A New Life of Goethe

THE consciousness that biography is a particular and a difficult art is borne in upon us when we stop to consider how few, how very few, of our really heroic figures have been set before us in anything that approaches a standard or authentic record. For intimate knowledge of da Vinci, of Luther, of Byron, or Napoleon, to whom do we turn ? It cannot be argued that to the biographer Byron and Napoleon, for instance, are not alluring subjects. Repeatedly great men have rushed in. Yet Moore failed with Byron, and the Napoleons of Scott and Hazlitt have long since started on their way to oblivion. Not infrequently failure may be attributed to lack of sympathetic insight, more often still it may be ascribed to a misconception of the biographer’s privilege and function.

Biography is not excellent in proportion as it approaches the “secret memoir.” The biographer is not one who has been chartered to explore the backstair happenings in the houses of great men. To be sure, significant, relevant detail is his by right; only in so far, however, as, taken with the body of the portrait, it denotes its subject truly. This, unfortunately, is often forgotten, and the foremost of living biographers, John Morley, in discussing history, though animadverting, doubtless, upon his own art, could write in his Diderot, “There have been many signs in our own day of its becoming narrow, pedantic, and trivial. It threatens to degenerate from a broad survey of great periods and movements . . . into vast and countless accumulations of insignificant facts, sterile knowledge, and frivolous antiquarianism, in which the spirit of epochs is lost, and the direction, meaning and summary of the various courses of human history all disappear.”

The subject of a biography should be as consistent and as explicable as is the hero of a work of art. The writer is to make him the familiar of his readers; he is dramatizing, or shall we say novelizing, a life’s story. We do not forget that one of our classic biographies was made by merely joining naïvely phonographic records of conversation with links of admiring comment. To set forth a cause by its effect is, of course, a valid principle of artistic representation, and Boswell’s impression is an index of Johnson’s greatness. From his account we carry away a stronger impression of the reality of the old lexicographer than if we had been privileged to con his large, seamy face in the portrait of some eighteenth-century Meissonier. Such a work, however, can only be written by a contemporary. A Life of Goethe, on the contrary, written by a German scholar at the close of the nineteenth century, ran a particular danger of becoming “narrow, pedantic, and trivial.” The great world-figure has moved back into his century. University scholars have given us the histology of every section of his career, save only the diplomatic, for which documents are wanting. Through this maze of erudition the writer would have to thread his way carefully, lest he sacrifice living knowledge to pedantry, reality to “frivolous antiquarianism.” Bielschowsky,¹ fortunately, has not thus lost himself. More clearly than any of his predecessors, he has revealed to us the fullness of Goethe’s many-sided personality. He has gone forward steadily and surely, extenuating little, and setting down naught in malice. He has not deviated from his path to force himself into the old bogs of controversy; nor does he approach each new incident as if he were handling a case in chancery. There is progression, there is growth. A great life is lived before us and he who runs may read. Without the author’s avowal it would have been plain that he considered Goethe’s life the greatest of his works, and the narrative is set forth in the main in the poet’s own words, as culled from the works, letters, and journals. The biographer has challenged forth the old Titan once more to tell his story, though this time we are given to understand it is to be Wahrheit only.

In a conversation with the artist, Heinrich Meyer, Goethe had said, “All the pragmatic characterizations of biographers are of little value compared with the naïve details of a great life.” Such details have of course been given before. Lewes has told us, for instance, with what delight the august Privy Councillor could dance through midnights with the peasant girls in the mines of Salzburg, and how the author of Werther could write to his beloved (Frau von Stein) and beg her to send him a sausage.

