities of our kind, to the
great human virtues which raise the civilized man above the
savage.
There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable
as that of the United States. The chief advantage of democratic
government is, in a country like this, the enormous force it can
command on an emergency. By "emergency" I mean the sup-
pression of an insurrection or the conduct of a foreign war. But
it is not equally strong in the ordinary work of administration.
A good many governments, by far inferior to it in strength, fill
the offices, collect the taxes, administer justice, and do the work
of legislation with much greater efficiency. One cause of this
inefficiency is that the popular standard in such matters is low,
and that it resents dissatisfaction as an assumption of superiority.
When a man says these and those things ought not to be, his
neighbors, who find no fault with them, naturally accuse him of
giving himself airs. It seems as if he thought he knew more
than they did, and was trying to impose his plans on them. The
consequence is that in a land of pure equality, as this is, critics.
are always an unpopular class, and criticism is in some sense an
odious work. The only condemnation passed on the governmental
acts or systems is apt to come from the opposite party in the
form of what is called "arraignment," which generally consists in
wholesale abuse of the party in power, treating all their acts,
small or great, as due to folly or depravity, and all their public
men as either fools or knaves. Of course this makes but small
impression on the public mind. It is taken to indicate not so
much a desire to improve the public service as to get hold of the
offices, and has as a general rule but little effect. Parties lose
their hold on power through some conspicuously obnoxious acts or
failures; never, or very rarely, through the judgments passed on
## p. 6377 (#355) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6377
them by hostile writers or orators. And yet nothing is more
necessary to successful government than abundant criticism from
sources not open to the suspicion of particular interest. There is
nothing which bad governments so much dislike and resent as
criticism, and have in past ages taken so much pains to put
down. In fact, a history of the civil liberty would consist
largely of an account of the resistance to criticism on the part
of rulers. One of the first acts of a successful tyranny or des-
potism is always the silencing of the press or the establishment
of a censorship.
Popular objection to criticism is however senseless, because
it is through criticism—that is, through discrimination between
two things, customs, or courses that the race has managed to
come out of the woods and lead a civilized life. The first man
who objected to the general nakedness, and advised his fellows to
put on clothes, was the first critic. Criticism of a high tariff
recommends a low tariff; criticism of monarchy recommends a
republic; criticism of vice recommends virtue. In fact, almost
every act of life, in the practice of a profession or the conduct
of a business, condemns one course and suggests another. The
word means judging, and judgment is the highest of the human
faculties, the one which most distinguishes us from the animals.
There is probably nothing from which the public service of
the country suffers more to-day than the silence of its edu-
cated class; that is, the small amount of criticism which comes
from the disinterested and competent sources. It is a very rare
thing for an educated man to say anything publicly about the
questions of the day. He is absorbed in science, or art, or liter-
ature, in the practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his
business; and if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is
a languid one. He is silent because he does not much care, or
because he does not wish to embarrass the administration or
"hurt the party," or because he does not feel that anything he
could say would make much difference. So that on the whole,
it is very rarely that the instructed opinion of the country is ever
heard on any subject. The report of the Bar Association on the
nomination of Maynard in New York was a remarkable excep-
tion to this rule. Some improvement in this direction has been
made by the appearance of the set of people known as the "Mug-
wumps," who are, in the main, men of cultivation. They have
been defined in various ways. They are known to the masses
―
## p. 6378 (#356) ###########################################
6378
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
mainly as "kickers"; that is, dissatisfied, querulous people, who
complain of everybody and cannot submit to party discipline. But
they are the only critics who do not criticize in the interest of
party, but simply in that of good government. They are a kind
of personage whom the bulk of the voters know nothing about
and find it difficult to understand, and consequently load with
ridicule and abuse. But their movement, though its visible rec-
ognizable effects on elections may be small, has done inestimable
service in slackening the bonds of party discipline, in making
the expression of open dissent from party programmes respect-
able and common, and in increasing the unreliable vote in large
States like New York. It is of the last importance that this un-
reliable vote-that is, the vote which party leaders cannot count
on with certainty-should be large in such States. The mere
fear of it prevents a great many excesses.
But in criticism one always has hard work in steering a
straight course between optimism and pessimism. These are the
Scylla and Charybdis of the critic's career. Almost every man
who thinks or speaks about public affairs is either an optimist or
a pessimist; which he is, depends a good deal on temperament,
but often on character. The political jobber or corruptionist is
almost always an optimist. So is the prosperous business man.
So is nearly every politician, because the optimist is nearly al-
ways the more popular of the two. As a general rule, people
like cheerful men and the promise of good times. The kill-joy
and bearer of bad news has always been an odious character.
But for the cultivated man there is no virtue in either optimism
or pessimism. Some people think it a duty to be optimistic, and
for some people it may be a duty; but one of the great uses of
education is to teach us to be neither one nor the other. In the
management of our personal affairs, we try to be neither one
nor the other. In business, a persistent and uproarious optimist
would certainly have poor credit. And why? Because in busi-
ness the trustworthy man, as everybody knows, is the man who
sees things as they are: and to see things as they are, without
glamor or illusion, is the first condition of worldly success. It
is absolutely essential in war, in finance, in law, in every field.
of human activity in which the future has to be thought of and
provided for. It is just as essential in politics. The only reason
why it is not thought as essential in politics is, the punishment
for failure or neglect comes in politics more slowly.
