Various - Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

What, then, was this task to which Goethe had so early devoted himself, and which seemed to him too important to be postponed even to the exigencies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods? It was that task about which, since Goethe’s time, so much has been said – self-culture. “From my boyhood,” says Wilhelm, speaking evidently for Goethe himself, “it has been my wish and purpose to develop completely all that is in me.” Elsewhere he says, “to make my own existence harmonious.” Here is the refined form of selfishness of which Goethe has been so often accused. And undoubtedly the phrase is one which will bear a selfish interpretation, just as a Christian may be selfish when he devotes himself to the salvation of his soul. But in the one case, as in the other, it is before all things evident that the task undertaken is very serious, and that the man who undertakes it must be of a very serious disposition. When, as in Goethe’s case it is self-planned and self-imposed, such an undertaking is comparable to those great practical experiments in the conduct of life which were made by the early Greek philosophers. Right or wrong, such an experiment can only be imagined by an original man, and can only be carried into effect by a man of very steadfast will. But we may add that it is no more necessary to give a selfish interpretation to this formula than to the other formulæ by which philosophers have tried to describe the object of a moral life. A harmonious existence does not necessarily mean an existence passed in selfish enjoyment. Nor is the pursuit of it necessarily selfish, since the best way to procure a harmonious existence for others is to find out by an experiment practised on oneself in what a harmonious existence consists, and by what methods it may be attained. For the present, at least, let us content ourselves with remarking that Goethe, who knew his own mind as well as most people, considered himself to carry disinterestedness almost to an extreme. What especially struck him in Spinoza, he says, was the boundless unselfishness that shone out of such sentences as this, “He who loves God must not require that God should love him again.” “For,” he continues, “to be unselfish in everything, especially in love and friendship, was my highest pleasure, my maxim, my discipline, so that that petulant sentence written latter, ‘If I love you, what does that matter to you?’ came from my very heart.”

However this may be, when a man, so richly gifted otherwise, displays the rarest of all manly qualities – viz., the power and persistent will to make his life systematic, and place all his action under the control of a principle freely and freshly conceived, he rises at once into the highest class of men. It is the strenuous energy with which Goethe enters into the battle of life, and fights there for a victory into which others may enter, that makes him great, that makes him the teacher of these later ages, and not some foppish pretension of being above it all, of seeing through it and despising it. But just because he conceived the problem in his own manner, and not precisely as it is conceived by the recognized authorities on the conduct of life, he could take little interest in the controversies which those authorities held among themselves, and therefore passed for indifferent to the problem itself. He did not admit that the question was to form an opinion as to the conditions of the life after death, though he himself hoped for such a future life, for he wanted rather rightly to understand and to deal with the present life; nor did he want what is called in the schools a philosophy, remarking probably that the most approved professors of philosophy lived after all much in the same way as other people. It seemed to him that he was more earnest than either the theologians or the philosophers, just because he disregarded their disputes and grappled directly with the question which they under various pretexts evaded – how to make existence satisfactory.

He grasps it in the rough unceremonious manner of one who means business, and also in the manner which Rousseau had made fashionable. We have desires given us by God or Nature, convertible terms to him; these desires are meant to receive satisfaction, for the world is not a stupid place, and the Maker of the world is not stupid. This notion that human life is not a stupid affair, and that the fault must be ours if it seems so, that for everything wrong there must be a remedy, 35 35 “Sicherlich es muss das Beste Irgendwo zu finden sein.” is a sort of fundamental axiom with him, as it is with most moral reformers. Even when he has death before his mind he still protests. “‘He is no more!’ Ridiculous! Why ‘no more?’ ‘It is all over.’ What can be the meaning of that? Then it might as well never have existed. Give me rather an eternal void.” And this way of thinking brings him at once, or so he thinks, into direct conflict with the reigning system of morality, which is founded not on the satisfaction, but on the mortification of desire. He declares war against the doctrine of self-denial or abstinence. “Abstain, abstain! – that is the eternal song that rings in every ear. In the morning I awake in horror, and am tempted to shed bitter tears at the sight of day, which in its course will not gratify one wish, not one single wish.” So speaks Faust, and Goethe ratifies it in his own person, when he complains that, “we are not allowed to develop what we have in us, and are denied what is necessary to supply our deficiencies; robbed of what we have won by labor or has been allowed us by kindness, and find ourselves compelled, before we can form a clear opinion about it to give up our personality, at first in instalments, but at last completely; also that we are expected to make a more delighted face over the cup the more bitter it tastes, lest the unconcerned spectator should be affronted by any thing like a grimace.” He adds that this system is grounded on the maxim that “All is vanity,” a maxim which characteristically he pronounces false and blasphemous. That “all is not vanity” is indeed almost the substance of Goethe’s philosophy. “His faith,” so he tells the Houri who, at the gate of Paradise, requires him to prove his orthodoxy, “has always been that the world, whichever way it rolls, is a thing to love, a thing to be thankful for.” 36 36 “Dass die Welt, wie sie auch kreise, Liebevoll und dankbar sei.”

This doctrine again, is not in itself or necessarily a doctrine of selfishness, though it may easily be represented so. It may be true that all virtue requires self-denial; but for that very reason we may easily conceive a system of senseless and aimless self-denial setting itself up in the place of virtue. It is not every kind of self-denial that Goethe has in view, but the particular kind by which he has found himself hampered. His indignation is not moved when he sees absistence practised in order to attain some great end; it is the abstinence which leads to nothing and aims at nothing that provokes him. He has given two striking dramatic pictures of it. There is Faust, who cannot tolerate the emptiness of his secluded life; but does it appear that he rebels against it simply because it brings no pleasure to himself, even though it confers benefit upon others and upon the world? The burden of his complaint is that his abstinence does no good to anybody, that the studies for which he foregoes pleasure lead to no real knowledge; and expressly to make this clear, Goethe introduces the story of the plague, which Faust and his father had tried to cure by a drug, which did infinitely more harm than the plague itself. The other picture is that of Brother Martin in “Götz,” the young monk who envies Götz his life so full of movement and emotion, while he is himself miserable under the restraint of his vows. Here, again, the complaint is that no good comes of such abstinence. The life of self-denial is conceived as an utter stagnation, unhealthy even from a moral point of view. It is contrasted with a life not of luxury, but of strenuous energy, at once wholesome and useful to the world.