UC-NRLI 
 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS, 
 
 FIRST SERIES, No, 2. 
 
 GOETHE AND THE (DONDUGT OF LIFE. 
 
 BY CALVIN THOMAS, A. M., 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF GERMAN AND SANSKKIT. 
 Entered at the Poet-Office at Ann Arbor, Mich. . as Second-class matter. 
 
 OF THE 
 
 ANN ARBOR: 
 ANDREWS & WITHERBY, 
 
 

GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 4 Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreichund gut.' 
 
 It is now some thirty years since Thomas De Quincey 
 expressed the opinion that Goethe had been much over- 
 rated and that during the next generation or two his repu- 
 tation would decline.* Verily, as M. Renan lately observed, 
 the vocation of prophet has become in our time peculiarly 
 difficult. Since De Quincey printed his splenetic essay 
 the prestige of Goethe has steadily increased until he has 
 become, it is safe to say, the most imposing and authorita- 
 tive personage in the history of modern literature. Her- 
 mann Grimm calls him simply ' the greatest poet of all 
 times and of all peoples.' Matthew Arnold, while gently 
 deriding Grimm's statement of the matter as over-patrio- 
 tic, is himself -on record to the effect that he, Goethe, 'in 
 the depth and richness of his criticism of life, is by far our 
 greatest modern man.'f Edmond Scherer, a Frenchman 
 who is certainly not chargeable with any prepossessions in 
 favor of things trans-Rhenane, finds that Goethe, ' although 
 he has not Shakespeare's power, is a genius more 
 vast, more universal, than Shakespeare.' Finally, Oscar 
 Browning, writing for the new Encyclopaedia JBri- 
 tannica, uses this language: 'Posterity must decide 
 his exact precedence in that small and chosen com- 
 
 * Enc. Brit. 8th ed. article Goethe. 
 
 t A French Critic on Goethe in the volume Mixed Essays. In this essaj 
 the above-quoted opinion of Grimm as well as that of Scherer are consid- 
 ered at some length. 
 
 1 59849 
 
2 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 pany which contains the names of Homer, Dante, 
 and Shakespeare. ... As Homer concentrated in 
 himself the spirit of antiquity, Dante of the Middle Ages 
 and Shakespeare of the Renaissance, so Goethe is the 
 representative of the modern spirit, the prophet of man- 
 kind under new circumstances and new conditions, the 
 appointed teacher of ages yet unborn.' 
 
 But Mr. Browning has another remark which is even 
 more significant than that quoted, since it leaves nothing 
 to posterity, but calmly announces as settled a question 
 about which there has been vastly more disagreement than 
 about Goethe's eminence as a poet. The remark is this : 
 4 He needs no defence, nothing but sympathetic study.' 
 
 A few years ago those who interested themselves in 
 Goethe made it their primary business for the most part 
 either to assail or to defend him. The charges of the as- 
 sailants are sufficiently familiar. It was said that he was 
 cold, statuesque, unpatriotic, indifferent to all except 
 aesthetic issues; that in his relations to women he was 
 heartless and insincere ; that as a poet he was immoral, 
 and as a man self-centered and vain. To these charges, 
 then, various answers were forthcoming. And so the bat- 
 tle went on ; Goethe being treated much as if he had been 
 some hero of romance sent into the world ready-made to 
 serve as a pattern for all mankind, instead of being as he 
 was, a man, with a history, and with a man's indefeasible 
 right to blunder and be held only the more dear for his 
 blunders, provided they be honestly made in the pursuit 
 of large and worthy ideals. * 
 
 It would hardly be correct to speak of this battle as 
 ended ; it still goes on here and there. The real students 
 of Goethe, however, have well nigh lost interest in it. For 
 
 *< Die IrrthOmer ries Menschen machen ihn eigeutlich liebenswttrdig.' 
 "-Goethe's Werke, XIX, 59. (Heinpel edition). 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 3 
 
 it has become clear that the old theory of heartlessness, 
 selfishness, moral pococurantism and what not, was ut- 
 terly unsound and rested upon an elaborate misconcep- 
 tion.* The sources of the misconception are in good 
 part known. It sprang very largely from an unskillful 
 reading of Dichtung und Wahrheit. In part also it came 
 from the bitter attacks of ' Young Germany ' and other 
 writers in the fourth and fifth decades of the present cen- 
 tury. These men, blind for the time being to the import- 
 ance of everything save the political agitation in which 
 they were themselves engaged, were naturally made 
 angry because they could not quote Goethe in the interest 
 of their own or any other sound and fury. But the pas- 
 sions and the issues of that time have disappeared ; its 
 patriotic dream is realized, and lo, it is now seen on every 
 hand that one of the most valuable possessions of the 
 united fatherland is the life of Goethe just as it was. 
 Surely one who knows at all what that life signifies to the 
 New Germany will be slow to join in regrets that it could 
 not have been this, that or the other thing which it was 
 not. A pamphleteer, an anchorite or an angel could not 
 have become the commanding teacher that Goethe is. In 
 other words it can be seen in the light of* the present bet- 
 ter than it could be seen a few years ago that the great 
 German poet lived consciously to a^ high destiny. Fur- 
 thermore ; after all the microscopic study that has of late 
 been bestowed upon him, his life stands out so high in its 
 purpose, so earnest in its endeavor, and so large in its re- 
 sults, that there is, as there ought to be, a growing disposi- 
 tion to take him on what he himself regarded as the main 
 
 * ' Man uannte Goethe wiederholt den raarmornen Gott, und da er es so 
 oft h6rte, glaubte er es selbst; er 1st iiie marmorn gewesen weder vor noch 
 naeh der Helena; er war ein gules ireues, deutsches Herz, fahig sich zu 
 freuen, zu leiden und zu weinen, bis an sein Lebensende.' Julian Schmidt, 
 Preussische JahrbUcher 39,388. 
 
