GOETHE & THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
by Owen Barfield
From the Golden Blade – An Anthroposophical Journal
This article is sourced from the 1949 Volume
Few English people know much of Goethe, and of that few most rather dislike him. I make this observation with some confidence because it is based on a sort of private Gallup poll which I have been desultorily conducting over the last twenty years. The dislike is not violent, but its roots are deep and it will yield neither to sincere admiration of his greatness, nor to a fond love of his best lyrics. Admiration, even reverence, for a genius is one thing: the taste for a man is another. A taste for Goethe you will certainly find here and there in England, but you will find it in small circles wedded to the study of German language and literature rather than among the general reading public.
From the point of view of literary criticism this would not matter so much. What makes it important is the fact that Goethe is rarely presented to us as a writer pure and simple. We are to look on him, we are told, first and foremost as a teacher; and the lesson he teaches is the way to live. It is not a First Folio we are invited to admire, but a man. It was so that he himself wished to be regarded, and he has had his way; for it is so that he is in fact regarded by all to whom he is most dear. Voilá un homme ! said Napoleon after meeting him. So say all true “Goetheanists.” So also said Rudolf Steiner. For it was by no means only the scientific work,1 and the all-important way of knowledge and attitude to Nature associated with it, to which Steiner attached importance. Indeed there can have been few men more deeply steeped in loving knowledge of Goethe’s whole work and personality; and it is a man—not indeed a perfect, but a reverend, but emphatically an imitable man—who purports to be disclosed, when the author of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, points (how often in his lectures !) to the author of the Remische Elegien.
1 [This is however, the only part of Goethe’s work which has any fundamental connection with Anthroposophy. As it is being dealt with elsewhere in this Annual I omit all further reference to it.]
The reasons for the distaste I have mentioned are fairly clear to me, and I shall begin by trying to state them as clearly and forcibly as I can. What then are the obstacles in the way of some twentieth century neophyte who seeks in all humility to enter the temple of Goethe and worship at the shrine ? First, we are living in very bad times. In general there are none more propitious for attaching us to the great teachers of humanity:—
Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad days my mind ? …
But it must be confessed that, if it is for comfort in tribulation that we turn to the Weimar of a hundred and fifty years ago, we meet with a rather chilling reception. I do not know what sort of reading Wilhelm Meister may make in 1949 in a cellar in Berlin; but both the precept and the example of Goethe for the proper conduct of human life do seem to presuppose, almost as a sine qua non, at least three good meals a day, an adequate domestic staff to make them appear and disappear, and a comfortable sum coming in, preferably quarterly, of its own accord.
Given these together with unbroken physical health, the doctrine is plain to read and not acceptable. If a man feels very badly indeed that he wants to go to Italy, let him go ! We are to warm both hands before the fire of life, to reject no experience it offers and to profit by all. We are to have life—not some pale and prelatical Ersatz of the spirit, raised from the seed of renunciation or suffering, but good, rich, fruity human life in the ordinary sense and we ace to have it more abundantly. And then—we are to be at peace with ourselves—heruhigt. If that is impossible for a time, we are, it is true, to acquire strength from dispeace—doch starker in der Unruhe sein. But the last is only obiter. The essence of the doctrine, and all the emphasis of it, is the obligation to live a full, happy, peaceful, active life, transmuting experience and, above all, joyful experience—gradually into wisdom. Ripeness is all.
I need not labour the obvious. The cry of one of Goethe’s English admirers, Matthew Arnold, from the middle (as it seems to us) of the blue lagoon of Victorian security:—has, to say the least of it, lost nothing of its force three years after the second World War.
Strong was he, with a spirit free
From mists, and sane, and clear ;
Clecarer, how much ! than ours—yet we
Have a worse course to steer …
But we, brought forth and rear’d in hours
Of change, alarm, surprise—
What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise ?
– has, to say the least of it, lost nothing of its force three years after the second World War.