## p. 6379 (#357) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6379
The pessimist has generally a bad name, but there is a good
Ideal to be said for him. To take a recent illustration, the man
who took pessimistic views of the silver movement was for nearly
twenty years under a cloud. This gloomy anticipation of 1873
was not realized until 1893. For a thousand years after Marcus
Aurelius, the pessimist, if I may use the expression, was "cock
of the walk. " He certainly has no reason to be ashamed of his
rôle in the Eastern world for a thousand years after the Moham-
medan Hegira. In Italy and Spain he has not needed to hang
his head since the Renaissance. In fact, if we take various na-
tions and long reaches of time, we shall find that the gloomy
man has been nearly as often justified by the course of events as
the cheerful one. Neither of them has any special claim to a
hearing on public affairs. A persistent optimist, although he may
be a most agreeable man in family life, is likely, in business or
politics, to be just as foolish and unbearable as a persistent pes-
simist. He is as much out of harmony with the order of nature.
The universe is not governed on optimistic any more than on
pessimistic principles. The best and wisest of men make their
mistakes and have their share of sorrow and sickness and losses.
So also the most happily situated nations must suffer from inter-
nal discord, the blunders of statesmen, and the madness of the
people. What Cato said in the Senate of the conditions of suc-
cess, "vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo, prosperê omnia cedunt,"
is as true to-day as it was two thousand years ago. We must
remember that though the optimist may be the pleasantest man to
have about us, he is the least likely to take precautions; that is,
the least likely to watch and work for success. We owe a great
deal of our slovenly legislation to his presence in large numbers
in Congress and the legislatures. The great suffering through
which we are now passing, in consequence of the persistence.
in our silver purchases, is the direct result of unreasoning opti-
mism. Its promoters disregarded the warnings of economists and
financiers because they believed that somehow, they did not
know how, the thing would come out right in the end. The
silver collapse, together with the Civil War over slavery, are
striking illustrations to occur in one century, of the fact that
if things come out right in the end, it is often after periods of
great suffering and disaster. Could people have foreseen how the
slavery controversy would end, what frantic efforts would have
been made for peaceful abolition! Could people have foreseen
## p. 6380 (#358) ###########################################
6380
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
the panic of last year, with its wide-spread disaster, what haste
would have been made to stop the silver purchases! And yet
the experience of mankind afforded abundant reason for antici-
pating both results.
This leads me to say that the reason why educated men should
try and keep a fair mental balance between both pessimism and
optimism, is that there has come over the world in the last
twenty-five or thirty years a very great change of opinion touch-
ing the relations of the government to the community. When
Europe settled down to peaceful work after the great wars of the
French Revolution, it was possessed with the idea that the free-
dom of the individual was all that was needed for public pros-
perity and private happiness. The old government interference.
with people's movements and doings was supposed to be the
reason why nations had not been happy in the past. This became
the creed, in this country, of the Democratic party, which came
into existence after the foundation of the federal government.
At the same time there grew up here the popular idea of the
American character, in which individualism was the most marked
trait. If you are not familiar with it in your own time, you may
remember it in the literature of the earlier half of the century.
The typical American was always the architect of his own for-
tunes. He sailed the seas and penetrated the forest, and built
cities and lynched the horse thieves, and fought the Indians and
dug the mines, without anybody's help or support. He had even
an ill-concealed contempt for regular troops, as men under con-
trol and discipline. He scorned government for any other pur-
poses than security and the administration of justice. This was
the kind of American that Tocqueville found here in 1833. He
says:
"The European often sees in the public functionaries simply force;
the American sees nothing but law. One may then say that in
America a man never obeys a man, or anything but justice and law.
Consequently he has formed of himself an opinion which is often
exaggerated, but is always salutary. He trusts without fear to his
own strength, which appears to him equal to anything. A private
individual conceives some sort of enterprise. Even if this enterprise
have some sort of connection with the public welfare, it never occurs
to him to address himself to the government in order to obtain its
aid. He makes his plan known, offers to carry it out, calls other
individuals to his aid, and struggles with all his might against any
25. 501
***
Ind
74
3.
2. 4
1. A PS
# 7 8 1 23 1
57
## p. 6381 (#359) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6381
obstacles there may be in his way. Often, without doubt, he suc-
ceeds less well than the State would in his place; but in the long
run the general result of individual enterprises far surpasses anything
the government could do. "
Now there is no doubt that if this type of character has not
passed away, it has been greatly modified; and it has been mod-
ified by two agencies- the "labor problem," as it is called, and
legislative protection to native industry. I am not going to make
an argument about the value of this protection in promoting
native industry, or about its value from the industrial point of
view. We may or we may not owe to it the individual progress
and prosperity of the United States. About that I do not pro-
pose to say anything. What I want to say is that the doctrine.
that it is a function of government, not simply to foster indus-
try in general, but to consider the case of every particular in-
dustry and give it the protection that it needs, could not be
preached and practiced for thirty years in a community like this,
without modifying the old American conception of the relation
of the government to the individual. It makes the government,
in a certain sense, a partner in every industrial enterprise, and
makes every Presidential election an affair of the pocket to every
miner and manufacturer and to his men; for the men have for
fully thirty years been told that the amount of their wages would
depend, to a certain extent at least, on the way the election
went. The notion that the government owes assistance to indi-
viduals in carrying on business and making a livelihood has
in fact, largely through the tariff discussions, permeated a very
large class of the community, and has materially changed what I
may call the American outlook. It has greatly reinforced among
the foreign-born population the socialistic ideas which many
bring here with them, of the powers and duties of the State
toward labor; for it is preached vehemently by the employing
class.
