Chapter III: Goethe and His Contemporaries (1)

HAMANN—LICHTENBERG—HERDER—HIS DRAWBACKS OF TEDIOUSNESS, PEDAGOGY, AND
“METEOROSOPHIA,” BUT GREAT MERITS—THE ‘FRAGMENTE’—THE ‘KRITISCHE
WALDER’—THE ‘URSACHEN DES GESUNKNEN GESCHMACK,’ THE ‘IDEEN,’ ETC.—
‘AGE-, COUNTRY-, AND RACE-, CRITICISM’—SPECIMENS AND REMARKS—
WIELAND—GOETHE—THE ‘HAMLET’ CRITICISM, ETC.—THE ‘SPRÜCHE IN PROSA’—
THE STERNE PASSAGES—REVIEWS AND NOTICES—THE CONVERSATIONS—SOME MORE
GENERAL THINGS: GOETHE ON SCOTT AND BYRON—ON THE HISTORIC AND
COMPARATIVE ESTIMATE OF LITERATURE—SUMMING UP: THE MERITS OF
GOETHE’S CRITICISM—ITS DRAWBACKS: TOO MUCH OF HIS AGE—TOO MUCH A
UTILITARIAN OF CULTURE—UNDULY NEGLECTFUL OF LITERATURE AS
LITERATURE—SCHILLER—HIS ÆSTHETIC DISCOURSES—THE BÜRGER REVIEW—THE
‘XENIEN’—THE CORRESPONDENCE WITH GOETHE—THE ‘NAÏVE AND SENTIMENTAL
POETRY’—OTHERS: BÜRGER—RICHTER—THE ‘VORSCHULE DER ÆSTHETIK’—THE
SO-CALLED “ROMANTIC SCHOOL”—NOVALIS—THE ‘HEINRICH’—THE EARLIER
‘FRAGMENTS’—THE LATER—HIS CRITICAL MAGNIFICENCE—TIECK—THE SCHLEGELS—
THEIR GENERAL POSITION AND DRIFT—THE ‘CHARACTERISTIKEN’—A. W.: THE
‘KRITISCHE SCHRIFTEN’ OF 1828—ON VOSS—ON BÜRGER—THE ‘URTHEILE,’
ETC.—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DRAMATISCHE KUNST UND LITERATUR’—THEIR
INITIAL AND OTHER MERIT—THE SCHLEGELIAN POSITION—THE ‘VORLESUNGEN
ÜBER SCHÖNE LITERATUR UND KUNST’—ILLUSTRATED STILL MORE BY
FRIEDRICH—UHLAND—SCHUBARTH—SOLGER—PERIODICALS, HISTORIES, ETC.

There is a difficulty in writing about German criticism, especially in the great period of Goethe’s productiveness, which hardly occurs in any other department of our subject. Not only is there much positive critical writing from all the writers, great and small, of the time, but almost all the writings of the great ones are criticism of an indirect and applied kind. The whole of German Literature from 1750 to 1830 is a sort of _Seminar_—a kind of enormous and multifarious Higher Education movement, pursued, with much more than half consciousness, by persons often of great talent and sometimes of great genius. To give an account of all this is impossible: if it were possible it would be really improper, because much of what the Germans found out with infinite labour was only what nations more fortunately situated in regard to literary position had inherited, if they sometimes neglected their inheritance. But they also found out certain things which other nations had not: nor is it easy to combine an indication of these with an account, full, but not too full, of the entire movement; and hardly any two persons are likely to agree on the point where fulness is reached but running over has not begun.

[Sidenote: _Hamann._]

An early and remarkable instance of this critical permeation is Hamann,[645] the “Magus of the North.” If Hamann had been anything but a German, superficial readers might take him for a quack; indeed, as it is, they have done so, and possibly may still do so. After an early visit to England—which was anything but fortunate, save that it imbued him with English literature—and after trying various occupations, he passed the greater part of his life in a very poor public employment. He wrote large numbers of letters to Lindner, Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, and other persons, and published many short treatises, of the most miscellaneous in kind, and the most eccentric and occasionally apocalyptic in style and title. But he was in reality as deadly a foe of affectation and sham as Carlyle himself, who, no doubt, took not a little from him. His polemic with his friend, and townsman, and “high-honoured Herr-magister” Kant (whom, however, one shudders to find elsewhere described as “ein guter _homunculus_”) does not concern us. But it is almost impossible to read a few pages in his works without coming across some literary reference, more or less remarkable when its date is considered. As early as 1759 he writes[646] to Kant himself, “Wir schreiben für ein Volk das Maler und Dichter fordert”; three years later[647] he entitles two of his quaint little pieces “Author and Critic,” “Reader and Critic,” and fills them with ironic wisdom. Earlier than these last, in May 1761,[648] he has read Diderot, and, like Lessing,[649] has discovered in and with him that rules are all very well, but that there is something “more immediate, more intimate, obscurer, but more certain” than the Rule.

He is harsh, but by no means wholly unjust (as indeed we have seen), when he finds, in _The Elements of Criticism_, “Mehr Worte und Wendungen als Sachen”; he knows Burke; and he leaves his “Magus”-tower to discuss Baretti and Goldoni. Mystic as he is, he detects the emptiness of the new Æsthetic:[650] and consistently champions direct perception of literary and other beauty in individual cases. It is admitted that his Shakespeare study[651] transmitted itself to Herder, upon whom he had great influence: and, generally speaking, he may be said to have exercised at least as much power in the germinal and stimulating way upon the younger writers, who were to form the great generation, as Lessing did in the way of dogma and method. Against the mere _Aufklärung_ and against _Sturm und Drang_, Hamann was alike a conservative and preservative agency: and he is one of the authors, now getting terribly numerous, on whom I should like to spend much more time and space than can be afforded here.

