Goethe

Benedetto Croce, Emily Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429628146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria tedesca

Croce admired Goethe partly because the latter possessed a knowledge of human nature in all its aspects but nonetheless kept his mind above and beyond political sympathies and the quarrels of nations. In this volume originally published in English in 1923, Croce distils his critical ideas about Goethe with the aim of helping readers to better understand the German poet's work.

GOETHE

I

MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE

BIOGRAPHICAL research is wont to occupy itself in far greater detail with Goethe than with any other poet—and not without just reason; though it is to be regretted that in his case, more perhaps than in the case of other writers, this kind of research crushes and stifles pure artistic consideration. He who said that if Goethe had not been a great poet in verse, he would yet have been a great artist in life, made a statement which cannot be defended in the strict sense of the word, as it is impossible to imagine the life he lived without the poetry which he produced. Nevertheless, the author of the statement has traced in a rather picturesque manner the relation of Goethe’s life to his poetry, a relation which is like that of a whole to one of its parts, a very conspicuous part. For is it not true that the greater number of volumes of Goethe’s works (even omitting his letters and his “conversations”) consist of reminiscences, annals, diaries, accounts of his travels, and that several other volumes contain autobiographical matter interspersed or concealed, to which critics are still endeavouring to discover the keys? Does not this autobiographical element enfold and cover on all sides like some rank vegetation those works of his which are more exclusively his poetical works?

As he was an artist in life, so he can teach us how to live. He does not teach, however, as a moralist who sets us an ideal and furnishes us with precepts, but he teaches us directly by his own life of which the observations and the maxims which he wrote and enunciated form the illustration and the theoretical compendium. He does not teach this or that particular technical method, or, if you like, he teaches these as well, but, first of all, he teaches us about the life of man in its essentially human aspect. He shows us by examples in his own life how to solve general problems—problems which arise in the great world of affairs, problems which appear in the narrow round of one’s own existence, problems of constancy, of change, of passion, of will, of practice and theory, of different ages and of the duty which belongs to each age, and so forth. His own biography together with his works, offer us a complete and classic course in noble humanity, per exempla et præcepta. It is a treasure which in these days deserves to be used to a much greater extent by educators and by autodidacts themselves.

It is true that a certain literature now in fashion, which shows a preference for what is colossal and mysterious, and which flatters more especially the egotist and the voluptuary, has begun to recommend the imitatio Goethii, describing its own model as a superhuman and inhuman being, placed beyond good and evil, and delighting in this representation of Goethe, which merely reflects its own follies. For the personality of Wolfgang Goethe consists of calm virtue, earnest goodness and justice, wisdom, balance, good sense, sanity, and, in a word, all those qualities which are generally laughed at as being “bourgeois.” Other masters, certainly not Goethe, can teach one how to shirk the modest duties of life, how to become cunning and inhuman, how to become sensual and even bestial. He was deep but not “abysmal,” as some critics of to-day would wish to consider him. He was a man of genius, but not diabolical. His words were simple, clear, and kindly. In order to impress his teaching on the minds of those whom he cared for, he liked to clothe it in humble verse. For instance, wishing to warn us not to lose ourselves in abstract universality, he simply said:

Willst du dich am Ganzen erquicken,

So musst du das Ganze im Kleinsten erblicken.¹

or, for instance, these lines written in the year of his death to several young writers who sent him their poetical compositions:

Jüngling, merke dir in Zeiten,

Wo sich Geist und Sinn erhöht,

Dass die Muse zu begleiten,

Doch zu leiten nicht versteht.²

And what, in substance, did he teach? To be above all, whatever else one may be, thoroughly and wholly human, ever working with all one’s faculties in harmony, never separating feeling and thought, never working on externals or as a pedant; a task which, in the turbulent years of youth and fascinated by eccentric minds like Hamann, Goethe may have conceived in a somewhat material or fanciful sense, but which he immediately deepened, and therefore made clearer and corrected, rendering concrete its mystical and ineffable totality by determining it more closely. And, on the one hand, he realized in himself and advised others to seek true totality in the particular, in one’s particular work, mastery in “self-limitation,” and, on the other hand, not to shut one’s heart to passions and affections, but not to become their prey, and to develop in oneself ever more and more fully the element of activity, training oneself not to desire and to dream, but to will and to act. He knew that passions, and especially love, come uncalled for and assert themselves. He never thought of combating or eradicating these passions by ascetic abstention, or of suppressing feeling by over-developing the rational part of his nature; but he endeavoured to reconcile both elements and, when feeling and imagination threatened him and finally gained the upper hand, he used to free himself by representing these phases in works of art: a method to which each one can have recourse, even if he is not expressly a poet by profession or a great poet like Goethe, because this method is really nothing but the faculty of objectifying our mental conditions to ourselves, of contemplating them, of giving an account of them to ourselves, and of thus opening a way to meditation and liberation. Even after he had attained to a thorough knowledge and mastery of himself, even in his maturity, Goethe did not close his heart to the thrills of love, but he never allowed them to check his activity; sometimes even he treated them as a sort of fever, the cessations of which one should take advantage of; so that in an epigram he exhorts himself to get on quickly with the work in hand before Love should awake again. As he was armed against natural impulse, he was not seriously its enemy. But he was the sworn enemy of all abstract theories which take upon themselves to regulate human affairs: and here also he succeeded and advised others never to force themselves to follow a preconceived plan, but to value spontaneity and to desire to be rather the spectator than the master of one’s own talent (“das inwohnende Talent ganz als Natur zu betrachten”),¹ and to allow it to turn to poetry, to science, to criticism, to this or that material and species of poetry, whatever represents the needs and the objective and real necessities of various moments (“denn es ist Drang, und so ist’s Pflicht”)²: a variety of movements which, provided they are not the result of an amateurish fancy, will embody a much severer logic and coherence than those which one sometimes presumes to impose on it from without. Goethe accepted nothing from without. He refused to continue to play the part of a discontented rebel once inexperience and youthful ferment were definitely passed; neither could he agree to play the part of a cursing, instigating prophet or of a national, warlike seer, since, never having engaged in social and political struggles, but only in inner moral conflicts, he could not participate with the whole weight of his personality in the rise of national units against the world power of Napoleon; for, though he loved his native country of Germany, he could not bring himself to hate the French, and, seated in his study in Weimar, he did not feel in the mood to compose war songs which, as he said, should be written in camp and to the sound of the drum. And because fanatics are rarely spontaneous and generally intellectualistic, he abhorred fanatics of all kinds, sentimentalists and “enthusiasts,” worshippers of the “superman,” mystics, catholicizers, down to the Romanticists. He never lost his serenity of judgment, and he preferred indulgence, not weak, indifferent indulgence, but that other kind of indulgence, strong and sure, which understands deeply because it has experience and prescribes, if possible, a remedy and does not make itself heard; he even came to consider those who opposed him and hated him as a necessary element and a favourable means for his own development. To observe oneself, to examine oneself, never to pause, to prefer the work to the achievement, “sich überwinden,” ever to conquer oneself; this he desired and achieved. And to be oneself and not to resemble anyone else, but to resemble (he in his peculiar way as others in their peculiar way) the Highest, “dem Höchsten,” that is to say, Reason and Truth.

¹ “If you wish to enjoy the Whole, you must discover the Whole in the smallest part.”

² “Youth, remember in those moments when mind and feeling soar, that the Muse can accompany but is not an unerring guide.”

¹ “To regard the talent which one possesses as nothing but nature.”

² “For since the impulse to do it exists, it is one’s duty to do it.”

