Goethe's Message to America

ANNIVERSARIES of great men of the past are valuable as incentives for stating anew the abiding elements of their fame, for reëxamining their essential contributions to the higher life, for realizing afresh those traits in them which, in spite of changed surroundings and conditions, appeal to us with the force of immediate actuality. The Goethe anniversary, then, which has been celebrated this year with a good deal of popular enthusiasm in not a few American cities as well as throughout Germany, may well induce us to ask, not what was Goethe for his time and his people, but what is he for our time and our people, — what insights, convictions, ideals, may we gain from his work and his personality that will help us in facing the manifold problems that beset our own life ; in short, what is Goethe’s message to America ? I shall try to answer this question under the head of two ideas, the ideas of freedom and culture; for in these two conceptions, it seems to me, the sum total of Goethe’s message to America is contained.

I.

That Goethe, before everything else, is a spiritual emancipator must be clear to every one who has felt, however faintly, the breath of his genius. Yet nowhere can this emancipating force of Goethe’s character be better understood or work more freely than here in America. Happily, the time is long since past when he was feared by respectable society as a libertine and destroyer of good morals, when he was hated by the church as an atheist and a subverter of faith. Even his adversaries, nowadays, have agreed to respect him as the great apostle of free humanity. Nevertheless, it may not be superfluous to show how closely Goethe’s ideal of a free humanity is allied to the best in American life.

Goethe is a classic of individualism. His moral conceptions are founded upon the unwavering belief in the paramount value of personality ; and the full assertion, the complete development, of this personality is to him the fundamental and inviolable law of all human activity. If his Wilhelm Meister had no other importance or interest for us, this novel would be sure of a lasting place in the history of American culture for this reason alone : that here an idea is anticipated which may be called the very corner stone of educational thought in America, — the idea that the true task of education is, not to preserve from error, but to guide through error to fuller individuality and richer experience. It is, however. not only in this general principle of individualism that Goethe is at one with the strongest tendencies of American intellectual life; in the application also of this principle to concrete reality he seems to address himself above all to a people which, like the American, is engaged in the struggle of shaping its own national individuality.

Outright American, one might say to begin with, is the extraordinary sense of reality which has prevented Goethe from becoming a prey to the fantastic speculations and romantic hallucinations of his time, and which perhaps more than anything else has helped him in the manifold conflicts of his life to assert incessantly his own self. To be sure, he too paid his tribute to the sentimentalism of the period in which his youth fell; he too was affected by the exaggerated idealism of the Weimar epoch ; he too suffered from the overstraining of the aesthetic sense which gives to most of the great German writers of the beginning of this century an almost feminine character. Yet how does his Werther stand out from the other sentimental novels of the Storm and Stress period through genuine feeling and plastic power ! In what clear and simple outline does his Iphigenie stand forth against the shadowy productions of the other classicists ! How firm and resolute even as idealized figures as Hermann and Dorothea tread the ground of reality! And with what inexorable truthfulness does Goethe, in Tasso and The Elective Affinities, expose the immorality of aspirations which do not rest upon the recognition of actual facts and existing laws ! It was this incorruptible sense of reality which enabled Goethe, in the affairs of church and state, always to find out the truly productive and significant, no matter to what party it might belong ; so that the admirer of Napoleon could also be an admirer of English parliamentary government, the follower of Spinoza also a glorifier of mediæval popery. It was this same sense of reality which preserved Goethe from subscribing to any of the metaphysical tenets which, during his long life, one after the other intoxicated the minds of his contemporaries. It was this same sense of reality which in scientific matters kept him in the narrow path of patient and unbiased observation ; which made him in biological research a forerunner of Darwin ; in the history of literature and art a master of that criticism which does not condemn or canonize, but analyzes and comprehends. It was this same sense of reality which made him speak the blunt but wholesome word, " The occupation with thoughts on immortality is for aristocratic circles, and especially for ladies who have nothing to do ;” which made him put into the mouth of the aged Faust this confession of faith : —

Do we not recognize in all this a deep affinity between Goethe and the genius of the American people ? Do we not see here symptoms of the same state of mind which is the source of the traditional fairness and impartiality of the American commonwealth toward the manifold creeds and religious denominations, of the preëminently experimental bent of American science, of the decidedly practical type of American life even in its religious and ethical aspects ? Do we not see here an anticipation of the truly American conviction. — American in spite of demagogues and jingoes, — the conviction that freedom has no more dangerous enemy than blind enthusiasm for any theory or any party principle ?