[Sidenote: _Lichtenberg._]

There are rather strong points of resemblance between Hamann and the somewhat younger Lichtenberg. Both were very much influenced by visits to England, and both show the inspiration or English humourists— especially Swift—in their not exactly forced, but very decidedly _purposed_, eccentricity. Lichtenberg, however, was more a man of this world than the “Magus”: and he shows very much more of the passion of the time for physics. Never did any one’s writings better deserve the title of _Vermischte Schriften_[652] than his, consisting as they do, for the most part, of a bewildering assemblage of mote-articles, ranging from the question “Why Germany has no seaside watering-place,”[653] and from an account of a “Sausage-Procession”[654] (which gives a foretaste not merely of Jean Paul but of _Sartor Resartus_ itself) to serious mathematical and physical discussions. Lichtenberg is perhaps best known to English readers by his dealings with Garrick and other English theatrical persons: but there is not a little pure literature in him, outside as well as inside his two sets of titularly literary _Bemerkungen_.[655] He has actual animadversions on Pope, on Swift, on the early German drama even: but his most noteworthy critical achievements are to be found in more general maxims and judgments, many of them showing that creditable anxiety for the literary improvement of his country which the best men of his generation all felt, and which was rewarded in and by the next. He stigmatises that excessive _imitation_ which even here we have had to notice: he says plumply,[656] _Die Deutschen lesen zu viel_; he is prophetically, as well as actually, notable on the process of commenting and translating Shakespeare.[657] But perhaps his best judgment-epigram is on that critical vice which is the other extreme from general denigration. “Men call,” says he, “others by the name of genius, as wood-lice [_Kelleresel_] are called Millepedes. Not that they _have_ a thousand legs, but that people won’t take the trouble to count!”

[Sidenote: _Herder._]

With Herder himself a different form of difficulty besets the historian. Here there is no question of scattered literary _obiter dicta_ occurring in a range of obstinately miscellaneous thinking. Twenty volumes[658] of ostensibly and really literary work, of which something like a full half is actual criticism, present themselves to the inquirer; he knows, and everybody knows, that his author counts, as hardly anybody else, save Lessing and Goethe, has counted, in the literary development of one of the great “completely equipped”[659] literary nations of Europe; he can see, if he has any eyes at all, that Herder is, with Lessing, Diderot, and the shy and mainly apocryphal Gray, one of the very few leaders in the conversion of Europe at large to a catholic study of literature. And yet the arguments against any very full treatment of him in such a book as this are twenty-legion strong.[Sidenote: _His drawbacks of tediousness,_] In the first place, there is what I can only call a certain fearful _woolliness_ about Herder’s literary work. It scarcely ever compresses and crystallises itself into a solid and fiery thunderbolt of literary expression. He himself, in the very forefront of it,[660] speaks of “Die liebe Göttin Langeweile,” “the dear Goddess Ennui,” as having “hunted many, if not most people, into the arms of the Muses.” I am afraid it must be said that in his own case the dear Goddess did not understand where her mission as matchmaker ended, and is too frequently present at the interviews of man and Muse.

[Sidenote: _pedagogy,_]

In the second place, that pedagogic instinct which has been noted, which is so excusable and so praiseworthy in him and in his contemporaries, when we consider their circumstances and _milieu_, interferes somewhat disastrously with the freedom and the lasting interest of his writing. The Latin nations, by their inheritance of real or supposed prerogative from Latin itself, we English by our alleged national self-sufficiency, escape this in greater or less degree. All the four, Italians, French, Spaniards, English, take themselves in their different degrees and manners for granted; they are “men,” if only in the University sense. The Germans of the mid-eighteenth century are, and take themselves for, schoolboys: it is greatly to their credit, but it does not precisely make them good reading without a great deal of good will. [Sidenote: _and_ meteorosophia,] Lastly Herder, as it seems to me (though, no doubt, not to others), in consequence of this sense of dissatisfaction with his own literature, climbs too rapidly to generalisations about the relation of literature itself to national character, and to the connection of literature generally with the whole idea of humanity. All this is noble; but we are in a bad position for doing it. It will be a capital occupation for persons of a critical temperament when humanity has come to an end—which it has not even yet, and which it certainly had still less in Herder’s time.[661]

[Sidenote: _but great merits._]

These general disadvantages are indeed compensated by general merits of a very eminent kind. Stimulated by Hamann, by Lessing, and by his own soul, Herder betook himself, as nobody had done before him, to the comparative study of literature, to the appreciation of folksong (perhaps his best desert), to the examination of Ancient, Eastern, Foreign literature in comparison with German. This is his great claim to consideration in the history of literature and of criticism: and it is so great a one that in general one is loath to cavil even at the most extravagant expressions of admiration that have been lavished upon him.

[Sidenote: _The_ Fragmente.]

But individual examination of his works revives the objections taken above. For instance, the early _Fragmente zur Deutschen Litteratur_[662] has an almost unique _relative_ interest. I do not know where to look for anything like it as a survey (or rather a collection of studies) of a literature at a given period of its development. On the language; on the prosody;[663] on the “rhetoric” in the narrow-wide sense, of German after the close of the Seven Years’ War; on the chief authors and kinds of its literature; on a vast number of minor points, positive and comparative, in relation to it, Herder lavishes an amount of filial devotion, of learning, of ability, which is quite admirable. Taken _absolutely_, the value and the interest, and therefore the admiration, shrink a little.

[Sidenote: _The_ Kritische Walder.]

The _Kritische Wälder_, which followed the _Fragmente_ in a couple of years,[664] are occupied, first, with a sort of continuation of the work of Winckelmann and of Lessing in the _Laocoön_ (a continuation which, like its forerunners, busied itself chiefly with the arts other than literature), and then with some work of Lessing’s enemy, Klotz,[665] somewhat more directly literary in kind. Klotz, however, had busied himself, and Herder necessarily busies himself in turn, with general questions of the moral-literary type, especially in reference to Homer and Virgil. The book is full of those curious _Rettungen_ or “white-washings,” of which we have previously referred to an example in speaking of Lessing on Horace. But it has not very much for us.