What makes this look the more serious is, that our political
and social manners are not adapted to it. In Europe, the State
is possessed of an administrative machine which has a finish,
efficacy, and permanence unknown here. Tocqueville comments
on its absence among us; and it is, as all the advocates of civil-
service reform know, very difficult to supply. All the agencies
of the government suffer from the imposition on them of what
I may call non-American duties. For instance, a custom-house
## p. 6382 (#360) ###########################################
6382
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
organized as a political machine was never intended to collect the
enormous sum of duties which must pass through its hands under
our tariff. A post-office whose master has to be changed every
four years to "placate" Tammany, or the anti-Snappers, or any
other body of politicians, was never intended to handle the huge
mass which American mails have now become. One of the
greatest objections to the income tax is the prying into people's
affairs which it involves. No man likes to tell what his income
is to every stranger, much less to a politician, which our col-
lectors are sure to be. Secrecy on the part of the collector is in
fact essential to reconcile people to it in England or Germany,
where it is firmly established; but our collectors sell their lists to
the newspapers in order to make the contributors pay up.
In all these things, we are trying to meet the burdens and
responsibilities of much older societies with the machinery of a
much earlier and simpler state of things. It is high time to halt
in this progress until our administrative system has been brought
up to the level even of our present requirements. It is quite
true that, with our system of State and federal constitutions
laying prohibitions on the Legislature and Congress, any great
extension of the sphere of government in our time seems very
unlikely. Yet the assumption by Congress, with the support of
the Supreme Court, of the power to issue paper money in time
of peace, the power to make prolonged purchases of a commod-
ity like silver, the power to impose an income tax, to execute
great public works, and to protect native industry, are powers.
large enough to effect a great change in the constitution of so-
ciety and in the distribution of wealth, such as, it is safe to say,
in the present state of human culture, no government ought to
have and exercise.
One hears every day from educated people some addition to
the number of things which "governments" ought to do, but for
which any government we have at present is totally unfit. One
listens to them with amazement, when looking at the material
of which our government is composed,- for the matter of that,
of which all governments are composed; for I suppose there is no
question that all legislative bodies in the world have in twenty
years run down in quality. The parliamentary system is appar-
ently failing to meet the demands of modern democratic society,
and is falling into some disrepute; but it would seem as if there
was at present just as little chance of a substitute of any kind as
## p. 6383 (#361) ###########################################
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
6383
of the dethronement of universal suffrage. It will probably last
indefinitely, and be as good or as bad as its constituents make
it. But this probable extension of the powers and functions of
government makes more necessary than ever a free expression
of opinion, and especially of educated opinion. We may rail at
"mere talk" as much as we please, but the probability is that
the affairs of nations and of men will be more and more reg-
ulated by talk. The amount of talk which is now expended on
all subjects of human interest -and in "talk" I include contri-
butions to periodical literature-is something of which no previ-
ous age has had the smallest conception. Of course it varies
infinitely in quality. A very large proportion of it does no good
beyond relieving the feelings of the talker. Political philosophers
maintain, and with good reason, that one of its greatest uses is
keeping down discontent under popular government. It is un-
doubtedly true that it is an immense relief to a man with a
grievance to express his feelings about it in words, even if he
knows that his words will have no immediate effect. Self-love is
apt to prevent most men from thinking that anything they say
with passion or earnestness will utterly and finally fail. But still
it is safe to suppose that one half of the talk of the world on
subjects of general interest is waste. But the other half certainly
tells. We know this from the change in ideas from genera-
tion to generation. We see that opinions which at one time
everybody held became absurd in the course of half a century —
opinions about religion and morals and manners and government.
Nearly every man of my age can recall old opinions of his own
on subjects of general interest, which he once thought highly
respectable, and which he is now almost ashamed of having ever
held. He does not remember when he changed them, or why,
but somehow they have passed away from him.
In communities these changes are often very striking. The
transformation, for instance, of the England of Cromwell into the
England of Queen Anne, or of the New England of Cotton
Mather into the New England of Theodore Parker and Emerson,
was very extraordinary, but it would be very difficult to say in
detail what brought it about or when it began. Lecky has some
curious observations in his "History of Rationalism" on these
silent changes in new beliefs, apropos of the disappearance of the
belief in witchcraft. Nobody could say what had swept it away;
but it appeared that in a certain year people were ready to burn
-
## p. 6384 (#362) ###########################################
6384
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
old women as witches, and a few years later were ready to laugh
at or pity any one who thought old women could be witches.
"At one period," says he, "we find every one disposed to believe
in witches; at a later period we find this predisposition has
silently passed away. " The belief in witchcraft may perhaps be
considered a somewhat violent illustration, like the change in
public opinion about slavery in this country. But there can be
no doubt that it is talk somebody's, anybody's, everybody's talk
-by which these changes are wrought, by which each generation
comes to feel and think differently from its predecessor.
