Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

have been, or may yet be, our own. We feel, the most of us, that we, too, have been borne along the same tempestuous waters of life. His companion, Mephisto, has also been our companion. We recognize him as a wellknown individual, always true to the laws of his own being, who has whispered many a temptation into our ears, or, what is worse, has whispered many a consolation. He is a hideous disguised consistency throughout; and, as some one has said, the identical devil of modern times. But in equal clearness-strongly contrasted from him by her innocence, and from Faust by her contented simplicity-stands the gentle Gretchen, whose story unseals the deepest fountains of love and pity. We take to the artless maiden, as a true product of nature, from the first; we grow happy with her in the brief paradise of affection and reverence that opens upon her young hopes; our heart breaks with her, in her cruel betrayal, and, when she departs, during that horrid night in the dungeon, her poor distressed brain, like Ophelia's, quite shattered, we listen to her expiring words as a voice from the spiritland, summoning us all to judgment on her account. It seems as if the whole world were condemned by the sad issue of such a tragedy.

The prose writings of Goethe manifest the same original and masterly genius as his poems. We might give in evidence of this his Werther, which set all Europe agog, and his Elective Affinities, which extorted from all Christendom a howl (while all Europe, and all Christendom, devoured both); but we shall confine our remarks to Wilhelm Meister, which is, doubtless, his master-piece. As a narrative, it is pronounced generally destitute of interest; for, like the needy knife-grinder, "story, God bless you, it has none to tell, sir;" while there is only the slightest development of plot in it-no highly-wrought or intense scenes, no grandiloquent or morbid personages, who stamp and tear about for nothing, and only events, for the most part commonplace and unimportant, following each other in a languid way that quite persuades the admiring reader to a gentle sleep. Compared with the mob of incident that dash and thunder through more modern tales, it is tame even to extreme dullness.

Yet, by observing a little while, we find in it a clear self-existent world, filled with actual men and women, whose actions, though not great or extraordinary, are very much the actions of humans. They are characters of real life; their foibles and virtues alike drawn with an unsparing hand, presented as samples of this very various world for our study, and not as heroes for our worship. The author writes as though he had no further interest in them than he would have in the same number of indifferent individuals anywhere; he merely raises a curtain to let us see what they are at, and all their sayings and tricks, some of them fantastic enough, he watches with imperturbable gravity. At times, we are inclined to think that he despises the whole pack of them, yet he goes on parading them with the utmost calmness, betraying not the slightest disapproval or vexation at anything they do, and shrinking from no untoward discovery. He writes their biography with the most scrupulous fidelity-a fidelity which has this advantage for us, that we get a deeper interest in their proceedings. We come gradually to watch their movements, to listen to their long talks, and even to suspect that, after all, they may possess some deep significance. This suspicion is helped out by certain general remarks we happen upon-quite too simple and obvious as they seem at first-but which cling to the memory, and transform themselves, in some way or other, to profound suggestions, as if the observation and insight of a long, busy life were suddenly deposited there. Then we are aroused here and there by single passages of a splendid and majestic eloquence; criticisms of art, brief but rare, penetrating, comprehensive, keen, far-reaching glances into practical life and the philosophy of trade, business, and human nature, accompanied by a most provoking tolerance of all seeming human weaknesses, and a most genial sympathy with all human strivings. There are also chance allusions that open up wondrous depths; obscure hints growing every moment more palpable, till they stand forth as luminous, world-embracing truths; light sparkles of wit, which merely flash at the outset upon the senses, but, before the end of it, condense in the mind into rare gems of wisdom; manifest traces of an al

1856.]

Lewes's Life of Goethe.

most universal culture in the author; little outbreaks of song, that make the whole heart ache, we know not why: to say nothing of entire pages of poetry, in the shape, perhaps, of a critique on Hamlet, or of lofty sentiments, and noble original views of religion-all flowing in a language of liquid sweetness. The upshot of the matter is, slow-moving that

66

our dull-seeing,

The

'Thespis cart" is changed, as if by enchantment, into an ideal world: the theatrical life of the hero, with its trivialities of all sorts, its high aspirings and slender realizings, is seen as an illuminated picture of a still higher life; where every incident has a higher end, and every character embodies higher phases in human development. vivacious Philena, the clear-minded Jarno, the beneficent Natalia, the manly Lothario, the dignified Abbe, the cultivated Uncle-the mysterious melancholy Harper, and that singular child of enthusiasm and suffering, the wild boy-girl Mignon-a beam from heaven struggling through the dank vapors of earth-all attach us to them with a feeling of brotherhood, as elements of that manifold rich life of which we, too, are a part-as notes and tones in that universal melody which nature is ever sending up to her God.

