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G O E T H E

T H O M A S M A N N

This year, Yale University celebrates the three hundredth an-

niversary of its founding. Since 1819, The Yale Review has

been a crucial part of the university’s intellectual ambitions

and cultural heritage. To help take note of Yale’s traditional

encouragement of the international exchange of ideas, we have

been reprinting over the course of this year’s issues notable

pieces that originally appeared in these pages. This final in-

stallment o√ers essays by Thomas Mann and Paul Valéry.

Written to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of

Goethe’s death, the following tribute by Thomas Mann ap-

peared in The Yale Review in June 1932. It remains a re-

markable meditation on one German master by another, and

Mann’s homage to his esteemed predecessor is as much a keen

self-portrait as it is a literary critique. In retrospect, Mann’s

paean to the Germany of the classical epoch – ‘‘the nation of

poets and thinkers,’’ he terms it – has a darkly ironic tone,

coming as it does on the very edge of the Nazi era.

This essay was the first of several appearances by Mann in

The Yale Review. Three years later, his story ‘‘Disillusion’’

was published, along with a letter (in German). In 1938, his

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‘‘Address at the Dedication of the Thomas Mann Collection at

Yale University’’ was published. And later, two more essays,

‘‘Germany and the Germans’’ in 1945 and ‘‘G. B. S. – Man-

kind’s Friend’’ in 1951. In the same year that Mann’s essay on

Goethe appeared, The Yale Review also published work by

Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, André Gide, Thorn-

ton Wilder, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Frank O’Connor, Kay

Boyle, Julian Huxley, André Maurois, Robert Benchley, Her-

bert Read, Liam O’Flaherty, Zona Gale, I. A. Richards, Pearl

Buck, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Walter Lippmann.

For this essay on Goethe, a task of which I feel so unworthy, I shallfall back upon a memory, a personal experience, to hearten myselffor the venture and give it the stamp of authenticity, which is bestand final in all things. I recall the emotions that crowded in uponme years ago when I found myself for the first time in Goethe’schildhood home on the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt. Those roomsand stairs I knew perfectly, in style and tone and atmosphere. Herewas ‘‘ancestry,’’ as it is recorded in the book of my life, and thebeginning, likewise, of something gigantic. I was at home and atthe same time I was a late and shy guest in the realm of genius.The homelike and the grand rubbed shoulders. This bourgeois-patrician mansion, now become a museum, where reverencetreads softly as at the cradle of a demi-god; this dignified anddecorous setting, treasured and held sacred because of the son wholeft it behind – how far behind! – to grow to austere worldstature – I gazed on all this, I breathed it in; and the discordbetween familiarity and awe in my breast was resolved intothat feeling in which humility and self-assertion are one, intosmiling love.

I cannot speak of Goethe except with love – with a sense ofintimacy; if there be o√ensiveness in this, it is mitigated by thekeenest awareness that he is incomparable. I may leave it to thosewho feel qualified by training and temperament to dwell upon hishighest flights, from their purely intellectual standpoint as histo-rians and commentators. It is quite another thing to share inGoethe’s substance, in its human guise; and it is only from thisstandpoint that I and others like me can speak of Goethe at all.Why deny that recognition, that right of intimacy, transcending

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the personal and embracing the national? This year the world atlarge is commemorating that great citizen; but only Germans cando so with the familiarity I have mentioned that comes throughbeing a part of his substance. The dignified bourgeois setting asthe home of one who was to be at home in all that is human; theworld greatness with a bourgeois origin: this destiny, the result ofgood ancestry and tremendous growth, is nowhere found in such atypical form as in Germany; and everything German that hasgrown up from the bourgeois order to higher spiritual levels issmilingly at home in that Frankfurt birthplace.

There are various ways of looking at the figure of this greatman and poet (always putting the emphasis upon the man), de-pending upon the historical standpoint from which we regardhim. Thus he appears – to take the most modest view first – as thelord and master of a German cultural epoch, the classical epoch,for which the Germans have been hailed as the nation of poets andthinkers. It was an epoch of idealistic individualism and the sourceof the German concept of culture; a period which, in Goethe’s owncase, cast its humane spell in the peculiar psychological combina-tion of self-development and self-fulfilment with the idea of edu-cation, in such a way, moreover, that the idea of education bridgedthe gap between the inner life of the individual and the socialorder. To see Goethe thus, as the representative of this classical-humanist epoch of culture, is to take the narrowest view of hispersonality. A second, much larger, way of regarding him suggestsitself: it is that in which Carlyle, one of his first admirers outsideGermany, saw him immediately after the great German’s death.There have been men on this earth, Carlyle remarks, who have setup impulses requiring fifteen hundred years for their completedevelopment, impulses, indeed, that even after two thousand yearscontinue to act with all their individual force. From such a stand-point, the age of Goethe extends not only over centuries but overmillennia. As a matter of fact, even to Goethe’s contemporaries hispersonality had something so miraculous about it that they couldcall him ‘‘a divine human being’’ without any sense of extrava-gance. There was in this wonderful personality the making of acolossal myth, comparable with those of the greatest humanbeings who have trod this earth, and no one can say to whatproportions his stature will yet grow with the passage of time. To

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such men belongs the world-wide acclaim that falls to the lot oflegendary figures only, the pride of the race – representatives oftimeless humanity, who form the highest justification of mankindface to face with the external and the universal.

But between these two ways of looking at Goethe, the mostintimate and the most sublime, there is a third and intermediatepossibility; and for us, who are witnessing the ending of the bour-geois epoch, and who are destined in the throes and crises of thetransition to find a path to new worlds, new patterns of life withinand without – for us this third approach appears the most directand natural. We may best see him as the representative of the halfmillennium that we call the bourgeois age, which extends fromthe fifteenth century to the close of the nineteenth.