4 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 issue.* Any one who is willing to do this will find that 
 he has on hand employment enough of a kind at once 
 more agreeable and more profitable than either continu- 
 ing or replying to the old fusilade of censure. 
 
 The task which I have proposed to myself in the fol- 
 lowing pages is to sketch the outlines of Goethe's ethical 
 creed. If he be really the greatest of all critics of life, 
 then a correct and reasonably concise account of the ele- 
 ments of his criticism ought surely to possess a certain 
 value. But is any such account in reality possible? 
 Goethe himself was no system-maker and that which is best 
 and most valuable in him comes to us largely in the form of 
 incidental commentary. Is there not danger, in case of a 
 man possessing Goethe's prodigious intellectual range, 
 that any attempt to schematize will result in simply vul- 
 garizing ? There certainly is danger of this kind and I am 
 keenly alive to it. At the same time I think it undenia- 
 ble that this scattered wisdom is in general but the rich 
 fringe which may sometimes conceal, but is nevertheless 
 attached to, a coherent thread of ethical doctrine. The 
 laying bare of this thread may not be an easy, but it ought 
 not to be a hopeless task. At any rate that is what is here 
 undertaken. That which I am about to offer is neither 
 attack nor panegyric, but a study. It will spring in- 
 deed from a strong admiration of the character of Goethe, 
 but then, surely, none but an injudicious friend of the 
 great poet would wish to charge him with perfection. 
 Probably he got his fair share in Adam's great legacy of 
 capacity for going wrong, but his shortcomings may be 
 left, at least for the purposes of the present inquiry, where 
 he himself left them in the good-natured epigram : 
 
 * ' Das Hauptfundament des Sittlichen 1st der gute Wille.'r- Goethe's 
 Werke, XIX, 77. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 5 
 
 What you say is nothing new ; 
 Fallible I was and who can doubt it? 
 What you stupid devils say about it, 
 I know it better than you.* 
 
 I. SPINOZA. 
 
 The three chief subjects of Goethe's thinking were 
 Nature, Art and Conduct. Now these are the three high- 
 est and largest interests of humanity and hence it was a 
 very significant saying of his that the three men to whom 
 he owed the most were Linnaeus, Shakespeare and 
 Spinoza, f It was Linnaeus who first brought home to him 
 a sense of nature's wealth and of the fascination which 
 comes from puzzling at her riddles. It was Shakespeare 
 from whom he first learned the meaning and the possibil 
 ities of art. It was Spinoza who kindled in him a new 
 fervor for right living and gave him the ground-work of 
 an ethical philosophy. Goethe was born in 1749 and his 
 first introduction to the Ethics of Spinoza occurred appar- 
 ently between 1770 and 1774. What was it that the young 
 German poet drew from the lens-grinder of Amsterdam ? 
 Half a century later the same poet, no longer young, tried 
 to answer this question and these are his words from 
 Dichtung und Wahrheit: 
 
 ^When I had sought the world over after a means of 
 education for my singular character I happened upon the 
 Ethics of this man. What I may have read out of the 
 book and what I may have read into it, I could hardly tell. 
 Suffice it to say, I found here that which quieted my pas- 
 
 *'Gar nichtsNeuessagt Ihr mir! 
 Unvollkommen war ich ohne Zweifel, 
 Was Ihr an mlr tadelt, dumrae Teufel, 
 Ich weiss es besser als Ihr.' Werke, II, 378. 
 
 fCf. Viehoff, Goethe'* Gedichte, II, 89. 
 
6 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 sions and seemed to offer me a large and free outlook over 
 the physical and moral world. But that which especially 
 drew me to him was the boundless unselfishness that 
 shone from every sentence. That marvellous saying, 
 4 Whoso truly loves God must not demand that God love 
 him in return,'* with all the propositions that support it 
 and the consequences that flow from it, filled my mind 
 completely. To be unselfish in everything, and most so 
 in love and friendship, was my delight, my maxim, my 
 exercise ; so that that later wild saying, c If I love thee 
 what is that to thee ? ' f came from my very heart. For 
 the rest let me not fail to recognize here also the truth 
 that the most intimate unions spring from contrasts. 
 Spinoza's perfect equanimity contrasted with my turbu- 
 lent striving; his mathematical method was the opposite 
 of my poetic way of thinking and of putting things ; and 
 precisely that artificial treatment which some thought ill- 
 adapted to ethical subjects made me his earnest disciple 
 and excited my most ardent admiration.']; 
 
 Not much importance can be attached to this sugges- 
 tion about the attraction of opposites. There is good evi- 
 dence that Goethe was repelled from other men by the 
 very qualities which he thinks were a part of Spinoza's at- 
 tractiveness. In Faust he pours ridicule upon the whole 
 business of logic-chopping and scattered sayings indicate 
 clearly enough his distrust of formal proof as a means of 
 arriving at the highest knowledge. The real source of 
 Spinoza's power lay not in his form but in his matter ; in 
 the large sweep of his thought and the vastness of his out- 
 look. It is true that he can no longer affect a reader of 
 to-day as he did certain minds a hundred years ago ; for 
 
 * Spinoza's Ethics, Part V, prop 19. 
 t Werke. XVII, 228. 
 J Werke, XXII, 168. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 7 
 
 the most of what he had to say has since that time been 
 better said in the language of poetry and science. But 
 even now one who will not allow himself to be repelled by 
 the hard and forbidding shell of Spinoza's mechanical 
 method will feel often enough that the man was far too 
 great for his dialect. The geometrical jargon in which he 
 deemed it best to cast his thought gives an impression of 
 clipped wings and manacled limbs ; but underneath the 
 jargon is the soul of a Hebrew poet and it was this poet 
 who appealed so powerfully to Goethe. 
 