-
No one ever talks freely about anything without contributing
something, let it be ever so little, to the unseen forces which carry
the race on to its final destiny. Even if he does not make a posi-
tive impression, he counteracts or modifies some other impression,
or sets in motion some train of ideas in some one else, which
helps to change the face of the world. So I shall, in disregard
of the great laudation of silence which filled the earth in the
days of Carlyle, say that one of the functions of an educated man
is to talk; and of course he should try to talk wisely.
## p. 6384 (#363) ###########################################
## p. 6384 (#364) ###########################################
THE GOETHE HOUSE
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## p. 6384 (#365) ###########################################
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## p. 6385 (#367) ###########################################
6385
GOETHE
(1749-1832)
BY EDWARD DOWDEN
OHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main
on August 28th, 1749, and died at Weimar on March 22d,
1832. His great life, extending over upwards of fourscore
years, makes him a man of the eighteenth century and also of the nine-
teenth. He belongs not only to German but to European literature.
And in the history of European literature his position is that of suc-
cessor to Voltaire and Rousseau.
Humanity, as Voltaire said, had lost
its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth century was to recover
them. Under all Voltaire's zeal for destruction in matters of religious
belief lay a positive faith and a creative sentiment,- a faith in human
intellect and the sentiment of social justice. What indefatigable toil!
what indefatigable play! Surely it was not all to establish a nega-
tion. Voltaire poured a gay yet bitter élan into the intellectual move-
ment of his time. Yet amid his various efforts for humanity he
wanted love; he wanted reverence. And although a positive tend-
ency underlies his achievements, we are warranted in repeating the
common sentence, that upon the whole he destroyed more than he
built up.
Voltaire fought to enfranchise the understanding. Rousseau
dreamed, brooded, suffered, to emancipate the heart. A wave of pas-
sion, or at least of sentiment, swept over Europe with the Nouvelle
Héloise,' the 'Émile,' the 'Confessions. It was Rousseau, exclaims
Byron, who "threw enchantment over passion," who "knew how to
make madness beautiful. " Such an emancipation of the heart was felt,
in the eighteenth century, to be a blessed deliverance from the
material interests and the eager yet too arid speculation of the age.
But Byron in that same passage of Childe Harold' names Rousseau
"the self-torturing sophist. " And a sophist Rousseau was. His intel-
lect fed upon fictions, and dangerous fictions,-fictions respecting
nature, respecting the individual man, respecting human society.
Therefore his intellect failed to illuminate, clarify, tranquilize his
heart. His emotions were turbid, restless, and lacking in sanity.
Here then were Goethe's two great predecessors: one a most viva-
cious intelligence, the other a brooding sensibility; one aiming at an
emancipation of the understanding, but deficient in reverence and in
XI-400
## p. 6386 (#368) ###########################################
6386
GOETHE
love; the other aiming at an emancipation of the affections, but defi-
cient in sanity of thought. In what relation stood Goethe to these
great forces of the eighteenth century?
In his old age Goethe, speaking of Voltaire, uses the words a
universal source of light. " But as a young man he was repelled by
"the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and his perversion of so many
worthy subjects. " "He would never have done," says Goethe, "with
degrading religion and the sacred books, for the sake of injuring
priestcraft, as they called it. " Goethe, indeed, did not deny a use to
the spirit of negation. Mephistopheles lives and works. Yet he lives
and works as the unwilling servant of the Lord, and the service he
renders is to provoke men from indolence to activity.
Into the influence of Rousseau, on the contrary, and into the gen-
eral movement of feeling to which Rousseau belonged, Goethe in his
youth was caught, almost inevitably; and he abandoned himself to it
for a time, it might seem without restraint.
Yet Goethe differed from Rousseau as profoundly as he differed
from Voltaire. Rousseau's undisciplined sensibility, morbidly excited
by the harshness or imagined harshness of his fellows, by bodily tor-
ment, by broodings in solitude, became at last one quivering mass of
disease.
"No tragedy had ever a fifth act so squalid. " What a con-
trast to the closing scenes of Goethe's life in that house of his, like
a modest temple of the Muses, listening to Plutarch read aloud by
his daughter-in-law, or serenely active, "ohne Hast aber ohne Rast»
(without haste, but without rest), in widening his sympathies with
men or enlarging his knowledge of nature.
How was this? Why did the ways part so widely for Rousseau
and for Goethe ?
The young creator of 'Werther' may seem to have started on his
career as a German Rousseau. In reality, Werther' expressed only
a fragment of Goethe's total self. A reserve force of will and an in-
tellect growing daily in clearness and in energy would not permit
him to end as Rousseau ended. In Götz von Berlichingen' there
goes up a cry for freedom; it presents the more masculine side of
that spirit of revolt from the bonds of the eighteenth century, that
"return to nature," which is presented in its more feminine aspects
by Werther. ' But by degrees it became evident to Goethe that the
only true ideal of freedom is a liberation not of the passions, not of
the intellect, but of the whole man; that this involves a conciliation
of all the powers and faculties within us; and that such a concilia-
tion can be effected only by degrees, and by steadfast toil.