This son of a Frankfurt middle-class family once remarkedupon the problems that so gifted a man as Byron had to face owingto his social environment, his high birth and great wealth. Acertain middle station, Goethe says, would seem to be more condu-cive to the growth of talent, ‘‘which accounts for the fact that wefind all great artists and poets in the middle strata of society.’’ Thiswas not the only occasion on which he sang the praises of themiddle class as a fertile soil of talent; there are countless passagesin his conversations in which he ascribes to the bourgeoisie thesteadfast human quality which pervades ‘‘Hermann und Doro-thea,’’ or, as he himself calls it, ‘‘The beautiful, orderly Bildung bywhich this class is enabled to survive in peace and war.’’ Goethetells us: ‘‘In Karlsbad somebody once referred to me as a soberpoet. By this he meant to convey that for all my poetic activity Icontinued to be a sensible man according to bourgeois standards.Some regarded this as praise, others as censure. That is not for meto decide; my nature is as he described it, and it must be left toothers to judge of its merits.’’ So we, too, may regard the commentas neither praise nor censure; we simply take it as the dispassion-ate statement of a critical observer who was certainly no fool. Itmay seem rather a humorous business, almost by way of a joke, topoint out in a man of Goethe’s stature traits that one can callbourgeois in the common, ordinary sense of the word. Yet it ispossible to carry the observation of the petty and the external to ahigher level where even such trifles acquire significance. Take, forexample, his outward manner of living, the attention he gave to

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dress, his taste for elegance, the neatness and cleanliness of every-thing that passed through his hands, as attested by his friends.These are the simplest and most natural habits of good breeding,formed in the nursery.

In the words of one of Goethe’s contemporaries, ‘‘he showed nosign of the eccentric behavior so often found in men of genius; hewas simple and courteous.’’ There was nothing solemn or pompousabout him, no pose of priestly dignity. He could make fun ofhimself, and provided nothing weighed on his mind, he was quitecapable of a childlike or fatherly good nature. It gave him the mostgenuine pleasure to do people kind turns, and to show them littleattentions. With sympathetic solicitude he came to the aid of thosewho found di≈culty in adjusting themselves to life, and then hewas wont to harp on his favorite idea of ‘‘well-being,’’ a thoroughlybourgeois idea, surely. This idea raised to a higher spiritual signifi-cance we find in ‘‘Dichtung und Wahrheit,’’ where Goethe ana-lyzes the sense of well-being and finds it rooted in the periodicregularity of outward things – the interchange of day and night,the succession of the seasons, of flowers and fruit, and all else thatcomes at regular intervals. Where that even rhythm in nature andin life’s phenomena falters, Goethe feels there is actual disease anddanger, and he regards this as the chief reason for suicide.

To this lighter side of the picture belongs also the bourgeoisemphasis that Goethe laid upon good living, on both food anddrink, taking o√ense when on occasion he felt himself neglectedin such matters; and certainly his close friendship with Zelterowed part of its relish to the delicious young Teltow carrots thatfound their way to Goethe’s table. As business man and head of hishousehold, he is keen, distrustful, and tenacious. For all that he is apoet, he drives a sharp bargain, and he exacts the maximum profitfrom his literary output.

We find in Goethe, too, a bourgeois love of order, inherited fromhis father, and, as in his father’s case, this degenerates, when hegrows old, into decidedly pedantic habits and a whimsical maniafor collecting. In ‘‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’’ he says that one of hisfather’s principles, which became a hobby, was to carry through atall costs anything once undertaken. When a book was selected forreading in the family circle, it had to be read to the bitter end, nomatter how boring it turned out to be; and his father insisted in all

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other a√airs that a thing once begun be completed, however ar-duous, or even pointless, the task. One must not underestimate thehabit-forming e√ect of such discipline. It was Goethe’s nature totire easily, to be restless and to pursue a diversity of interests; ofthese tendencies that ethical imperative to finish work beguncertainly acted as a necessary corrective. From a point of view thatis above practical and social considerations, it may not matterwhether an artist possesses the middle-class virtues of patience,industry, and tenacity that make one carry through a project andput the final touches to it. But the egoism of the artist’s dream andself-gratification must be o√set by social impulses or, if you like,by a bourgeois sympathy and desire to render service – if it is toresult in a rounded work. And who knows whether ‘‘Faust,’’ in-finite in its inner scope, would have reached even the stage ofexternal completion that it has if the bourgeois father had notimplanted in the boy’s mind the pedagogical imperative to finishthings?

‘‘The half-artist,’’ says Goethe to Eckermann, ‘‘is always in ahurry to have done and takes no pleasure in the work. Genuine,truly great talent, on the contrary, finds its highest happiness inthe working out of the idea.’’ ‘‘One should not be concerned withthe thought of getting through,’’ he says, ‘‘just as one travels, notfor the sake of arriving, but for the sake of travelling.’’ ‘‘Thereare excellent people,’’ he remarks at another time, ‘‘who can donothing extemporaneously or superficially. Their natures demanda state of calm and deep absorption in the thing under consider-ation. Such talents often provoke our impatience, in so far as theyrarely satisfy our desires of the moment. However, it is in this waythat the highest achievements come about.’’ Here he is speakingobjectively of ‘‘excellent people’’; but it is obvious that in largemeasure he belongs with them, and that his own highest achieve-ments were attained in this manner.