He was not less a master in literary life, passing here too from a youthful fiery assertion of the rights of “genius” and “feeling” and from rebellion against “rules,” not indeed to the restoration of external rules and to an aversion for feeling and genius—since he always claimed to have been “ein Befreier,” a liberator, who had taught men to cultivate art “von innen heraus,” from the heart—but to study, to meditation, to “Besonnenheit.” In his early days like the other Stürmer und Dränger he had been an opponent of French literature, which was intellectualistic and ironical, aged and correct like an old lady. But he soon learned to appreciate the clearness of Voltaire’s prose and the value of schools and discipline; and he lashed his own Germans severely, who would not “learn art” and who were wont to justify every unseemliness they wrote by saying that they had “lived” it. He also abandoned very quickly the illuministic dream that society could ever reach a period of art and of life generally, in which the right path would be opened up once for all. For he observed that the path does indeed open out as the result of effort, but, like the waves to a ship, closes immediately afterwards. “To give poetical form to reality”: thus Merck, a friend of his, had defined the tendency which Goethe showed clearly from his youth; and he remained true to this saying. The other saying that “all true poetry is occasional poetry” is merely a variant of the former. But the indispensable artistic content, drawn from personal life, must be such as it really presented itself, and not vanity, that is to say, self-complacency, without sound basis. Hence he reproved those who made experiments in order to supply themselves with material for poetry, and, after publishing Werther, he was surprised that youths should wertherize and should wish to draw from poetry and put into life what he had drawn from life and put into poetry. For this and similar reasons he was a severe critic of the Romantic movement, and to the separation of the two types of art which then obtained he added as a marginal note the qualification that the classical was “healthy” and the romantic “diseased.” What displeased him in the botch-work of the Romanticists was the absence of form and character and the indulging of the ego; and he saw in their “humourism” the acute manifestation of disease, because “humour” (he remarked very rightly) is an element of genius, but can never be a substitute for it, and its predominance marks the decay of art, which it corrodes and eventually destroys. This is a diagnosis and a criticism of a value which is not simply historical and transitory, but theoretical and lasting, inasmuch as it defines spiritual attitudes which are perpetually presenting themselves, and existed then as they do now. And in Goethe’s time, as in our time, holds good the criticism he made of a certain Romantic drama which he called a “pathological product, as in it are treated with excessive insistence the parts which have no substance and those which would require substance are, on the contrary, lacking in it”; and his feeling inclined to lose courage in face of the faultless verse, which had become very common in Germany, where, he said, poetical culture is so widely diffused that “there is no longer anyone who writes bad verse.” Hatred for foreign elements or nationalism in poetry seemed to him stupid, or at most antiquated, and his famous idea of Weltliteratur, of universal literature, of which he announced the coming, only meant opposition to every nationalistic idea, the assertion of the supernationality of poetry, whereby it seemed to him that it would henceforth be possible for every free soul to seek everywhere its own kindred souls and to receive from all sides stimulus and examples, and also warnings not to enter paths which have been tried already and which lead nowhere. His judgments on contemporary poets (contemporaries of Goethe in his old age) are almost all substantial and definitive; it may suffice for us to remember that after having received and read the Promessi sposi immediately after its publication, he perceived that this book was the mature work of Manzoni, in which there appeared “in its fulness that inner world which in the tragedies had not had room to develop”; he even noted the fault, the only fault of this work, namely, the unduly large place given to history, by which he thought that, owing to the unfortunate tendency of the time, Manzoni allowed himself sometimes to be overwhelmed, as Schiller by philosophy. Manzoni, in truth, so allowed himself to be dominated by it that he quenched in himself the poet for the historian and the moralist; this too Goethe had foreseen to a certain extent, when he had censured the division which the author made of the characters of his tragedies into “historical” and “ideal.”

On Goethe’s æsthetic many dissertations have been written which are mistaken, because they search not for what Goethe thought, but for what he did not think. Thus, seeing that he did not solve or deal with problems of a certain kind, such as those which are usually considered to belong to the philosophy of art or to æsthetic, the conclusion is drawn that he was not a philosopher of art. Whereas, on the contrary, it should have been said that he was a philosopher of those problems of art which offered themselves in the first place to him as an artist, and that here, as in moral life, he is able to provide a great wealth of suitable observations and of efficacious instruction. He was not a philosopher in the scholastic sense, but he was indeed a philosopher in the real sense, in his meditations on the problems of science and nature. With regard to other problems, which we might term metaphysical or religious, he adopted an attitude of reserve, or rather took little interest in them, holding to the maxim that “one should explore the explorable and calmly worship the Inexplorable.” It may be (or rather it is certain) that in his idea of a science of nature which in the various species of phenomena should search for the primitive phenomenon (Urphänomen), which is an idea which can be thought and seen at the same time, he was wrong and did little honour to either science or poetry, as was the case, moreover, with all contemporary “natural philosophers.” It may be (and it certainly is) that he was much mistaken in his bitter criticism of Newton, and in rejecting the use of mathematics in physical sciences; another mistake which he shared with other idealists, his contemporaries. It may be (and it probably is true, as it is the opinion of experts) that his theory of colours is neither true nor false, but physically indifferent, a sort of mythology of light and darkness, which is useless for calculation and explains nothing in a scientific sense. On the other hand, he made real and original discoveries in anatomy and botany, fields of research in which observation and intuition render good service. It is also not less true that he, emerging from a century intoxicated with mathematics, understood and had the courage to assert that mathematics do not lead to the knowledge of reality, and that in them there is nothing exact but their own exactness, a sort of “French tongue” in which everything becomes clearer and at the same time poorer, and in which everything drowns its own being and its own character. Original and of great philosophical importance is the idea, which he often suggested, that truths are to be recognized by their capacity for promoting life, and that sterile truths for this very reason are not truths; an idea which we interpret and justify in the sense that every truth has reference to a vital problem, set historically, and therefore operates in life; if it does not operate, it is a sign that the problem was non-existent and the pretended truth mere subtilty, tautology, or verbalism. Further, worthy of notice is that other frequent thought of his that truth is individual and, although it is such, or rather because it is such, is true. Glimmers and presentiments which are slight and vague perhaps, but which foreshadow doctrines which arose later spontaneously, from intrinsic necessity, and which are now sha...