And so we find him willing during ten years at Weimar to under-
take work which might appear to be fatal to the development of his
genius. To reform army administration, make good roads, work the
## p. 6387 (#369) ###########################################
GOETHE
6387
mines with energetic intelligence, restore the finances to order,- was
this fit employment for one born to be a poet? Except a few lyrics
and the prose Iphigenie,' these years produced no literary work of
importance; yet Goethe himself speaks of them as his "zweite Schrift-
stellerepoche,❞—his second epoch as a writer. They were needful to
make him a master in the art of life, needful to put him into posses-
sion of all his powers. Men of genius are quick growers; but men of
the highest genius, which includes the wisdom of human life, are not
speedily ripe. Goethe had entered literature early; he had stormed
the avenues. Now at six-and-twenty he was a chief figure in Ger-
man, even in European, literature; and from twenty-six to thirty-
seven he published, we may say nothing. But though he ceased to
astonish the world, he was well employed in widening the basis of
his existence; in organizing his faculties; in conciliating passions, in-
tellect, and will; in applying his mind to the real world; in endeavor-
ing to comprehend it aright; in testing and training his powers by
practical activity.
A time came when he felt that his will and skill were mature;
that he was no longer an apprentice in the art of living, but a master
craftsman. Tasks that had grown irksome and were felt to be a dis-
traction from higher duties, he now abandoned. Goethe fled for a
time to Italy, there to receive his degree in the high school of life,
and to start upon a course of more advanced studies. Thenceforward
until his closing days the record is one of almost uninterrupted labor
in his proper fields of literature, art, and science. "In Rome," he
wrote, "I have for the first time found myself, for the first time come
into harmony with myself, and grown happy and rational. " He had
found himself, because his passions and his intellect now co-operated;
his pursuit of truth had all the ardor of a first love; his pursuit of
beauty was not a fantastic chase, but was subject to rational law; and
his effort after truth and his effort after beauty were alike supported
by an adult will.
His task, regarded as a whole, was to do over again the work
of the Renascence. But whereas the Renascence had been a large
national or European movement, advancing towards its ends partly
through popular passions and a new enthusiasm, the work which
Goethe accomplished was more an affair of intelligence, criticism,
conscious self-direction. It was less of a flood sweeping away old
dikes and dams, and more of a dawn quietly and gradually drawing
back the borders of darkness and widening the skirts of light. A
completely developed human being, for the uses of the world,- this
was the ideal in which Goethe's thoughts centred, and towards which
his most important writings constantly tend. A completely developed
State or commonwealth should follow, as an ideal arising out of the
## p. 6388 (#370) ###########################################
6388
GOETHE
needs and demands of a complete individual. Goethe knew that
growth comes not by self-observation and self-analysis, but by exer-
cise. Therefore he turned himself and would turn his disciples to
action, to the objective world; and in order that this action may be
profitable, it must be definite and within a limited sphere. He
preaches self-renunciation; but the self-renunciation he commends is
not self-mortification; it is the active self-abandonment of devotion to
our appropriate work. Such is the teaching of Wilhelm Meister':
it traces the progress of a youth far from extraordinary, yet having
within him the capacity for growth, progress through a thousand
errors and illusions, from splendid dreams to modest reality. Life is
discovered by Wilhelm to be a difficult piece of scholarship. The
cry for freedom in Götz,' the limitless sigh of passion heard in
'Werther,' are heard no more. If freedom is to be attained, it can
only be through obedience; if we are to "return to nature," it cannot
be in Rousseau's way but through a wise art of living, an art not at
odds with nature, but its complement:-
"This is an art which does mend nature - but
The art itself is nature. »
If we ask,- for this, after all, is the capital question of criticism. —
What has Goethe done to make us better? the answer is: He has
made each of us aspire and endeavor to be no fragment of manhood,
but a man; he has taught us that to squander ourselves in vain
desires is the road to spiritual poverty; that to discover our appro-
priate work, and to embody our passion in such work, is the way to
true wealth; that such passion and such toil must be not servile, but
glad and free; that the use of our intelligence is not chiefly to
destroy, but to guide our activity in construction; and that in doing
our best work we incorporate ourselves in the best possible way in
the life of our fellows. Such lessons may seem obvious; but they
had not been taught by Goethe's great predecessors, Voltaire and
Rousseau. Goethe, unlike Voltaire, inculcates reverence and love;
unlike Rousseau, he teaches us to see objects clearly as they are, he
trains us to sanity. And Europe needed sanity in the days of Revo-
lution and in the days which followed of Reaction.
Sanity for the imagination Goethe found in classical art. The
young leader of the Romantic revival in Germany resigned his
leadership; he seemed to his contemporaries to have lost the fire.
and impulse of his youth; his work was found cold and formal. A
great change had indeed taken place within him; but his ardor had
only grown steadier and stronger, extending now to every part of his
complex nature. The change was a transition from what is merely
inward and personal to what is outward and general. Goethe cared
## p. 6389 (#371) ###########################################
GOETHE
6389
less than formerly to fling out his private passions, and cared more
to comprehend the world and human life and to interpret these
through art. He did not go into bondage under the authority of the
ancients; but he found their methods right, and he endeavored to
work as they had worked. For a time the reaction carried him too
far: in seeking for what is general, he sometimes passed on to what
is abstract, and so was forced into the error of offering symbols to
represent these abstractions, instead of bodying forth his ideas in
imaginative creations. But in the noble drama of 'Iphigenie,' in the
epic-idyll of 'Hermann und Dorothea,' and in many of the ballads
written during his period of close companionship with Schiller, we
have examples of art at once modern in sentiment and classical in
method.
