LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 632.-5 JULY, 1856. From The National Review. CHARACTERISTICS OF GOETHE. The Life and Works of Goethe: with Sketches of his Age and Contemporaries, from published and unpublished sources. By G. H. Lewes. 2 vols. Nutt, 1855. Freundschaftliche Briefe von Goethe und seiner Frau an Nicolaus Meyer, aus den Jahren 1800-1831. Leipzig, Hartung 1856. [Friendly Letters from Goethe and his Wife to Nicolas Meyer, between the years 1800 and 1831. Leipzic, 1856.] so that the one might be regarded as the woof, and the other as the warp." He adds, that his life-long friend and patron, the Duke of Weimar, had this magnetic influence to such a degree that nobody could resist him, and no work of art ever failed in the poet's hands which the Duke had suggested or approved. "He would have been enviable indeed if he could have possessed himself of my ideas and higher strivings; for when the dæmon forsook him, and only the human was GOETHE tells us in his Autobiography, that left, he knew not how to set to work, and while his mind was wandering about in was much troubled at it. In Byron this elesearch of a religious system, and thus passing ment was probably very active, giving him over the intermediate areas between the such powers of fascination, especially with various regions of theological belief, he met women." Eckermann, with his usual dewith a certain phenomenon which seemed to lightfully childlike simplicity, anxiously asks, him to belong to none of them, and which Has not Mephistopheles traits of this nahe used to call therefore dæmonic influence. ture?" "No," replies Goethe, "Mephisto"It was not divine, for it seemed unintellec- pheles is too negative a being. The dæmonic tual; nor human, for it was no result of un- manifests itself in positive active power among derstanding; nor diabolic, for it was of bene- artists. It is found often in musicians, more ficent tendency; nor angelic, for you could rarely among painters. In Paganini it often notice in it a certain mischievousness. shows itself to a high degree, and it is by It resembled chance, inasmuch as it demon- means of it that he produces such great strated nothing; but was like providence, in- effects." Of himself he says, "it does not asmuch as it showed symptoms of continuity. lie in my nature, but I am subject to its Every thing which fetters human agency influence; by which Goethe probably seemed to yield before it; it seemed to dis- meant modestly to disclaim having any perpose arbitrarily of the necessary elements of sonal fascination of this kind over other men, our existence." It is not always, says this but to indicate, what we know from other great observer of life, "the first and best, conversations he really held to be true, that either in moral nature or in abilities," who apparently arbitrary and quite inexplicable possess this magnetic influence, and it is but impulses had often exercised the most decisive rarely" that they recommend themselves by and frequently fortunate influence on his own goodness of heart; but a gigantic force goes career. But it is quite clear that Goethe did out of them, and they exercise an incredible possess in no common degree this faculty for, power over all creatures, nay, even over the in a certain sense, fascinating men by his elements themselves; and who can say how presence, as well as by his writings. If far this influence may reach? All moral Byron had more of it as a man, Goethe sucforces united are powerless against them. ceeded in imparting far more of it to his The masses are fascinated by them. They works, and neither his life nor works can be are only to be conquered by the universe it- properly judged without reference to its inself," when they enter into conflict with it. fluence. It is something quite distinct from Of course Goethe was thinking mainly of mere beauty, power, or general merit, either Napoleon, and men like him, as he afterwards of personal character or of literary creation. told Eckermann, when he wrote this passage. It is a power which goes out from the inSuch men put forth, he says, a power, "if dividual man, and which can imprint itself not exactly opposite to, yet at least crossing, only on such writings as carry with them the that of the general moral order of the world; stamp of individual character; and not DCXXXII. LIVING AGE. VOL. XIV. 1 always even on those, if, as for example in eyes he slept with, to take note of his own sleep and his own tears, and an extra will, subject to the command of the third eye, ready to rescue the ordinary will from the in tricacies of human emotion. Shakespeare's knowledge of life was, we should think, less drawn from constant vigilance and presence the case of Byron's earlier works, the play of character is a good deal merged in some exaggerated mood of sentiment. It is not intensity numbers of writers have surpassed Goethe in the intensity both of literary and personal characteristics. Schiller was a man of far keener and intenser, though narrower of mind in the passing moment (to which nature, and yet he could not help going into utter captivity to that calm and somewhat limply-constituted mind. It is not even in itself independence or strength of will; for though Goethe had this in a remarkable degree, many others, as probably Schiller, had possessed it in as high a degree, who had been quite destitute of his fascinating talent. If it be expressible in one phrase at all (which it is not), it might be called presence of mind in combination with a deep knowledge of men; we mean that absolute and complete adequacy to every emergency which gave Napoleon his sang froid at the very turning-point of his great battles, which had descended in some measure to his nephew, and which in the literary world has secured for Johnson his