[Sidenote: _The_ Ursachen des Gesunknen Geschmack,]

There is some more, though the quality may be differently appreciated by different persons, in the Prize Essay of 1773 on the _Causes of the Decline of Taste in different Nations_:[666] and a great deal more in the twenty years later _Ideen zur Geschichte und Kritik der Poesie und bildenden Künste_.[667] In the first, Herder develops (not of course for the first time, for Montesquieu had given the line long before, if he had not applied it much to literature, and Du Bos had started it before _him_, and Vico had in a manner anticipated both; but for the first time in a wide, and at the same time not loose, application to literature itself) the idea of Age- and Race-criticism—the close conjunction of a general conception of the characteristics of a time and a country with the phenomena observed or supposed to be observed in groups of literary production. In theg second, at once generalising further, and descending to further particulars, we have an attempt to connect literature with general characteristics of humanity, and almost innumerable critical experiments of this process, on different authors and schools and kinds.

[Sidenote: _the_ Ideen, _&c._]

Anything that has to be said in general on these processes is for the Interchapters; but we may here repeat that no one can well exaggerate their historical importance or the influence that they have exercised since. Further, the merit of their combined precept and example, in directing study at once to those features which are common in all literature, and to the individual bodies by comparison of which the general features are discernible, is quite beyond question. The Prize Essay has perhaps the main defects of its kind, that of “figuring away” in plausible gyration, without bringing home any very solid sheaves, or even leaving any definite path. But the immense Miscellany of the _Ideen_ more than makes up for this. Herder’s general scheme, here, in the _Adrastea_,[668] in that _Aurora_ (suggested by the dawn of the nineteenth century) which he only planned, and which was but a small part of the huge adventures for which he died lamenting his lack of time, may be described as that of a mediæval collection of _Quæstiones Quodlibetales_, methodised by the presence throughout of his leading practical and theoretic ideas. [Sidenote: Age-, Country-, and Race-, Criticism] These were, as has been said, the necessity of enriching German literature with material, and furnishing it with patterns, “plant,” and processes, by the study of _all_ literature, ancient and modern, as a practical and immediate aim; and the working out of the notions of literature, as connected with the country, and literature, as connected with the general race, for ultimate goal.

[Sidenote: _Specimens and Remarks._]

But, owing to the enormous _dissipation_,—the constant flitting from flower to flower which his task imposed on him,—Herder was not and could not be a very important critic on particular points. He was bound to share the over-valuation of _Ossian_[669]—for was not _Ossian_ exactly what was wanted to dissolve and lubricate the _sècheresse_ of French-German enlightenment, and did it not appear to give a brilliant new example of “national” literature? So we must not overblame him for this, any more than we must overpraise him—while praising him heartily— for having been undoubtedly the main agent in inoculating the Germans with Shakespeare.[670] Elias Schlegel had begun the process, and Hamann had continued it; but the first was cut off too early for him to do more than make a beginning, and Hamann’s mission was rather to send others, including Herder himself, than to work directly upon the general. It is also fair to say that, with all his soaring ideals and world-wide aspirations of mental travel, there was little _Schwärmerei_ about Herder, except in a few semi-poetical passages, which can easily be skipped. His judgment is a pretty sound and sensible one, if his taste is not infallible—see for instance his remarks on political poetry (xvi. 169, _op. cit._), and the equally modest and intelligent observations which follow on the impossibility of emulating or surpassing the special qualities of foreign literatures, however useful these literatures may be for study.[671] To any nation Herder must have been a useful and stimulating teacher; to the Germans at this time he was simply invaluable. But the definition of his general scope, and these few particulars of his procedure, must suffice us here.[672]

[Sidenote: _Wieland._]

Wieland, the other chief of German _belles lettres_ between Lessing and Goethe, is also one of those writers—necessarily thickening upon us as we proceed—who were very important to their own times and countries, but whose importance historically is here less a matter for detailed investigation than for general summary. His extensive work[673] is full of criticism; indeed his position as editor of the _Teutsche Merkur_ was one of the most responsible and not of the least influential in the great German period. The curious modernised-classical or classicalised-modern novels and miscellanies of which he was so fond— especially the _Abderiten_—abound in it, in a more or less dissolved and diffused state; the seven or eight volumes of his miscellaneous works[674] contain more in a precipitated and concentrated condition. Now he will ask—but perhaps not answer—the question, “Was ist eine schöne Seele?”[675] then discourse (after the fashion of Burke and Barnwell and Bulwer) on “the Relation of the Agreeable and Beautiful to the Useful”;[676] then come closer still to real practical criticism in the interesting “Sendschriften an einen Jungen Dichter” of 1784.[677] The alphabetically arranged reviews and notices which fill, or help to fill, the three last volumes deal with all manner of authors and books, from Aristophanes to the _Amadis_, and from Louise Labé to Luis Vivès. In all, modified to some extent by the influence which his greater juniors exercised latterly on him, there appears that somewhat rococo, but interesting, attractive, and very largely beneficent blend or coupling of wit and imagination (or at least fancy) which is Wieland’s characteristic, and which undoubtedly did much—very much—to raise the Germans out of another and much less attractive mixture of pedantry and horse-play and bombast. But his individual critical utterances are of less importance to us. And so to Goethe himself.

[Sidenote: _Goethe._]

In a certain sense the whole six-and-thirty volumes[678] of Goethe’s work, with all the _Letters_ and _Conversations_ added, may be said to be a record of his criticism: in this sense he certainly deserved the hackneyed “nothing if not—--” But for our purposes, though we may step beyond them now and then, the famous passages in _Wilhelm Meister_ and elsewhere (especially “Shakespeare und Keine Ende”) on Shakespeare, the _Sprüche in Prosa_, the collected papers on German and other literature, and the _Conversations_ with Eckermann, will give a sufficient collection of texts. The _Xenien_ will be more conveniently postponed till we deal with their other author.