Bielschowsky’s work is pitched in a higher key. Yet he has accepted Goethe’s dictum and made it a principle of procedure, and his wealth of characteristic incident, behind which we never lose the sense of the mastering personality, exhibits his hero in all his multifarious endeavor. We see him at his home, at the council chamber, in the laboratory, at his desk, climbing the Harz, on the hills above Rome, and in the grain-fields of Sicily. He writes, ponders, makes love before us, and the resultant portrait allures, engages, then compels our interest. We are made to feel with Wieland that Goethe was the most human of men and that with more truth than Terence he might have called out in challenge, Homo sum. This was the motto which he carried on his shield. All things were his, and had he written alexandrines, he too might have said,— “ Mon âme aux mille voix, que le Dieu que j’adore

Mit au centre de tout comme un écho sonore.”

Like Victor Hugo’s, nay, even more than Hugo’s, Goethe’s works are the Memoirs of a Soul. In his preface to Les Contemplations, the author made clear the secret of the appeal of every sane lyric poet. “Quand je vous parle de moi,” he says, “je vous parle de vous.” This will admit of even stricter application in Goethe’s case, for as his life and personality were the more normal, his works as the reflection of that life possess a larger measure of universal truth. This brings us to the brink of a much-mooted question, that of Goethe’s romanticism. As opposed to Hugo, he is a classicist in so far as his experience is the more typical, in so far as it was controlled and dominated not by phantasy, or by imagination even, but by reason; and in considering his work under this aspect we shall be reminded of that nice distinction which has been made between Goethe and Shakespeare, the poet of the Fausts, and the poet of Macbeth and the Sonnets: the one is a dichtender Denker, the other a denkender Dichter.

Most readers of Goethe will remember his remark that all his poems are Gelegenheitsgedichte. Bielschowsky presses this point and raises it to the perilous dignity of a thesis. He contends that all that is good and great in the poet’s achievement, in prose or verse, mirrors events participated in by the author. This theory has led him into a fruitful field. He has collated the events and their appearance in the works with much acumen, and has often welded then indissolubly. He has discovered significant relations that had previously been either only dimly divined or entirely unknown, and it is on this side that lies whatever his study may possess in the way of original contribution. The results are most satisfying in the illuminating chapter on Goethe’s Lyrics. When the author applies his theory to certain of the other works, Hermann and Dorothea for instance, the reader who is interested only in Goethe and not in the thesis will feel that he protests too much and that he is forcing a work of art into a frame for which it was not made. It may be that the misfortunes of Lili suggested the epic. This is an interesting conjecture. Yet it is a mere conjecture, for the poet himself was strangely reticent about his sources here and refused to commit himself even when a similar story had been discovered by his critics in Göcking’s chronicle. Such being the case, it would have been more profitable to establish the fact than to elaborate the theory, though the fact itself would after all have been for the critic of comparatively minor importance. We mention it at length only because it is characteristic.

Bielschowsky, unlike Lewes, for instance, is the type of the scholar who delivers himself up, bound, as it were, to a particular study. This close focusing of all his interests on one man has enabled him to enter into the fullness of the poet’s life, to coördinate, to reconstruct, to illuminate. Yet with gazing too intently upon his star he has lost sight of the skies. His criticisms, and this is the weakness of the work, are often clearly ex parte judgments, and reveal a naïve lack of literary perspective. There are fewer arcana in the life of this essentially normal man than we are led to believe. He had gathered experience with full hands and much that he wrote was autobiographical, though in a remoter sense than his biographer would lead us to infer.

Goethe’s greatness lies in the fact that he could enter sympathetically into all of human life, ins volle Menschenleben, that he found it everywhere interesting, that he could understand and pardon all things. Tout comprendre est tout pardonner. Of him more than of any other singer, we feel that he could have struck every chord in the lyre, that he could have sung every theme, and if he did not it was only because of the limits of time that hedged him in. His personality was essentially mobile and he did not infrequently write surpassing well of things in which he had no part. And why should he not ? The problem involved is as old as Plato’s Ion. Was Homer a great charioteer because he so excellently and accurately describes a chariot race ? The philosopher’s answer was “inspiration.” It is not necessary to believe with Taine that Shakespeare was once a Hamlet in real life. Iago is as convincing as the hand-palsied Dane. It is not necessary to have thrown an ink-pot at the devil to be able to draw a Satan, and he who could make a Mephistopheles of a Merck, could, more easily than his own Faust, have made a man of an homunculus. Because Prometheus is a good poem, Goethe is not necessarily a Prometheus, any more than Æschylus or Shelley. And whether we agree with Taine or not, it is perfectly certain that Shakespeare experienced Hamlet when he created him; and whether Goethe had ever been the son of a village innkeeper or not, he certainly lived like one and felt like one in the year when he wrote Hermann and Dorothea.