Deliberateness and slowness, a motherly patience, as it were, inthe creative process – these are features inseparably bound up withhis genius. Goethe is much more the laborious artist than thedashing improviser. The wonderful story which ultimately ap-peared under the plain title of ‘‘Novelle’’ he carried about in hishead for thirty years. ‘‘Egmont’’ required twelve years between

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conception and completion, ‘‘Iphigenie’’ eight, ‘‘Tasso’’ nine. Thework on ‘‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’’ took sixteen years, that on‘‘Faust’’ spanned almost four decades. In reality, the poetic activityof his entire life drew its sustenance from his youth. He was notthe man of ever new projects and inventions; essentially, his pro-ductive process consisted rather in working out themes whichdated back to his early years, and which he carried about with himfor decades, pouring the wealth of his whole experience into them,so that they took on a cosmic liberality. Thus ‘‘Faust’’ was in itsorigin a breezy student play, poking fun at faculties and professorsand unfolding in doggerel verse the sweetly tragic story of a littlemiddle-class girl’s seduction. But the germinating power of thisslender sapling was so great, and the steadfast care and zealousnurture lavished upon it in secret proved so e√ective, that even-tually its canopied crown overshadowed everything, so that it hasset a standard for the poetry of Germany and mankind at largeand is a work to which one turns as one turns to the Bible, to find acompelling and comforting rendering of all that is human. Sim-ilarly, ‘‘Wilhelm Meister’’ set out to be the novel of a young manwith a passion for the theatre, with no larger aim than to portraythe world of wild bohemianism more vividly than had ever beendone before. But in the end the whole business of the stage provedto be only the starting-point for an epic cultural journey of suchfar-reaching and all-embracing proportions that a clever Roman-tic critic could sum up the significance of his epoch in these threephenomena: ‘‘The French Revolution, Fichte’s ‘Theory of Knowl-edge,’ and ‘Wilhelm Meister.’ ’’ This unforced, unambitious, quiet,and natural, almost vegetative, kind of growth from humble be-ginnings to something of universal scope, is the most lovable fea-ture of Goethe’s impressive life work.

Goethe is reported to have said: ‘‘There are only two ways ofreaching an important goal: violence or persistence.’’ The way ofthis great foe of violence and champion of peaceful processes waspersistence, steadiness, endurance. We find in Goethe an elementof care, of solicitude, that may be regarded as bourgeois in itsethical aspects. ‘‘The provident man is master of the day,’’ he says.He sings the praise of dawn, of morning, as the time when we arenot only most intelligent but also most careful; ‘‘for care also,’’ he

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adds, ‘‘is an aspect of intelligence, even if only a passive one;stupidity does not bother about it.’’ And the praise of morning asthe time of true creative vigor he chants in a festive strain:

Day before day, divine honor be thine!

Bound up with this carefulness is his sense of the value of time,amounting to a cult, a religion. He exploits every minute, and hislife is one of the most industrious on record in the diversity of itsactivities. He never really relaxes.

Despite his saying that to be a man was to be a fighter, he was agreat lover of peace, and he has himself told us that the attitude ofheaven-storming Titanism was alien to his soul. His poetry drewno inspiration from any such mood of radical defiance. ‘‘It wasmore in keeping with my temperment,’’ he says, ‘‘to portray thatpacific, plastic, long-su√ering resistance that acknowledges therule of the higher powers though it would meet them on a footingof equality.’’ His contemplative, dispassionate way of looking atlife, of entering into all phenomena and rendering them articu-late, his blanket pronouncement that life is good, excludes thetragic: were he to yield to that spell, he says, instead of dreadingand shunning it, it would destroy him. There is a touch of sobrietyand common sense in all this which was resented as anti-poetic bysuch seraphic visionaries as Novalis. ‘‘Goethe is an utterly practicalpoet,’’ Novalis writes. ‘‘He is in his works what the Englishman isin his wares: thoroughly simple, tasteful, well-adapted, and dur-able. He has done in the field of German literature what Wedg-wood did in the field of English art. . . . It is more in line with hisnatural inclination to finish some trifle to the final touch, to give itthe most perfect polish and adaptation, than to undertake some-thing of cosmic scope and know in advance that it can never beexecuted to perfection.’’

For all their animus, these criticisms are keen and exact withincertain limits. The bourgeois ideal, we note, is not lacking in theirpurport; and that Novalis felt the charm of what the term bour-geois connotes for him there, is attested by another passage wherehe declares: ‘‘ ‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’ is a powerful proof ofthat magic of delivery, that insinuating flattery to the ear inherentin a bright, pleasing, simple, yet variegated style. He who has thischarm of diction can interest and entertain us with the most

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insignificant trifles. This spiritual unity is the very soul of a book,the secret of its personal appeal.’’ It is impossible to conceive acooler and at the same time truer appraisal of the rational magic,the artlessly divine charm of Goethe’s style, than that of Novalis.All straining after e√ect, all poetic extravagance are indeed for-eign to Goethe’s style, which, nevertheless, always goes to thelimit, moving on a middle plane of discreet audacity, masterlyboldness, and infallible artistic tact. Always supple and precise,even the dictated prose of Goethe’s old age retains that magicrhythm, a most perfect blend of Eros and Logos, that lures andleads us on irresistibly. There is no solemn pomp or priestly dig-nity about his tone – to one schooled in Goethe’s tradition andtaste, language of that sort is repugnant and utterly boring to reador to listen to with the inner ear. With Goethe one is invariablyconscious of a voice of middle pitch and intensity, a voice notraised above the level of prose utterance, even in the lyrics, yet of aserene boldness unheard of in prose. He has a way of recreatingwords – it is as if they had just sprung from the womb of language,absolutely fresh and radiant and unique. He seems to invest a wordwith new meaning, in such a way, moreover, that its meaningtakes on a peculiarly transcendental hue, serene and uncanny atthe same time, something that is both ‘‘golden’’ and sublime, atonce well-bred and swashbuckling in the peculiar sense of Goe-the’s saying that there is a trace of the buccaneer in every artist,and that talent is unthinkable without it. This holds good equallyfor ‘‘Faust,’’ the ‘‘Divan,’’ and the prose writings; and if the au-dacity in them must be credited to the artist, the element oftemperate moderation may be set down as a bourgeois feature.

