One thing must or should have struck every reader (at all accustomed to draw conclusions from what he reads) about the Hamlet passages in Meister.[[679]] These passages might have been written by a man who was only acquainted with a prose translation of the piece into a language other than its own. This may seem a little staggering: but it is true. Goethe handles—with extraordinary and for the most part unerring insight—the characters, the situations, the conduct of the play. But there he stops dead. Of its magnificent and ineffable poetical expression—of those phrases and passages which, read hundreds of times through scores of years, produce as much effect on the fit reader as at first, and more—he says nothing. “Shakespeare und Keine Ende” tells the same story: nearly all, if not all, the scattered references from the Frankfort speech of 1771, when he was just of age, to the last remark to Eckermann sixty years later, tell the same. It is at least a curious one. One begins to wonder whether the person who wrote Shakespeare was, not Bacon, but, say, Wieland.
The Sprüche in Prosa.
Many things, however, might, and some perhaps shall, be said about this. Let us turn to the more miscellaneous and general utterances of the Sprüche in Prosa, which, with the parallel verse jottings, especially some of the Zahme Xenien, are recognised as supplying a sort of running accompaniment of Goethe’s thought, for all periods of his life. No one (again with the same slight goodwill to think) can read far in either of these divisions, much less in both of them, without perceiving the very strong, we might almost call it the overbearing, practical and ethical tendency, even of those passages which apparently bear most closely on literature. All the best things are generalised as much as possible, with perhaps some forgetfulness of the writer’s own caution about Allgemeine Begriffe.[[680]] In these generalities there is much that is admirable, such as the famous “Superstition is the poetry of life,”[[681]] and the much less known but very striking “Rhythmical movement has something magical about it: it makes us believe that the Sublime is our own property.”[[682]] The danger appears in his often-quoted comparison of Classicism to Health and Romanticism to disease[[683]]—if he had said “Classicism is precaution against disease: Romanticism is making the best of that which must come,” there would have been something to say for him. But it is far off in the admirable, “There are pedants who are also scoundrels; and they are the worst of all.”[[684]]
But when we pass from these generalities—disputable sometimes, indisputable not seldom, almost always stimulating—to individual judgments, the case is a little altered. If he had oftener written such notes as “Vis superba formæ. Ein schönes Wort von Johannes Secundus,”[[685]] it had been better. What is the good of saying of Henry IV.[[686]] that “If everything else extant of the kind were lost, we could restore poetry and rhetoric completely out of this alone”? Nobody shall outgo me in rational admiration of Henry IV. I will not give up a hair of Doll Tearsheet’s head, nor a blush of the page’s cheek. Everything in it is good: but to say that everything that is good is in it would deepen the inscrutable smile on Shakespeare’s face a little less inscrutably. The saying, however, may perhaps be allowed the credit, as well as the discredit, due to enthusiastic exaggerations. This is not the case with the passages on Sterne,[[687]] which are numerous, which form a tolerably complete context, and which are yet separated from each other, and returned upon, in a fashion which shows what a strong impression the subject had made on the writer’s mind.
The Sterne passages.
We begin with the sufficiently round statement, “Yorick Sterne was the finest[[688]] spirit that ever worked. Whosoever reads him has at once the feeling of freedom and beauty; his humour is inimitable, and not every kind of Humour frees the soul.” Now, as a thing said once, this would be surprising enough, however well we may think of Sterne: but Goethe does not leave it alone. After the widest casts round to the general aspects of Poetry and Science, Art and Humour, he circles back to “Tristram.” “Even at this moment” (the context shows that this must have been pretty late in his life), “every man of culture should take his works once more in hand, that the nineteenth century may learn what we owe him already, and look out for what we may still owe him.” Another page and more of generalities, and he harks back again. “Sterne was born in 1713 and died in 1768. To comprehend him one must not leave out of consideration the moral and ecclesiastical state of his time: we should remember that he was Warburton’s contemporary.” And then a context of notes remarks on his “free spirit,” “his power of developing things from within,” of “distinguishing truth from falsehood,” his “hatred for the didactic-dogmatic, the pedantic tendencies of the serious”; his wide reading and discoveries of “the inadequate and the ridiculous”; his “boundless sagacity and penetration,” and a great many other things. Admitting that Sterne is “never a model,” he thinks him “always suggestive and stimulating,” and makes the charitable remark that “the element of coarseness in him, in which he moves so carefully and elegantly, might have spoilt many others.”
Now this is at first odder than the hyperbole about Henry IV., and takes one’s breath away more completely for the moment. One may have a very strong liking for “Atalanta’s better part,” for the lightness, grace, good sense, refreshing qualities of Shandyism, and a very great admiration for Sterne’s genius, especially for the uniqueness, if not exactly the impeccability, of its literary expression. But to make of him, even to the extent to which it is possible to make of his master Rabelais, an author to be turned over by day and night, a vade mecum, a great teacher, a literary discoverer and deliverer, the “finest spirit that ever worked”—this is really going rather too far. Yet the point of view is perfectly obvious, and it is equally obvious that it is not a literary point of view at all. Goethe felt severely the Philistinism of his own country, and he had—as most Continentals always have had, and as some dear good Englishmen think it proper still to have—the idea that England was specially dominated by the weaver’s beam. Sterne to him is a David: his jests and pranks are the small stones of the brook, and he thinks of nothing more than of the discomfiture of Goliath.
Yet he could be Philistine enough himself, as where, in Shakespeare und Keine Ende, having talked of the universality of Shakespeare[[689]] more mysteriously and pretentiously, but far less intelligently and forcibly, than Dryden a century and more earlier, he tells us that “Coriolanus is pervaded throughout by the chagrin experienced at the refusal of the mob to recognise the choice of its betters.” In Julius Cæsar “everything rests on the idea that the leaders are averse to seeing the highest place filled, because they wrongly imagine that they can work successfully in co-operation.” Antony and Cleopatra “declares with a thousand tongues [plus a thousand copybook headings?] that idle enjoyment is incompatible with a life of activity.” We have all heard of Goethe as a great and true Apollo, a Philistine-slayer from youth to age. Was there ever more platitudinous and trivial chatter of Ashdod than in these three sentences? And how, again, when we find him, like a seventeenth-century Preceptist, dividing literary motives into Progressive, Retrogressive, Retardative, Retrospective, and Anticipatory, a list which yet once again sets one thinking, with a shameful joy, on possible Rabelaisian developments and parodies of it? Is our own poor Alison, with his Bandit unequally yoked to a Grecian nose[[690]]—are the poor Le Bossus and Rapins themselves—to be scoffed at, when we find this Jove of Weimar and Germany laying it down that “Christians contending with Christians will not, especially in later times, form a good picture,” but that “Christians conquering Turks” are admissible?