 But Goethe even in his youth was not the man 
 to put himself completely into the hands of a master 
 and it is best to avoid any such phrase as that he ' accepted ' 
 Spinoza's philosophy. That philosophy, considered as a 
 theory of the universe, is built upon two ideas : the idea 
 that what we call Nature is an aspect of God, and the idea 
 that this God works by necessity through changeless and 
 eternal laws. Now it is true that both these thoughts found 
 congenial soil in the mind of young Goethe. Even as a 
 boy he took delight in a sense of personal closeness to the 
 Infinite and he was repelled by the current conception of 
 God, both orthodox and deistic, as a Ruler in the nebulous 
 distance. * A little later the nature -worship of the day 
 took possession of him and the open fields could lift him 
 into a religious ecstacy. He tells us too of his early diffi- 
 culties over ' dispensations ' like the great Lisbon earth- 
 quake and the accident to his father's house. This being 
 the temper of his mind it is not strange that he was ready 
 to listen to a man who told him that the God whom he de- 
 sired to approach and the nature he loved were one, that 
 outside of this One nothing whatever was conceivable, 
 and that of this One changeless eternal- law was the very 
 
 * Dichtung und Wahrheit, Erstes Buch,p<wim. Werke, XX, 25 ff. 
 
8 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 essence. That these convictions soon became a part of his 
 mental life and in some degree the basis of his scientific 
 thinking, is abundantly attested in his writings.* But that 
 he ever took any great interest in Spinoza's ' proofs ' as 
 such there is little reason to suppose. Late in his life we 
 find him saying, and the words mark the lifelong bent of 
 his mind : ' I do not venture to theorize concerning the Ab- 
 aolute.'t Spinoza's work, however, is largely made up of 
 such theorizing. The truth is that whalf Goethe drew from 
 Spinoza, was, as he himself intimates, not so much a cer- 
 tain set of clear intellectual convictions concerning the 
 constitution of the world, as rather a fund of emotion, an 
 ethical exaltation which presently crystallized into a few 
 great regulative principles of conduct. Can anything be 
 done in sober prose to throw light upon the character of 
 this emotion? Not much perhaps and yet the attempt is 
 worth making. 
 
 Let us assume that Spinoza's focal doctrines are true. 
 Let us put aside the thought of an extramundane Ruler 
 
 -* For example : ' Was war' ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse, 
 Ira Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse ! 
 Him ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
 Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen, 
 So dags, was in Him leht, und webt uud ist, 
 Nie Seine Kraft, nle Semen Geist vermisst.' 
 
 -WerkeU.223. 
 
 1 Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale. 
 i Alles 1st sie mit einem Male.' Werke II, 237. 
 
 Nach ewigen, ehrnen, 
 
 Grossen Gesetz n, 
 
 Mils sen wir alle 
 
 Unseres DaseinH 
 
 Kreise vollendt n. Werke, 1, 167. 
 
 t 'Vom Absoluten im theoretischen Sinne wag' ich nic^t zu reden ; 
 behaupten ober darf ich: dass, wer es in der Erscheinung anerkannt und 
 imrner im Auge behalten hat, sehr grossen Gewinn davon erfahren wird.' 
 Werke. XIX, 77. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OP LIFE. 9 
 
 and abolish the word supernatural from our vocabulary. 
 Let us actually believe that the universe is a manifestation 
 of necessary and eternal law. This last is nothing more 
 than the assumption upon which all science rests. And 
 yet it commonly requires effort to realize the full scope of 
 the thought. Fichte illustrates it by showing that if a grain 
 of sand on the beach were to lie a few inches from where 
 it does lie, the whole precedent history of the world must 
 have been different. Under this hypothesis Nature becomes 
 in literal truth 
 
 ' A subtle chain of countless rings.' 
 
 And each particular fact, say, a moth, or a man, or a planet, 
 is a link in the chain. And what must be the effect of 
 such a thought upon a man's ethical instinct ? It is very 
 commonly argued that Spinoza's hypothesis must inevit- 
 ably act as a moral poison. It leads, as we are told, to 
 quietism and listlessness ; for what ground of effort is there, 
 if what one is and does is determined by a chain of natural 
 causes ? It plays into the hands of badness because it 
 provides no post-mortem punishment for badness and no 
 eternal distinction between right and wrong. And it leads 
 to pessimism and contempt of life because it makes of a 
 human being nothing but a momentary bubble upon an 
 infinite ocean. To all of which we can only say : If this 
 be logic, it is at least not history. Some or all of these 
 effects may have followed in Asia from certain forms of 
 pantheistic thought, but they have never been observed in 
 those who have been influenced by Spinoza. His doctrine 
 is not a narcotic poison at all, but at once a tonic and a 
 sedative. Its first real effect has never been better de- 
 scribed than in the words of Herder : ; The consciousness 
 of living under high and beautiful laws must destroy ego- 
 
10 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OP LIFE. 
 
 tism and reconcile man with his fate.'* This, surely, is 
 much for any philosophic or scientific creed to be able to 
 do ; for egotism, that is, narrow selfishness combined with 
 an over-estimate of one's own importance, is the "root of 
 nearly all that morality and religion have to dread. Its 
 second effect is to give to conduct not a diminished but a 
 greatly increased significance, by pressing home the 
 thought that an action once dropped into the shoreless 
 ocean goes out in widening wave-rings to the end of time. 
 Instead of ' Thou God seest me,' Spinoza puts the thought : 
 The thing thou doest is henceforth a part of the world's 
 fate forever and forever. To a serious person this is the 
 most solemn motive for right conduct that can possibly 
 be imagined. A ground of earnestness being thus provided, 
 the next question naturally is : What is the ultimate object 
 to be attained? Spinoza makes the great end of life to be 
 that personal happiness which comes from the knowledge 
 and the love of God. Upon his theory, then, right living 
 presupposes, first, a feeling for the solemnity of life ; this 
 feeling may be called, with reference to the words of Goe- 
 the below, sympathy with the World-soul. Secondly there 
 is to be a steady desire to know more and more of God 
 (struggle with the World-mind; for 'God' is here, it 
 must be borne in mind, only a name for all that is). From 
 this knowledge, Spinoza teaches, will come love and acqui- 
 escence and these will beget happiness. Such, in naked 
 outline, is the ethical ideal that underlies that wonderful 
 stanza from Eins und Alles, perhaps the most pregnant 
 half-dozen lines to be found in the whole range of Goethe's 
 
 poetry : 
 
