The necessary ego: Was Goethe a universal sage or a self-serving egotist?

“ Perhaps nothing has injured Börne more in the estimation of the present generation than his violently prejudiced denunciation of Goethe. Goethe, as productive and intelligent spirit, is so great, and his temperament and personality are so unique, that in our own day a man's judgment of him gives a valuable clue to that man's mind and character. ”

“ In those early years there was one particular point of close union between botany and the sense of beauty. It was only two years before Haeckel’s birth that Goethe, the man who had put into inimitable verse new and pregnant truths of botany, passed to his rest at Weimar.
It is no longer a special distinction of any prominent personality of the nineteenth century to have been influenced by Goethe. It is a kind of natural necessity from which one cannot escape. All that is great in the century can be traced back to Goethe. ”

“ His way of understanding love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something mean and repulsive in it. There is no ardor, no generosity in him. A secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through all the wealth and flexibility of his talent. It is true that the egotism of Goethe has at least this much that is excellent in it, that it respects the liberty of the individual, and is favorable to all originality. ”

“ Above all, the reader is impressed by the noble feeling of humanity that pervades his utterances. Goethe has seen as much of the world as it is given to men to see; yet in his judgments there is no trace of a bitter or querulous temper. He is mild, serene, and helpful.
Weimar had now become a place of pilgrimage for young poets, who looked to Goethe as the supreme master of their craft. Among those who came to him was the poet who was destined to take, after Goethe’s death, the first place in the imaginative literature of Germany—Heinrich Heine. ”

“ Frederika, for instance, must often have been astonished and rather dismayed by strange opinions expressed by her lover, and it is likely enough that she questioned him about religion, and that his answer was in spirit akin to the matchless lines in which Faust makes confession of his faith. But Goethe never seeks in his poetry simply to reproduce his personal experience. He transports us into an ideal world in which all that he has to show us stands out clearly, stripped of the accidental qualities which in actual life so often obscure our vision and{76} disturb our judgment. ”

“ In taking reality as the basis of ideal structures, Goethe severed from it associations which were only of temporary or accidental interest. He brought it into new relations, touched it with the transforming power of the imagination, and gave to individual facts universal significance. Hence the greatest of his works are as fresh to-day as when he wrote them; and they could lose their living power only if human nature itself were radically changed.
As a critic of literature, he had the sanity of judgment and the intuitive insight which mark all poets of the highest genius. ”

“ He interested himself in agriculture, horticulture and mining, which were of paramount importance to the welfare of the duchy, and out of these interests sprang his own love for the natural sciences, which took up so much of his time in later years. The inevitable love-interest was also not wanting. As Friederike had fitted into the background of Goethe’s Strassburg life, Lotte into that of Wetzlar, and Lili into the gaieties of Frankfort, so now Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a Weimar official, was the personification of the more aristocratic ideals of Weimar society. ”

“ The producers had taste and skill, but were not masterful as men. Goethe always looked straight through the work to the man behind it; in art and poetry the personality was everything. The special talent of one kind or another was quite secondary. The greatest works are the least literary. To speak in literature as a man, and not merely as a scholar or professional litterateur, is always the crying need. The new poet has this or that gift, but what is the human fund back of all? What is his endowment of the common universal human traits? How much of a man is he? ”

“ The old Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man than to any other.
I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the sake of culture. ”

“ So long as one lives for himself and is considering, even in the highest and noblest way, his own self-culture, there lingers in him some taint of his original selfishness, or, at best, he but half sees his way. As Goethe has expressed it: “While one strives, he errs.” This self-directed effort must, at last, cease. Nothing is more untrue, nothing is more fundamentally disheartening, than the maxim of Lessing which so many have admired, according to which endless effort after truth is to be preferred to the possession of the truth. ”

“ So do opulent and selfish men still seek "to hide their heart in a nest of roses." Literature sometimes follows the same cue. Goethe made it one of the rules of his life to avoid everything that could suggest painful ideas, and the taint of his egotism is on a considerable class of current literature which serenely ignores the morbid aspects of life. Art has yielded to the same temptation. The artist has felt that he was concerned only with strength, beauty, and grace ”