[Sidenote: _The_ Hamlet _criticism, &c._]

One thing must or should have struck every reader (at all accustomed to draw conclusions from what he reads) about the _Hamlet_ passages in _Meister_.[679] _These passages might have been written by a man who was only acquainted with a prose translation of the piece into a language other than its own._ This may seem a little staggering: but it is true. Goethe handles—with extraordinary and for the most part unerring insight—the characters, the situations, the conduct of the play. But there he stops dead. Of its magnificent and ineffable poetical _expression_—of those phrases and passages which, read hundreds of times through scores of years, produce as much effect on the fit reader as at first, and more—he says nothing. “Shakespeare und Keine Ende” tells the same story: nearly all, if not all, the scattered references from the Frankfort speech of 1771, when he was just of age, to the last remark to Eckermann sixty years later, tell the same. It is at least a curious one. One begins to wonder whether the person who wrote Shakespeare was, not Bacon, but, say, Wieland.

[Sidenote: _The_ Sprüche in Prosa.]

Many things, however, might, and some perhaps shall, be said about this. Let us turn to the more miscellaneous and general utterances of the _Sprüche in Prosa_, which, with the parallel verse jottings, especially some of the _Zahme Xenien_, are recognised as supplying a sort of running accompaniment of Goethe’s thought, for all periods of his life. No one (again with the same slight goodwill to think) can read far in either of these divisions, much less in both of them, without perceiving the very strong, we might almost call it the overbearing, practical and ethical tendency, even of those passages which apparently bear most closely on literature. All the best things are _generalised_ as much as possible, with perhaps some forgetfulness of the writer’s own caution about _Allgemeine Begriffe_.[680] In these generalities there is much that is admirable, such as the famous “Superstition is the poetry of life,”[681] and the much less known but very striking “Rhythmical movement has something magical about it: it makes us believe that the Sublime is our own property.”[682] The danger appears in his often-quoted comparison of Classicism to Health and Romanticism to disease[683]—if he had said “Classicism is precaution against disease: Romanticism is making the best of that which must come,” there would have been something to say for him. But it is far off in the admirable, “There are pedants who are also scoundrels; and they are the worst of all.”[684]

But when we pass from these generalities—disputable sometimes, indisputable not seldom, almost always stimulating—to individual judgments, the case is a little altered. If he had oftener written such notes as “_Vis superba formæ_. _Ein schönes Wort von Johannes Secundus_,”[685] it had been better. What is the good of saying of _Henry IV._[686] that “If everything else extant of the kind were lost, we could restore poetry and rhetoric completely out of this alone”? Nobody shall outgo me in rational admiration of _Henry IV._ I will not give up a hair of Doll Tearsheet’s head, nor a blush of the page’s cheek. Everything in it is good: but to say that everything that is good is in it would deepen the inscrutable smile on Shakespeare’s face a little less inscrutably. The saying, however, may perhaps be allowed the credit, as well as the discredit, due to enthusiastic exaggerations. This is not the case with the passages on Sterne,[687] which are numerous, which form a tolerably complete context, and which are yet separated from each other, and returned upon, in a fashion which shows what a strong impression the subject had made on the writer’s mind.

[Sidenote: _The Sterne passages._]

We begin with the sufficiently round statement, “Yorick Sterne was the finest[688] spirit that ever worked. Whosoever reads him has at once the feeling of freedom and beauty; his humour is inimitable, and not every kind of Humour frees the soul.” Now, as a thing said once, this would be surprising enough, however well we may think of Sterne: but Goethe does not leave it alone. After the widest casts round to the general aspects of Poetry and Science, Art and Humour, he circles back to “Tristram.” “Even at this moment” (the context shows that this must have been pretty late in his life), “every man of culture should take his works once more in hand, that the nineteenth century may learn what we owe him already, and look out for what we may still owe him.” Another page and more of generalities, and he harks back again. “Sterne was born in 1713 and died in 1768. To comprehend him one must not leave out of consideration the moral and ecclesiastical state of his time: we should remember that he was Warburton’s contemporary.” And then a context of notes remarks on his “free spirit,” “his power of developing things from within,” of “distinguishing truth from falsehood,” his “hatred for the didactic-dogmatic, the pedantic tendencies of the serious”; his wide reading and discoveries of “the inadequate and the ridiculous”; his “boundless sagacity and penetration,” and a great many other things. Admitting that Sterne is “never a model,” he thinks him “always suggestive and stimulating,” and makes the charitable remark that “the element of coarseness in him, _in which he moves so carefully and elegantly_, might have spoilt many others.”

Now this is at first odder than the hyperbole about _Henry IV._, and takes one’s breath away more completely for the moment. One may have a very strong liking for “Atalanta’s better part,” for the lightness, grace, good sense, refreshing qualities of Shandyism, and a very great admiration for Sterne’s genius, especially for the uniqueness, if not exactly the impeccability, of its literary expression. But to make of him, even to the extent to which it is possible to make of his master Rabelais, an author to be turned over by day and night, a _vade mecum_, a great teacher, a literary discoverer and deliverer, the “finest spirit that ever worked”—this is really going rather too far. Yet the point of view is perfectly obvious, and it is equally obvious that it is not a literary point of view at all. Goethe felt severely the Philistinism of his own country, and he had—as most Continentals always have had, and as some dear good Englishmen think it proper still to have—the idea that England was specially dominated by the weaver’s beam. Sterne to him is a David: his jests and pranks are the small stones of the brook, and he thinks of nothing more than of the discomfiture of Goliath.