 Soul of the World, come and invest U8 ; 
 
 Then with the World-mind's self to test us, 
 
 * Herder's Qesprfahe fiber Qott. See Julian Schmidt's edition of the 
 Ideen zur Oeschichte der Menachheit. Vol. I, p. LXXXII. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 11 
 
 Becomes our being's noble call ; 
 Good Spirits lead, our way attending, 
 High masters, soothing and befriending, 
 
 To Him that made and makes the All.* 
 
 What, now, were the c few great regulative principles ' 
 above alluded to ? The answer to this question will show 
 us how Goethe, building upon Spinoza's foundations, but 
 throwing away Spinoza's scholastic rubbish and putting 
 a construction of his own upon Spinoza's prescriptions, 
 worked out a theory of life which forms an epoch in mod- 
 ern thought. * 
 
 II. SELF-AFFIRMATION. 
 
 It was originally a proposition in physics, which Spi- 
 noza, borrowing from Des Cartes and enlarging the scope 
 of its application, made the basis of his own theory of the 
 passions, and so, in some sense, of his entire prescriptive 
 philosophy. The proposition is : ' Everything, so far as in 
 it lies, endeavors to persist in its own being.'f This prin- 
 ciple, that persistence in suo ease is a universal law of 
 things, being duly established, Spinoza proceeds to apply 
 it in the domain of ethics thus : k Since reason demands 
 nothing contrary to nature, it therefore demands that every 
 one shall love himself, seek his own true advantage, desire 
 all that leads a man to greater perfection and generally, so 
 far as in him lies, endeavor to persist in his own being. 
 Then, seeing that virtue is naught else than acting accord- 
 ing to the laws of one's own nature, and seeing that no one 
 
 * Weltseele komm, uns zu durchdringen ! 
 Dann mit clem Weltgeist selbst zu ringen, 
 
 Wird unsrer KrSfte Hochberuf. 
 Theilnebjnend ffthren gute Geister, 
 Qelinde leitend, hOchste Melster, 
 
 Zu Dem, der Alles schafft und schuf.' Werke, II, 228. 
 
 t Ethics, Part III, prop. 6. 
 
12 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 endeavors to preserve his own being except in accordance 
 with the laws of his own nature, it follows that the foun- 
 dation of virtue is this very endeavor to persist in one's 
 own being.'* The author of the Ethics takes pains to guard 
 this deduction against the suspicions of those who might 
 think ' that self-interest is the beginning of wickedness 
 but not of goodness.' He explains that man's perfection 
 is realizable only in society and can not therefore be con- 
 sidered apart from the general weal. The law of persist- 
 ence in one's own being really requires, therefore, the doing 
 of those things which make for the good of one's self and 
 one's fellow-men. To enable us to decide what things 
 these are, the help of reason must be called in. Reason 
 tells us that to the attainment of the end in question a 
 certain part of one's ' being ' needs to be repressed rather 
 that c persisted ' in. But still the foundation of virtue on 
 its positive or active side is the affirmation of self. 
 
 We turn now to Goethe. 
 
 The present Century is marked by the emergence of a 
 new ethical ideal which, under the name of Culture, has 
 made both friends and enemies. But whatever view be 
 taken of this ideal, Goethe is usually made to stand sponsor 
 for it. He is regarded as the founder of the cult and, like 
 many real founders of a cult, he has been overlaid with 
 mythology. 
 
 There is in literature, especially in English and Amer- 
 ican literature of the not too recent past, a mythological 
 Goethe, who has been the target of many a shot in prose 
 and verse. This myth is a creature without a heart, inca- 
 pable of self-sacrifice and deaf to the finer issues of mo- 
 rality. The only thing that he cares for is himself. His 
 motto, so to speak, is : Art for art's sake and Goethe its 
 
 * Ethic*, Part IV, prop. 18, Scholium. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 13 
 
 prophet. He is a sort of ^Esthetic Mogul bent solely upon 
 achieving his own pleasure and exhibiting his own great- 
 ness. Very different from all this is the real Goethe as 
 disclosed in the facts of his life, and yet it is not hard to 
 find in the real Goethe something which, with a little mis- 
 construing and a good deal of ignoring, can be worked over 
 into the phantom just described. What was this some- 
 thing? Probably the best concise answer to this question 
 is to be found in a sentence of Dichtung und Wahrheit, a 
 sentence written down by Goethe as he stood on the 
 threshold of old age and looked back upon his early ro- 
 mance with Friederike Brion. The words, which contain 
 the rationale not only of his conduct toward the village 
 
 maid, but also of his entire life, are these : ' Man may seek 
 
 his higher destiny on earth or in heaven, in the present or 
 in the future ; yet for that reason he remains exposed to 
 constant wavering within and to continual disturbance 
 from without until he once for all makes up his mind to 
 declare that that is right which is suited to him ( c was 
 ihm gemass ist').* 
 
 What now is to be said of this definition ? The first 
 thought of most readers probably is to repudiate it with 
 indignation as the very climax of moral perversity. On the 
 face of it it seems to justify all that has been said about its 
 author's lack of feeling for the higher aspects of righteous- 
 ness and morality. To say that the Right is the Agreeable, t 
 sounds very like a vulgar falsehood. But he who goes in 
 search of Goethe, ' the clearest, largest and most helpful 
 thinker of modern times,'! will not find him in the region 
 of vulgar falsehoods. Then, too, the definition in question 
 is pronounced by so good an authority as Rudolf Virchow 
 
 * Werke, XXII, 18. 
 
 t Matthew Arnold, in the essay cited above. 
 