“ Genius itself, however purely a conception of the intellect, is not exempt from the strong influences of joy and suffering, love and hatred, hope and fear, in the development of its powers. It may be that Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, basking upon the whole in the sunshine of life, drew little supplementary force from its trials and agitations. But the history of one not less wonderful than any of these, the career of Dante, tells a different tale ”

“ But no study of Goethe is complete without some recognition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to hurl the book across the room with an indignant perception of its sensuality. For the sins of his life Goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in his life by his final marriage with Christiane; for the sins of his literature many others must suffer. I do not despair, however, of the day when the poor honest herd of man kind shall give universal utterance to the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, in art, in religion, for the devil that it is ”

“ But absolute egotism in Goethe, as in Emerson, summoned all nature to minister to the self: all nature, if not actually compelled to this service by a human creative fiat, could at least be won over to it by the engaging heroism of her favourite child. ”

“ In this philosophy the ancestral ego, the soul perplexed and incredulous at being born into this world, returns to haunt us in broad daylight and to persuade us with its ghostly eloquence that not that ego but this world is the ghost.
The egotism which in German philosophy is justified by a theory in German genius is a form of experience. It turns everything it touches into a part of its own life, personal, spontaneous, sincere, original. It is young and self-sufficient ”

“ But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate. ”

“ In this sense any philosophy, if warmly embraced, has a moralising force, because, even if it belittles morality, it absorbs the mind in intellectual contemplation, accustoms it to wide and reasoned comparisons, and makes the sorry escapades of human nature from convention seem even more ignominious than its ruling prejudices.
The particular theory of egotism arises from an [Pg 163] exorbitant interest in ourselves, in the medium of thought and action rather than in its objects. It is not necessarily incorrect, because the self is actual and indispensable ”

“ Egoism—if I may coin a distinction—is one thing, egotism another. Goethe was an egoist—he is full of a radiating self; but such egoism is, if we reflect, the very opposite of the egotist, who is full of a shrivelled selfishness. Such were the later phases of Napoleon, who changed from a generous imparter into an absorbing monopolist. That was egotism. All genius, however, has been egoist, and ever will be; for genius is at once the ear, sensitive to the subtlest appeals of existence, and the voice which constrains others to enter the realm of its ideas. ”

“ Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own person, and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures, and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgement more than from depraved feelings ”

“ Egoism, in the new psychological sense of the word, may be regarded as the deliberate attempt in an individual's life to throw the chief interest and emphasis of his days upon the inward, personal, subjective impressions produced by the world, rather than upon outward action or social progress. Egoism does not necessarily imply the invidious stigma of selfishness. Goethe, the greatest of all egoists, was notoriously free from such a vice. ”

“ Egoism does not necessarily imply "egotism," though it must be confessed that in Montaigne's case, though not in Goethe's, there may have been a touch of that less generous attribute.
Egoism is an intellectual gesture, a spiritual attitude, a temperamental atmosphere. It is a thing which implies a certain definite philosophical mood in regard to the riddle of existence; though, of course, between individual egoists there may be wide gulfs of personal divergence. ”

“ It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleasure that of the satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different in each individual. His system treats every man as a genius, for it regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which it claims the same sort of tender consideration that is conceded to genius. But in laying down such rules Goethe thinks first of himself. He has spent long years in trying to make out his own vocation. He has had an opportunity of living almost every kind of life in turn. ”

“ But the timid superstition which sets up self-denial, divorced from all rational ends, as a thing good and right in itself, which makes us afraid of enjoyment as such, this is the chief hindrance, and against this Goethe launches his chief work “Faust. [Pg 22] ” There is another hindrance, less obvious and needing to be dealt with in another way, which Goethe therefore attacks usually in prose rather than in poetry.
Man, as Goethe conceives him, is essentially active. The happiness he seeks is not passive enjoyment, but an occupation, a pursuit adapted to his inborn capacities. ”