Yet he could be Philistine enough himself, as where, in _Shakespeare und Keine Ende_, having talked of the universality of Shakespeare[689] more mysteriously and pretentiously, but far less intelligently and forcibly, than Dryden a century and more earlier, he tells us that “Coriolanus is _pervaded throughout_ by the chagrin experienced at the refusal of the mob to recognise the choice of its betters.” In _Julius Cæsar_ “_everything rests on_ the idea that the leaders are averse to seeing the highest place filled, because they wrongly imagine that they can work successfully in co-operation.” _Antony and Cleopatra_ “declares with a thousand tongues [_plus_ a thousand copybook headings?] that idle enjoyment is incompatible with a life of activity.” We have all heard of Goethe as a great and true Apollo, a Philistine-slayer from youth to age. Was there ever more platitudinous and trivial chatter of Ashdod than in these three sentences? And how, again, when we find him, like a seventeenth-century Preceptist, dividing literary motives into Progressive, Retrogressive, Retardative, Retrospective, and Anticipatory, a list which yet once again sets one thinking, with a shameful joy, on possible Rabelaisian developments and parodies of it? Is our own poor Alison, with his Bandit unequally yoked to a Grecian nose[690]—are the poor Le Bossus and Rapins themselves—to be scoffed at, when we find this Jove of Weimar and Germany laying it down that “Christians contending with Christians will not, especially in later times, form a good picture,” but that “Christians conquering Turks” are admissible?

[Sidenote: _Reviews and Notices._]

The very numerous literary reviews and notices which fill nearly two volumes[691] of the Works in the edition we are using must, of course, be read by every one who desires to acquaint himself thoroughly with Goethe’s criticism: but they have not quite the importance which they might be expected to have, and very often, when they are at their best, that best comes to little or nothing more than we find condensed and quintessenced in a maxim of the _Sprüche_ or a sentence of the _Conversations_. This indeed could not be otherwise: for the most “panoramic intellect” (a phrase which Goethe acknowledged with rather sardonic politeness when it was applied to him by some English critic[692]) cannot see, and the most facund tongue cannot say, the same thing differently every time. Even in the earliest there are very neat things, as where[693] poor Sulzer’s _Die Schönen Künste_ is described in the opening sentence of the review as “Very suitable for translation into French: indeed it might very well have been translated _from_ French.” The very latest, such as that on Mérimée’s _La Guzla_,[694] display that combination of fresh interest, impartial judgment, and experienced knowledge which ought to be the reviewer’s equipment, but which unluckily few attain.

[Sidenote: _The_ Conversations.]

On the whole, however, the _Conversations with Eckermann_ are the richest _placer_ of Goethe’s criticism, and the most convenient for the general reader. There appears to be no reason for any exaggerated scruples about admitting them as genuine and trustworthy. Eckermann, no doubt, has some of the irritating qualities which are almost inseparable from the Boswellian temperament: one need not be ashamed of enjoying that characteristic Heinesquery, the regret

“Dass Goethe sei todt,
Und Eckermann sei zu Leben.”

But this need not prevent our being thankful that Eckermann remained _zu Leben_ long enough to put these things on record. There is nothing in the least disloyal or disgusting about them: the sternest hater of eavesdropping need not be afraid or ashamed to take up the book. And Eckermann seems to have been very fairly in possession of the two positive and the one negative qualities required by his difficult and rather thankless art—exactness, intelligence up to a certain point, and the absence of the superfluous cleverness which might have tempted him to refine, and touch up, and overlay. Therefore some analysis of the chief critical utterances of the book should find a place here. It must, moreover, always be remembered that Goethe was a man soaked in literature, and that those who read him without having at least dipped in it are apt to make mistakes.[695] Pretty early we have one of those striking generalities which catch mankind, and which—in a sense not unjustly—have earned their author his immense reputation. “Fact must give the motive, the points that require expression the particular kernel; but to make a beautiful enlivened whole, _that_ is the business of the poet.”[696] The practical advice about a certain job of verse[697] is as good as it can be, and as we should expect it to be; to find a better and more _conscious_ craftsman of letters than Goethe, you may take the wings of the morning and put a girdle round the earth in vain. Nor perhaps is much more needed than mere quotation for the three words on the opposite page, _Ach, das Publikum!_ There is a very noteworthy passage[698] on Schiller and his philosophy, and a still more noteworthy one,[699] indeed one of the cardinal places of the whole, on the character of writers, with a context—accidental as far as dates go (for there is a full fortnight between them), but real in thought—on Style.

The classification of his enemies[700] is very interesting and curious, as are, both from the critical and the personal standpoint, the observations[701] on Klopstock and Herder. But what follows[702] immediately, on the contemporarily intimate relations between France and Germany in literature, is more noteworthy still, and so is, especially when we take account of the dates and of other places, Goethe’s dissuasion[703] of Eckermann from undertaking a _compte-rendu_ of German Literature for an English Review. At this very time[704] the _Globe_ was being founded in Paris: and Goethe’s admiration for the _Globe_ was unbounded. J. J. Ampère he knew personally: but the praise which so constantly recurs applies to Sainte-Beuve, Rémusat, and others almost more than to Ampère. In one place later, he expresses his surprise that these young French reviewers did not think it necessary, as the Germans did, to “hate one another” if they differed in opinion.[705] Alas! the disease was not, and is not, confined to Germany: and it certainly did not spare these same contributors to the _Globe_. But their width of range, their comparative spirit, their judicial and yet not pedagogic manner, justly enchanted Goethe. And it was doubtless because he did not, in 1824, think it possible for a reviewer to show them, that he bade Eckermann not “eat the beans” of reviewing.

