Иоганн Вольфганг фон Гёте
Maxims and Reflections
It is almost the last fruit of this life of concentrated activity, the final outcome of this indomitable character, that is here put before us. And we shall find that to the complex phenomena of the world Goethe applied no other measure but reason and the nature and needs of man. With a full consciousness of the mysteries that surround our existence, he never made the futile endeavour to pass beyond the bounds of present knowledge and experience, or to resolve contradictions by manipulating the facts. In these detached reflections he does, indeed, propound a theory and sketch out a system of conduct; but they cannot, like the Thoughts of Pascal, for instance, be brought under a single and definite point of view. They are a mirror of life itself, and the inner and outer facts of life in all their diversity. The unity they possess is the unity that is stamped upon them by the all-embracing personality of their author, always and unweariedly striving to make his life systematic, distinct, and fruitful; and to judge them as a whole, a man must be able to fathom so great a genius. But to every one in every walk of life Goethe has a word of wise counsel, as though he understood every form of existence and could enter into its needs. In a fine passage in the Wanderjahre, he likens the thought that thus in wondrous fashion takes a thousand particular shapes, to a mass of quicksilver, which, as it falls, separates into innumerable globules, spreading out on all sides. And while these sayings may present thoughts in seeming contradiction one with another, as the moment that called them forth presented this or that side of experience, their inmost nature is a common tendency to realise a great ideal of life. It is little they owe to the form in which they are cast; they are not the elements of an artistic whole which must be seized before we can understand the full meaning of its parts. They are a miscellaneous record of the shrewdest observation; and to read them as they should be read, a few at a time, is like the opportunity of repeated converse with a man of extraordinary gifts, great insight, and the widest culture, who touches profoundly and suggestively now on this, now on that aspect of life and the world and the progress of knowledge. It is the fruit of his own experience that Goethe gives us; and we shall do well to think of it as he himself thought of another book, and to bear in mind that "every word which we take in a general sense and apply to ourselves, had, under certain circumstances of time and place, a peculiar, special and directly individual references."
Goethe is no exception to the rest of mankind in not being equally wise at all times, and in the maxims there are degrees of value: they do not all shine with the like brilliance. Some of them are valuable only for what they suggest; of some, again, it is easy to see that, they appear as matters of speculation rather than as certainties. They raise difficulties, ask for criticism, if possible, correction; or, it may be, they call attention to the contrary view and invite a harmony of opposites. Some of them make a great demand upon our ability "to understand a proverb and the interpretation; the words of the wise and their dark sayings." Their value sometimes depends on the way they are viewed, the culture brought to their understanding, the temper in which they are approached. We look at them, and at first admire; we change our point of view, and find something to criticise and dispute. The obscurity of maxims, as Goethe reminds us, is only relative; not everything can be explained to the reader which was present to the mind of the writer. Some of them seem at first to be of little interest; on one side they may even repel, but from another they attract again, and win perhaps a partial approval. They seem to move as we change our position, and to be without fixed or certain character. But some, again, are so clear and unmistakable, so immeasurably above criticism or objection, that like the furthest of the stars they have no parallax: whatever position we take, their light is steadfast.
Let no one suppose that in the main Goethe's reflections on life had never been made before; that it was not so, no one knew better than he. As a preface and note of warning to them all, he reiterates the words of the preacher: "there is no new thing under the sun." Yes! says Goethe, there is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again. "It is only when we are faithful," he says elsewhere,2 "in arresting and noting our present thoughts, that we have any joy in tradition; since we find the best thoughts already uttered, the finest feelings already expressed. This it is that gives us the perception of that harmonious agreement to which man is called, and to which he must conform, often against his will as he is much too fond of fancying that the world begins afresh with himself." What Goethe means is that we shall do best to find out the truth of all things for ourselves, for on one side truth is individual; and that we shall be happy if our individual truth is also universal, or accords with the wisest thought of the past. It is in this practical light that we must view the maxims, and not as mere academic generalities. It is easy to read them in an hour and forget them as soon; easy to view them with a tepid interest as the work of a great author; but no one will fully understand the value of any of them, who has not experience enough to know its truth. Well is it for us if with the experience we also gain the truth! If any one should say that some of these maxims are very obvious, and so simply true as almost to be platitudes, I would bid him remember that the best education is often to discover these very simple truths for oneself, and learn to see how much there is in commonplaces. For those who have grown old in the world are never weary of telling us that the further we go, the more we shall find, in general, that the same things will happen to us as have happened to others; and it will then be our advantage if we have the same reflections, best of all if we come of ourselves to the same conclusions, as the wisest of those who have gone before us; next best, if we can really and intelligently follow in the footsteps of their thought.