Goethe's faith in the methods of classical art never passed away,
but his narrow exclusiveness yielded. He became, with certain guid-
ing principles which served as a control, a great eclectic, appropriat-
ing to his own uses whatever he perceived to be excellent. As in
'Hermann und Dorothea' he unites the influences of Greek art with
true German feeling, so in his collection of short lyrics, the West-
Östlicher Divan' (West-Eastern Divan), he brings together the genius
of the Orient and that of the Western world, and sheds over both
the spiritual illumination of the wisdom of his elder years. Gradu-
ally his creative powers waned, but he was still interested in all-
except perhaps politics-that can concern the mind; he was still the
greatest of critics, entering with his intelligence into everything and
understanding everything, as nearly universal in his sympathies as a
human mind can be. The Goethe of these elder years is seen to
most advantage in the 'Conversations with Eckermann. '
The most invulnerable of Goethe's writings are his lyrical poems;
against the best of these, criticism can allege nothing. They need no
interpreter. But the reader who studies them in chronological order
will observe that as time went on, the lyric which is a spontaneous
jet of feeling is replaced by the lyric in which there is constructive
art and considerate evolution. In the poems of the West-Östlicher
Divan' Goethe returns to the lyric of spontaneity, but their inspira-
tion is rather that of a gracious wisdom, at once serious and playful,
than of passion.
His period of romance and sentiment is best represented by 'The
Sorrows of Werther. ' His adult wisdom of life is found most abun-
dantly in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. ' The world has long
since agreed that if Goethe is to be represented by a single work, it
shall be by 'Faust. ' And even those who perceive that 'Faust' is
best understood by being taken along with Goethe's other writings--
his early 'Prometheus,' his autobiography, his travels in Italy, his
## p. 6390 (#372) ###########################################
6390
GOETHE
classical dramas, his scientific studies, his work as a critic, his vast
correspondence, his conversations in old age- cannot quarrel with
the judgment of the world.
'Faust,' if we include under that name the First and the Second
Parts, is the work of Goethe's whole life. Begun and even far ad-
vanced in early manhood, it was taken up again in his midmost
years, and was completed with a faltering hand in the closing season
of his old age.
What it loses in unity, or at least in harmonious
development as a piece of art, it gains in autobiographical interest.
All his works, Goethe said, constituted a great confession. More than
any other of his writings, Faust' is the confession of his life.
There are two ways in which a reader may deal with 'Faust. '
He may choose for his own delight a fragment, detach it and disre-
gard the rest; he may view this fragment, if he pleases, as a whole,
as a rounded work of art. Such a reader will refuse to pass beyond
the First Part of the vast encyclopædic poem. To do this is legiti-
mate. The earliest form in which we possess the drama, that of the
transcript made by Fräulein von Göchhausen, is a tragedy which
might be named 'The Tragedy of Margaret. ' Possibilities of further
development lay in the subject, were indeed required by the subject,
and Goethe had probably already conceived certain of them; yet the
stadium in the progress of Faust's history included in 'The Tragedy
of Margaret' had a unity in itself. But a reader may approach
'Faust' otherwise; he may view it as expressing the complete mind
of Goethe on some of the deepest problems of human life. Viewing
it thus, he must accept the whole work as Goethe has given it; he
must hold in abeyance, at least for a time, his own particular likings
and dislikes. While keeping his mind open to all the poetry of Faust,
he will soon discover that here is something more than a poem. It
may be unfortunate for the work of art that it belongs, certainly in
its execution, possibly even in the growth of its conception, to far
sundered periods of its author's career, when his feelings respecting
art were different, when his capacity for rendering his ideas was now
more and now less adequate. Such a reader, however, would part
with nothing: in what is admirable he finds the master's hand; in
what is feeble he discovers the same hand, but faltering, and pathetic
in its infirmity. He is interested in 'Faust' not solely or chiefly as
"The Tragedy of Margaret': he finds in it the intellect, the charac-
ter, the life of Goethe; it is a repository of the deepest thoughts and
feelings concerning human existence of a wise seer, a repository in
which he laid by those thoughts and feelings during sixty years of
his mortal wayfaring.
-
From early manhood to extreme old age 'Faust' was with Goethe,
receiving now and again, in Frankfort, in Weimar, in Rome, some
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new accession. We can distinguish the strata or formations of youth,
of manhood, and of the closing years. We recognize by their diver-
sities of style those parts which were written when creation was
swift and almost involuntary, a passion and a joy, and those parts
through which Goethe labored at an old man's pace, accomplishing
to-day a hand's-breadth, to-morrow perhaps less, and binding blank
pages into his manuscript, that the sight of the gaps might irritate
him to produce. What unity can such a work possess, except that
which comes from the fact that it all proceeded from a single mind,
and that some main threads of thought-for it would be rash to
speak of a ground idea-run through the several parts and bind
them together? 'Faust' has not the unity of a lake whose circuit
the eye can contemplate, a crystal set among the hills. Its unity is
that of a river, rising far away in mountain solitudes, winding below
many a mirrored cliff, passing the habitations of men, temple and
mart, fields of rural toil and fields of war, reaching it may be dull
levels, and forgetting the bright speed it had, until at last the dash of
waves is heard, and its course is accomplished; but from first to last
one stream, proceeding from a single source. Tourists may pick out
a picturesque fragment of its wanderings, and this is well; but per-
haps it is better to find the poetry of its entire career, from its cloudy
cradle to the flats where it loses itself in the ocean.
one.
