Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Page 9

have seen, of the smallest chance to be decisive, or indeed to last

beyond the day, had been uttered regarding it. Some regretted that the
fire of /Werter/ was so wonderfully abated; whisperings there might be
about 'lowness,' 'heaviness;' some spake forth boldly in behalf of
suffering 'virtue.' Novalis was not among the speakers, but he censured
the work in secret, and this for a reason which to us will seem the
strangest; for its being, as we should say, a Benthamite work! Many are
the bitter aphorisms we find, among his Fragments, directed against
/Meister/ for its prosaic, mechanical, economical, coldhearted,
altogether Utilitarian character. We English again call Goethe a mystic;
so difficult is it to please all parties! But the good, deep, noble Novalis
made the fairest amends; for notwithstanding all this, Tieck tells us, if
we remember rightly, he continually returned to /Meister/, and could
not but peruse and reperuse it.
Goethe's /Wanderjahre/ was published in his seventy-second year;
/Werter/ in his twenty-fifth; thus in passing between these two works,
and over /Meister's Lehrjahre/ which stands nearly midway, we have
glanced over a space of almost fifty years, including within them, of
course, whatever was most important in his public or private history.
By means of these quotations, so diverse in their tone, we meant to
make it visible that a great change had taken place in the moral
disposition of the man; a change from inward imprisonment, doubt and
discontent, into freedom, belief and clear activity; such a change as, in
our opinion, must take place, more or less consciously, in every
character that, especially in these times, attains to spiritual manhood,
and in characters possessing any thoughtfulness and sensibility, will
seldom take place without a too painful consciousness, without bitter
conflicts, in which the character itself is too often maimed and
impoverished, and which end too often not in victory, but in defeat, or
fatal compromise with the enemy. Too often, we may well say; for
though many gird on the harness, few bear it warrior-like; still fewer
put it off with triumph. Among our own poets, Byron was almost the
only man we saw faithfully and manfully struggling, to the end, in this
cause; and he died while the victory was still doubtful, or at best, only
beginning to be gained. We have already stated our opinion, that
Goethe's success in this matter has been more complete than that of any
other man in his age; nay, that, in the strictest sense, he may almost be

called the only one that has so succeeded. On this ground, were it on no
other, we have ventured to say that his spiritual history and procedure
must deserve attention; that his opinions, his creations, his mode of
thought, his whole picture of the world as it dwells within him, must to
his contemporaries be an inquiry of no common interest; of an interest
altogether peculiar, and not in this degree exampled in existing
literature. These things can be but imperfectly stated here, and must be
left, not in a state of demonstration, but at the utmost, of loose
fluctuating probability; nevertheless, if inquired into, they will be found
to have a precise enough meaning, and, as we believe, a highly
important one.
For the rest, what sort of mind it is that has passed through this change,
that has gained this victory; how rich and high a mind; how learned by
study in all that is wisest, by experience in all that is most complex, the
brightest as well as the blackest, in man's existence; gifted with what
insight, with what grace and power of utterance, we shall not for the
present attempt discussing. All these the reader will learn, who studies
his writings with such attention as they merit; and by no other means.
Of Goethe's dramatic, lyrical, didactic poems, in their thousandfold
expressiveness, for they are full of expressiveness, we can here say
nothing. But in every department of Literature, of Art ancient and
modern, in many provinces of Science, we shall often meet him; and
hope to have other occasions of estimating what, in these respects, we
and all men owe him.
Two circumstances, meanwhile, we have remarked, which to us throw
light on the nature of his original faculty for Poetry, and go far to
convince us of the Mastery he has attained in that art: these we may
here state briefly, for the judgment of such as already know his writings,
or the help of such as are beginning to know them. The first is his
singularly emblematic intellect; his perpetual never-failing tendency to
transform into /shape/, into /life/, the opinion, the feeling that may
dwell in him; which, in its widest sense, we reckon to be essentially the
grand problem of the Poet.