Disappointed, we will suppose mean the poet as a poet, the lyric poet pure and simple. And here he is on surer ground. “The creator of German literature”—we are no judges of that. What we do know is, that this man sings, sings, sings. Mignon’s Song, the Chorus in Heaven, and the opening scene of the second part of Faust, a score of Lieder, whose settings may well have been almost from childhood a part of the very stuff of his soul—till he learnt German and hardly knew which was the more precious, the melodies of Schubert or the words of Goethe! But let him now, in an attempt to measure the man’s true stature as a poet, advance beyond an anthology acquaintance and seek to come to grips with the whole corpus of Goethe lyric. He is likely to be bothered by the over whelming preponderance of the erotic motive. The proportion of love-songs—adolescent in mood, though not in their intellectual and imaginal overtones—is, for a great poet, so enormous. “There is,” said Coleridge once, “a nimiety, a too-muchness about the Germans.” One may—and none of these exceptionally favourable conditions is particularly common to-day—one may be not easily tired by regular rhymed verse, lucidly expressed; one may take a special delight in the feminine endings in which German poetry abounds; one’s darling Muse may even be Erato; and still …. it was Max Beerbohm, parodying George Moore, who observed:”There are times, are there not, dear reader, when one is not thinking about girls ?”
From the love-lyrics he passes—perforce, for it is a life that he has been directed to admire—to the love-affairs. Excellent stuff here for the meticulous or the gossipy biographer, and fine, cosy reading for those who find poetry itself a little boring—if only it were Kit Marlowe or Robbie Burns they were talking of! If only it were not for the painful embarrassment of that ecce homo ! And then, somehow or other he-or she—will have to come to terms with the whole tone of Goethe’s attitude to women:
“Pah !” said Goethe, laughing, “as if love had anything to do with the understanding ! The things we love in a young woman (Frauenzimmer) are something quite different from understanding. We love in her beauty, youthfulness, playfulness, trustfulness, her character, her faults, her caprices, and God knows what all that is indescribable; but we do not love her understanding.” 2
I do not stop to enquire how an educated young woman of to-day will relish these observations of the Master. I only observe that at the point where understanding is ruled out they seem to prefer the frank appetite of Donne to the blend of cool patronage and passionate adoration, with a mild flavouring of zenana, which they will find if they apply themselves to the study of Goethe’s life and writings. So, at all events, they say; and I believe they believe what they say.
Lastly, running through the whole succession of Goethe’s entanglements, and indeed through his whole life, is that “x” which it is so difficult to name without begging the question—non-attachment, egotism, the will to self-development, the Renaissance or Faustian appetite for all experience, “self-culture.” And this brings us to the gravamen of the charge against him. It is not new. It was urged, in this country, both by Carlyle’s friend John Sterling and by Tennyson. It is, that at the deep heart’s core there lay nothing but that refined yet ruthless egotism, that cool objectification of personal relationships as “experiences,” for which lesser men are called bounders. George Santayana, describing Faust (and therefore Goethe 3) in his Three Philosophical Poets, put it clearly enough :—
He had regretted in the same way the unhappiness of Gretchen … He would continue, if life could last, doing things that, in some respects, he would be obliged to regret; but he would banish that regret easily, in the pursuit of some new interest, and, on the whole, he would not regret having been obliged to regret them. Otherwise, he would not have shared the whole experience of mankind, but missed the important experience of self-accusation and self-recovery.
This is a crucial passage. There are those, not overburdened with moral sense or humour, who agree that it is what Goethe practised and preached and fully approve it. I am not addressing them. We others respond rather differently. We are, for instance, willing to believe that, if we had the time and inclination to research into , the break with Lili (for these are matters on which we prefer to form our own opinions), we should easily agree that Goethe was not to blame, or at least that his behaviour was neither mean nor unworthy. What is much harder to stomach is the sound of his voice, at Weimar later, explaining to Eckermann how important it had been for him to have the experience of being betrothed. We can swallow all the, entanglements at a gulp without so much as winking. But the old man’s voice, his biography festooned about with Charlottes, Katchens, Minnas, Frederikas, Mariannes and goodness knows whom al, solemnly telling Eckermann how he had been working all his life at his own “ennoblement” (an meiner Veredelung )—this is a somewhat tougher morsel. It is not so much
moral comments that spring to our lips as explosions—of the pithy sort which Sir Toby Belch hurled from behind his hedge at the unchecked complacencies of Malvolio.
