Reviews and Notices.
The very numerous literary reviews and notices which fill nearly two volumes[[691]] of the Works in the edition we are using must, of course, be read by every one who desires to acquaint himself thoroughly with Goethe’s criticism: but they have not quite the importance which they might be expected to have, and very often, when they are at their best, that best comes to little or nothing more than we find condensed and quintessenced in a maxim of the Sprüche or a sentence of the Conversations. This indeed could not be otherwise: for the most “panoramic intellect” (a phrase which Goethe acknowledged with rather sardonic politeness when it was applied to him by some English critic[[692]]) cannot see, and the most facund tongue cannot say, the same thing differently every time. Even in the earliest there are very neat things, as where[[693]] poor Sulzer’s Die Schönen Künste is described in the opening sentence of the review as “Very suitable for translation into French: indeed it might very well have been translated from French.” The very latest, such as that on Mérimée’s La Guzla,[[694]] display that combination of fresh interest, impartial judgment, and experienced knowledge which ought to be the reviewer’s equipment, but which unluckily few attain.
The Conversations.
On the whole, however, the Conversations with Eckermann are the richest placer of Goethe’s criticism, and the most convenient for the general reader. There appears to be no reason for any exaggerated scruples about admitting them as genuine and trustworthy. Eckermann, no doubt, has some of the irritating qualities which are almost inseparable from the Boswellian temperament: one need not be ashamed of enjoying that characteristic Heinesquery, the regret
“Dass Goethe sei todt,
Und Eckermann sei zu Leben.”
But this need not prevent our being thankful that Eckermann remained zu Leben long enough to put these things on record. There is nothing in the least disloyal or disgusting about them: the sternest hater of eavesdropping need not be afraid or ashamed to take up the book. And Eckermann seems to have been very fairly in possession of the two positive and the one negative qualities required by his difficult and rather thankless art—exactness, intelligence up to a certain point, and the absence of the superfluous cleverness which might have tempted him to refine, and touch up, and overlay. Therefore some analysis of the chief critical utterances of the book should find a place here. It must, moreover, always be remembered that Goethe was a man soaked in literature, and that those who read him without having at least dipped in it are apt to make mistakes.[[695]] Pretty early we have one of those striking generalities which catch mankind, and which—in a sense not unjustly—have earned their author his immense reputation. “Fact must give the motive, the points that require expression the particular kernel; but to make a beautiful enlivened whole, that is the business of the poet.”[[696]] The practical advice about a certain job of verse[[697]] is as good as it can be, and as we should expect it to be; to find a better and more conscious craftsman of letters than Goethe, you may take the wings of the morning and put a girdle round the earth in vain. Nor perhaps is much more needed than mere quotation for the three words on the opposite page, Ach, das Publikum! There is a very noteworthy passage[[698]] on Schiller and his philosophy, and a still more noteworthy one,[[699]] indeed one of the cardinal places of the whole, on the character of writers, with a context—accidental as far as dates go (for there is a full fortnight between them), but real in thought—on Style.
The classification of his enemies[[700]] is very interesting and curious, as are, both from the critical and the personal standpoint, the observations[[701]] on Klopstock and Herder. But what follows[[702]] immediately, on the contemporarily intimate relations between France and Germany in literature, is more noteworthy still, and so is, especially when we take account of the dates and of other places, Goethe’s dissuasion[[703]] of Eckermann from undertaking a compte-rendu of German Literature for an English Review. At this very time[[704]] the Globe was being founded in Paris: and Goethe’s admiration for the Globe was unbounded. J. J. Ampère he knew personally: but the praise which so constantly recurs applies to Sainte-Beuve, Rémusat, and others almost more than to Ampère. In one place later, he expresses his surprise that these young French reviewers did not think it necessary, as the Germans did, to “hate one another” if they differed in opinion.[[705]] Alas! the disease was not, and is not, confined to Germany: and it certainly did not spare these same contributors to the Globe. But their width of range, their comparative spirit, their judicial and yet not pedagogic manner, justly enchanted Goethe. And it was doubtless because he did not, in 1824, think it possible for a reviewer to show them, that he bade Eckermann not “eat the beans” of reviewing.