Boswell, and for Goethe his Eckermann. Johnson, indeed, was immeasurably Goethe's inferior in the range of his experience, and, what is of more importance, in his knowledge of man; but he was perhaps his superior in mere presence of mind, and hence was greater in conversation, but less in fascination. The than ever; there is a resistance while the Duke of Wellington had nearly as much presence of mind as Napoleon himself; but he had immeasurably less of the other element of fascination instinctive knowledge of men, and how to use them. we imagine him to have abandoned himself far more completely than Goethe), and more from the power of memory and imagination to reproduce those sympathies again. However this may be, Shakespeare has himself sketched, less perhaps this cool presence of mind itself than the effect which it produces on other men, in his picture of Octavius Cæsar in Antony and Cleopatra. Cæsar's cool self-possessed eye for every emergency, and for the right use of human instruments, and its paralyzing effect on Antony's more attaching and passionate power of character, is a striking example of what Goethe would have called the "dæmonic" element in human affairs- the element that fascinates men by at once standing out clear and quite independent of their support, and yet indicating the power to read them off and detect for them their own needs and uses. There is always in this kind of magnetic power something repulsive first; but if the repulsion be overcome, the attraction becomes stronger secondary mind is striving to keep its independence, and conscious of the spell,- an intense devotion after he has once relinquished it, and consented to be a disciple or a servant. So the soothsayer tells Antony, "Thy demon, that's thy spirit which keeps Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable, Becomes a fear, as being overpowered; there- Make space enough between you." Goethe is almost unrivalled in the literary world in the degree in which he combines these qualities. Shakespeare may have had them equally, but his dramas are too impersonal to tell us clearly what kind of individual influence he put forth. We should conjecture that his sympathy with men was too vivid to have enabled him to keep, as was the case with Goethe, a part of himself as a permanent reserve-force outside the actual field of action, and ready to turn the flank of any new emergeney. Shakespeare can scarcely, we think, have been so uniformly able to detach himself, if he would, from the sympathies and passion of the moment as Goethe certainly was; for Goethe, like the little three-eyed girl (Drei-äuglein) in the German tale, had always an extra organ besides the.. This is just the difficult point for our And Goethe, who had, as he says, himself experienced the force of this blind fascination in the Duke of Weimar's influence over him, as well as wielded it in no slight degree, tells Eckermann (himself a captive), “The higher a man stands, the more he is liable to this dæmonic influence; and he must take constant care that his guiding will be not diverted by it from the straight way. you are better nature stoutly to sustain itself, and cede | who had no intellectual ground to fight for, to the dæmonic no more than is reasonable." surrendered without terms. But no man of In Goethe himself this fascinating power eminent ability and a different school of existed as strongly as it is well possible to thought seemed to approach him without conceive in a man whose whole intellectual some sense that, if exposed constantly to his nature was of the sympathetic and con- immediate influence, he had to choose betemplative, rather than of the practical cast, tween fascination and repulsion. Hence his who had no occasion to " use men ex- very few intimate male friends: scarcely any cept as literary material, and who, while man at all able to enter his mind and share he stood out independent of them, and could his deeper interests, was likely to be found at will shake off from his feet the dust of who could go so completely into captivity to long association, yet felt with them as one his modes of thought; and, tolerant as he who understood their nature and had entered was, the centrifugal force of his mind threw into their experience. Goethe's sympathetic off, to a certain respectful distance, all that and genial insight into man would have been the attractive force was not able to approa pure embarrassment to a practical cold-priate as part of itself. There has been a tempered tool-seeker like Napoleon, who very similar effect produced by his writings never deciphered men through sympathy, but on those even who did not know the man. always by an instinctive tact for detecting Novalis fluttered round them, repeatedly exmasterly and workmanlike results. And vice pressing his aversion, like a moth round a versû, the imperturbable self-possession and candle. They invariably repel, at first, EngNapoleonic sang froid of judgment, that lish readers with English views of life and underlay in Goethe all storms of superficial duty. As you read more and more, and the emotion, was no little embarrassment to him characteristic atmosphere of the man is in many of his literary moods. It prevented breathed into your life, you find the magnetic him, we think, from ever becoming a great force coming strongly over you; dramatist. He could not ever lose himself as a man mesmerized; in his creations: yet it was emphatically this which gave that peculiar and undefinable fascination to those minutely-accurate observations on life with which all his later prose works and his conversations are so thickly stocked. You can clearly see that men of strong nature did not submit to Goethe's magnetic influence without a struggle. Schiller, at first intensely repelled from him, was only gradually