16 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 is a passion ceases to be such when we form a clear and 
 distinct idea of it (in modern phrase, when we think we 
 understand it). The first step toward freedom is, then, to 
 learn to understand one's own nature as a part of the 
 Eternal Order which is God ; for passion is subdued the 
 moment we think of that which excites it as inevitable. 
 Such contemplation of the ordered universe combined 
 with a religious feeling of calmness and acquiescence is 
 what Spinoza terms the ' love, of God,' and the love of 
 God is in his theory the psychical state toward which 
 every effort should tend. It is at once the supreme virtue 
 and the supreme happiness. 
 
 It was the part of the Ethics just outlined which af- 
 fected the mind of Goethe most deeply and from which, 
 as he tells us, he drew a feeling of composure and an en- 
 thusiasm for unselfishness. That which impressed him 
 most'and made the reading of the Ethics an epoch in his 
 life was precisely the thought that only through repression 
 of self is the true perfection of self attainable. It is along 
 the line of this thought, the value of conscious self- discip- 
 line, that much of Goethe's significance as a critic of life 
 is to be found. The subject falls under two heads. 
 
 1. Self-control. The theme of Goethe in his earliest 
 works is(always in some form or other, the power of pas- 
 sion ; usually itis the power of passion engaged in disas- 
 trous revolt against the bad or the prosaic facts of life. 
 His tragic pathos is the ending of this revolt in despair or 
 death.(jlis heroes rave and rant and weep and are swayed 
 by feeling as a reed is shaken by the wind. Passion is 
 their tyrant, their fate ; it drives them to ecstasy or to 
 destruction and they appear to have no resource but to go 
 as they are impelled. Werther shoots himself because the 
 world is his enemy and never dreams that his enemy is 
 himself. He and his kind scarcely raise the question of 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 17 
 
 ruling their own spirits because emotional susceptibility 
 and emotional extravagance are their badge of distinc- 
 tion, their noblesse. For them the voice of the heart is 
 alone divine and the counsels of reason and prudence are 
 vulgar, r Everywhere in this literature of ' Storm and 
 Stress ' there is an assumption, tacit or explicit, that feel- 
 ing is the sacred and admirable thing in human nature, 
 and that reason with its suggestions o moderation and 
 self-control inhabits a lower and meaner level. Running 
 through the early works of Goethe will be found this 
 dualism : passion set over against worldly wisdom in such 
 a way that the former is obviously meant for sympathy 
 and the latter for blame or contempt. V N And there is no 
 doubt where the sympathies of the author lay in this per- 
 petually recurring conflict. The young celebrity who ar- 
 rived at Weimar in November, 1775, was himself a man 
 of feeling in the fullest sense of the term. His letters of 
 this period often suggest an emotional nature set on a 
 thousand sensitive springs. For a time he continues in 
 the old way is enthusiastic, excitable, reckless. Then sud- 
 denly a change has begun. Hard work, the sense of re- 
 sponsibility, the study of nature, his friendship for Char- 
 lotte von Stein and not least of all the Ethics of Spinoza, 
 combine to effect a radical transformation of his character. 
 Upon his return from a Swiss tour in 178u Wieland noticed 
 that he was a changed man and observed in him a certain 
 <ru)<ppoffuvr) which produced a quieting effect upon those that 
 saw him. From thi's time the poetry of Goethe begins to 
 reveal a new note, the note of calmness, and to be charged 
 with a new ' message,' viz : thej necessity and the beauty of 
 self-control. This message 'appears in the unfinished 
 Geheimnisse, written in 1784^-5, one notable stanza of 
 which is : 
 
 For every power tends forward to the distance, 
 
 2 
 
18 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 To live and to be working here and there ; 
 And thereunto its obstinate resistance 
 The Stream of Time opposeth everywhere. 
 Amid this stormy, difficult existence 
 The spirit hears the oracles declare : 
 That thrall the universal tyrant shapeth 
 He that subdues himself alone escapeth ! 
 
 The Iphigenie and the Tasso are the first-fruits of this 
 new philosophy.^ Goethe finished a first draft of the form- 
 er in 1779 and began the latter shortly afterward. Both 
 plays occupied him while in Italy, 1786-87, the one being 
 given its final form there, the other being completed after 
 his return to Weimar in 1788. These plays are thus sepa- 
 rated by only a few years from Wertker and Clamgo but 
 they read like the work of another man. These smooth 
 and tranquil pentameters, this delicate phrasing, this sin- 
 gular interest in decorum, what have these things in com- 
 mon with the wild and stormy language of the earlier days ? 
 The transition here referred to has sometimes been con- 
 strued as primarily a change of artistic creed due to the 
 influence of Italy and of Greek art. But these influences, 
 as the above dates show, could at the most only have per- 
 fected a process that had already been some time going on. 
 And then, to say that the Iphigenie is a Greek play in 
 German is at any rate one of the most superficial things 
 that can be said of it. The work is not primarily an aes- 
 thetic experiment of any kind, but is in its inmost essence 
 
 * - Denn alle Kraft dringt vorwarts in die Weite, 
 Zu leben und zu wirken hier und dort ; 
 Dagegen engt und heramt von jeder Seite 
 Der Strom der Welt und reisst uns rait sich fort. 
 In diesem innern Sturm und aussern Streite 
 Vernimmt der Geist ein schwer-verstanden Wort: 
 Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, 
 Befreitder Mensch sich, der sich tlberwlndet.' 
 