And does not Goethe’s realism fall under the same heading –his realism as opposed to Schiller’s poetical practice of making anidea his starting-point – a contrast such as exists between Tolstoy’sfull-bodied, homeric figures and Dostoevsky’s shadowy visions?There was something that his friend Merck said to him when hewas young, something he never forgot and in a sense adopted ashis motto: ‘‘Your way, from which nothing can swerve you, is toendow reality with poetic form; the others start out with poeticpreconceptions and then try to endow them with reality, a pro-cedure resulting in arrant nonsense.’’ ‘‘It is the spirit of reality thatconstitutes genuine ideality,’’ says Goethe with pointed reference

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to Schiller, clothing his idealism in anti-idealistic language in away that is characteristic of his whole attitude towards individualhuman matters and towards the problems of the race, notably inpolitical questions. As he once crassly put it, the burning of afarmhouse is a genuine calamity and catastrophe, whereas ‘‘thedestruction of the fatherland’’ is a mere phrase. This is a mostradical expression of his unpolitical and anti-political cast of mind,and, what amounts to the same thing, his impatience with politi-cal democracy. Yet it does not brand him as an aristocrat. Goetheinsisted that at bottom Schiller was far more of an aristocrat thanhe himself. Schiller represents the middle-class idea politicallyand democratically speaking, while Goethe represents it on thespiritual and cultural side. We are aware, of course, that it was as abourgeois in the spiritual and cultural sense that Goethe abhorredthe French Revolution as something gruesomely alien, somethingthat sapped his vitality like a disease and came very near to ruin-ing him as a poet.

It is hard to say to what extent the German bourgeois idea owesits introspective, cultural, anti-political impress to Goethe, and towhat extent Goethe, as an exponent of these qualities, merelyreflected the German bourgeois character. Perhaps it is a case ofinteraction and mutual confirmation, for nothing can rock theconviction that in spite of being a citizen of the world, or rather byvirtue of it, Goethe was spiritually a bourgeois, a German bour-geois. The impassioned language of the political humanitarianstruggle for freedom is foreign to him. That is why he found itnecessary to emphasize that he too was a fighter, a fighter forhuman freedom. ‘‘You need not hesitate,’’ he said, ‘‘to erect amonument to me as well as to Blücher. He freed you from theFrench: I freed you from the nets of philistinism.’’ He was afighter and liberator in the realm of morality, of thought, espe-cially in matters of sex, but not in the realm of political and socialorganization. In Gretchen’s pitiful lot and Faust’s love and guilt,there is no attack on any law, any social state, any institution: inthis ‘‘tragedy’’ a poet holds communion with the Eternal on thefate of man. Thus it was possible that when called upon as mem-ber of the state council of Weimar to sit in judgment on an actualcase of a mother charged with infanticide, in which the otherstern ministers invoked the death penalty, this same poet could

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put his signature on the warrant with the words ‘‘I too,’’ and thisdespite the fact that the Duke himself was inclined towards mercy.I am not the first to feel that this is in its way as moving as thewhole Faust tragedy.

The French writer Maurice Barrès has called ‘‘Iphigenie’’ acivilizing work because it champions the rights of society againstthe arrogance of the spirit. This remark is even more applicable tothat other essay in self-education, in self-discipline amounting toself-castigation, ‘‘Tasso,’’ a play which is so often berated becauseof the fastidious seemliness of its atmosphere. There is a connec-tion between this civilizing tendency and that awful ‘‘I too’’ bywhich Goethe forced himself to throw the weight of his o≈cialauthority into the balance in defense of the rights of societyagainst the spirit – this same Goethe who had so powerfully con-tributed to the liberation of the spirit, both as poet and man ofletters, by releasing emotion and by his broad and searching anal-ysis of human nature. He defended society in that conservativesense which is inherent in the concept of defense. A purely non-political attitude is an impossibility; one can at most be anti-political, that is to say, conservative, whereas the political spiritis humanitarian and revolutionary in its very essence. RichardWagner had the same thing in mind when he declared: ‘‘TheGerman is conservative.’’ It can happen, however, as in the case ofWagner and his spiritual disciples, that this German conservatismmay turn into nationalistic agitation – an attitude that left Goe-the, German citizen of the world as he was, cold to the point ofscorn, even at a time when nationalism had so powerful a historialjustification as in 1813. His horror of the Revolution was due to hisabhorrence of political, democratic agitation, and its spiritual by-product, nationalism. And it is a significant fact, tending to showhow little the German middle-class character has changed, thatthis same cultural dread of the inroads of political agitation reas-serted itself in our own day, between 1916 and 1919, roughly speak-ing; and the instinctive and elemental vehemence with which thisstruggle had to be fought all over again makes it seem unlikelythat the embattled spirits were fully aware how true to type thewhole performance ran.