subdued, though thoroughly and strangely magnetized into idolatry by personal converse. Herder's keen and caustic nature vibrated to the end between the intense repulsion he felt for Goethe's completely unmoral genius, the poet's impartial sympathy for good and evil alike, and the ir- Let us attempt to contribute to the soluresistible attractions which his personal in- tion of this difficulty by some account and fluence exerted. Only those could thoroughly criticism of Goethe's life and genius in concling to Goethe from the first who were not nection with that personal character which conscious of having any strong intellectual so subtly penetrates all he has written. independence to maintain. Carlyle mistook completely when he said that Goethe, like Shakspeare, leaves little trace of himself in his creations. To a fine eye this is not even true of Shakspeare, though Shakspeare leaves no immediate stamp of himself, and critical inference alone can discern him in his works; but far less is it true of Goethe. A rarefied self no doubt it is Women, who love nothing so much as a completely independent self-sustained nature, especially if joined with thorough insight into themselves, were purely fascinated at once. Wieland, The most pleasant and characteristic sketch of Wieland in English literature is contained in a few pages contributed to the second volume of Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe, p. 227. - you feel his calm independence of so much on which you helplessly lean, combined with his thorough insight into that desire of yours to lean, drawing you irresistibly towards the invisible intellectual centre at which such independent strength and such genial breadth of thought was possible. And yet you feel that you would be in many and various ways lowered in your own eyes if you could think completely as he thought and act as he acted. It becomes a difficult problem, in the presence of so much genius, and beneath so fascinating an eye, "for our better nature stoutly to sustain itself and yield to the dæmonic no more than is reasonable." a highly distilled gaseous essence; but every | Latter-day oracle in Piccadilly upon one of where, penetrating all he writes, there is the the injurious attacks that had been directed ethereal atmosphere which travelled about against Goethe. Carlyle stopped suddenly, with Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Mr. Lewes' volumes give us a very able and deeply interesting biography, a book, indeed, of permanent value; the incidents illustrating character, though not quite exhausting his materials, are disposed with skill, and the artistic criticism, while thoroughly appreciating Goethe's transcendent poetical genius, is independent, sensible, and English. From his moral criticism of Goethe, and sometimes, though not so frequently, from the poetical, we very widely dissent, and hope to give the grounds of our dissent. Something more too might have been done, we think, in the way of defining his individual position both as a poet and as a man. But it is impossible to deny Mr. Lewes high merit for the candor of his biography. Where Goethe has been most censured, he gives all the facts without reserve; and he does not go into any helpless captivity to the poet and artist. He gives his readers the elements for forming their own moral judgments, and he has shaken off from his feet the ponderous rubbish of the German scholiasts. and with his peculiar look and emphasis said, "Yes, it is the wild cry of amazement on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not a spooney too! Here is a goldlike intellect, and yet you see he is not an idiot! not in the least a spooney!" This was true enough of Goethe, no doubt; but we suspect that Mr. Carlyle was resisting a secret feeling that there was a limpness and want of concentration in Goethe's whole nature, intellectual and moral, from the results of which his imperturbable self-possessed presence of mind and great genius alone saved him; that he did in consequence go sometimes up to the brink of spooneyishness in early days, and even across the verge of unreal " high art" in later life. These are just the defects to which Mr. Carlyle is most sensitive. It is true Goethe never was in danger of permanently sinking into either abyss; for his head was always cool, and his third eye, at least, always vigilant. But it may perhaps account for the unusual failure of our great essayist in delineating Goethe, that the poet's wonderful writings were less the real object of his Herr Duntzer and his colleagues are admiration than the strange fascination of valuably used in Mr. Lewes' book; but they the character behind. In the very brief are also valuably spared. Mr. Lewes has not sketch we must give of the poet's life, we submitted himself to Carlyle's somewhat in- shall, of course, so far as possible, select our discriminating, strained, and lashed-up furor illustrations from passages or incidents passed of adoration for every word that the German over in Mr. Lewes' volumes, wherever they sage let drop. There is, by the way, noth-seem to be equally characteristic. ing more remarkably illustrative of Goethe's Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at noon "dæmonic" influence than Carlyle's worship on the 28th Angust, 1749, in Frankfort-onof him. Except his permanent unfailing the-Maine, seems to have inherited his genial, self-possession, he lacked almost all the per- sensitive, sensuous, and joyous temperament sonal qualities which usually fascinate that from his mother; and from his father, the great writer's eye. And accordingly there pride, self-dependence, and magnificent formruns through the essays on Goethe a tone of ality, the nervous orderliness, perseverance, arduous admiration, a helpless desire to fix and the microscopic