 -Tf'erfce-,1, 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 19 
 
 biographical. Every scene betokens, it is tru%- a new 
 poetic art, but it is an art-that ---has-been born of a radical 
 change of heart in the artist. Iphigenie is herself an apos- 
 tle of ' sweet reasonableness' and the catastrophe of the 
 piece is only that King Thoas, besieged by love, pride, 
 anger and self-interest yields to the gentle eloquence of 
 the priestess whom he wishes for a wife, and in magnifi- 
 cent triumph over himself, speaks the word 'farewell.' 
 No wonder the Weimar public did not know what to make 
 of the Iphigenie. They were familiar enough with the 
 dramatic pathos which lies in a battle to the death with 
 fate or tyranny or a leader of armies. They would have 
 understood a fifth act which let the curtain fall upon a 
 stage filled with corpses. But they had no understanding 
 such as Goethe had come to have, of the pathos which lies 
 in that unseen, noiseless battle the winning of which is 
 said to be more than the taking of a city. 
 
 The drama of Tasso turns upon the cure of a morbid 
 nature whose enemy is himself. Tasso is, like Werther, a 
 man with a high-strung emotional temperament who sees 
 everything through a distorting medium. L The play gives 
 the same fundamental situation as the .earlier novel, viz: 
 a man of feeling at loggerheads with the world about him. 
 But whereas Werther has it all his own way and goes to 
 destruction, an object of pity to the end, Tasso is set over 
 against the admirable foils of Antonio and the Duke, and 
 is saved ; an object of compassion at first and at last of ad- 
 miration. In Goetz and Clavigo the man of prudence and 
 worldly wisdom is a scoundrel ; in Tasso he is master of 
 the situation and is meant to be admired. The poet of 
 1774 has his eye fixed upon the awlul power of passion ; 
 the poet of 1788 is thinking of the perfection of character 
 through self-control. 
 
 How deeply this philosophy sank into the mind of 
 
20 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OP LIFE. 
 
 Goethe $iardly needs to be told. Composure is a Goethean 
 
 specialty} ^His life illustrates it, his writings plead its 
 
 cause.', 'Whatsoever frees our minds without giving us 
 
 control over ourselves, is injurious; '^ in this well-known 
 
 saying of his one can read much of the momentous differ- 
 
 ^ ence between Goethe and Voltaire. c Goethe the all too 
 
 calm,' sings the Swedish poet Tegner, and jnany others 
 
 * have said the same thing. Well, at any rate here was no 
 
 cold ffH* but a warm one who, with earnest mind chose 
 
 what he took to be the part of wisdom. And having chosen 
 
 -he kept his course "at the risk- of being mytliologized as 
 
 n unsympathetic and statuesque. 
 
 2. Renunciation and Resignation. Early in the 
 history of the Christian church, holiness, i. e. righteousness 
 in its highest phase, came to be associated in thought with 
 asceticism. Christians had been commanded to repent of 
 their sins and to renounce the world ; and so the doing of 
 penance involving more or less of self-torture was accepted 
 as the divinely prescribed way to the topmost heights of 
 Christian character. This doctrine of renunciation of the 
 world, though it has in the process of the centuries sur- 
 vived some startling vicissitudes of interpretation, is still 
 in theory a corner-stone of Christian ethics. And natur- 
 ally ; since the modern Christian, though he may no longer 
 hold that the world is entirely bad, yet does hold that its 
 chief goodness consists in the opportunity it offers to pre- 
 pare for another world that is vastly better. But how 
 must the maxim of renunciation be looked upon by a man 
 ** like Goethe &) HenSltdj it is true, to a belief that death is 
 not the end of life, ^Wft lie^never make$ ay use of this be- 
 
 *'Alles, was unsern Geist befreit, ohne uns die Herrschaft fiber uns 
 selbst zu geben, 1st verderblich.' Werke, XIX, 20. 
 
 Compare also: ' Welche Regierung die beste sel? Diejenlge, die uns 
 lehrt, una selbst zu regieren.' Werke, XIX, 71. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 21 * 
 
 &*-\ 
 
 lief in his ethical philosophy. He held also that life, in 
 the world that now is, is a irood thing which ought to be 
 enjoyed. v In fact he makes enjoyment (of a certain kind) 
 the great end of life. l Wherefore,' he says, c wherefore 
 this expenditure of suns and planets and moons, of stars 
 and milky ways, of comets and nebulae, of worlds made 
 and making, if a fortunate man is not at last to enjoy his 
 existence ? '*<- To a man with such a creed must not renun- 
 ciation in any form seem at least a mistake and all kinds 
 of self- torturing morality a mere monstrous fanaticism? 
 It might seem soy and yet renunciation is again a Goethean 
 specialty. I In a letter of 1820 he tells how he constantly 
 practices it and feels himself '.strengthened' in conse- 
 quence. Wilhelm Meister^s Lehrjahre has more or less to 
 do with the subject, and Wilhelm Meister's Wander jahre 
 oder Die Entsagenden is named after it. It is the main 
 theme of Die Wahlvervandsphaften and a minor theme of 
 Die Natttrliche Toclitcr. It is interwoven with the con- 
 clusion of j^atttfand Dichtung und Wahrheit has a short 
 essay upon it. it has been sometimes thought that all 
 this interest in renunciation is, from an ethical point of 
 view, somewhat factitious and means nothing more 
 than an artist's fondness for a particular kind of 'etude ; 
 for the real conviction of Goethe, as nobody will doubt 
 who knows him, was that expressed in the words : ; Impa- 
 tience is of no good, of still less is remorse ; the one in- 
 creases the old guilt the other creates new.' \ But making 
 all due allowance for the poet's love of ' studies ' in un- 
 worldliness and in penitential renunciation, it is still to be 
 
 * Werke, XXVIII, 199. 
 
 f Nichts taust Ungeduld, 
 Noch weniger Reue ; 
 Jene vermehrtdie Schuld, 
 Diese schafFt neue.' Werke, II, 339. 
 