But although the matter of Goethe's sayings is not original in the sense of being new to the world – while it was original for him, since he discovered it for himself and on his own path, their manner is something new, and their range is unparalleled. Take any other set of maxims you will, nowhere is there so wide an outlook, nowhere so just an estimate of human difficulties, nowhere an aim at once so lofty and so practicable. Nowhere is there a larger, stronger, healthier, more tolerant view of life and the world, or an atmosphere clearer of the mists that too often obscure and distort our vision. And in their expression, nowhere is there so little of the besetting sin to sacrifice truth to effect. Goethe has none of the shallow malice and uncharitable candour that with writers of an earlier age passed for the practical wisdom of every day; and we need only contrast his maxims with the similar work of La Rochefoucauld, Helvetius, and Chamfort, admirable as they may be in their exposure of human selfishness, to determine on which side is the greater service to mankind. How different the views of the world taken by how many writers! – the secret of it all is that the men themselves are different.
It was said of Goethe that his heart, which few knew, was as great as his intellect, which all knew. Certainly his writings and not least his maxims are a profound example of the truth that in the last resort it is moral rather than intellectual qualities that make great literature. It is not to be denied that much may be done by a mere facility of style, a command of words, a fine taste, a wide acquaintance with the turns and resources of language; but in the end the effect is produced by the man himself, his character and his strength. To the strenuous, earnest man, like Goethe, the world offers a stirring spectacle and provides a great opportunity; and he grasps and uses them both to the best of his peculiar capacity. It is diversity of temperament dealing with partial knowledge that makes so many and such various doctrines. A man's views of life are, in short, those which he deserves to have, and his writings are cast in the mould of his character. It is no more strange that the authors of books should give us such varied pictures of the humanity around us, than that painters should conceive natural objects so differently. Literature, too, is like a gallery of landscape and portrait: it is the same world which is presented, the same men and things; but the way of looking at it varies with the artist; who, whatever his training may have been, will see in Nature what he brings to it himself. Ars est homo additus naturæ. If this be truly to define the essence and method of Art, it is equally true to say that Literature is man added to life; and, here as there, everything depends on the character and capacity of the man.
No one has as yet said that he doubts Goethe's capacity, although there are many who have solemnly pronounced him uninteresting. The critic who can read Goethe's works with real attention, and then venture to call them dull, is simply showing that he has no call to the office he assumes, or no interest in literature of the highest class. What is true, of course, is that Goethe is profoundly serious, and he is, therefore, not always entertaining; but that is enough to make him pass for dull in the eyes of those who take literature only as a pastime, – a substitute for a cigar, or something to lull them to sleep when they are tired. But another and more formidable accusation is made against Goethe which affects his character, and would go far to destroy the value of his writings if it were true; but to many it is curiously inconsistent with the other charge of being dull. It is that he is immoral. Now of all the great writers of the world, Goethe is admittedly the greatest teacher. He is essentially and frankly didactic; and nowhere is there so large and worthy a body of literature from a single pen which is informed with so high and so serious a purpose. Roundly to call its author immoral is a charge which sufficiently refutes itself by its own ignorance and absurdity. The charge comes, as a rule, from those who judge life by the needs and duties of a young girl, and they confound the whole of morality – character and conduct in all relations to one's fellow-men – with one section of it. They forget that Goethe was a man of the old régime; that his faults were those of his time and class. They forget that an extreme repugnance to all monasticism, asceticism, and Roman Catholicism in general, naturally led him to pay a diminished regard to the one virtue of which the Christian world is sometimes apt to exaggerate the importance, and on which it is often ready to hang all the law and the prophets. To some, again, Goethe appears to be a supremely selfish wizard, dissecting human passion in the coldest blood, and making poetical capital out of the emotional tortures he caused in others. This, too, is a charge which the merest acquaintance with his life and work must of necessity refute: it is too simple a slander to be seriously discussed. Since these are charges which have, however, kept many estimable people from reading Goethe, it may be some consolation to them to know that the maxims are entirely free from any possibility of objection on this ground.