As to Goethe, an observation may be warranted concerning thehuman and personal implications of the anti-idealistic attitude,

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although the psychological ground is so uncertain that a hint willhave to su≈ce. There can be no doubt about the fact that idealisticfaith, although it may lead to martyrdom, tends to make for hap-piness in its possessor in a way that is not the case with a poet whotakes a lofty and supremely ironical point of view and knowsneither convictions nor preferential valuations but mirrors allthings with the same impartial a√ection. Scanning Goethe moreclosely as he appears after the innocence of youth has left him, wenotice in his face deep furrows of grief and of bitterness, a lack ofzest that is related in an intimate and uncanny way to his skepti-cism regarding ideals, to his naturalistic impartiality – to what hecalled his ‘‘moral dilettantism.’’ There is a peculiar frigidity andviciousness about him, a humor suggestive of witches’ sabbaths, aneerie fitfulness that continues to arouse one’s curiosity and must beencompassed in one’s love if one loves Goethe. When we press intothis phase of his nature, we realize that it is the children of thespirit who are more closely concerned with happiness and har-mony than are the children of nature. Clearness and single-mindedness in the conscious pursuit of a goal, positive faith andfervor, everything, in short, that makes for peace of mind is muchmore easily accessible to the children of the spirit. Nature does notgive peace, simplicity, singleness; she is equivocal, contradictory,negative; there is in her an element of radical skepticism. She doesnot bestow goodness, for she herself is not good. She does notpermit of clean-cut judgments, for she is neutral. She endows herchildren with an indi√erent and problematical disposition thatis more akin to torment and viciousness than to happiness andserenity.

‘‘Goethe’s tendency towards negation and his skeptical neu-trality were strikingly in evidence once again,’’ wrote Chancellorvon Müller. And many other contemporaries were struck by anelemental, obscure, malicious, confusing, even diabolical, strain inhis make-up. One could collect a hundred statements attesting hismoods of sardonic humor, his spirit of sophistry and contradiction.‘‘In one of his eyes there is an angel, in the other lurks a devil,’’wrote a fellow traveller. But the most sinister comment on recordabout him says: ‘‘He has tolerance without kindness.’’ ‘‘He wouldspeak,’’ Charlotte von Schiller writes, ‘‘in sentences that all con-tained contradictions, so that one could draw any conclusion one

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pleased; but one had a painful feeling that the Master was twid-dling his thumbs at the world.’’ Twiddling his thumbs! Thatsounds like nihilism – and, in all seriousness, what did Goethebelieve in? Not in humanity; I mean, not in the possibility ofmankind’s being purged and liberated by revolutionary means.‘‘The see-saw will go on forever,’’ he says; ‘‘one class will su√erwhile the other thrives; egoism and envy, like evil demons, willalways be pulling the strings, and the strife of factions will neverend.’’ But did he at least believe in art? Was it sacred to him in anyemotionally religious sense? Certain remarks point to the negativeanswer. I shall never forget my impression on reading for the firsttime his rejoinder to a young man who had enthusiastically de-clared that he intended to live and labor and su√er for art. Goetheanswered coolly, ‘‘With art there can be no question of su√ering.’’He always kept a cold douche in readiness for people who gushedand raved about poetry. One day he upset the person he wastalking to with the paradox that a poem amounts to nothing atbottom. ‘‘Every poem is in a sense a kiss bestowed upon the world,but mere kissing begets no children.’’ He then stopped abruptlyand refused to take up the conversation again.

I cannot help linking these traits with a phenomenon that hasstruck and put o√ a great many observers. All his life Goethe nevergot over a certain constraint and embarrassment in his relationswith people; this, which was especially singular in a man of theworld and a courtier, he would try unsuccessfully to hide underceremonious sti√ness. On one occasion, when notice was taken ofthe aloof formality which Goethe assumed towards curious visi-tors and admirers, Ottilie von Goethe declared that it was a fact,however incredible in a man of his social experience and savoir-

vivre, that this seemingly haughty bearing was in reality a mask tocover up genuine embarrassment. By way of explanation sheadded that Goethe was at heart truly modest and humble. I do notdoubt it. The greater a man’s range, the further is he removedfrom conceit, which is always a sign of limitation. But Goethehimself has said: ‘‘Only rogues are modest,’’ and he was certainlynot without a sense of his greatness, of his incomparable superi-ority over all the people he met. There must have been deepergrounds for his constraint: it is a sign of that ironic nihilism ofwhich I have spoken, that eerie absence of innermost conviction

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characteristic of the poet, that lack of enthusiasm and faith inideals such as animated Schiller.

It is certain that all the hatred that Goethe had to endure, allthe reproaches and complaints about his egoism, his haughtiness,his want of moral sense, his ‘‘vast obstructive power,’’ are due to hiscoldness towards idealistic political enthusiasm in the form ofmilitant nationalism or the humanitarian revolutionary gospel;and also to the fact that his life was directly opposed to the domi-nant trend of the age, the idea of democracy and nationalism. Intheir criticism and complaints people forgot that Goethe’s indif-ference to the political order by no means signified a lack of lovefor mankind. Indeed, it was he who said that the mere sight of ahuman face could cure him of melancholy, and he endorsed thehumanist’s words that ‘‘The proper study of mankind is man.’’ Norcan he have been indi√erent to the future of the race. For man,love, the future, these are all one – one emotional complex ofsympathy with life. And despite Goethe’s unpolitical bent, sympa-thy with life was part of his very being. To express it he evencoined a term that seemed to me both paradoxical and strikinglybold when I grasped its import. It was as a young man who tookhis pessimism very seriously, having found its philosophical sanc-tion in Schopenhauer, that I recall coming upon Goethe’s word‘‘lebenswürdig,’’ worthy of life, in a line of his Epilogue to Schil-ler’s ‘‘Bell’’: ‘‘Shall death snatch one so worthy of life?’’ This was anassociation that had not existed before, to my knowledge; it was abrand-new term bearing Goethe’s personal signature. The idea oflife being enthroned on a pedestal and empowered to bestow onthose who made themselves worthy of it the highest award ofmerit – an award that should rightfully exempt one from personalannihilation – this clashed with my juvenile notion of nobility,which I was accustomed to connect with a sublime unfitness andmaladjustment to earthly life. And, in truth, Goethe’s strangeterm is the expression of a defiant positivism, of an a≈rmation oflife that rises above pessimism and constitutes, to my mind, a veryhigh and abstract form of the bourgeois idea. This aristocraticbourgeois idea of being in partnership with life, of having one’sfeet solidly planted on the earth, is the prerogative of those whomnature has endowed with special privileges; and there is some-

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thing not far from brutality in their contempt for ‘‘starveling soulsthat hanker after the unattainable.’’