The passage[706] which naturally and immediately follows on the connection of German and English literature, and the frank avowal of the enormous indebtedness of the former to the latter, is deservedly famous, and certainly shows Goethe most favourably in the light of that combined lamp of intelligence, learning, and character which he himself always liked to turn on his subject. But one does not read with so much satisfaction what follows at a little distance on the sufficiency of translation,[707] a passage at which, I feel sure, all the Muses wept. Scientifically, morally, practically, translation can do much: from the point of view of pure literature, all it can do is to supply something different from the original—good perhaps, bad perhaps, between the two most probably, but never _the_ original. Once more he refers valuably[708] to the great older contemporaries of his youth—Lessing, Herder, Wieland, as well as to Schiller. Always we may apply to Goethe when he speaks of Schiller what Thackeray says so well of Pope[709] when he speaks of Swift. His remarks on Menander in more places than one supply a very curious document, or item of a document, as to his criticism generally, when we reflect in what a fragmentary state the great New Comic has come down to us. Many notable passages on Shakespeare and Molière follow: indeed, the various contexts on Molière should be as carefully looked at and compared as those on Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott. They will form, with these, the chief bases of our general estimate of Goethe’s criticism.

The judgment[710] of January 1827 on Hugo is famous and interesting. More favourable than later ones, it shows the critic’s eclecticism, if not quite his catholicity. He saw, and saw rightly, the connection with Chateaubriand: and we must not _now_ be too severe on him for thinking _then_ that Hugo “may be as important as Lamartine and Delavigne.” A less agreeable side of his criticism—one to which we have had, and shall have, to turn and return—is the remark on Flemming,[711] _er kann jetz nicht mehr helfen_. Now Flemming certainly was not a very great poet; he _has_ only “a very pretty talent, rather prosaic and _bourgeois_.” But the “er kann jetz nicht mehr _helfen_” is hard to forgive. It is a point of view which has done harm to many, notably to Mr. Arnold: but that is between the Muses and themselves. What concerns us, is that it is bad in itself. The idea that such and such a writer “won’t _pay_,” that you can’t “get culture” out of him, is the pure Philistinism of culture itself. It is the exact analogue to the theory and practice of “saving your own dirty soul” in religion. What does it matter whether he “helps” or not, if he is good and, in his own little or large measure, delights? This calculus of profit is mighty disgusting and, we may add, mighty dangerous: for it is at the root of much of the bad criticism in the world.

He is in his better mind, and in his own sphere, with the remark[712] that now, fifty years ago, and fifty years hence, it is, was, will be so that what men wrote when they were young will be best enjoyed by young men. And we may note in passing wise and witty things on destructive criticism,[713] on Smollett,[714] on _Lazaret-poesie_,[715] before leaving with a good taste in our mouth, the first and, for literary utterances I think the weightiest, volume of the _Conversations_.

A good example of that common-sense judgment which is perhaps Goethe’s chief claim as a critic is to be found early in vol. ii.,[716] where he speaks of Aristotle as “rash in his opinions.” At first sight this may seem not merely impertinent, but contradictory of the facts: and yet there is much in it. Undoubtedly Aristotle, great as he is, _was_ rash, with the peculiar Greek rashness of imagining that Greek facts were all facts: and this was nowhere more the case than in his literary criticism. We may be less happy—on the same page and the next—with a repetition of Philistinisms against Fouqué and the Middle Ages, about there being “nothing worth our fetching from these dim old German times,” or with an additional mistake (which again has done much harm) about the “miseries” of these said times and the uselessness of adding them to our own. How much better is a fresh application of “the apples of gold and pictures [frames] of silver,” a metaphor of which he was fond, a little later! “Die Frauen,” says he,[717] “sind silberne Schalen in die _wir_ goldene Aepfel legen.” In other words, their worth and their fairness are their fairness and their worth to _our_ imagination, which indeed is the conclusion of the whole matter, not merely in gynæcology. His statement as to Voltaire[718] that “everything which so great a talent writes is good,” is interesting to compare with the direct negative of Joubert. And it may repay anybody if he thinks a little about its connection with a more general and very important statement of Goethe’s, that “in Art and Poetry Personality is everything,”[719] wherewith also it were well to combine his frequent references[720] to his favourite idea of the “dæmonic.” His extreme and repeated[721] admiration of _Daphnis and Chloe_ (undoubtedly a charming thing) is to be noted.

The third volume, giving us[722] Eckermann’s second skimmings of his notes and memories, is, perhaps naturally, less fruitful, but it is far from barren. Another of the audacious and felicitous phrases which have done so much to establish Goethe’s fame is that[723] about Shakespeare’s “unflustered, innocent, _sleepwalkerish_ manner of production”: and the passage on Schlegel[724] is a good combination of magnanimity and veracity. One of the strangest blunders of interpretation ever made by such a man is that by which he makes[725] Macduff’s “He has no children” apply to Macbeth instead of to Malcolm, thereby not only making necessary a clumsy explaining-away of Lady Macbeth’s own words, but spoiling the poetry of the actual passage. In the same context comes the contradiction of himself, that Shakespeare thought mainly of the stage when he wrote.[726] On the other hand, the passage[727] on Burns, Béranger, and the effect on literary talent of an exciting atmosphere of various kinds, from the clash of sentiment and thought in a city like Paris to the inspiration of traditional ballad-literature, is all but consummate in a certain way.

Then read him on the _incommensurableness_ of poetry,[728] and (in a happier vein about Classic and Romantic than that which has been noticed) pronouncing[729] that, for all the fuss (_Lärme_) about the two, “a work that is good all through will be a classic sure enough,” and you may leave him in a state of reconciliation which, in wise persons, will not be disturbed by later utterances on French authors, Guizot, Villemain, Mérimée, Victor Hugo even, though on the latter you may think that he has got at a wrong angle. After all, one may say that Hugo and not Goethe was in that position: for few persons with a critical head now think of the author of _Marion de l’Orme_ as they think of the author of the _Contemplations_ and the _Légende_.