Intimately associated with this thoroughly masculine sense of reality, and again closely akin to American character, is the glorification of work and deed which shines forth with such beneficent and freeing splendor from all of Goethe’s works, from Götz von Berlichingen down to the Second Part of Faust, and no less from his own life. The fundamental importance of this conception for Goethe’s whole view of the world is in the first place proved by a superabundance of individual utterances, which, made at widely separated times and on most different occasions, all agree in this, that man acquires true freedom only by action. “ Ah, writing is but busy idleness,” says Götz ; “ it wearies me. While I am writing what I have done, I lament the misspent time in which I might do more.” Faust translates the first line of the Gospel according to John by, “ In the beginning was the Deed ; ” and at the end of his life he draws the balance of his earthly experience in the words, “ Enjoyment makes debased,” and, " The deed is everything;, the glory naught! ” And more personally still Goethe expresses this same thought in his Maxims and Reflections : " Endeavor to do your duty, and you know at once what you are. What is your duty ? The demand of the day.” Under the title Five Things, he lays down in the Divan this succinct and intensely practical rule of life : —

And as a last sacred bequest he leaves to his friends the message : —

But not only in such isolated though significant utterances has Goethe expressed his conviction of the saving quality of work ; his whole moral attitude is determined by this one idea. Goethe shares with the Christian religion a strong sense of the sinfulness of human nature and of the necessity of redemption. With the Christian religion he sees the true aim of life in the delivery from hereditary weakness, in the victory of mind over matter. But of all church conceptions none was ever more foreign to him than the idea of repentance as a condition of the soul’s salvation. Repentance seemed to him something entirely negative and unproductive, a gratuitous and useless self-humiliation. Not through contrition and self - chastisement, but through discipline and selfreliance, he thought, is the way to perfection. For this reason, throughout his life he kept as much as possible aloof from all influences which seemed to endanger his self-possession, such as pain. care, grief, fear ; while he incessantly and systematically cultivated in himself and others whatever tends to heighten the feeling of self, as joy, cheerfulness, hope, courage. For this reason, Wilhelm Meister finds lasting satisfaction in calm renunciation of a happiness which lies outside the limits of his nature, and in the firm conviction that by this very renunciation he insures his true spiritual freedom. For this reason, finally, Faust atones for his guilt, not by self-destruction. but by a life devoted to freedom and progress.

And this leads us to the third manifestation of Goethe’s individualism which most preëminently points to the spirit of modern American life, —his belief in the saving power of unceasing progress. As in the development of the earth, of plant and animal life, he saw progress not in sudden and unexpected convulsions, but in gradual and steady transformation, so in spiritual matters, also, he found the essence of personal life not in ecstatic emotions and violent upheavals, but in an unremitting and even growth from one mental state to another, until at last a condition should be reached in which the fetters of earthly personality would fall away, and the individual spirit be drawn into the restless movement of the universal spirit.

Might one not say, Here there is a dream of the life beyond, here there is a prophetic delineation of the future world, such as might well have presented itself to Goethe’s eye as a continuation and completion of modern American life, with its endless movement, change, and restless striving ? It is, at any rate, well worth noticing that not long after this poem was written Goethe expressed himself on questions of the political and commercial life of the United States in a manner which betrays an extraordinary insight into the vital problems and tasks of our national development. Through Alexander von Humboldt Goethe was informed, in 1827, of the project of a Panama canal, and the octogenarian listened to this project with a youthful eagerness and enthusiasm, as though it concerned an undertaking in his own. immediate neighborhood. “ All this,” he said to Eckermann, “ is left to the future and to wide-reaching enterprise. This much, however, is certain : if a canal is constructed, through which vessels of every size and cargo may go from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, there will result from it incalculable consequences for the whole civilized and uncivilized world. I should be surprised, therefore, if the United States would let the opportunity pass of getting such a work into its hands. It is to be foreseen that this youthful republic, with its decided tendency toward the west, will have annexed and populated, within thirty or forty years, even the wide areas beyond the Rocky Mountains. It is also to be foreseen that along the whole Pacific coast, where nature has formed the roomiest and safest harbors, there will arise, in course of time, very important cities, which will serve as points of commerce between the United States and China. In that case, however, it will be not only desirable, but almost indispensable, for men-of-war as well as merchantmen to maintain a quicker connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific coast of North America than has been heretofore possible. I repeat, then: it is absolutely necessary for the United States to construct and control a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, and I am sure they will accomplish it. I shall not live to see it; but it might well be worth the while on that account to stand it here for another fifty years.”