“ It follows that a principal condition of happiness is a just self-knowledge. He will be happy, who knows what he wants and what he can do. Here again Goethe gives importance to a doctrine which in itself is obvious enough by the persistent energy with which he applies it. He has been himself bewildered by the multiplicity of his own tastes and aptitudes. He has wanted to do everything in turn, and he has found himself capable to a certain extent of doing everything. Hence the question—What is my true vocation? ”

“ The world extends itself like American trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the Middle Ages, to be a simple and comprehensible affair; but modern life to respect a multitude of things, which is distracting.
Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and by his own versatility to dispose of them with ease ”

“ The inner storm and stress gradually subsided, and the new Goethe—statesman, scientific investigator, man of the world, courtier, friend of princes—came to see that after all feeling was not everything, and that its untrammeled expression was not the whole of art. Form and decorum counted for more than he had supposed, and revolution was not the word of wisdom. Self-control was the only basis of character, and limitation lay at the foundation of all art. To work to make things better, even in a humble sphere, was better than to fret over the badness of the world. ”

“ Talent, says Goethe, thrives in solitude, but character grows in the stream of the world. It is a twofold discovery which a man must make before the highest kind of success lies within his grasp: the discovery of his own individual gift, force, or aptitude, and the discovery of his place in society. If it were possible to secure complete development of one's power in isolation, the product would be, not the full energy of a man expressing itself through a congenial activity, but a detached skill exercised automatically and apart from a personality. ”

“ For Individualism (egotism) is the creator of everything, just as already genius [a definite egotism] which is always originality, is regarded as the creator of new historical productions. Freedom teaches us: set yourselves free, get rid of everything burdensome ”

“ Like Young he proclaims that [Pg 95] genius is a law to itself, that all imitation and subservience to rule is disastrous to imaginative production. "Principles," he declares, "are even more injurious to genius than examples." The burden of the Essay is the glorification of the genius of the architect of Strassburg cathedral, and of Gothic architecture in general, which, Goethe maintained, should be correctly designated "German" architecture, as having had its origin on German soil. ”

“ The time was yet far distant when it could be affirmed, that genius is that power of man which by its deeds and actions gives laws and rules. At this time it was thought to manifest itself only, by overstepping existing [Pg 662] laws, breaking established rules, and declaring itself above all restraint. It was, therefore, an easy thing to be a genius, and nothing was more natural than that extravagance both of word and deed should provoke all orderly men to oppose themselves to such a monster. ”

“ With these explanations of what are called the vanity and egotism of Genius, be it remembered, that the sense of their own sufficiency is assumed by men at their own risk. The great man who thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping fuel on his fire. It is indeed otherwise with his unlucky brethren, with whom an illusion of literary vanity may end in the aberrations of harmless madness ”

“ I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. ”

“ But as, in general, learning can [Pg 575] never exist without the accompaniment of a universal smattering and a universal pedantry, nor the practice of any profession without empiricism and charlatanry, so there sprung up a violent conflict, the purpose of which was to guard use from abuse, and place the kernel high above the shell in men's estimation. In the execution of this design, it was perceived that the shortest way of getting out of the affair, was to call in the aid of genius, whose magic gifts could settle the strife, and accomplish what was required. ”

“ Genius is its own reward : for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. " Whoever is born with a talent, to a talent, finds in this his fairest existence," says Goethe. When we look back at a great man of former times, we do not think, " How happy is he to be still admired by all of us! ”

“ The loveliness of Lotte (by the way, she is a real person, Charlotte Buff; while the lover is a composite of Goethe himself and young Jerusalem, who had actually shot himself at Wetzlar for the love of another man's wife) , as we see her in pictures of German artists, feeding her numerous brothers and sisters, who cling to her, fans Werther's love, which is stronger than all the other forces of his heart. Unable to resist his passion, he chooses death as an inevitable necessity. ”

