Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Page 2

save, or help to save any mortal, his endeavours
will have been repaid.
With these things in some measure before us, we must remind our
readers of another influence at work in this affair, and one acting, as we
think, in the contrary direction. That pitiful enough desire for
'originality' which lurks and acts in all minds, will rather, we imagine,
lead the critic of Foreign Literature to adopt the negative than the
affirmative with regard to Goethe. If a writer indeed feel that he is
writing for England alone, invisibly and inaudibly to the rest of the
Earth, the temptations may be pretty equally balanced; if he write for
some small conclave, which he mistakenly thinks the representative of
England, they may sway this way or that, as it chances. But writing in
such isolated spirit is no longer possible. Traffic, with its swift ships, is
uniting all nations into one; Europe at large is becoming more and more
one public; and in this public, the voices for Goethe, compared with
those against him, are in the proportion, as we reckon them, both as to

the number and value, of perhaps a hundred to one. We take in, not
Germany alone, but France and Italy; not the Schlegels and Schellings,
but the Manzonis and De Staels. The bias of originality, therefore, may
lie to the side of censure; and whoever among us shall step forward,
with such knowledge as our common critics have of Goethe, to
enlighten the European public, by contradiction in this matter, displays
a heroism, which, in estimating his other merits, ought nowise to be
forgotten.
Our own view of the case coincides, we confess, in some degree with
that of the majority. We reckon that Goethe's fame has, to a
considerable extent, been deserved; that his influence has been of high
benefit to his own country; nay more, that it promises to be of benefit
to us, and to all other nations. The essential grounds of this opinion,
which to explain minutely were a long, indeed boundless task, we may
state without many words. We find, then, in Goethe, an Artist, in the
high and ancient meaning of that term; in the meaning which it may
have borne long ago among the masters of Italian painting, and the
fathers of Poetry in England; we say that we trace in the creations of
this man, belonging in every sense to our own time, some touches of
that old, divine spirit, which had long passed away from among us, nay
which, as has often been laboriously demonstrated, was not to return to
this world any more.
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. All good men may be called poets in act, or in
word; all good poets are so in both. But Goethe besides appears to us as
a person of that deep endowment, and gifted vision, of that experience
also and sympathy in the ways of all men, which qualify him to stand
forth, not only as the literary ornament, but in many respects too as the

Teacher and exemplar of his age. For, to say nothing of his natural gifts,
he has cultivated himself and his art, he has studied how to live and to
write, with a fidelity, an unwearied earnestness, of which there is no
other living instance; of which, among British poets especially,
Wordsworth alone offers any resemblance. And this in our view is the
result. To our minds, in these soft, melodious imaginations of his, there
is embodied the Wisdom which is proper to this time; the beautiful, the
religious Wisdom, which may still, with something of its old
impressiveness, speak to the whole soul; still, in these hard,
unbelieving utilitarian days, reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but not
unreal World, that so the Actual and the Ideal may again meet together,
and clear Knowledge be again wedded to Religion, in the life and
business of men.
Such is our conviction or persuasion with regard to the poetry of
Goethe. Could we demonstrate this opinion to be true, could we even
exhibit it with that degree of clearness and consistency which it has
attained in our own thoughts, Goethe were, on our part,