No less than three books on Goethe have been issued in the course of the last few months, and the fact is sufficient evidence that the cult of the Olympian Jupiter of Weimar, which was first inaugurated eighty years ago by Carlyle, is in no danger of dying out in England. Professor Hume Brown has given us a penetrating and judicious study of Goethe’s youth, such as one had a right to expect from the eminent Scottish historian.[17] Mr. Joseph McCabe has given us a comprehensive survey of Goethe’s life, and an objective and critical appreciation of his personality.[18] Both are in profound sympathy with their subject, but neither is a blind hero-worshipper. In Mr. McCabe’s life we are not only introduced to the scientist who is ever in quest of new worlds to conquer, we are also made acquainted with the pagan epicure ever engaged in amorous experiments! We are not only introduced to the sublime poet and prophet, we are also introduced to the incurable egotist, who could only find time to visit his old mother once every ten years, whilst, as boon companion of a petty German Prince, he always found time for his pleasures. We are not only admitted to contemplate the pomp and majesty of his world-wide fame, we are also admitted to the sordid circumstances of Goethe’s “home.” And our awe and reverence are turned into pity. We pity the miserable husband of a drunken and epileptic wife rescued from the gutter; we pity even more the unhappy father of a degraded son, who inherited all the vices of one parent without inheriting the genius of the other.

I.

The first quality which strikes us in Goethe, and which dazzled his contemporaries, and continues to dazzle posterity, is his universality. He appears to us as one of the most receptive, one of the most encyclopÆdic intellects of modern times. A scientist and a biologist, a pioneer of the theory of evolution, a physicist and originator of a new theory of colour, a man of affairs, a man of the world and a courtier, a philosopher, a lyrical poet, a tragic, comic, satiric, epic, and didactic poet, a novelist and an historian, he has attempted every form of literature, he has touched upon every chord of the human soul.

It is true that, in considering this universality of Goethe, it behoves us to make some qualifications. His human sympathies are by no means as universal as his intellectual sympathies. He has no love for the common people. He has the aloofness of the aristocrat. He has a Nietzschean contempt for the herd. He takes little interest in the religious aspirations of mankind or in the struggles of human freedom. The French Revolution remains to him a sealed book, and his history of the campaign in France is almost ludicrously disappointing.

With regard to what has been called his “intellectual universality,” the elements which compose it cannot be reduced to unity and harmony. It would be difficult to co-ordinate them into a higher synthesis, for that universality is at the same time diversity and mutability. Goethe is essentially changeable and elusive. In his works we find combined the antipodes of human thought. There is little in common between the poet of Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther on the one hand and the poet of Tasso and Iphigenia on the other hand. The intellect of Goethe is like a crystal with a thousand facets reflecting all the colours of the rainbow.

And it may well be asked, therefore, whether this encyclopÆdic diversity can aptly be called universality. Universality must ultimately result in unity and harmony, and it is impossible to assert that Goethe’s mind ever achieved unity and harmony, that it was ever controlled by one dominant thought.

At any rate, whether a defect or a quality, there can be no doubt that this encyclopÆdic diversity has turned to the great advantage of his glory. It is precisely because Goethe is an elusive Proteus that all doctrines may equally claim him. Romanticists turn with predilection to the creator of Werther or the first “Faust.” Classicists admire the plastic beauty of Tasso and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the WeltbÜrger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German race. The sensuous and voluptuous libertine is enchanted by the eroticism of the “Roman Elegies.” The domesticated reader is drawn by that chaste idyll, Herman and Dorothea. The Spinozist and Pantheist are attracted by the general tendencies of his philosophy. The Christian is at liberty to interpret “Faust” in a sense which is favourable to his religion. The Liberal politician can point to the author of Goetz and Egmont. The Conservative and Reactionary can claim all the works of Goethe’s maturity, when the poet had become the perfect courtier.

II.

There is a second quality which Goethe possesses in a supreme degree, and by which he is distinguished from his contemporaries—namely, mental sanity and serenity. Most of his fellow-poets reveal some morbid characteristics, are afflicted with some Weltschmerz, with some internal spiritual malady. They live in an atmosphere of strife and discord. The marvellous vitality of Goethe has escaped from the contagion. Like his fellow-poets, he passed through the crisis of the Sturm und Drang. But it seems as if he had only known it in order to give to his experiences a final artistic expression. He communicated the “Wertherian malady” to a whole generation, but he himself emerged triumphant and unscathed. The hurricane which wrecked so many powerful intellects spared his own. After the Italian journey he never ceased by example and precept to recommend harmony and balance, and he became so completely the perfect type of intellectual and artistic sanity that the world has forgotten the Bohemian days of Frankfurt and Leipzig, the merry days of Weimar, the repulsive vulgarity of his drunken mistress and wife, the degradation of his son, and has agreed only to contemplate the Olympian majesty of Weimar. Whether the repose and sanity of Goethe were unmixed virtues, or whether they were partly the result of indifference, of impassivity or selfishness, is another question. Certain it is that there is no other trait in Goethe’s personality which has done more to raise him in the esteem of posterity. He has proved to the world that internal discord and distraction and morbid exaltation are not the necessary appanage of genius, and that, on the contrary, the most powerful genius is also the most sane, the most balanced, the most self-possessed, the most harmonious.

III.

Without going here into the purely formal and artistic qualities of Goethe’s works, there is one fact which, perhaps more than any other, impressed itself on the imagination of the world, and that is the realization of his own personality, the achievement of his own destiny. Of all his poems, the rarest and most perfect is the poem of his life. Hitherto no such life had ever been allotted to a favourite of the Muses. He seemed to have received a bountiful abundance of all the gifts of the fairies—superb health, comfort, and wealth, the love of an adoring mother and sister, the loyalty of illustrious friends, the favour of Princes, the homage of women, and the admiration of men. To him was opened every province of human activity. He exhausted every form of enjoyment. His life until the end was like the unfolding of a glorious version of a happy dream. At eighty years of age he remained the one surviving giant of the golden age of German literature. In his lifetime he was considered by Europe, as well as by Germany, as the most glorious exemplar of his race, and the city of his adoption had become a pilgrimage attracting worshippers from all parts of Europe. Death was merciful to him. The last act of his life was as beautiful as the others. It was not preceded by the gradual dissolution of his physical and intellectual strength; rather was it like the burning out of a flame. He passed away in an apotheosis, and the last words uttered by the dying poet, “Mehr Licht, mehr Licht” (More light, more light), have become for all future generations the final expression of his philosophy and the symbol of his personality.

CHAPTER VII