“ It is attained by the firm assurance that, somewhere and somehow, a power exists that makes for moral good; that our moral endeavours are met, so to speak, half-way by a moral order in the universe, which comes to the aid of individual effort. And the sum and substance of his teaching, whether in the maxims or in any other of his mature productions, is that we must resign ourselves to this power, in gratitude and reverence towards it and all its manifestations in whatever is good and beautiful. This is Goethe's strong faith, his perfect and serene trust. ”

“ This it is that gives us the perception of that harmonious agreement to which man is called, and to which he must conform, often against his will as he is much too fond of fancying that the world begins afresh with himself." What Goethe means is that we shall do best to find out the truth of all things for ourselves, for on one side truth is individual; and that we shall be happy if our individual truth is also universal, or accords with the wisest thought of the past. It is in this practical light that we must view the maxims, and not as mere academic generalities. ”

“ Goethe differed from Spinoza’s pantheism in his own way; for Goethe conceived man to have an independent function in the infinite. Man makes his contribution to history and does not merely passively appropriate the products of the world around himself. Man reacts upon the world, he resists it, and becomes alive to the joy of it.
To Goethe the world had a soul, because the world gives clearness to the human soul. Nature shows how closely she is related to us by disclosing to us her inmost soul. Here in Goethe is a mysticism in modern garb, an artistic view of life. ”

“ Like all the Romantic philosophy, Goethe’s philosophy was a personal revelation, and not a formulated doctrine for universal application. Like all the Romanticists, Goethe was a highly strung personality, and his philosophy was conceived to be true by himself only for himself. He did not look upon the trivialities and the conventions of life as mere limitations of his personality, but as a fall from truth. Truth is realized by man when he is in vital interchange with the universe. ”

“ Or perhaps we come nearer our meaning, if we say that in Goethe we discover by far the most striking instance, in our time, of a writer who is, in strict speech, what Philosophy can call a Man. He is neither noble nor plebeian, neither liberal nor servile, nor infidel nor devotee; but the best excellence of all these, joined in pure union; 'a clear and universal Man.' Goethe's poetry is no separate faculty, no mental handicraft; but the voice of the whole harmonious manhood: nay it is the very harmony, the living and life-giving harmony of that rich manhood which forms his poetry. ”

“ The imagination is the great unifier of humanity. Men's perceptions may be various, their powers of understanding very unequal; but the imagination is, as it were, the self-consciousness of instinct, the contribution which the inner capacity and demand of the mind makes to experience. To indulge the imagination is to express the universal self, the common and contagious element in all individuals, that rudimentary potency which they all share. To stimulate the imagination is to produce the deepest, the most pertinacious emotions. ”

“ They are a mirror of life itself, and the inner and outer facts of life in all their diversity. The unity they possess is the unity that is stamped upon them by the all-embracing personality of their author, always and unweariedly striving to make his life systematic, distinct, and fruitful; and to judge them as a whole, a man must be able to fathom so great a genius. But to every one in every walk of life Goethe has a word of wise counsel, as though he understood every form of existence and could enter into its needs. ”

“ Johnson, though in his attitude towards tradition he is less Johnsonian than Socratic. Like Socrates he saw on what terms a break with the past may be safely attempted. “Anything that emancipates the spirit,” he says, “without a corresponding growth in self-mastery, is pernicious.” We may be sure that if the whole modern experiment fails it will be because of the neglect of the truth contained in this maxim. Goethe also saw that a sound individualism must be rightly imaginative. He has occasional hints on the rôle of illusion in literature and life that go far beneath the surface. ”

“ The problem with Goethe is, the development of a character through growth; Shakespeare’s: given a certain character and a certain collision, how will the given character demean itself? The common man with an effort could tell what he himself would have done under such and such circumstances, but Shakespeare could have done all things, and grasping one side of himself he holds it, and shows it for one person, and another for another. He never confuses—never changes. The divine inspiration sways him. The power to do this, the Universal which can take on all and be all, is genius. ”