On the historic and comparative estimate of literature.
Another remarkable thing about Goethe’s criticism, which might be illustrated from the Sprüche, from Eckermann, and from other sources, may again surprise those who have simply adopted the common opinion of him as an apostle of universal culture. Curiously enough, he, the “Doctor Universalis” of nineteenth-century literature, as some would make him, distinctly discourages and disparages that historic study of Comparative Letters which is the distinguishing nineteenth-century principle. His warning to the Germans, that they have most to lose by the introduction of a “world-literature,” is no doubt true enough ad hoc or ad hos: and when, close by, he emits the wish, “May the study of Greek and Roman literature remain the basis of the higher Culture,” we can only say “Amen, and Amen” ever-lastingly. But his stigmatisation of Chinese, Indian, Egyptian literatures as Curiositäten—useless for moral and æsthetic culture—is very tell-tale: and even the most experienced person may be slightly shocked when he finds Goethe extending this taboo to European-mediæval letters as well.[[735]]
Summing up: the merits of Goethe’s criticism.
I hope that it is not extravagant to think that this selection of the actual facts of the case, individual and grouped, may serve to base, with some solidity, a judgment of Goethe’s actual position as a critic. For a considerable time, let us say roundly the middle forty years of the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1870, this position, very mainly owing to the efforts of a large number of great men from Carlyle downwards, was exalted to the very skies: and even more recently it has been rather left alone than seriously attacked. The causes of this—causes which to some extent are true causes and must always operate—may be put shortly as follows. Goethe possessed, to an extraordinary degree, and later perhaps than any one else, that singular wisdom which has been more than once animadverted upon as the property, in the strict sense, of the eighteenth century. He was, for half its length and for nearly two-thirds of his own life, a man of its own: and he never escaped, or wished to escape, entirely from its influence. He was always “in touch” with life and fact: there was “no nonsense about him,” to use an excellent vernacular phrase which, if somewhat double-edged, has a keen and heavily backed edge on the favourable side. There are no “Samothracian mysteries of bottled moonshine” in him; the most apparently dreamy parts of his loftiest and greatest things, such as the second part of Faust, are always, like natural and healthy dreams, merely sublimations of actual facts—experienced or capable of being experienced.
But further, and on the other hand, he had, from very early youth, and by the favour of those of “the Mothers” who allow men of great genius to anticipate and combine the gifts which most have only later and separately, a very strong infusion indeed of Romance and of Science—the two apparently opposite characteristics of the century to which his last thirty years belonged. He had hardly a touch of the special stupidity which accompanied the special cleverness of his earlier century—the degeneration of “common-sense.” In him the fashionable and epidemic diseases of the Neo-classic period were neutralised by the appropriate agencies, without any of these turning to the morbid. The comparison of Goetz with The Robbers is an education in pathological criticism. Nobody ever served under two flags with such honour and credit as Goethe; he may even be said to have effected, if not alone, yet mainly, a reconciliation and junction of arms between his two masters. Yet again his almost unique mastery (just glanced at) of the tendencies of the morrow; his sympathy, in his age, and when he was in a way the greatest man of letters in Europe, with the ideas, tastes, aspirations of quite young men—not merely secured, but to no very small extent deserved, the enthusiastic adhesion of these latter. And when we add to these powerful general things his extraordinary literary gifts, the still more extraordinary range of his interests, the Olympian good-nature of his character, and his singular, and almost supra- or infra-human, avoidance of extremes, it ceases to be at all surprising that the position above noted should have seemed to good wits to be his: it may even seem ungracious, pedantic, absurd to take any exceptions to it.
Its drawbacks: too much of his age.
Yet the exceptions must be taken, and, if possible, made good. The greatest of them—at least, according to those general lines which he himself loved and followed—is connected with that peculiarity of his which has been noticed a few lines previously. He is just a little too much of the day and the morrow combined—not enough of yesterdays and to-morrows far behind and far ahead. The least local and temporary of those who are for an age—possessor of the widest “age” perhaps of them all—he is still of that age, and, except in criticisms that are of life rather than of literature, not sufficiently of all time. As we have seen and shown, he cannot duly appreciate the Middle Ages; and the fact that others were over-appreciating them does not excuse him a whit. In his formative precepts he looks too much to what he thought the requirements of actual nineteenth-century literature—a modified Romanticism, not excluding Science. In other words, he keeps time without winding for a longer period than any other clock on record, but he is perhaps rather impossible to wind afresh. On that calculus of his own which we have disallowed and protested against, which we shall shortly disallow and protest against afresh, one might too often say that he cannot “help us any more.” He is not as “rash in his opinions” as he thought Aristotle was, but he is more inadequate; we can nowadays allow for and discard Aristotle’s rashness, and find abundance of the eternal left in him, and we cannot quite do this with Goethe. We must sometimes, with Aristotle, have, and mark, the side-note, “This was a man of the fourth century B.C.”; we must always with Goethe have the other, “This was the cleverest man of 1770-1830.” Take him again with Longinus, and we find that Longinus needs hardly any side-note at all—only here and there in utterances such as that about the Odyssey. And I at least think that Coleridge, though he certainly needs it here and there, needs it seldomer, far seldomer, than Goethe.