22 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 insisted that that large seriousness which was a part of his 
 nature shows itself here alsoJ Asceticism and self-morti- 
 lication are no part of his creed )aut they are great facts in 
 life and he takes note of them. He drops admonitions 
 enough, too, that pleasure is dangerous and that constant 
 submission to self-imposed restraints is of the essence of 
 high character. In only one other place does Faust rise to 
 such height as where at the end of an impassioned de- 
 scription of an ideal ruler he says to Mephistopheles : 
 ^ ' Enjoyment makes vulgar.' * 
 
 But there is another aspect of the doctrine of renun- 
 ciation which is, for the understanding of Goethe, the 
 really important one. A part of the above-mentioned 
 passage from Dichtung und Wahrheit is as follows: 
 
 4 Our physical as well as our social life,our manners and 
 customs, our worldly wisdom, philosophy and religion, 
 even many casual occurrences call upon us to renounce. . . . 
 For the performance of this hard task, however, Nature 
 has endowed man with abundant strength, hardihood and 
 tenacity. Especially is he aided by that buoyancy of mind 
 which is given him in inexhaustible supplies. By this 
 means he is able each moment to give up a particular 
 thing if he can only the next moment reach out after some- 
 thing new; and thus unconsciously we keep restoring our 
 whole life. We put one passion in place of another; em- 
 ployments, dilettantisms, amusements, hobbies we try 
 them all through to the end only to cry out at last that all 
 is vanity. No one is horrified at this false, this blasphem- 
 ous saying; indeed it is thought to be wise and irrefutable. 
 But there are few persons who, anticipating such intoler- 
 able feelings, in order to avoid all partial resignations, re- 
 sign themselves universally once for all. Such persons 
 
 * ' Geniessen raacht gemein.' Werke, XIII, 182. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 23 
 
 convince themselves with regard to the eternal, necessary, 
 law-governed order of things and seek to acquire ideas 
 which are indestructible and which are only confirmed by 
 contemplation of that which is transient.' 
 
 Renunciation is here not an abandonment of pleasure, 
 nor any form of self-castigation, but a purely intellectual 
 act. It is the acquirement and maintenance of a certain 
 habit of mind and its use is to counteract the influences 
 that make for pessimism. ( One of the gravest of ethical 
 needs is a source of courage, or, what is much the same, an 
 antidote for indifference, despair and cynicism. The anti- 
 dote which Goethe prescribes is compound. The second 
 part of it consists in fixing the mind as much as possible 
 
 - upon'great ideas which are not liable to decay and death. 
 
 '^This subject naturally requires further consideration by it- 
 self. The first part of the antidote consists in renunciation- 
 once-for all or resignation. We can spike the guns of the 
 croaking army from the Preacher down by simply admit- 
 ting in advance all they can say as to the vanity of the 
 world's life, that is to say, of the purely selfish pursuit of 
 property, distinction or pleasure. These things are vanity 
 not in the sense that they are contemptible but in the 
 sense that the gratification they bring is imperfect and 
 transitory. They do not afford the kind of peace which 
 the nature of man forever craves, and when one has once for 
 all admitted this fact he is not to be convulsed by each 
 new illustration of it. 
 
 There are different kinds of resignation. It may be 
 languid and apathetic ; it may, like the sky and the rocks 
 in Mr. Arnold's poem 
 
 4 Seem to bear rather than rejoice.' 
 
 Again one may be resigned to the ills of life because 
 he holds that these ills are wisely ordained as a medium 
 
24 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 wherein to prepare for another life in which they shall not 
 appear. Butlthe resignation commended by Goethe i like 
 neither of tEese. If is energetic and courageous, intent 
 solely upon performance and full of faith that life is good < 
 Veven without reference to issues that are beyond the grave. 
 " This is the creed at which Faust arrives in the fullness of 
 his years and the ringing words in which he speaks his 
 mind are in themselves a complete text book of modern 
 humanism : 
 
 The circle of the earth is known to me, 
 What's on the other side we cannot see. 
 Fool he who thither turns his blinking eyes, 
 And dreams of beings like him in the skies ! 
 Let him stand fast and look around him here! 
 To him that does his work Earth's riddle's clear. 
 Why need he fancy other worlds of bliss? 
 What he can seize and hold is his in this. 
 Thus let him travel his allotted day, 
 If ghosts beset him let him go his way; 
 And be he while both joy and pain betide, 
 Each moment of his life unsatisfied!* 
 
 IV. SELF-SURRENDER 
 
 It is not easy to describe in brief compass that part of 
 life which for Goethe is not vanity and which he thinks it 
 4 false and blasphemous ' to call vanity. Perhaps the best 
 
 *' Der Erdenkreis 1st mlr genug bekannt, 
 Nach drftben ist die Aussicht uns verrant; 
 Thor, wer dorthin die Augen blinzend richtet, 
 Slch liber Wolken Seinesgleichen dichtet! 
 Er stehe fest und sehe hier sich um ; 
 Dem Ttichtigen ist dtese Welt nicht stumra. 
 Was branch t er in die Ewigkeit zu sch weifen ! 
 Was er erkennt, Iftsst sich ergreifen. 
 Er wandle so den Erdentag entlang, 
 Wenn (leister spuken, geh' er seinen Oang ; 
 Im Weiterschreiten flnd T er Qual und Glflck, 
 Er, unbefriedigt Jeden Augenblick ! ' Werke, XIII, 220. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OP LIFE. 25 
 
 formula will be : The good work one is able to do in behalf 
 of any or all of the great ideas for the sake of which, so 
 far as can be seen, mankind exists. And here again there 
 is much in common between the Jew philosopher and the 
 humanistic poet. Says Spinoza in describing the line of 
 observation and reflection which had led him to his own 
 theory of life : 
 