In view of the gifts which nature lavished upon this favoredchild of hers, it may seem strange that Goethe met all attempts, ofenvious critics and the enthusiasts alike, to extol his life as sin-gularly happy with a clean-cut denial. Calm yourselves, he says, Iwas not happy; if all the good hours of my life were added to-gether, they would not amount to four weeks. ‘‘It was an endlesstask of rolling a rock uphill that always had to be done over again.’’And then follows the impressive statement that really explainseverything: ‘‘The demands upon my activity, outer as well as inner,were too many.’’ So he was not happy – as a result of the taskswhich his genius set while the importunings of the world con-stantly got in the way of his performing them. And how about therelations of this marvel of vitality to health and disease? Genius, aswe know, can never be normal in the banal, narrowly bourgeoissense; no matter how favored by nature, it cannot be natural,healthy, regular in the sense of the philistine. Physically, there isalways about it much that is delicate, irritable, precariously bal-anced; psychically, much that is uncanny, alien to the normal, andalmost psychopathic. Goethe knew this and stated it for Ecker-mann’s benefit: ‘‘The extraordinary achievement of such people’’(such people as I, we may interpolate for him) ‘‘presupposes a verydelicate organization, more sensitively tuned than is usual andcapable of hearkening to celestial voices. Such an organization iseasily upset and dislocated when it comes into conflict with theworld and its elements, and unless this abnormal sensibility iscombined with an extraordinary tenacity, chronic ill health islikely to result.’’ In this combination of sensibility and tenacity thepeculiar vitality of genius is once and for all defined. All thismakes us realize what a tenacious will to live, in the higher senseof the word, what a vital ethos, as one might say, must have beenneeded to keep such a constitution as Goethe’s from deserting itspost in the service of life, to make it endure to the end of the fullbiblical span and hold out until the age of eighty-two. That wasno child’s play, either physically or spiritually. ‘‘He who wrote‘Werther’ at twenty,’’ Goethe exclaims on one occasion, ‘‘how is heto live at seventy!’’

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He feared this little book, filled with destructive sentimentality,which had once plunged the world into a delirious ecstasy ofdying; and as an old man he confessed that since its appearance hehad read it only once, carefully avoiding it afterwards. ‘‘It is allcombustibles,’’ he says, ‘‘it has an uncanny e√ect on me, and I amafraid of experiencing again the pathological state from which itsprang.’’ In his maturity he insists, in theory, that art should o√erwhat is healthy and full of zest. He rails at what he calls the ‘‘field-hospital poetry’’ of his day. Over against such perverted art he setsthe Spartan poetry which not only sings battle songs but alsoinspires men with the courage to face life’s struggles. But didhe always act accordingly? Certainly not in ‘‘Werther’’; and for apoet of harmony and inspiriting Spartan exhortation, it appearsstrange that in his most intimate emotional revelation he identi-fies himself with an earlier fellow poet, whose career leads to themadhouse and the monastery.

The bourgeois sense of partnership with life would seem torequire strictness in morals, an unconditional a≈rmation of mo-rality; for reason and morality are the pillars of life. Yet, in avery un-bourgeois way, Goethe defends passion and what peoplecall ‘‘over-intensity and morbidity,’’ insisting that over-intensityand morbidity are also natural states of mind and that so-called‘‘health’’ can exist only as an equilibrium of opposing forces. Andhe contradicts a disciple who ventured the opinion that there wasnothing positive to be gained for man’s higher spiritual develop-ment from Byron’s writings because of their questionable moral-ity. ‘‘But why not?’’ answers Goethe. ‘‘Byron’s courage, his bold-ness, his grandeur – doesn’t all that make for higher development?We must guard against trying to find this solely in what is strictlypure and moral.’’ That is what I call speaking in a way thattranscends the middle-class manner.

Be that as it may, an artist of Goethe’s creative genius contrivessomehow to smile upon life and keep faith with it. Despite hisconservatism and negative attitude towards politics, there is notthe slightest trace of the reactionary about him, and this is indica-tive of his sympathy with life. The versatility, the infinite dilet-tantism of his nature, has made it easy for people on opposite sidesto fall back upon Goethe for support; one thing, however, isimpossible – to invoke his name in the cause of any spiritual

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reaction. He was no ‘‘prince of midnight,’’ no Metternich whomutilated life because of his sinister fear of the future. Goetheloved order, but he expressly placed reason and light at its service,and he despised stupidity and darkness. ‘‘The human pack,’’ hesays in ‘‘Wilhelm Meister,’’ ‘‘fear nothing so much as reason; theyought to fear stupidity if they had the sense to know what is reallyto be feared.’’ Against reaction and obscurantism in art Goethestood his ground at all times, as when he opposed a certain fash-ionable a√ectation of primitivism in painting. He is a champion ofthe free and the strong in art. He admires Molière for his truthful,ruthless exposure of man’s foibles; and he would like to bar younggirls from the theater in order to leave the stage free for anabsolutely unhampered portrayal of life before mature men andwomen.