minuteness of eye by on some characteristic which he could infi- which, at least after the first rush of youth nitely admire, betraying that he was in was gone by, he was always distinguished. subjection to the " eyes behind the book," His mother was but eighteen when he was not to the thing which is said in it. There born. She was a lively girl, full of German was nothing of the rugged thrusting power sentiment, with warm impulses, by no means of Johnson, of the imperious practical faith much troubled with a conscience, exceedingly of Cromwell, of the picturesque passion of afraid of her husband, who was near twenty Danton, of the kingly fanaticism of Mahomet; years her senior, and seemingly both willing nothing, in short, of the intensity of nature and skilful in the invention of occasional which Carlyle always needs behind the saga- white lies adapted to screen her children from city he worships. Mr. Lewes reports a rather his minute, fidgety, and rather austere superaffected piece of Carlylese, delivered by the intendence. She "spoiled " her children on 1 principle, and made no pretension to conduct | loved, and indeed of all death. Writing to a systematic training, which she abhored. Zelter of his son's death, he says, "the stayShe said of herself in after-years, that she ing-away (Aeussenbleiben) of my son has could "educate no child, was quite unfit for weighed dreadfully upon me in many ways." it, gave them every wish, so long as they And his feeling was so well known, that his laughed and were good, and whipped them old friend and mistress, the Frau von Stein, if they cried or made wry mouths, without who died before him, directed that her funeral ever looking for any reason why they laughed should not pass his door, lest it should imor cried."* Her belief in Providence was press him too painfully. No one dared to warm with German sentiment, and not a tell him of Schiller's death; and so it was little tinged with superstition. She rejoiced also at the death of his wife's sister, and in greatly when her son published the Confes- other cases. Indeed, his constant unwillingsions of a Beautiful Soul, which she loved as ness manfully to face the secret of his own a memorial of a lost pietistic friend. Her anguish, was a principal source of a shade religion was one of emotion rather than of of unreality in a generally very real characmoral reverence. She was generous and ex- ter. He habitually evaded the awful task travagant, and, after her husband's death, of fathoming the meaning and the depth of seems to have spent capital as well as income. suffering. He avoided all contact with keen She was passionately fond of the theatre, a pain. He could not bear, although in the taste which she transmitted to her son. Her neighborhood, to visit his brother-in-law at a hearty simplicity of nature made her every time when his sister's child was dying. It where loved. Her servants loved and stayed was not weakness, - it was his principle of with her to the last. She seems to have had actions; and the effects remain in his works. at least as much humor as her son, which, for He writes like a man who had not only exGermans, was not inconsiderable, and not perienced but explored every reality of human much more sense of awe. She gave the life except that of anguish and remorse. The most detailed orders for her own funeral, and iron that enters into the soul had found him even specified the kind of wine and the size too; but instead of fronting it as he fronted of the cracknels with which the mourners all other realities of life, and pondering its were to be regaled; ordering the servants message to the last letter, he drew back from not to put too few raisins into the cakes, as it with what speed he might. This experishe never could endure that in her life, and ence even his Faust wants. Remorse, grief, it would certainly chafe her in her grave. agony, Goethe gently waived; and, by avertHaving been invited to go to a party on the ing his thoughts, softened them gradually day on which she died, she sent for answer that without exhausting their lesson. Hence his "Madame Goethe could not come, as she passion never reaches the deepest deep of was engaged just then in dying." Yet her human life. It can glow and melt, but is sensitiveness was so great, that she always never a consuming fire. His Werther, Tasso, made it a condition with her servants that Ottilie, and Clärchen, suffer keenly, but they should never repeat to her painful news never meet the knife-edge. There is nothing that they had picked up accidentally, as she in his poems like the courageous reality of wished to hear nothing sad without absolute suffering which vibrates through some of necessity. And during her son's dangerous Shelley's lyrics and his Cenci. The fascinaillness at Weimar, in 1805, no one ventured tion of pain he can paint, but not the conto speak to her of it till it was past, though she affirmed that she had been conscious all the time of his danger without the heart to mention it. This peculiarity Goethe inherited. Courageous to the utmost degree in all physical danger, he could never bear to encounter mental pain which he could any how avoid. He invented soft paraphrases to avoid speaking of the death of those he had *Letter to her granddaughter, -Dunzter's Frauenbilder, p. 511. Dunzter's Frauenbilder, p. 583. quest of the will over its deeper aspect of terror. The temperament he inherited from his mother. But to him was granted a conspicuously despotic will, which should have enabled him to sound this depth also. From his father it is far more difficult to say what qualities of mind Goethe inherited. The old man had always worried his family; and it became fashionable among the poet's friends, who were enthusiastic about his mother, to ignore or depreciate the old coun |