II.

Goethe is not only a representative of freedom ; he is also, and in a still more peculiar sense, a representative of culture.

What is culture ? Does it consist in the refinement of the senses, in the increase of needs, in the perfection of talents, in the acquisition of knowledge, in the widening of the intellectual horizon ? All these elements contribute to produce culture, but they are not culture. Culture is not an accomplishment, but a state of mind. Culture he alone has who realizes the relation of his accomplishments, whatever they may be, to the larger life of which he forms a part; whose aim in heightening his own personality is only to make it better fitted for service to the community. The striving for true culture, therefore, contains a democratic as well as an aristocratic tendency. It is aristocratic ; for it tends to give to the most refined, the best schooled, the most fully developed, the part in public life which is their due. It is democratic ; for it is bound to no class and no rank, and it increases the feeling of public responsibility in direct proportion to the increase of personal attainments.

This, if I am not mistaken, is the conception of culture which is becoming more and more dominant among the best representatives of American civilization. To be sure, there are still not a few of our college professors and college alumni who think that culture is bound up with the possession of certain magic formulae, as the verbs in μι, or the absolute ablative, or the Thirty-Ninth Theorem. But it certainly seems as though the rule of such magic formulæ were nearing its end, even in academic circles ; it certainly seems as though the time were not far distant when the conviction will have become universal that every kind of knowledge and every kind of accomplishment may lead to genuine culture, provided that this knowledge and this accomplishment have been acquired in a thorough manner, and are employed in such a way as to benefit the-community.

As to Goethe, it is perfectly obvious that his conception of culture entirely agrees with the view just propounded. Some critics have taken offense at the sudden turn from classic sublimity to practical reality which marks the end of Faust’s career. To me this turn is the most beautiful proof of the noble largemindedness of Goethe’s ideal of culture. Faust has gone through the world in all its length and breadth ; he has felt the highest happiness and the deepest woe; he has seen the splendor of an imperial court and experienced the intrigues of political life ; he has passed in review the grotesquely fantastic figures of mediæval folklore and the heroic forms of classic legend ; his striving for complete humanity has thus acquired ever fuller and richer reality ; and how does this striving now culminate ? Wherein does he gain final and lasting satisfaction ? Therein that he puts all his knowledge and accomplishments, all his experience and intuition, at the service of the common need ; therein that, standing “ on a free soil with a free people,” shoulder to shoulder with his brethren, in daily renewed toil he fights the cause of the common man. Is not this a striking glorification of the principle that the essential thing in culture is not the What, but the How ; that its measure is not a certain amount of knowledge and accomplishments, but the state of mind in which these acquisitions are employed ? Is it not a shining symbol of the necessity of the submission of the individual, even the most refined individual, to the common weal? Is it not a poetic anticipation of the ideal for which our whole age is struggling, and on whose realization depends the future of the American people, the reconciliation and amalgamation of intellectual aristocracy with democratic organization of society ?

Three practical consequences which may be drawn from this submission of the individual to the whole, which indeed have been drawn by Goethe himself, seem to me of especial significance for American life.