[Sidenote: _Some more general things: Goethe on Scott and Byron._]

To proceed from particulars to mediate generalities, a very instructive light on Goethe’s general critical attitude may be obtained by comparing his expressions in regard to Scott and to Byron.[730] He admires both. But in regard to Scott he justifies his admiration. His analysis to Eckermann[731] of _The Fair Maid of Perth_ is really critical: he points out how good this passage is, how cunningly that episode is worked in, how powerful is that other picture. He praises _Rob Roy_ in the same manner,[732] “going at the jugular,” selecting the truth of detail, the _unendliche Fleiss in den Vorstudien_ (the very thing which shallow critics deny to Scott), and so forth. Now, his eulogies of Byron are quite different. They are nearly all in generals; the most definite passage that I remember, about the wigshops and lamplighters in _Don Juan_, comes from Eckermann’s mouth, not Goethe’s. The great man himself is struck by Byron’s social and political position; he is lost in wonder at Byron’s real or supposed revolt against what he, like others, supposes to have been English Philistinism (the Philistinism of Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding!), and the like. It is never a phrase, a passage, a situation, hardly ever a book[733] that he praises. And I do not know a closer approach to the merely and purely _bête_ in a writer of the greatest literary, and of great critical, genius than the remark[734] that a few lines of _Don Juan_ “poison the whole _Gerusalemme_.” It would be as sensible to say that one stanza of Tasso is an antidote to the whole of _Don Juan_. The two things are “incommensurable,” and severed by a gulf.

[Sidenote: _On the historic and comparative estimate of literature._]

Another remarkable thing about Goethe’s criticism, which might be illustrated from the _Sprüche_, from Eckermann, and from other sources, may again surprise those who have simply adopted the common opinion of him as an apostle of universal culture. Curiously enough, he, the “Doctor Universalis” of nineteenth-century literature, as some would make him, distinctly discourages and disparages that historic study of Comparative Letters which is the distinguishing nineteenth-century principle. His warning to the Germans, that they have most to lose by the introduction of a “world-literature,” is no doubt true enough _ad hoc_ or _ad hos_: and when, close by, he emits the wish, “May the study of Greek and Roman literature remain the basis of the higher Culture,” we can only say “Amen, and Amen” ever-lastingly. But his stigmatisation of Chinese, Indian, Egyptian literatures as _Curiositäten_—useless for moral and æsthetic culture—is very tell-tale: and even the most experienced person may be slightly shocked when he finds Goethe extending this taboo to European-mediæval letters as well.[735]

[Sidenote: _Summing up: the merits of Goethe’s criticism._]

I hope that it is not extravagant to think that this selection of the actual facts of the case, individual and grouped, may serve to base, with some solidity, a judgment of Goethe’s actual position as a critic. For a considerable time, let us say roundly the middle forty years of the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1870, this position, very mainly owing to the efforts of a large number of great men from Carlyle downwards, was exalted to the very skies: and even more recently it has been rather left alone than seriously attacked. The causes of this— causes which to some extent are true causes and must always operate—may be put shortly as follows. Goethe possessed, to an extraordinary degree, and later perhaps than any one else, that singular _wisdom_ which has been more than once animadverted upon as the property, in the strict sense, of the eighteenth century. He was, for half its length and for nearly two-thirds of his own life, a man of its own: and he never escaped, or wished to escape, entirely from its influence. He was always “in touch” with life and fact: there was “no nonsense about him,” to use an excellent vernacular phrase which, if somewhat double-edged, has a keen and heavily backed edge on the favourable side. There are no “Samothracian mysteries of bottled moonshine” in him; the most apparently dreamy parts of his loftiest and greatest things, such as the second part of _Faust_, are always, like natural and healthy dreams, merely sublimations of actual facts—experienced or capable of being experienced.

But further, and on the other hand, he had, from very early youth, and by the favour of those of “the Mothers” who allow men of great genius to anticipate and combine the gifts which most have only later and separately, a very strong infusion indeed of Romance _and_ of Science— the two apparently opposite characteristics of the century to which his last thirty years belonged. He had hardly a touch of the special stupidity which accompanied the special cleverness of his earlier century—the degeneration of “common-sense.” In him the fashionable and epidemic diseases of the Neo-classic period were neutralised by the appropriate agencies, without any of these turning to the morbid. The comparison of _Goetz_ with _The Robbers_ is an education in pathological criticism. Nobody ever served under two flags with such honour and credit as Goethe; he may even be said to have effected, if not alone, yet mainly, a reconciliation and junction of arms between his two masters. Yet again his almost unique mastery (just glanced at) of the tendencies of the morrow; his sympathy, in his age, and when he was in a way the greatest man of letters in Europe, with the ideas, tastes, aspirations of quite young men—not merely secured, but to no very small extent deserved, the enthusiastic adhesion of these latter. And when we add to these powerful general things his extraordinary literary gifts, the still more extraordinary range of his interests, the Olympian good-nature of his character, and his singular, and almost supra- or infra-human, avoidance of extremes, it ceases to be at all surprising that the position above noted should have seemed to good wits to be his: it may even seem ungracious, pedantic, absurd to take any exceptions to it.

[Sidenote: _Its drawbacks: too much of his age._]

Yet the exceptions must be taken, and, if possible, made good. The greatest of them—at least, according to those general lines which he himself loved and followed—is connected with that peculiarity of his which has been noticed a few lines previously. He is just a little too much of the day and the morrow combined—not enough of yesterdays and to-morrows far behind and far ahead. The least local and temporary of those who are for an age—possessor of the widest “age” perhaps of them all—he is still of that age, and, except in criticisms that are of life rather than of literature, not sufficiently of all time. As we have seen and shown, he cannot duly appreciate the Middle Ages; and the fact that others were over-appreciating them does not excuse him a whit. In his formative precepts he looks too much to what he thought the requirements of actual nineteenth-century literature—a modified Romanticism, not excluding Science. In other words, he keeps time without winding for a longer period than any other clock on record, but he is perhaps rather impossible to wind afresh. On that calculus of his own which we have disallowed and protested against, which we shall shortly disallow and protest against afresh, one might too often say that _he_ cannot “help us any more.” He is not as “rash in his opinions” as he thought Aristotle was, but he is more inadequate; we can nowadays allow for and discard Aristotle’s rashness, and find abundance of the eternal left in him, and we cannot quite do this with Goethe. We must sometimes, with Aristotle, have, and mark, the side-note, “This was a man of the fourth century B.C.”; we must always with Goethe have the other, “This was the cleverest man of 1770-1830.” Take him again with Longinus, and we find that Longinus needs hardly any side-note at all—only here and there in utterances such as that about the _Odyssey_. And I at least think that Coleridge, though he certainly needs it here and there, needs it seldomer, far seldomer, than Goethe.

