Too much a utilitarian of Culture.
But there is another count. Goethe, as everybody knows, had a private chapel (which has bred chantries and churches and cathedrals all over the world), with an ephod and teraphim and everything complete, dedicated to the great god, Cham-Chi-Thaungu, otherwise called Culture. It is ill to be joined to any idols: and this was well seen of him. “This cannot help us,” he says constantly; “we cannot fetch any good out of this.” “Such times, such books, such men have nothing to say for us.” Now, such sentences, from the point of view of the really higher criticism, are anathema, because they are negative. The corresponding positives are not condemnable at all. If a thing does help any one, if any can fetch good, or delight, out of it, it passes at once—in a low class perhaps, perhaps in a high—but it passes. That it does not help any particular person proves nothing at all. If the work is good, on its own scale and specification, it can afford to wait for the persons whom it will help, to whom it will “give culture.” Its beauty is its sole duty. Indeed “What is culture?” is a question to be asked not at all jestingly, and it will be hard to find the answer.
Unduly neglectful of literature as literature.
Yet once more the specimens given (I believe quite fairly) above entitle us—and all but the most blindly fanatical Goetheaner will find it hard to disentitle us from the observation—to observe in them a constant deflection from strictly literary consideration of things. He likes to consider “poetry” rather than “poesy,” poets rather than poetry; and in poets he is always considering the not strictly poetical qualities. He extols, for instance, in a well-known passage, Byron’s “Keckheit, Kühnheit, Grandiosität.” Now the last, though a somewhat questionable, may be a real, poetical quality: but what is there essentially poetical in Keckheit and Kühnheit? The occasion requiring them, it is good that a poet—as that a fox-hunter, a sub-lieutenant left in command of the regiment, a householder facing a fire or a burglar at two o’clock in the morning—should have them: but what is there specially poetical about them? On the contrary, may not a man have them and be, in virtue of having them, a bad, and the worse, poet? Character, conduct, personality (the second construed in a liberal way), these things are what Goethe is always harping on. Now, ten generations of foes and friends have (with the good leave of some friends as well as foes of mine) been able to make out next to nothing at all about Shakespeare’s character, conduct, and personality. Yet most people think that Shakespeare was, let us say, one of the great poets of the world. Shelley’s character was rather weak; his conduct was sometimes disgusting; his personality, though generally amiable, is very vague; and some of us think him the “next poet,” not merely the next English poet, to Shakespeare. We may be wrong: but our case is a case.
Therefore, insolent absurdity as it may seem, I venture to doubt whether Goethe’s criticism is of the absolutely greatest value. We have met with many marks or notes of the true critic in our “journey across Chaos,” and some of them Goethe has. But there are most important ones which he lacks. That he is a great dramatic critic I can very well admit: but his very greatness here, on the principle more than once referred to, makes him a dubious critic of literature. For the Goethe of Faust (not least of the Second Part of it), of the best lyrics, and of some other things, I have, and for a great number of years have had, almost unlimited admiration: for the critical Goethe I feel very much less. That, assisted by natural xenomania, he was a great revelation to Englishmen seventy, eighty, even a hundred years ago, I can very well allow and believe: that he was a valuable populariser of a critical attitude, useful as an alterative to that of Neo-classicism, I know. But I am less sure that there is much in him, as he would himself say, for us now. Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge, are creeds: though the first and second are too succinct and the last too discursive and full of lacunæ. I can admit even Scaliger, even Boileau, to be of the calibre of a will-worship. But Goethe, the critical Goethe, has too much the character of a superstition, now rather stale.
Schiller.
Schiller’s critical position, which some have estimated very highly, depends first upon the collection of small æsthetic treatises, and of a few actual reviews, which is included in his prose works;[[736]] secondly, in his share of the Xenien; and thirdly, in the critical utterances of his Letters, especially those in the correspondence with Goethe, though by no means neglecting those to others, especially Körner. With regard to the first part of the first division, extraordinary importance has been attached to it by some—importance which a wary person would be slow to accept on trust, when he remembers, not merely the remarks of A. W. Schlegel, a declared unfriend, but those of Goethe, Schiller’s unflinching defender, and those of Novalis, a very competent and apparently quite dispassionate observer.[[737]] Much, however, will of course depend on the estimation in which “æsthetic salt for putting on the tail of the Ideal”[[738]] is itself held.