First, the necessity of self-limitation, if the individual is really to accomplish something for the whole. On this point Goethe has expressed himself in a manner which cannot help being a welcome message to those of us who expect from the specialization of studies not a narrowing, but a deepening of culture. “ Manysidedness,” he says, “ prepares only the element in which the one-sided can work. Now is the time for the one-sided; well for him who comprehends it, and who works for himself and others in this spirit. Practice till you are an able violinist, and be assured that the director will have pleasure in assigning you a place in the orchestra. Make an instrument of yourself, and wait and see what sort of place humanity will grant you in universal life. Every one needs to serve from the lowest rank upward. To limit one’s self to one craft is the best. To the narrow mind it will be, after all, a craft; to the more intelligent, an art; and the most enlightened, when he does one thing, does everything, — or, to be less paradoxical, in the one thing which he does rightly he beholds the semblance of everything that is rightly done.”

Secondly, the necessity of a reverent attitude toward the large whole of which the individual is only an insignificant part. “Freedom lies not in this,” says Goethe, “ that we are not willing to acknowledge anything above us, but that we revere what is above us. For by revering it we raise ourselves to its level, and evince by our recognition that we ourselves have the higher in us, and are worthy of being part of it.” Words like these — words which are borne out by Goethe’s habitual attitude toward small things as well as great — may well serve to rectify certain defects of American life brought about by exaggerated individualism.

Finally, the assurance that this reverent attitude toward the larger whole, of which each of us forms a part, is the best foundation for genuine enjoyment. The joylessness of American life is caused, in part at least, by the absence of this feeling of reverence. We hasten and hurry after a distant, unknown happiness, and trample in the dust the flowers which blossom round about us. Titanlike we pile Pelion upon Ossa, forgetting that divine joy is to be found only upon the calm heights of Mount Olympus. How different Goethe ! To be sure, in a moment of discouragement he once said that his life, after all, had been nothing but toil and trouble, the continual rolling of a stone which had to be lifted ever anew, and that in the seventy-five years upon which he was looking back he had had not four weeks of real comfort. But these very words show the infinite capacity of his reverent soul for true enjoyment. For in spite of his unfulfilled desires, in spite of his consciousness of the fragmentariness and insufficiency of human life, he retained to his last moment the power of deriving joy from the apparently most insignificant source, of losing himself in worshipful feeling for the small wonders that surround us. A few weeks before his death he wrote to Boisserée: “ I have now come to my limit, in this sense : that I begin to believe where others despair, those, namely, who expect too much from knowledge, and thereby are led to deem the greatest treasures of mankind as naught. Thus we are driven from the whole to the part, and from the part to the whole, whether we will or not.”

III.

A little episode from the German War of Liberation may give us an idea of how the figure of Goethe stood before the minds of the noble youths who at that time flocked from the colleges and universities to the defense of their country. It is an incident which happened to a company of Lützow volunteers at the beginning of the campaign of 1813, in the town of Meissen. A member of this company — Friedrich Foerster, the friend of Theodor Koerner — relates the occurrence as follows : “ We had just finished our morning song, in front of the inn in which our captain was quartered, when I saw a man whose features seemed familiar to me entering a mail coach. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw it was Goethe ! Having at once communicated the glorious discovery to my comrades. I approached the coach with a military salute and said : ‘ I beg to report to your Excellency that a company of Royal Prussian Volunteers of the Black Rifle Corps, en route for Leipzig, have drawn up before your headquarters and desire to salute your Excellency.’ The captain gave the command ‘ Present arms ! ’ and I called, ‘ The poet, of all poets, Goethe, hurrah ! ’ The band played, and the whole company cheered. He touched his cap and nodded kindly. Now I once more stepped up to him and said : ‘ It is no use for your Excellency to try to keep your incognito ; the Black Riflemen have sharp eyes, and to meet Goethe at the beginning of our march was too good an omen to pass unnoticed. We ask from you a blessing for our arras !’ ‘With all my heart,’ he said. I held out my gun and sword ; he laid his hand on them and said: ‘ March forward with God ! And may all good things be granted to your joyous German courage ! ’ While we again cheered him, still saluting he drove past us.”

To us Americans this little scene from the “Holy War” of the Germans may well symbolize our own relation to Goethe. We too are engaged in a holy war ; we too are fighting for the highest ideals of life, the freedom and the culture of our people ; we too ask the great man whose prophetic eye so clearly foresaw our destiny to bless our arms.

Kuno Francke.