If Goethe, who is everywhere great, is anywhere greatest, it is in his songs It was his habit through and ballads. life, to turn all his experiences into poetry, that he might thereby work off the burden of his emotions, whether joyful or sad. His songs, therefore, are remarkable for their freedom and spontaneity. Yet a writer in the British Review, in a generally able article, describes his lyrics as marked by "deliberativeness," comparing him in this respect with Wordsworth. Now, to us they seem to be the very opposite of deliberative. They are the very outpourings of his mind in all its moods; a melodious diary of his daily and almost hourly changes of feeling; simple breathings of the inward life; sparkling jets of momentary thought and affection. There is perpetual freshness and reality about them, like the bloom of new spring-flowers. They are outgrowths of every-day existence, speaking of the present, the actual, the world around and in us, and possessing a Even when hearty human interest.

their meaning is insignificant, they ring

through us, to haunt the memory and
imagination, like snatches of Mozart's
music. The correspondence of the
form with the substance is so perfect,
yet simple, that the charm defies all
analysis. It it felt but not detected. As
Carlyle says of Burns's song, too, they
sing themselves; they are favorites
with composers as they are with the
people; and once heard cling to the
brain like spells. Then again, how di-
versified these lyrics; some as simple
as the whimperings of a child; others
grotesque, naïve, or full of a devil-may-
care animal spirit; others tender, plain-
tive, thoughtful; others wild, unearth-
ly, and smelling of the cloister; and
others again, proud, lofty, defiant, like
the words of a Titan heaping his scorn
upon the gods. Dwight, one of our
finest critics of art, says of these, that
"they are as remarkable for their wild
grandeur of thought and language as
they are for their irregular, unrhymed,
There is some-
dithyrambic measure.

thing in their Greek, chorus-like, mys-
terious style and movement, which can-
not be lost without losing all their
poetry. They breathe the old Greck
atmosphere of Eschylus. The soul's
proud assertion of itself in Promethe-
us;' the child-like, unquestioning awe
and wonder, and even admiration, with
which the sublimity of destiny is cele-
brated in the Limits of Man,' in such
lofty unalterable language, as if desti-
ny itself had fitted each word in its
place; the delicious unrest of the

[ocr errors]

Spring' feeling, the yearning to be taken up with which nature's beauty overcomes the ravished soul, so sweetly clothed in the fable of Ganymede;' the simple majesty of the Godlike;' all have an air of unpremeditated inspired beauty and grandeur, which defies imitation; and they lose much of their reality and charm in any other language. What ballads, in any literature, are comparable to the Bride of Corinth,' the Erl-King,' and the 'God and the Bayadere?""

Without dwelling, however, upon the mere literary excellence of Goethe's performances, or even attempting a general characterization of his literary genius, let us proceed to explain why he is called so emphatically the artist of his age. It is the more important because his biographer, true to the behests of an incompetent philosophy, seems to ignore this as part of the mat

[ocr errors]

ter altogether, and stands dumbfounded in the presence of the pervading symbolism of Goethe's writings. A work of art, as well as a product of nature, is to him a simple fact, having relations to other facts, but no inward spiritual meaning. He is, therefore, perpetually quarreling with what he terms the mysticism of Goethe (although he has already pronounced him a great realist), and is pained at the obvious lapse of his faculties in the latter parts of the Meister and the Faust. But this " "mysticism" is as much a part of his being as his clearness of vision, or his serene wisdom, and demands as much the nicest study on the part of his critics.

The explanation of it, in our view, is simply this: that Goethe, as a man of genius and poet, was profoundly penetrated and possessed by all the vague struggling influences and aspirations of his time, and sought to give them melodious expression. The breath of the Divine Providence, which animated his century, only animated him the more interiorly and strongly, and the task of his genius was, to embody the movement of life in permanent forms. He lived from the middle of the eighteenth century (1749) to the beginning of the nineteenth (1832), through the most remarkable period of crisis and transition that the world ever saw. An old era was coming to an end, amid the decay' and destruction of many things, and a new era was endeavoring to get formed. There was agitation, confusion, perplexity, everywhere; "private life," as Varnhagen von Ense says, in unfolding a similar view of Goethe, full of

66

suffering, and the world at variance with itself; for, the old forms of society, long diseased and baneful, were unable to bind the fresh life to their own death, and the new unfolding forms were yet without a sanction."

Now, these were the elements with which the poetry of that epoch, or so much of it as was true and not a reminiscence, had to deal. Accordingly, we find, in the series of Goethe's works, a complete bodying forth of the successive steps of progress in the mighty struggle. In the earliest, the Goetz, we take a look back into the feudal time, and see it perish before us, in the person of the tenacious, stalwart hero, with a cry of woe to those that come after. Wehe der Nachkommenschaft! Then follows the Werther with its vapid sen

timentalism, and passionate whinings. and morbid self-love and sorrow, expressive of the chronic discontent of society, full of skepticism and black despair, and which, unable to reconcile itself to its condition, or get extricated therefrom, goes off in explosive violence.