This laudatory absorption in his subject leads the biographer to accept with but little correction the estimates of contemporaries. How immoderate expression could become in that age of sentimental excess, we may gather from the following quotation. “Let us make of him our Christ and let me be the least of his disciples,” Werthes wrote of the twenty-five-year-old author of Werther and Götz. Occasionally just a suspicion of this attitude has passed to the biographer. On the other hand, we are often given only Goethe’s impression of his contemporaries. Thus we are told that Frau von Stein was “a gentle, pure, and talented nature.” There are other estimates distinctly less flattering. All this adds markedly to the singleness of his portrait, though in the interest of the strict truth it might have been well to forewarn the reader unfamiliar with the Weimar circle. Goethe’s play, Clavigo, was based on an episode in Beaumarchais’s Memoirs, at that time believed to be true. Bielschowsky likewise leaves us with this impression, though in fact the episode had been romanced and distorted out of all recognition by the good-natured buffoon and adventurer who wrote it.

In the critical portions of the work, the reader will occasionally be taken aback by unabashed superlatives. In the suicide Werther “ fell the noblest and purest of human souls.” This is distinctly an eighteenth-century estimate. “ Werther, the great masterpiece,” is, “next to Hamlet, the most unique [eigenthümlich] figure in the literature of the world.” We are given reasons why Goethe’s Iphigenia is greater than the Iphigenia of Euripides. Of the youthful fragment, The Marriage of Hanswurst, it is written, “ If the play had been completed we should possess a comedy little inferior to Aristophanes in wit, and superior in bold license.” Those who feel that Aristophanes was conscious of the limits of his art will necessarily misconstrue Bielschowsky’s intended compliment.

When he turns to the works of the closing years, in which the aging Goethe occasionally wanders far from the poet’s province, the concrete, and writes in that compressed, telescoped style not unlike Shakespeare’s last manner, the critic confuses two categories. He seems to believe that a work of art is beautiful in proportion as it is profound, forgetting that when poetry ceases to be simple, sensuous, and passionate, it runs grave danger of ceasing to be poetry. Thus the second part of Faust is coupled with the first in one indiscriminate laud, though the first is a poem of man’s experience with desires and the world, and the second of his experience with phantoms, ideas, and that essentially morbid person, himself. To many they are as different in quality as Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The second poem of both masters has been anticlimaxed by the first; the griffe du lion is less and less evident, and the greatest poetry less and less frequent. Bielschowsky follows many commentators in speaking of Faust simply as the Gretchen Episode. Part II contains the body of the poem. Yet nearly a quarter of a century had elapsed between the publication of the two. The fact that Paradise Regained was Milton’s favorite does not make it his greatest poem, and for the critic Goethe’s views will not be decisive here. His two works, whatever their relation to the central theme, exhibit two distinct conceptions of poetry, and if they are both great world-literature they are great for different reasons and they should have been treated separately.

Through following his master so closely, Bielschowsky has given us a convincing, by all odds the most convincing, portrait of the great Sage of Weimar, the largest, fullest personality in history. He shows us how he lived and moved and had his being, how “he could split a day into a million parts and rebuild it into a miniature eternity.” As such it is an independent and valuable contribution to literature. For estimates of the literary achievement of Goethe, we shall still read with profit the book of his larger-minded, saner admirer, George Henry Lewes.