Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe

by James Sime

As a work of art, the Second Part is far inferior to the First. It lacks the unity which is to some extent given to the First Part by Faust’s relation to Gretchen; and it contains a multitude of symbolical ideas, the meaning of which it is hard to unravel. We miss, too, the fire and glow of the scenes conceived in Goethe’s early days, when “Faust” served as the direct imaginative expression of his own tumultuous thoughts and longings. Nevertheless, there are individual passages, especially in the scenes relating to Helen of Troy, full of splendid power; and the idea in which all is summed up is in every way worthy even of the grandest of the original elements of Goethe’s scheme. Before dying, Faust feels that a moment might come to which, with all his heart, he could say, “Oh, stay! thou art so fair!” But it is a moment which Mephistopheles, the representative of the evil in his nature, could never have secured for him. It is a moment of pure delight springing from the contemplation of the results of disinterested labour in the service of humanity.

This was Goethe’s last word to the world; the expression of his deepest and most settled conviction. To make selfish joy, as Faust had done, the supreme object of existence—that way lie perpetual evil and misery; to sacrifice self, to bring the will into harmony with ideal law, in all things to think and act in a spirit of love and brotherhood, as Faust, after fierce struggle, learns to do—in that, and in that alone, can man find a life truly fitted to his nature and capable of satisfying his deepest, inmost wants. The idea with which Goethe seeks to solve the problem of “Faust” is the old, yet ever new, doctrine—“He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

For many years Goethe enjoyed excellent health, and from day to day his work went on without serious interruption. The end—described simply and graphically in Düntzer’s “Goethes Leben”—came somewhat suddenly, when he was in his eighty-third year. On Thursday, March 15, 1832, when the young Grand Duchess paid him her usual weekly visit, he had much to say about a drawing which a friend had sent him from Pompeii. It was a sketch of an ancient design in mosaics, representing a scene in the life of Alexander the Great. The Grand Duchess saw in her friend no sign of an approaching illness, nor was Goethe, when he retired to his room in the evening, conscious of any physical change. During the night, however, he could not sleep, and next morning it was obvious that he had lost much of his usual vigour. Between the 19th and the 20th of March, about midnight, he had severe pains in the chest and suffered from an attack of breathlessness. Even these symptoms did not alarm him, and on the 20th he had strength enough to sign an official paper securing that aid should be granted to a lady whose talents as an artist had excited his admiration. But life was gradually ebbing away. On the morning of the 22nd of March, he sat in his armchair, holding the hand of his daughter-in-law, Ottilie, in his own, and conversing with her brightly. As he talked, his words came with increasing difficulty, and at last he wholly lost the power of speech. He made signs in the air, and, when his arm dropped, moved his fingers as if writing on his knee. Shortly before midday, leaning back in a corner of his chair, he softly passed away.

If we look back upon the course of Goethe’s long life, it is impossible not to be struck with admiration when we think of the extraordinary range of his activity. There are few departments of intellectual life into which he did not penetrate, and in everything which, as a thinker and writer, he undertook, he displayed the highest order of mental power. As a man of science, he ranks among the foremost investigators of his age. He had no sooner begun to reflect seriously on scientific problems than he placed himself in what proved to be the central current of modern thought. The supreme idea of the nineteenth century is the idea of evolution, and the position of those inquirers who immediately preceded Darwin is necessarily determined by the answer which must be given to the questions—Were they, in their observations and speculations, guided by aims which in the main accord with Darwin’s principle? Were they among the forerunners who prepared the way for the doctrine in which all that was best and most vital in pre-Darwinian scientific thought is summed up? In regard to Goethe, these questions must be answered emphatically in the affirmative. His discoveries, resulting almost equally from the exercise of his perceptive and imaginative faculties, were on the lines which led directly to the theory of evolution. It is only, indeed, since the law of evolution was detected, that the world has recognized the full meaning and importance of his contributions to scientific progress.

As a writer on art, Goethe was less original than as a man of science. But here also he was on the track that has been followed by the greatest of his successors. Greek architecture and sculpture Winckelmann had made in part intelligible; and, having absorbed his teaching, Goethe, as the result of his own observations in Italy, had many a luminous suggestion to offer as to masterpieces of ancient art, and as to the general processes of development with which they were related. In his study of modern art it was to the painters and sculptors whose technical skill was used in the service of high imaginative ideas that he instinctively turned; and no writer of his day sought more earnestly to show how little can be achieved in art if it is divorced from serious and noble thought. He felt, too, as only a few of the world’s intellectual guides have yet felt, how great is the place which properly belongs to art as one of the influences capable of giving dignity and refinement both to individual and to social life.