In the Elective Affinities, though written long afterwards, there is a recurrence to the same theme, but with greater depth of passion, and less external vehemence. Restlessness has subsided into impatience or suppressed hope. The soul asserts its natural freedom, but submissively, and with a sad consciousness of its impotence in the presence of inevitable circumstances. Without revolting openly, therefore, against existing forms, it postpones its fruitions to another world, where hearts long severed may unite again in the bonds of a free, spiritual attraction.

In Wilhelm Meisters' Apprenticeship the view of life has reached a higher plane. Doubt and distraction have not wholly ceased, but the prospect of a free and noble natural existence is not shut out from the present earth. Casting aside all petty personal grievances, the hero submits to all manners of living and doing, in the hope of working off every disquietude by a placid and perpetual activity. In the very exertion of his powers, he is made conscious of new and potent charms in life, so that its most commonplace details are set to a music, not wholly divine, and yet more than earthly. The moodiness and madness of the self-torturing spirit, give place to tranquil, serious endeavours: the clouds fall away; a mild effulgence reveals vistas of pleasant fields, and, though we reach no great ethical height, no broad Christian views of things, we still catch glimpses of the infinitely rich and varied possibilities of life, under a noble human culture. But it is only in the Wanderings that the inadequacy of the previous view is filled up, and work becomes worship, and the discordant elements of society are reconciled by a scheme of coöpertiave and constructive freedom.

"In the Wanderjahre," says Varnhagen "a comprehensive view of a new order is drawn in firm, not rigid characters, with poetical freedom. The necessities of daily life take their rank by the side of the highest elevation of mind; Christianity works in the form

1856.]

Lewes's Life of Goethe.

of mild piety; education spreads out her establishments, powerful and allcomprehensive; the taste for art, richly bestowed on individuals, becomes a universal advantage; the mechanical arts and trades, led by wise arrangements from their destructive rivalry, take their station without fear beside the higher arts, certain of receiving from them due honor and appreciation; natural disposition and capacity determine and ennoble every occupation. The false and incongruous position of woman disappears before rightly-assorted marriages, which bring together unequal classes. They are exalted into free ministers of a religion of love and benefi

cence.

A new estimate of things and of actions, a new choice and distribution of the lots of life, a new sense of the good and the beautiful, are disclosed, by means of an Association, extending over the whole earth, full of liberal activity, of respect for the highest and for the least; busied in extinguishing crime and want, and affording the rich prospect of mankind advancing in culture and in industry; whose maxim may be, in worldly things, a fair share in the possession and enjoyment of the stock of good existing for every member; in what relates to the attractions of mind, the liberation of the prohibited possible from all fetters that can be broken." It is evident from this, that if Goethe had given us a third part of the Meister (necessary to the completion of the original design), we should have had, in Wilhelm's Meisterjahre, a wonderful anticipation of the various socialistic experiments of this age. But the time was not then ripe.

years,

and

com

For the full and condensed expres-
sion of all this, however, we must turn
to the two parts of Faust, which, begun
in the author's earliest
pleted only near his death, runs paral-
lel in its development to his own being.
It is the grand resumé and consumma-
tion of his thought and hope. Abys-
mal, wild, and heterogeneous as it
there is yet a unity pervading it
which, though not wholly organic, gives
to it a certain consistency and life.
All the spiritual worlds are gathered to
watch its issues; all humanity is involved
in the result. As a legend, the fable
had its origin in the middle ages, but in
its actual working out, the century of
Goethe is transfixed on every page.
Faust comes before us as one who has

seems,

exhausted science in the pursuit of in-
dividual and selfish ends; as a repre-
sentative of the age of "victorious
analysis" and natural research. Hav-
ing worn away the golden days of youth
in the service of the intellect, his man-
hood is weary of the result, is saddened,
disappointed, withered, and would fain
throw away its barren and empty life.
A nameless unrest surges through his
soul, and no attainment in knowledge,
no conquest of nature, is able to speak
the word of peace to the billows. ~ All
his selfish-seeking turns to vanity in
the fruition. It drives him but further
from his fellow-man and from God. A
chill isolation and solitude is the recom-
pense of his toil. Musty parchments
get heaped about him, and skeletons
and grinning skulls, till, in the agony of
baffled endeavor, he curses life and
tience which endures its woes.
all its fancied joys, and even that pa-
is henceforth for him only contempt,
and mockery, and denial. And it is of
this mood that Mephistopheles, his evil
spirit, his other and lower self, the
incarnation of the intellect and the
senses, is born-Mephistopheles, who
hurries him along, from moral in-
difference to sensual indulgence, from
debauchery to seduction. and from
seduction to murder, till his soul, in
its hideous riot and self-abandon-
ment, breeds the monstrous crew who
celebrate their triumph in the fear-
ful witch-dance of the Brocken. The
principle of evil works itself out, at the
close of the first part of the tragedy, in
a scene of heart-rending dislocation and
distress.