The first part of 'Faust' is itself the work of more periods than
The original conception may belong to Goethe's student days
at Strassburg. He had grown weary of the four Faculties, - alas,
even of theology; he had known a maiden as fair and sweet and
simple as Gretchen, and he had left her widowed of her first love;
and there in Strassburg was the presence of that old Cathedral, which
inspired so terrible a scene in the 'Faust. ' From Strassburg he
returned to Frankfort, and no moments of his career of authorship
were more fruitful than these which preceded the first Weimar years.
It was in the heart of the Storm and Stress; it was the time of
'Götz' and 'Mahomet' and the Wandering Jew' and 'Werther'
and Prometheus. ' Here in Faust was another and a nobler Werther
seeking the infinite; here was another Prometheus, a Titan shackled
yet unsubduable. By Goethe's twenty-sixth year the chief portions
of the 'Faust, a Fragment,' published when he was forty-one, had
been written. But two scenes were added in Rome,- one of these
strange in its fantasy, the Witches' Kitchen,—as if to show that the
poet of the North was not quite enslaved by the beauty of classic
art. It was in the last decade of the eighteenth century that
Schiller succeeded in persuading Goethe to open his Faust papers,
and try to recover the threads of his design. Not until 1808, Goethe's
fifty-ninth year, was the First Part published as we now possess it.
## p. 6392 (#374) ###########################################
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GOETHE
It is therefore incorrect to speak of this Part as the work of the
author's youth; even here a series of strata belonging to different
periods can be distinguished, and critics have contended that even in
this Part may be discovered two schemes or plans not wholly in
harmony each with the other.
The first Fragment was written, as has been said, in the spirit of
the Storm and Stress. Goethe was weary of the four Faculties. The
magic work of the time which was to restore vigor and joy to men
was Nature. This is the theme of the opening scene of 'Faust. '
Among old instruments and dusty folios and ancestral lumber and
brute skeletons, away from Nature and her living founts of inspira-
tion, the old scholar has found neither joy nor true knowledge. He
opens the book of Nostradamus and gazes upon the sign of the Macro-
cosm; here in a symbol he beholds the life and energy of nature:-
"Where shall I grasp thee, infinite Nature, where?
Ye breasts, ye fountains of all life whereon
Hang heaven and earth. »
--
He cannot grasp them; and then turning from the great Cosmos, he
thinks he may at least dare to invoke the spirit of our own mother
planet Earth. But to Faust, with eyes bleared with the dust of the
study, to Faust, living in his own speculations or in dogmatic sys-
tems, the aspect of the Earth Spirit- a living fire. is terrible. He
falls back upon himself almost despairing, when the famulus Wagner
enters. What Werner was to the idealist Wilhelm Meister, Wagner is
to the idealist Faust: the mere scraping together of a little hoard of
barren facts contents Wagner; such grief, such despair as Faust's, are
for this Philistine of learning impossible. And then the fragment of
1790 passes on to Mephistopheles. Whether or not Goethe found the
features of his critical demon in Herder (as Grimm supposes), and
afterwards united these to the more pronounced likeness in his friend
Mephistopheles Merck, matters little. Whether Herder and Merck had
been present or not, Goethe would have found Mephistopheles in his
own heart. For the contrast between the idealist Faust and the real-
ist Mephistopheles exists in some form or other in almost every great
creation of Goethe. It is the contrast between Werther and Albert,
between Tasso and Antonio, between Edward and the Captain. Some-
times the nobler spirit of worldliness is dwelt on, as in the case of
Antonio; sometimes the cold, hard, cynical side, as in the case of
Mephistopheles. The theme of Faust as originally conceived was the
turning of an idealist from his own private thoughts and dreams to
the real world; from all that is unnatural,-systems, speculations, bar-
ren knowledge,- to nature and the founts of life; from the solitary
cell to the company of men; to action, beauty, life, and love. If he
―
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GOETHE
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can really succeed in achieving this wisely and well, Faust is saved.
He is delivered from solitude, the inane of speculation, the vagueness
of idealism, and made one with the band of his toiling fellows. But
to accompany him there is the spirit of base worldliness, the realist,
the cynic, who sees the meaner side of all that is actual, who if pos
sible will seduce Faust into accepting the world apart from that ele-
vating spirit which ennobles actual life, who will try to baffle and
degrade Faust by degrading all that he now seeks,-action and beauty
and life and love.
