The passage[[706]] which naturally and immediately follows on the connection of German and English literature, and the frank avowal of the enormous indebtedness of the former to the latter, is deservedly famous, and certainly shows Goethe most favourably in the light of that combined lamp of intelligence, learning, and character which he himself always liked to turn on his subject. But one does not read with so much satisfaction what follows at a little distance on the sufficiency of translation,[[707]] a passage at which, I feel sure, all the Muses wept. Scientifically, morally, practically, translation can do much: from the point of view of pure literature, all it can do is to supply something different from the original—good perhaps, bad perhaps, between the two most probably, but never the original. Once more he refers valuably[[708]] to the great older contemporaries of his youth—Lessing, Herder, Wieland, as well as to Schiller. Always we may apply to Goethe when he speaks of Schiller what Thackeray says so well of Pope[[709]] when he speaks of Swift. His remarks on Menander in more places than one supply a very curious document, or item of a document, as to his criticism generally, when we reflect in what a fragmentary state the great New Comic has come down to us. Many notable passages on Shakespeare and Molière follow: indeed, the various contexts on Molière should be as carefully looked at and compared as those on Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott. They will form, with these, the chief bases of our general estimate of Goethe’s criticism.
The judgment[[710]] of January 1827 on Hugo is famous and interesting. More favourable than later ones, it shows the critic’s eclecticism, if not quite his catholicity. He saw, and saw rightly, the connection with Chateaubriand: and we must not now be too severe on him for thinking then that Hugo “may be as important as Lamartine and Delavigne.” A less agreeable side of his criticism—one to which we have had, and shall have, to turn and return—is the remark on Flemming,[[711]] er kann jetz nicht mehr helfen. Now Flemming certainly was not a very great poet; he has only “a very pretty talent, rather prosaic and bourgeois.” But the “er kann jetz nicht mehr helfen” is hard to forgive. It is a point of view which has done harm to many, notably to Mr. Arnold: but that is between the Muses and themselves. What concerns us, is that it is bad in itself. The idea that such and such a writer “won’t pay,” that you can’t “get culture” out of him, is the pure Philistinism of culture itself. It is the exact analogue to the theory and practice of “saving your own dirty soul” in religion. What does it matter whether he “helps” or not, if he is good and, in his own little or large measure, delights? This calculus of profit is mighty disgusting and, we may add, mighty dangerous: for it is at the root of much of the bad criticism in the world.
He is in his better mind, and in his own sphere, with the remark[[712]] that now, fifty years ago, and fifty years hence, it is, was, will be so that what men wrote when they were young will be best enjoyed by young men. And we may note in passing wise and witty things on destructive criticism,[[713]] on Smollett,[[714]] on Lazaret-poesie,[[715]] before leaving with a good taste in our mouth, the first and, for literary utterances I think the weightiest, volume of the Conversations.
A good example of that common-sense judgment which is perhaps Goethe’s chief claim as a critic is to be found early in vol. ii.,[[716]] where he speaks of Aristotle as “rash in his opinions.” At first sight this may seem not merely impertinent, but contradictory of the facts: and yet there is much in it. Undoubtedly Aristotle, great as he is, was rash, with the peculiar Greek rashness of imagining that Greek facts were all facts: and this was nowhere more the case than in his literary criticism. We may be less happy—on the same page and the next—with a repetition of Philistinisms against Fouqué and the Middle Ages, about there being “nothing worth our fetching from these dim old German times,” or with an additional mistake (which again has done much harm) about the “miseries” of these said times and the uselessness of adding them to our own. How much better is a fresh application of “the apples of gold and pictures [frames] of silver,” a metaphor of which he was fond, a little later! “Die Frauen,” says he,[[717]] “sind silberne Schalen in die wir goldene Aepfel legen.” In other words, their worth and their fairness are their fairness and their worth to our imagination, which indeed is the conclusion of the whole matter, not merely in gynæcology. His statement as to Voltaire[[718]] that “everything which so great a talent writes is good,” is interesting to compare with the direct negative of Joubert. And it may repay anybody if he thinks a little about its connection with a more general and very important statement of Goethe’s, that “in Art and Poetry Personality is everything,”[[719]] wherewith also it were well to combine his frequent references[[720]] to his favourite idea of the “dæmonic.” His extreme and repeated[[721]] admiration of Daphnis and Chloe (undoubtedly a charming thing) is to be noted.
The third volume, giving us[[722]] Eckermann’s second skimmings of his notes and memories, is, perhaps naturally, less fruitful, but it is far from barren. Another of the audacious and felicitous phrases which have done so much to establish Goethe’s fame is that[[723]] about Shakespeare’s “unflustered, innocent, sleepwalkerish manner of production”: and the passage on Schlegel[[724]] is a good combination of magnanimity and veracity. One of the strangest blunders of interpretation ever made by such a man is that by which he makes[[725]] Macduff’s “He has no children” apply to Macbeth instead of to Malcolm, thereby not only making necessary a clumsy explaining-away of Lady Macbeth’s own words, but spoiling the poetry of the actual passage. In the same context comes the contradiction of himself, that Shakespeare thought mainly of the stage when he wrote.[[726]] On the other hand, the passage[[727]] on Burns, Béranger, and the effect on literary talent of an exciting atmosphere of various kinds, from the clash of sentiment and thought in a city like Paris to the inspiration of traditional ballad-literature, is all but consummate in a certain way.
Then read him on the incommensurableness of poetry,[[728]] and (in a happier vein about Classic and Romantic than that which has been noticed) pronouncing[[729]] that, for all the fuss (Lärme) about the two, “a work that is good all through will be a classic sure enough,” and you may leave him in a state of reconciliation which, in wise persons, will not be disturbed by later utterances on French authors, Guizot, Villemain, Mérimée, Victor Hugo even, though on the latter you may think that he has got at a wrong angle. After all, one may say that Hugo and not Goethe was in that position: for few persons with a critical head now think of the author of Marion de l’Orme as they think of the author of the Contemplations and the Légende.
Some more general things: Goethe on Scott and Byron.
To proceed from particulars to mediate generalities, a very instructive light on Goethe’s general critical attitude may be obtained by comparing his expressions in regard to Scott and to Byron.[[730]] He admires both. But in regard to Scott he justifies his admiration. His analysis to Eckermann[[731]] of The Fair Maid of Perth is really critical: he points out how good this passage is, how cunningly that episode is worked in, how powerful is that other picture. He praises Rob Roy in the same manner,[[732]] “going at the jugular,” selecting the truth of detail, the unendliche Fleiss in den Vorstudien (the very thing which shallow critics deny to Scott), and so forth. Now, his eulogies of Byron are quite different. They are nearly all in generals; the most definite passage that I remember, about the wigshops and lamplighters in Don Juan, comes from Eckermann’s mouth, not Goethe’s. The great man himself is struck by Byron’s social and political position; he is lost in wonder at Byron’s real or supposed revolt against what he, like others, supposes to have been English Philistinism (the Philistinism of Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding!), and the like. It is never a phrase, a passage, a situation, hardly ever a book[[733]] that he praises. And I do not know a closer approach to the merely and purely bête in a writer of the greatest literary, and of great critical, genius than the remark[[734]] that a few lines of Don Juan “poison the whole Gerusalemme.” It would be as sensible to say that one stanza of Tasso is an antidote to the whole of Don Juan. The two things are “incommensurable,” and severed by a gulf.