The element of moral teaching which runs through Goethe's mature works like a golden thread, re-appears in the maxims free and detached from the poetic and romantic environment which in such varied shapes is woven around it in Werther, Tasso, Meister, above all in Faust. To do the next duty; to meet the claims of each day; to persist with a single mind and unwearied effort on a definite, positive, productive path; cheerfully to renounce what is denied us, and vigorously to make the best of what we have; to restrain vague desires and uncertain aims; to cease bewailing the vanity of all things and the fleeting nature of this our world, and do what we can to make our stay in it of lasting use, – these are lessons which will always be needed, and all the more needed as life becomes increasingly complex. They are taught in the maxims with a great variety of application, and nowhere so concisely summarised as in one of them. "The mind endowed with active powers," so it runs, "and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth."
Goethe has been called, and with truth, the prophet of culture; but the word is often misunderstood. We cannot too clearly see that what is here meant is not a mere range of intellectual knowledge, pursued with idolatrous devotion: it is moral discipline, a practical endeavour, forming wise thought and noble character. And this is the product, not of learning, but of work: if we are to know and realise what there is in us, and make the best of it, our aim must be practical and creative. "Let every man," he urges, "ask himself with which of his faculties he can and will somehow influence his age." And again: "From this time forward, if a man does not apply himself to some art or handiwork, he will be in a bad way. In the rapid changes of the world, knowledge is no longer a furtherance. By the time a man has taken note of everything, he has lost himself." The culture of which he speaks is not mainly intellectual. We use the word in a way that is apt to limit and conceal its meaning, and we often apply it to a strange form of mental growth, at once stunted and overfed, to which, if we may judge by its fruits, any breath of real culture would be fatal. It has nothing to do with learning in the general and narrow sense of the word, or with the often pernicious effects of mere learning. In the language of the hour we are wont to give the exclusive name of culture to a wide acquaintance with books and languages; whether or not it results, as it has before now resulted, in a want of culture in character and outward demeanour, in airs of conceit, in foolish arrogance, in malice and acrimony.
A uniform activity with a moral aim – that, in Goethe's view, is the highest we can achieve in life. "Character in matters great and small consists," he says, "in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable." It is the gospel of work: our endeavour must be to realise our best self in deed and action; to strive until our personality attains, in Aristotle's word, its entelechy; its full development. By this alone can we resolve all the doubts and hesitations and conflicts within that undermine and destroy the soul. "Try to do your duty, and you will know at once what you are worth." And with all our doing, what should be the goal of our activity? In no wise our own self, our own weal. "A man is happy only when he delights in the good-will of others," and we must of a truth "give up existence in order to exist"; we must never suppose that happiness is identical with personal welfare. In the moral sphere we need, as Kant taught, a categorical imperative; but, says Goethe, that is not the end of the matter; it is only the beginning. We must widen our conception of duty and recognise a perfect morality only "where a man loves what he commands himself to do." "Voluntary dependence is the best state, and how should that be possible without love?" And just in the same sense Goethe refuses to regard all self-denial as virtuous, but only the self-denial that leads to some useful end. All other forms of it are immoral, since they stunt and cramp the free development of what is best in us – the desire, namely, to deal effectively with our present life, and make the most and fairest of it.
And here it is that Goethe's moral code is fused with his religious belief. "Piety," he says, "is not an end but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquillity of soul." This is the piety he preaches; not the morbid introspection that leads to no useful end, the state of brooding melancholy, the timorous self-abasement, the anxious speculation as to some other condition of being. And this tranquillity of soul, Goethe taught that it should be ours, in spite of the thousand ills of life which give us pause in our optimism. It is attained by the firm assurance that, somewhere and somehow, a power exists that makes for moral good; that our moral endeavours are met, so to speak, half-way by a moral order in the universe, which comes to the aid of individual effort. And the sum and substance of his teaching, whether in the maxims or in any other of his mature productions, is that we must resign ourselves to this power, in gratitude and reverence towards it and all its manifestations in whatever is good and beautiful. This is Goethe's strong faith, his perfect and serene trust. He finely shadows it forth in the closing words of Pandora, where Eos proclaims that the work of the gods is to lead our efforts to the eternal good, and that we must give them free play: —
Was zu wünschen ist, ihr unten fühlt es;
Was zu geben sei, die wissen's droben.
Gross beginnet ihr Titanen; aber leiten
Zu dem ewig Guten, ewig Schönen,
Ist der Götter Werk; die lasst gewähren.