There

In the second part we are shown the social effects of the same evil-an incoherent society, which is but one vast masquerade, where the spokesmen are fools, and the only recognized nexusmoney-a stupendous paper lie. Faust,

as

the representative of humanity, plunges into the midst of the mad whirl, strives to penetrate the mystery of its iniquity and errors, but in vain. He summons the antiquated faiths, and finds them the children of chimera: he worships the spirit of ancient beauty, in the person of the rejuvenated Helen, and she disappears as suddenly as she had appeared, leaving him only the vesture; he engages in war and commerce, and everywhere guilt, and care, and distress dog his steps-till at last, old, blinded, baffled, rich, and miserable,

[ocr errors]

re

he deliberately abandons his quest, surrenders his purpose of directing his own way, abjures his individual ends, and gives himself up to work. "What ho! ye myriads of humans," he cries, “ linquish your empty search and go dig the earth! Spread yourselves, in free, creative activity, over the globe-lay fire to the snug little private dwellings of the fond old couples-fill in the remorseless marshes and pools-rescue the land from the devouring ocean, till nature is brought into obedience to man, and ye shall all stand a free people upon a soil as free." But no sooner has Faust discharged himself of responsibility for himself, no sooner has he resolved upon a life of spontaneous creative activity, than he finds the goal is won. He calls upon the beautiful day to linger because his earth is now trans fused into heaven. The sin, and suffering, and sorrow of the past are forgotten in the glories of a better consciousness; legions of angels drop roses from the celestial voids; even the rocks break forth into song; and all who had ever sinned and suffered reappear, as the leaders of a heavenly throng who welcome the spirit of Faust to the regions of the redeemed, in a mystic sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and praise.

This is, of course, the very meagerest outline of Goethe's richly varied magnificent representation-like a single thread drawn from a tissue of cloth-ofgold-and yet, we venture to say, that it will not fall upon the reader with a stronger sense of the impotence of the conclusion than the original does, amid all its splendid accessories of music and picture. For everybody must feel, how much soever he may be impressed by the miraculous vigor and variety of the poem, that it nowhere strikes the highest key; that it nowhere utters the demiurgic word; and that the massive and beautiful world it builds up in the realm of thought is, after all, a bubble world, destined to no continuous life, as in gorgeous sunset we see innumerable colored lights dart and flash among the gold and silver-edged clouds, but we do not behold the sun. Glimpses there are of the great open secret of destiny, in that high doctrine of spontaneous labor for the good of others, in that immortal line

"Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan;" but the author has not surrendered him

self fully and joyously to its divine inspiration. Neither he nor his age felt, though it might have seen, nor does our age feel while it sees, what was proclaimed eighteen hundred years ago, that out of the heart are the issues of life; that goodness is greater than truth; that affection is better than culture; that wisdom is only wisdom in so far as it is a manifestation of love.

Mr. Lewes adopts as the motto of his book a sentence from Jung Stilling, to the effect that Goethe's heart was as large as his intellect; but in doing so has missed the point precisely which explains alike his failures and his success

es.

We do not mean to intimate by this that Goethe was destitute of heart, as the slang-whangers of criticism boisterously contend; for we do not see how he could have been a poet at all, without a large endowment of that sympathy which is the alchemy of genius. But we do mean to intimate that, large as his heart was, it was not commensurate with his intellect. Over all the outgoings of his spirit the intellect kept watch and ward, and, like a muffler over the mouth, too often discharged his breathings of their inward vital heat. His grand ideal of universal self-culture, to which all the circumstances of his existence were bent-his readings, his study, his companionships, his travelswas an ideal prompted by the head, and not by the heart. Those multifarious excursions into the realms of nature, while the warmer provinces of human history lay neglected, were excursions dictated by the head and not by the heart. That long life of shifting love-relations was a life over which reason rather than feeling presided, and as the persons of Frederica, Lilli, Sybilla, Katehen, and the French girl, rise before us, with disheveled tresses mantling their wan and mournful faces, we see the noble form of Goethe standing stern and impassive in the midst of them, like a mountain from which the cold winds of the summit have torn all the clinging vines and clustering flowers. We admire Goethe for the manful courage with which he met and worked down the ills of life, "carved a way for us through the impassable;" we are charmed into ecstacy by the eolian melodies which ever floated about his brain; and we are awed into mute reverence by the prodigious grasp and grandeur of his thought, and its deep reverberations

« AnteriorContinuar »