Great, however, as were Goethe’s achievements in the criticism of art and in science, they are of almost slight importance in comparison with his work as an imaginative writer. As a writer of romance, as a dramatist, as a lyrical poet, he towers high above all other men of letters whom Germany has produced. In the literature of his country he takes the rank which in that of Greece belongs to Homer, in that of Italy to Dante, in that of England to Shakespeare. Almost every element of human life is touched in his creations, yet he has told us that his writings are to be regarded as parts of one great “confession.” However remote they may seem to be from his own experience, they are directly or indirectly rooted in the facts of his personal history. To this is due one of the most distinctive qualities of his work both in verse and in prose—the extraordinary vitality of his ideas; the vividness with which all that he depicts is made to pass before us, as if it were a part of the outward and visible world. He cannot, however, be truly described as a realist, if by a realist is meant one who seeks to do no more than represent exactly what he himself has seen or felt. In taking reality as the basis of ideal structures, Goethe severed from it associations which were only of temporary or accidental interest. He brought it into new relations, touched it with the transforming power of the imagination, and gave to individual facts universal significance. Hence the greatest of his works are as fresh to-day as when he wrote them; and they could lose their living power only if human nature itself were radically changed.

As a critic of literature, he had the sanity of judgment and the intuitive insight which mark all poets of the highest genius. He has never, perhaps, been surpassed in his power of detecting the signs of a genuinely creative capacity; and this power, remarkable even in his youth, did not desert him in old age. He was constantly on the outlook for new intellectual forces, and, when they appeared, seldom failed to divine the direction in which they were moving, and the nature of the results they were likely to accomplish. Byron, Scott, Manzoni, Victor Hugo, Carlyle—all were hailed by Goethe as, in different ways, potent representatives of the later periods of the era to which he himself belonged. It did not occur to him to think of them as rivals. He thought only of his good fortune in having lived to see them carry on the movement of European literature.

When a writer achieves world-wide fame, we cannot resist the impulse to ask what he has to tell us as to the great, enduring spiritual problems of existence. We have seen how deeply Goethe, in youth, was influenced by Spinoza; and during the whole of his mature life his conception of the universe in some respects closely resembled that of the teacher whom he had so profoundly revered. Atheism was not only repugnant to his feeling, but seemed to him the last development of human folly. To him the world was but the manifestation of Divine energy; he thought of it as “the living garment of the Deity.” So far, his idea of the ultimate nature of things was simply Spinoza’s idea; but, when he had fought his way to an independent conviction, he differed widely from Spinoza in his mode of conceiving the Reality which reveals itself in the phenomenal order. The God in whom Goethe believed was not simply “Substance.” The enduring types or patterns to which, in his interpretation of Nature, he attributed such vast importance, imply the existence of something more and deeper than abstract force. They are Divine ideas, and would be unintelligible apart from Mind or Reason. That the word Reason, when applied to the creative energy of the universe, expresses absolute truth, Goethe nowhere says; but he held that man cannot but form far himself some representation of the Unknowable Power, and that to represent it as Reason is the least inadequate way in which we can catch some glimpse of its unutterable splendour.

The notion that the world was formed for man seemed to Goethe the offspring of extravagant self-conceit. Yet he had no mean estimate of the greatness of the human spirit. He recognized in it powers capable of indefinite growth and expansion, and did not doubt that there is an invisible realm in which, after it has fulfilled its mission in the present world, it passes to new and higher destinies. It appeared to him, however, strange and most unreasonable that men should miss what is great and worthy in this life by dreaming vaguely about a life to come. He conceived that the truest preparation for whatever may be in store for us in other states of existence must be the wise cultivation of the faculties with which we are endowed; and among these faculties he gave the highest place to the impulses which bring men into intimate and helpful association with their fellows.

The conduct of life he made a subject of profound reflection, and no modern writer illuminates it with a light at once so clear and so steady. It is for this reason that a quite peculiar relation springs up between Goethe and those who feel the power and the charm of his genius. They go back again and again to his works, his letters, his “Conversations,” and never fail to find in them some fruitful word that brings with it fresh hope and courage. His wise and noble sayings are the more inspiring because they almost invariably suggest deeper meanings than they directly utter. The mind, in appropriating them, is placed in contact, not with abstract dogmas, but with life itself, and is stimulated to the free exercise of its own energies.