And so too in Faust: it is the long struggle to realise an Ideal, dimly seen on life's labyrinthine way of error, that leads at last to the perfect redemption: —
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen.
And throughout the perplexities of life and the world, where all things are but signs and tokens of some inner and hidden reality, it is the ideal of love and service, das Ewig-Weibliche, that draws us on.
But this assurance cannot be reached by a mere theory; and Goethe is not slow to declare how he views attempts to reach it in that way. "Credo Deum! that," he reminds us here, "is a fine, a worthy thing to say; but to recognise God when and where he reveals himself, is the only true bliss on earth." All else is mystery. We are not born, as he said to Eckermann, to solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp. The problem, he urged, is transformed into a postulate: if we cannot get a solution theoretically, we can get it in the experience of practical life. We reach it by the use of an "active scepticism," of which he says that "it continually aims at overcoming itself and arriving by means of regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty." But he would have nothing to do with doctrinal systems, and, like Schiller, professed none of the forms of religion from a feeling of religion itself. To see how he views some particular questions of theology the reader may turn with profit to his maxims on the Reformation and early Christianity, and to his admirable remarks on the use and abuse of the Bible. The basis of religion was for him its own earnestness; and it was not always needful, he held, for truth to take a definite shape: "it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony." "I believe," he said to Eckermann, "in God and Nature and the victory of good over evil; but I was also asked to believe that three was one, and one was three. That jarred upon my feeling for truth; and I did not see how it could have helped me in the least." As for letting our minds roam beyond this present life, he thought there was actual danger in it; although he looked for a future existence, a continuation of work and activity, in which what is here incomplete should reach its full development. And whatever be the secrets of the universe, assuredly the best we can do is to do our best here; and the worst of blasphemies is to regard this life as altogether vanity; for as these pages tell us, "it would not be worth while to see seventy years if all the wisdom of this world were foolishness with God."
In Goethe we pass, as over a bridge, from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth; but though he lived to see a third of the nineteenth century, he hardly belongs to it. Of its political characteristics he had few or none. He was no democrat. As the prophet of inward culture, he took the French Revolution for a disturbance, an interruption, and not a development in the progress of the world's history; and for all its horrors and the pernicious demoralisation of its leaders, he had the profoundest aversion. But afterwards he came to see that it had beneficial results; that a revolution is ultimately never the fault of the people, but of the injustice and incapacity of the government; and that where there is a real necessity for a great reform, the old leaven must be rooted out.3 But he knew the danger of such a process, and he indicates it here in an admirable saying: "Before the French Revolution it was all effort; afterwards it all changed to demand"; and this may be supplemented by his opinion on the nature of revolutionary sentiments: "Men think they would be well-off if they were not ruled, and fail to perceive that they can rule neither themselves nor others." And if he, had thus no theoretical sympathy with democratic movements, he had little feeling for that other great political tendency of our time – nationality; convinced as he was that interest in the weal and woe of another people is always a mark of the highest culture. But apart from politics there is one characteristic of our own time in which he fully and especially shares, if only for the reason that he did much himself to produce it; and herein he has influenced us profoundly and is influencing us still. The nineteenth century has this advantage over every preceding age, that in it for the first time honest doubt, instead of distinguishing a few, has become a common virtue. Goethe is one of the surest and safest of those who have led the transition. "We praise the eighteenth century," he writes, "for concerning itself chiefly with analysis. The task remaining to the nineteenth is to discover the false syntheses which prevail, and to analyse their contents anew." Of the aim of analysis and the proper course of inquiry, no one has given a better account than Goethe in what he says, in the words I have quoted, about active scepticism; and in the sphere of morals and religion it will perhaps be found hereafter that he has contributed, in some degree at least, to the attainment of that "conditioned certainty," for which, as we hope, all our efforts are made.