 ' I noticed moreover that happiness and unhappiness 
 depend on the character of the object to which we attach 
 our affections. For about that which is not loved there 
 is never any contention ; there is no sorrow if it die, no 
 envy if it be possessed by another, no fear, no hate, no dis- 
 turbance of the mind whatever ; all of which things happen 
 if one loves that which can perish. But love for a thing 
 infinite and eternal feeds the mind with pure joy which is 
 free from all sorrow ; a thing which is greatly to be desired 
 and sought for with all one's powers. Sed amor erga rem 
 aeternam et infinitam sola laetitia pascit animum ipsaque 
 est omnis tristitiae expers : quod valde est desiderandum 
 totisque viribus quaerendum." 1 * 
 
 It is here implied distinctly enough that the supreme 
 end of life is happiness, but it is also taught that in order 
 to the attainment of any happiness that is without draw- 
 backs, an object of affection is needed which is not subject 
 to the vicissitudes of time and chance, lhat is to say, 
 while the root^of right conduct lies in the affirmation of 
 self, its fruitage, or the highest realization of self-interest, 
 lies in a self-surrendering devotion to an object felt to be 
 infinitely great and enduring. Or finally, in the words of 
 the greatest of all adepts in this kind of knowledge : 
 4 Whosoever will save his life shall lose it ; but whosoever 
 will lose his life for my sake shall save it.' 
 
 * De Intellectus Emendatione Tractates (3d paragraph.) 
 
26 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OP LIFE. 
 
 All this philosophy which has to do with man's need 
 of a religion, his need, that is, of an infinite and eternal 
 object of affection, Goethe could, and did accept with all 
 his heart. But Goethe was in two important particulars 
 what Spinoza was not: he was an heir of Hellas and a 
 contemporary of the Revolution. It is not strange there- 
 fore that he should put Man in the place of Spinoza's ' God ' 
 as the supreme object of devotion. And this is after all a 
 natural extension of Spinoza's doctrine. For with Spinoza 
 God is Nature. But Nature's last and highest thought is 
 Man ; at least we are able to discover no goal of Nature's 
 operations which is ulterior to Man and his perfection. It 
 is then reasonable to regard as the highest thing in Nature 
 those great dominating instincts or ideas through which the 
 destiny of men, whatever it be, is working itself out. Of 
 these ideas three are preeminent the idea of Right, the 
 idea of Truth, and the idea of Beauty. Others as the idea 
 of Power and of Love, may deserve mention, but the three 
 first-named have certainly been most efficient in bringing 
 man thus far from the state of animalism, and must be 
 mainly relied upon to take him the rest of the way to his 
 unknown goal. These great ideas which make for the 
 welfare of humanity are in reality the highest objects of 
 thought we know anything about. The most refined theism 
 combines them in a single Person and calls them by the 
 name of God. Work done for these is not vanity because 
 it will continue accomplishing its purpose through innu- 
 merable ages. There is then, no irreverence and no under- 
 , valuing of religion in Goethe's familiar saying: 'He that 
 has Art and Science has also Religion/* It means that 
 Beauty, Truth and Righteousness stand coordinated as the 
 worthiest possible objects of love. Each fulfills the great 
 
 * Werke, III, 274. 
 
GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OP LIFE. 27 
 
 requirement of a religion ; each furnishes a res aeterna et 
 infinite) devotion to which may be expected to afford a 
 better happiness than is to be had in the range of secular- 
 ity and selfishness. 
 
 But is the great prize to be won only on the heights of 
 artistic creation and of scientific discovery? Does the 
 world exist only for the refined and educated few ? A man 
 with such views could hardly be called a very ' helpful ' 
 thinker. The ethical creed of Goethe culminates in a doc- 
 trine which is large enough for the sage and easy enough 
 for the sage's valet ; which lays on them both the same 
 command and insures to each his own reward. The doc- - 
 trine is that happiness of the best kind comes only when 
 self is lost sight of in the sense of usefulness. To this 
 question, How to find peace ? Goethe addresses the great 
 work of his life. The theme of Faust is the redemption < -* 
 of a self-centered and self tormenting pessimist through 
 enlarged experience of life culminating at the last in self- 
 forgetful activity. 
 
 The earlier Faust is, like Werther and Tasso, a morbid 
 nature. His malady is that which is described by Sainte- 
 
 Beuve as ' un vague degodt du monde et de la vie / 
 
 une surexcitation maladive de Vdgoisme et de V orgueil."* 
 The one thing that he desires is happiness and he has be- 
 come a sentient misery. In the bitterness of his contempt 
 for life he wagers his soul with Mephistopheles that exist- 
 ence has not for him the possibility of one single happy 
 moment when he shall be ready ' to stretch himself com- 
 placently upon a bed of ease,)' : J4reir'he sets out through 
 the c little world and the great ' in search of this one happy 
 moment. One after the other he experiments witli riot, 
 love, politics, gestJrefcic sensualism, military leadership and 
 the getting of riches. He meets with various pleasures aft 
 of which presently end in sorrow or disappointment. At 
 
28 GOETHE AND THE CONDUCT OF LIFE. 
 
 last^in his old age^he forms and executes the great plan of 
 redeeming to human uses a large tract of the ocean's bed. 
 Full of riches and honor, but still thinking of himself, he 
 'is irritated by a trifling obstacle in his path, In trying to 
 get rid of this he commits a crime which he expiates with 
 blindness. Then with death at his door he summons up 
 all his energy to direct the draining of a pestilential marsh 
 on his domain. In his eagerness to complete the ..great 
 work before death shall interrupt him he forgets himSelf 
 and lets his imagination range forward to the coming gen- 
 erations that are to enjoy the results of his labor; -mdan 
 the anticipation of their happiness the supreme moment 
 has arrived for himself. He has both won and lost his 
 wager. There has been no lying down upon a bed of ease, 
 but the moment .of jmre joy, sola laetitia expers omnis 
 tristitiae, fcas falleiTto his lot. It came the moment he 
 ceased to look for it and fixed his thoughts upon the ben- 
 efit others were to get from the good work he had done. 
 
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