GOETHE
(1749-1832)
BY EDWARD DOWDEN
ohann Wolfgang Goethe was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main on August 28th, 1749, and died at Weimar on March 22d, 1832. His great life, extending over upwards of fourscore years, makes him a man of the eighteenth century and also of the nineteenth. He belongs not only to German but to European literature. And in the history of European literature his position is that of successor to Voltaire and Rousseau. Humanity, as Voltaire said, had lost its title-deeds, and the task of the eighteenth century was to recover them. Under all Voltaire's zeal for destruction in matters of religious belief lay a positive faith and a creative sentiment,—a faith in human intellect and the sentiment of social justice. What indefatigable toil! what indefatigable play! Surely it was not all to establish a negation. Voltaire poured a gay yet bitter élan into the intellectual movement of his time. Yet amid his various efforts for humanity he wanted love; he wanted reverence. And although a positive tendency underlies his achievements, we are warranted in repeating the common sentence, that upon the whole he destroyed more than he built up.
Voltaire fought to enfranchise the understanding. Rousseau dreamed, brooded, suffered, to emancipate the heart. A wave of passion, or at least of sentiment, swept over Europe with the 'Nouvelle Héloise,' the 'Émile,' the 'Confessions.' It was Rousseau, exclaims Byron, who "threw enchantment over passion," who "knew how to make madness beautiful." Such an emancipation of the heart was felt, in the eighteenth century, to be a blessed deliverance from the material interests and the eager yet too arid speculation of the age. But Byron in that same passage of 'Childe Harold' names Rousseau "the self-torturing sophist." And a sophist Rousseau was. His intellect fed upon fictions, and dangerous fictions,—fictions respecting nature, respecting the individual man, respecting human society. Therefore his intellect failed to illuminate, clarify, tranquilize his heart. His emotions were turbid, restless, and lacking in sanity.
Here then were Goethe's two great predecessors: one a most vivacious intelligence, the other a brooding sensibility; one aiming at an emancipation of the understanding, but deficient in reverence and in love; the other aiming at an emancipation of the affections, but deficient in sanity of thought. In what relation stood Goethe to these great forces of the eighteenth century?
In his old age Goethe, speaking of Voltaire, uses the words "a universal source of light." But as a young man he was repelled by "the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and his perversion of so many worthy subjects." "He would never have done," says Goethe, "with degrading religion and the sacred books, for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as they called it." Goethe, indeed, did not deny a use to the spirit of negation. Mephistopheles lives and works. Yet he lives and works as the unwilling servant of the Lord, and the service he renders is to provoke men from indolence to activity.
Into the influence of Rousseau, on the contrary, and into the general movement of feeling to which Rousseau belonged, Goethe in his youth was caught, almost inevitably; and he abandoned himself to it for a time, it might seem without restraint.