In the maxims on Literature there is some excellent criticism on literary methods, and much that may well be taken to heart by certain writers of our own day. Goethe had little but rebuke for the whole of the romantic movement, which began in his old age. The German form of it he thought unnatural, and at best a conventional imitation of an earlier period; and the French form, of which Victor Hugo was then the rising star, he thought a perversion of naturalism, an exaggeration of it until it became insipid or merely revolting. To Byron alone he gave the tribute of the most ungrudging admiration: in the opposition between classicism and romanticism, he declined to take him for a follower of either, but as the complete representative of his own time. The maxim that "the classical is health, and the romantic, disease," may not altogether commend itself to us now; but with wonderful insight Goethe foresaw the direction in which the romantic movement would lead. "The romantic," he says here, "is already fallen into its own abysm. It is hard to imagine anything more degraded than the worst of the new productions." If he could have said this two generations ago, what would he have said now? How could he have spoken without contempt of those who make all that is common and unclean in itself a subject with which literature may properly be occupied? These are the writers who profess to be realists, under a completely mistaken notion of what realism means, as applied to art; and to them the chief realities seem to be just the very things that decent people keep out of sight. They forget that in literature, as in all art, the dominating realities are the highest Ideals. As an antidote to this poison of corruption Goethe pointed to the ancient world, and bid us study there the types of the loftiest manhood. "Bodies which rot while they are still alive and are edified by the detailed contemplation of their own decay; dead men who remain in the world for the ruin of others, and feed their death on the living – to this," he exclaimed, "have come our makers of literature. When the same thing happened in antiquity, it was only as a strange token of some rare disease; but with the moderns the disease has become endemic and epidemic." Akin to these pseudo-realists, and coming under the same ban, are some of our modern novel-writers who do, indeed, avoid the depth of degradation, but try to move the feelings by dwelling in a similar fashion on matters which are not, and never can be, fit subjects of literary treatment; such as painful deaths by horrible distempers, or the minute details of prolonged operations. It is poor skill that cannot find material enough in the moral sufferings of men and women, and is driven to seek effect in descriptions of disease and surgery. Surely in any literature worthy of the name these are topics which a richer imagination and a more prolific art would have found unnecessary, and better taste would have left undescribed.
To another class of writers – those who handle a pretty pen without having anything definite to present, or anything important to say, Goethe has also an applicable word. It is a class which is always increasing in number, and tends to increase in talent. We may admit that second- or third-rate work, especially in poetry, was never before done so well as it is done now; and still we may find some useful truth in a distinction which Goethe drew for the benefit of the minor poets and the minor prose-writers of his own age. "Productions are now possible," he said, "which, without being bad, have no value. They have no value, because they contain nothing; and they are not bad, because a general form of good workmanship is present to the author's mind." In one of the many neglected volumes of his miscellaneous writings Goethe has a series of admirable notes for a proposed work on Dilettantism; and there the reader, if he is interested in Goethe's literary criticism, will find some instructive remarks in close connection with this aphorism, and also certain rules for discriminating between good and indifferent work which ought to receive the most attentive study. And the stylists who neglect plain language for a mosaic of curious phrase and overstrained epithet, may profitably remember that, as Goethe here says, "it is not language in itself which is correct or forcible or elegant, but the mind that is embodied in it."
"Translators," he tells us, "sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty and rouse an irresistible longing for the original." To them also he gives a piece of excellent advice: "The translator must proceed until he reaches the untranslatable." This is a counsel of exhortation as well as of warning. It bids the translator spare no effort, but tells him that at a certain point his efforts are of no avail. But none the less, Goethe might have added, the faithful translator must strive as if this hindrance to perfection did not exist; for it is thus only that he, or any one else, can do anything worth doing. On methods of translation much may be said, and it is sometimes urged, in a given case, that it is not literal or that it is too free. A distinguished writer has recently laid down that a translation should reproduce every word and phrase and sentence of the original as accurately as a delicate tracing reproduces the lines of a drawing. This is advice which may hold in the school-room, but, I venture to maintain, nowhere else. In so far as every language has a peculiar genius, a literal translation must necessarily be a bad one; and any faithful translation will of its nature be free. In other words, a translator will err if he slavishly adheres to mere expression; he must have complete liberty to give his author's meaning and style in the manner which he holds to be truest to the original; and so, in translating from a foreign tongue, it will be well for him to have some knowledge of his own. But he must guard against the abuse of his position: his liberty may become license, and his translation instead of being faithful may be phantastic. The translator's first and last duty is, then, to efface himself. His first duty is to stand entirely at the point of view of his author's thought; his last, to find the clearest and nearest expression in his own language both for that thought and for whatever is characteristic in the way of conveying it; neither adding anything of his own nor taking away anything from his author. The best translation is thus a re-embodiment of the author's spirit, a real metempsychosis. Nothing can be done without ideals, and this is the ideal at which the present translation aims. That it fails of its aim and has many defects, no one knows better than the translator himself; and he can only cherish the hope that where he falls short he is sometimes close to the confines of what cannot be translated.
December 2, 1892.