In spite of his being constantly attacked with a venom whichalmost strains our powers of belief today, he addressed himself tothe whole nation. It was a far cry from the middle-class boy,bending over his sketches and exercises by the window in themansard roof of his house on the Hirschgraben, to the man ofseventy who makes the moving confession that he had ‘‘learnedgreatness painfully.’’ It meant learning to adjust his activity to anever-widening range, both nationally and historically. And helearned more. The older he grew, the stronger became his desire tomake the world his forum, as we can well understand when weremember that his literary career began with so widely known asuccess as ‘‘Werther.’’ The idea grew upon him that poetry is a giftto all mankind, and that Germans particularly must look beyondthe narrow confines of their environment in order to avoid thepitfalls of pedantic conceit both as individuals and as a nation. ‘‘Forthat reason I like to glance around among foreign nations,’’ headds, ‘‘and I advise everybody to do likewise. Literature that ismerely national is now no longer of much account; the epoch ofworld literature is about to dawn, and everyone must work tohasten the coming of this epoch.’’ This term ‘‘world literature’’ is anew conception of Goethe’s; he puts it as half fact and half chal-lenge. World literature in Goethe’s sense, it scarcely need be said,does not signify simply the sum total of all the recorded expressionof the human spirit; he has in mind rather its rarest and finestflower, which, wherever it grows, is felt and recognized to be the

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possession of mankind at large, by virtue of its excellence anduniversality. Goethe’s new term is based upon recognition of thefact that the time has come when only what has world capacity isof genuine significance; the day is gone for what is limited in itsappeal to the sphere of its origin.

As a matter of fact, what he himself gave us had, in the opinionof connoisseurs, long taken its place in this world literature; andnot only that part of it which shows Mediterranean influence in itsclassical-humanistic spirit and form, but also that which is pre-eminently Nordic and German – such works as the first part of‘‘Faust’’ and the cultural novel ‘‘Wilhelm Meister.’’ In his old ageGoethe had the satisfaction of receiving from the hand of theScotsman Carlyle the English translation of ‘‘Wilhelm Meister,’’accompanied by a letter full of fervent filial a√ection and devo-tion. He turned the pages of a French edition of his Faust poem,adorned with drawings by Eugène Delacroix. He read solemntreatises on the newly published Helena episode of that poem inthe journals of Edinburgh, Paris, and Moscow; and it is well todwell upon this world-wide echo of his work as a satisfaction tohim that must have helped make up for many a sneering detrac-tor’s voice at home. ‘‘No nation,’’ he says, ‘‘is qualified to judge ofits own deeds and its own literature. One could also say this of anage.’’ A clever Frenchman has coupled these two sentences in thephrase: ‘‘L’étranger, cette postérité contemporaine.’’

Undoubtedly Goethe’s term world literature was in large mea-sure an anticipation. The developments of the ten decades thathave elapsed since his death, the perfection of communications,the stimulation of literacy exchange that followed in its wake, themovement of Europe, indeed of the whole world, in the directionof greater intimacy – a movement actually accelerated rather thanretarded by the Great War – all this was necessary to bring fullyinto being the epoch which Goethe saw ahead. So much is thisepoch now upon us that there is grave danger of our confusingwhat merits world-wide acclaim with inferior productions thathappen to have international currency – a fact which intellectualprovincials delight to exploit with a view to bringing into dis-repute at home accomplishments that have found the approval ofthe outside world. This possibility did not exist in Goethe’s time,or was much smaller than today. It was never feasible to use the

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honors that came to him from foreign countries as evidenceagainst him of an un-German mediocrity.

The thing that interests me about Goethe’s strong leaning to-wards all that is large and world-wide is the bourgeois and super-bourgeois nature of this trait. It comes out strikingly in certainphrases that he uses. He speaks of a ‘‘free-trade in ideas andfeelings,’’ a characteristic transference of the language of eco-nomic liberalism to the spiritual life. And this leaning towardsfreedom and expansion appears in connection not only with spacebut also with time. ‘‘In wide epochal circles,’’ as Goethe puts it, hesought scope for his activity. He is a citizen not of one centuryalone. I have already referred to his intimate a≈liations withearlier centuries, but it is important to emphasize his present andfuture status, and to suggest the direction in which his life force ismoving upon us and beyond us.

In this regard, the personal relations of the great lover of lifewith Schopenhauer are to me symbolic. One evening in his lateryears, Goethe, who had seen Mozart in his youth, attended a socialgathering, and, without looking around went straight up to theyoung philosopher whose doctoral dissertation on the fourfold rootof the principle of su≈cient reason he had just read, and congratu-lated him on this magnificent piece of work. He took the hand ofthe man who was preparing to write ‘‘The World as Will and Idea,’’the classic mainstay of European pessimism during the second halfof that pre-eminently bourgeois age, the nineteenth century, awork which had a decisive influence on the life of Wagner, and alsoof Nietzsche. This scene suggests a wonderful conjunction in thespiritual heavens. Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche –they were the great fixed stars of our youth, for both Germany andEurope: our spiritual ancestry, of which we are proud; for all ances-try, all consciousness of spiritual ancestry, is aristocratic. ‘‘The artistmust have ancestry, he must know whence he comes,’’ Goethe said.Here is the great spiritual home in which we were reared, theworld of the bourgeois spirit. It has within it a certain transcenden-tal element, by which it uplifts and transforms itself. ‘‘From whatshould the highest culture spring if not from bourgeois stock?’’Goethe says; and this saying has a deeper meaning than the wordculture seems capable of conveying today. I have asked, and I askagain: From what did the great liberating achievements of the

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revolutionary spirit spring ‘‘if not from bourgeois stock’’? – the willand the call to e√ect the most radical emancipation from limita-tions of class, to embark upon the most dangerous adventures inthe realm of thought – that is the charter of liberty which theSpirit has granted to the middle class. As for Nietzsche, child andgrandchild of protestant parsons, in whom nineteenth-centuryRomanticism achieved its own conquest, where was he rooted ifnot in the soil of the middle class? And just such a self-conquest ofthe bourgeois character through the Spirit we find in the novel ofGoethe’s old age, the ‘‘Wanderjahre.’’