It is Goethe himself who is at odds with himself,- the realist
Goethe set over against the idealist Goethe; and Mephistopheles is
the base realist, the cynic whose endeavor is to mar the union of
high poetry and high prose in human life, which union of high poetry
with high prose Goethe always looked upon as the true condition of
man's activity. In the Prologue in Heaven, written when Schiller
had persuaded Goethe to take up the threads of his play, the Lord
speaks of Faust as his servant. Mephistopheles wagers that he will
seduce Faust from his allegiance to the Highest. The Lord does not
wager; he knows:-
"Though now he serve me in a maze of doubt,
Yet I will lead him soon where all is clear;
The gardener knows, when first the bushes sprout,
That bloom and fruit will deck the riper year. »
These vague passionate longings of Faust after truth and reality
and life and love are not evil; they are good: they are as yet indeed
but the sprouting of the immature leaf and bud, but the Lord sees
in these the fruit that is to be. Therefore let Mephistopheles, the
spirit of negation, try his worst, and at the last discover how an
earnest striver's ways are justified by God. Faust may wander, err,
fall, grievously offend,-"as long as man lives, man errs;" but for
him who ever strives upward, through all his errors, there is redemp-
tion in the end.
The poem belongs to its epoch. Faust is the idealist, Mephis-
topheles is the realist, of the eighteenth century. Faust aspires to
nature and freedom like one who had drunk deeply of Rousseau.
Mephistopheles speaks like a degraded disciple of Voltaire, who has
lost his master's positive faith in the human reason. Goethe can ac-
cept as his own neither the position of Voltaire nor that of Rous-
seau; but actually he started in life as an antagonist of Voltaire and
a disciple of Rousseau, and in like manner his Faust starts on his
career as one who longs for a "return to nature. " While from merely
negative criticism nothing virtuous can be born, the vague longings
of one who loves and hopes promise measureless good.
## p. 6394 (#376) ###########################################
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GOETHE
Faust's vast aspirations, then, are not sinful; they only need to be
limited and directed to suitable ends. It is as God's servant that he
goes forth with the Demon from his study to the world. And Meph-
istopheles's first attempt to degrade Faust is a failure. In the orgy
of Auerbach's cellar, while the boisterous young bloods clash their
glasses, the old scholar sits silent, isolated, ashamed. It is only by
infecting his blood with the witch's poison that Mephistopheles can
lay hold of the spirit of Faust even for a time; and had he not seen
in the mirror that vision of Helena, whom he rightly loves, and whom
indeed he needs, he could not have put to his lips the filthy brewage
of the witch. But now indeed he is snared; the poison rages in his
veins; for one hour he is transformed into what the world basely calls
a man of pleasure. Yet Faust is not wholly lost: his better self, the
untrained, untamed idealist, begins to reassert its power; the fumes
of the poison dissipate themselves. Guilty though he be, his love of
Margaret is not what Mephistopheles requires that it should be: it is
not calculating, egoistic, cynical, nor dull, easeful, and lethargic. It
is not the crime of an experienced worldling nor of a dull, low liver:
it is the crime of one whose unwise heart and untaught imagination
delude him; and therefore though his fall be deep, it is not fatal.
The wrong he has wrought may be blind and terrible as that of
Othello to Desdemona; but it is not the serpentine stinging of an
Iago or a Mephistopheles.
So through anguish and remorse Faust is doing off the swathe-
bands of delusion, learning to master his will, learning his own heart,
learning the meaning of existence: he does not part from his ideal
self, his high aspirations, his ardent hopes; he is rather transforming
these into realities; he is advancing from dreams to facts, so that in
the end, when his life becomes a lofty prose, it may be interpene-
trated by a noble poetry.
It were long to trace the history of Faust through the ever puri-
fying and ascending scale of energies exhibited in the Second Part
of the drama. Affairs of State, science, art, war-all that Goethe
had known by experience-appear in this encyclopædic poem. One
word, however, must be said respecting the 'Helena. ' It is a mistake
to view this central portion of the Second Part as solely or chiefly
an allegory of the wedlock of classic and romantic art. As science is
shown to form a needful part of Faust's turning from the inane of
metaphysics to the positive world, so from the Greek spirit he learns
sanity and strength; the deliverance of the ideal man in Faust is
aided by the beauty and the healthfulness of classic art. Through
beauty, as Schiller tried to show in his letters on 'Esthetic Culture,'
we attain to freedom. Faust is not an artist, but a man; Helena is
but one of the spirits whose influence is needed to make him real
## p. 6395 (#377) ###########################################
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6395
and elevated. It is she who qualifies him for achieving practical
work in a high, ideal spirit.
The Fourth Act of the Second Part is wholly concerned with prac-
tical work. What is this which engages the student of the metaphysic
cell, who had gone through the four Faculties, and is now once again
grown old? What is this? Only well-defined and useful activity. He
has rescued some acres of arable land from the rage of the bar-
ren sea.
But Faust is not yet wholly delivered from evil; his activity is use-
ful, indeed, but it lacks the finer grace of charity. He commissions
Mephistopheles to destroy the cottage of old Philemon and Baucis,
which stands in the way of his territorial improvements. It is the
last crime of the unregenerate will. The four gray women-Care
and Blame and Want and Crime-now assail him; but there is vir-
tue in him to the last. However it may be with himself, grant only
that ages hence the children of men, free and happy, may dwell upon
the soil which he has saved for their place of labor and of love,-
grant but this, and even in the anticipation of it he is made pos-
sessor of the highest bliss.