[Sidenote: _Too much a utilitarian of Culture._]

But there is another count. Goethe, as everybody knows, had a private chapel (which has bred chantries and churches and cathedrals all over the world), with an ephod and teraphim and everything complete, dedicated to the great god, Cham-Chi-Thaungu, otherwise called Culture. It is ill to be joined to any idols: and this was well seen of him. “This cannot help us,” he says constantly; “we cannot fetch any good out of this.” “Such times, such books, such men have nothing to say for us.” Now, such sentences, from the point of view of the really higher criticism, are anathema, because they are _negative_. The corresponding positives are not condemnable at all. If a thing does help any one, if any can fetch good, or delight, out of it, it passes at once—in a low class perhaps, perhaps in a high—but it passes. That it does _not_ help any particular person proves nothing at all. If the work is good, on its own scale and specification, it can afford to wait for the persons whom it will help, to whom it will “give culture.” Its beauty is its sole duty. Indeed “What _is_ culture?” is a question to be asked not at all jestingly, and it will be hard to find the answer.

[Sidenote: _Unduly neglectful of literature as literature._]

Yet once more the specimens given (I believe quite fairly) above entitle us—and all but the most blindly fanatical _Goetheaner_ will find it hard to _dis_entitle us from the observation—to observe in them a constant deflection from strictly literary consideration of things. He likes to consider “poetry” rather than “poesy,” poets rather than poetry; and in poets he is always considering the not strictly poetical qualities. He extols, for instance, in a well-known passage, Byron’s “Keckheit, Kühnheit, Grandiosität.” Now the last, though a somewhat questionable, may be a real, poetical quality: but what is there essentially poetical in _Keckheit_ and _Kühnheit_? The occasion requiring them, it is good that a poet—as that a fox-hunter, a sub-lieutenant left in command of the regiment, a householder facing a fire or a burglar at two o’clock in the morning—should have them: but what is there specially _poetical_ about them? On the contrary, may not a man have them and be, in virtue of having them, a bad, and the worse, poet? Character, conduct, personality (the second construed in a liberal way), these things are what Goethe is always harping on. Now, ten generations of foes and friends have (with the good leave of some friends as well as foes of mine) been able to make out next to nothing at all about Shakespeare’s character, conduct, and personality. Yet most people think that Shakespeare was, let us say, one of the great poets of the world. Shelley’s character was rather weak; his conduct was sometimes disgusting; his personality, though generally amiable, is very vague; and some of us think him the “next poet,” not merely the next English poet, to Shakespeare. We may be wrong: but our case is a case.

Therefore, insolent absurdity as it may seem, I venture to doubt whether Goethe’s criticism is of the absolutely greatest value. We have met with many marks or notes of the true critic in our “journey across Chaos,” and some of them Goethe has. But there are most important ones which he lacks. That he is a great _dramatic_ critic I can very well admit: but his very greatness here, on the principle more than once referred to, makes him a dubious critic of literature. For the Goethe of _Faust_ (not least of the Second Part of it), of the best lyrics, and of some other things, I have, and for a great number of years have had, almost unlimited admiration: for the critical Goethe I feel very much less. That, assisted by natural xenomania, he was a great revelation to Englishmen seventy, eighty, even a hundred years ago, I can very well allow and believe: that he was a valuable populariser of a critical attitude, useful as an alterative to that of Neo-classicism, I know. But I am less sure that there is much in him, as he would himself say, for us now. Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge, are _creeds_: though the first and second are too succinct and the last too discursive and full of _lacunæ_. I can admit even Scaliger, even Boileau, to be of the calibre of a will-worship. But Goethe, the critical Goethe, has too much the character of a superstition, now rather stale.

[Sidenote: _Schiller._]

Schiller’s critical position, which some have estimated very highly, depends first upon the collection of small æsthetic treatises, and of a few actual reviews, which is included in his prose works;[736] secondly, in his share of the _Xenien_; and thirdly, in the critical utterances of his _Letters_, especially those in the correspondence with Goethe, though by no means neglecting those to others, especially Körner. With regard to the first part of the first division, extraordinary importance has been attached to it by some—importance which a wary person would be slow to accept on trust, when he remembers, not merely the remarks of A. W. Schlegel, a declared unfriend, but those of Goethe, Schiller’s unflinching defender, and those of Novalis, a very competent and apparently quite dispassionate observer.[737] Much, however, will of course depend on the estimation in which “æsthetic salt for putting on the tail of the Ideal”[738] is itself held.

[Sidenote: _His Æsthetic Discourses._]

The very strong inclination of the poet towards the abstract discussion is shown in his “Dissertation on the Connection of the Animal Nature of man with the Spiritual,” written and printed in his twenty-first year: as well as in others nearly as early. And few things of the kind can be more curious than the comparison of the “Briefe über _Don Carlos_” with such other defences of a man’s own work as Dryden’s or Corneille’s.[739] The Discourses on Tragedy,[740] which appeared in the _Thalia_ for 1792, of course have their interest. But Schiller’s most noteworthy exercises in this direction have, I believe, been generally thought to be the æsthetic discourses of the Fourteenth volume[741] and those on “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,”[742] and on “The Sublime” in the Fifteenth.

[Sidenote: _The Bürger review._]