The theme of this book is the self-conquest of individualistichumanity. With a prophetic boldness Goethe here sets his faceagainst it, in order to embrace human and educational principlesand aspirations which properly belong to our own day and havebut lately begun to permeate the general consciousness. In itspages one feels a tremor of the distant thunder of ideas that leadfar away from all that classical bourgeois concept of culture thatGoethe himself had been so eminently active in fostering andformulating. The ideal of individual universality is dropped, andan age of specialization proclaimed. Our present-day sense of theindividual’s inadequacy is there: it takes the sum total of men tomake mankind; the individual becomes a function; the idea ofcommunity and co-operation asserts itself; and the rigid disciplineof the ‘‘Pedagogical Province’’ depicted in the ‘‘Wanderjahre,’’ forall its concessions to the Muses, leaves little room for the individu-alistic, the ‘‘liberal,’’ bourgeois ideal.

This bold, dream-like anticipation of a new society to succeedthe bourgeois order is as remarkable, as impressive, as the oldman’s growing interest in engineering projects of utopian scope,his enthusiasm for undertakings like the cutting through of theIsthmus of Panama. He talks of these things insistently and goesinto detail as if they were of more importance to him than all thepoetry in the world, and that is true, in the last analysis. Hisoptimistic delight in the scientific side of civilization, a√ectingcommunications particularly, need cause no surprise in view of theend of Faust, who experiences his highest moment in the realiza-tion of a utilitarian dream, the draining of a swamp – a peculiara√ront, indeed, to the one-sidedly aesthetic and philosophicaltrend of the age! In the same way, Goethe was astonishingly inde-

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fatigable in his old age in discussing the possibilities of joining theGulf of Mexico with the Pacific, and in expatiating on the incal-culable e√ects of such a feat upon the whole world, civilized anduncivilized alike. He wanted the United States to undertake thework, and his fancy dwells upon the prosperous cities that wouldspring up one after another along the Pacific coast, where naturehad so felicitously prepared the ground for man by making goodharbors. He could hardly wait for that to come about – that andthe joining of the Danube and the Rhine, a perfectly staggeringproject, to be sure, along with a third very great project, the SuezCanal for the English. ‘‘To see all that,’’ he exclaims, ‘‘might makeit worth while to hold out on this earth for another fifty years.’’ Hecast his eyes over the earth, refusing to stop short at the borders ofhis own country; his enthusiasm for the future was vast enough totake in the whole world; and the quickening of life, the joys andsorrows, of foreign nations a√ected him as did those of his ownpeople. His was an imperialism of love – the imperialism of anaugust mind risen above barriers of nationality, a mind that cher-ished liberty particularly under its aspect of greatness. It is thesame trait that we have already seen in his heralding of a worldliterature.

In setting itself to create a utopia of applied science, the bour-geois outlook expands to world-wide proportions; it turns into‘‘communism,’’ taking that word in a su≈ciently broad, undog-matic sense. This is an enthusiasm of a sober sort. But what weneed today is the sobering of a world that is dying from thestranglehold of emotional survivals. Who was it who said that theGermans should be prohibited from using the world ‘‘Gemüt’’ forfifty years? It was Germany’s greatest poet. The middle-class manis lost and is doomed to be swept aside in the era that is approach-ing unless he can succeed in ridding himself of the fatal sentimentand life-sapping principles that still govern his thinking. He mustbravely espouse the future. It is idle to scorn reason and hold to astubborn cult of atavistic feeling which, in present conditions,appears utterly blind and senseless – a kind of desperate, malig-nant, murderous sentimentalism.

The new, socialized world, the world of planning and co-operation, will come; humanity will get rid of unnecessary su√er-ings that are a disgrace to intelligence; and this will be achieved

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by a great and sober e√ort that has already enrolled under itsbanner all who have turned their backs upon a cult of musty,obscurantist, petty bourgeois sentiment. It will come; for a rationaloutward order of things in keeping with the present stage ofhuman enlightenment must be created, or, if the worst happens,will be produced by violent convulsions. Only then can the heartreassert its rights with good conscience. The great sons of thebourgeois age, those whose capacity for spiritual growth raisedthem above the level of their class, are living proof of the fact thatthere are in the bourgeois nature infinite potentialities, unlimitedpotentialities for self-liberation and self-conquest. Our time sum-mons the middle class to remember these innate powers and totake their stand upon them intellectually and ethically. The rightto power is contingent upon the conviction that one has a historicmission to perform. If any class refuses to do this, or is too weak, itwill have to step aside, abdicate power, and make way for a typethat knows none of the inhibitions and ties of atavistic sentiment,which, one cannot but fear at times, may render the Europeanmiddle class unfit to guide the body politic and economic into anew world.

Without doubt, the credit that history is still willing to accord tothe bourgeois republic today – a short-term credit, indeed – restsupon the faith not yet lost that democracy also has that abilitywhich its increasingly powerful enemies claim as their own: theability to undertake our guidance into the new age. It is not bystaging celebrations for its great sons that the middle class provesitself worthy of them. The greatest of these, Goethe, hails it:

Turn your backs upon dead trappings,Let us love what is alive!