2 [ Conversations with Eckerman, 1824, Jan 2nd ]
3 [ I am no friend to the loose practice of identifying fictitious characters with the authors who created them ; bu in Goethe’s case it is inevitable. He himself always insisted on it, and even went so far as to tell Eckermann that poets only invent when inspiration fails. Also Santayana makes his own intention quite clear in the passage now quoted. ]
No authentic Anglo-Saxon with the right twinkle in his eye should have had much difficulty in disposing of “self-culture”—if this is all it is. It was no Bloomsbury witling, it was not even an Englishman, it was the sedulous disciple who introduced Goethe to the world of English letters, called him hero and made his reputation here, it was, in fact, Thomas Carlyle who wrote of him in a letter : “Goethe is the greatest genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest ass that has lived for three.”
We ought, however, to reflect that, whatever else “self culture” may have been, it was Goethe’s way of dealing with a problem which faces humanity as a whole. I mean the awkward phenomenon of increasing self-consciousness. It is our problem too, this curious malaise of humanity; and it has grown rather worse than better since Goethe’s day. It was perhaps about the i8th century that men first began to take more serious notice of that queer intruder on the life of the soul, the detached Onlooker present in each one of us, and half instinctively to make provision for him in their ideas and their conventions. It was then that the word psychology was used for the first time in its modem sense. Alongside, and a little apart from, the impulses, passions and thoughts which are the true stuff of the soul, there has come into being this nothingness, this mere awareness, which looks on and says of each : “Yes, I wish it, I feel it – and yet this wisher and this feeler are not quite me. I am here, looing on all the time.”
It was not always so. Formerly, if there were conflicting impulses, yet the one which prevailed was felt as the whole self in action. The whole Augustine sinned, and afterwards the whole Augustine repented. The whole Dante loved, lapsed, and loved again after a different fashion. But for us, in varying degrees, there is the sinner and the one who observes the sinner, the lover and the one who observes the lover. It is not a question of whether it is a good thing or not; it is simply a fact. The only question is, what is the right way for men to deal with it, now that it has come to stay.
Naturally it is nowhere more marked than in the sphere of the relation between men and women, for it is there that the experiencing soul behaves in the most surprising and fluctuant way. The device which the i8th century evolved for according recognition to the experiencing and to the observing soul in the same moment was the whole apparatus of archness and gallantry. Mark their significant use of the word “conscious.” In contemplating Goethe*s attitude to women we should always remember this. It is not simply that he accepted the conventions of his age (though we should not, either, forget that he does in fact belong to a quite remote one, having passed half his life before the French Revolution); he would instinctively feel the reason for, and the fitness of them.
Outmoded as all that apparatus is to-day, before we dismiss it utterly, we might just ask ourselves whether our own way of meeting the problem is so very much more satisfactory; we detach ourselves from the little gambols of our souls by calling them “fixations” and “transfers”; they spoke of “pleasing pain” and eyes that “deal delicious death.” Which is better? You pays your money and you takes your choice! But there is no doubt what Goethe’s choice would have been. He looked on the soul as he looked on Nature, as an inexhaustibly rich gift to be accepted with joy and treated with reverence and delicacy. And as with Nature, so with the soul, the problem was to grow more and more fully conscious of it without destroying it in the process. Both our scientists and our men of letters are for the most part indifferent to the destruction, provided they can get on with the consciousness. Witness the popularity of James Joyce.
We must also take into account the Germanity, if I may so call it, of Goethe’s own soul—that subtle distinction of colouring and emphasis which is best felt as untranslateableness. Goethe’s mother-tongue was one which can still, even to-day, employ the ineffable neuter gender, known also to the Greeks, in speaking of young females (feel the difference between “I saw her on a Sunday” and “Ich sah es an einem Sonntag“) and which at the same time trails about it the faint aroma of a mystical reverence for woman that is as old as Tacitus.
He found these things, he did not make them ; just as he found the social conventions of an age, in which educated young women were appalled at the idea of going out unaccompanied in society (at all events when he reached Weimar) in which adulterous liaisons were nevertheless as common as they are to-day. They were part of the air he breathed as he grew up. The only thing for which he can be accountable to praise or blame is the use he made of them. And in his hands they became that wholly untranslateable ewig-weibliche. Our “eternal feminine” has acquired a facetious overtone which puts it out of court; and yet Bayard Taylor’s rendering of the closing words of Faust:
The Woman-Soul leadeth us
Upward and on
is even more misleading, for it suggests the “ennobling” influence of one Thackeray’s heroines, and I do not think that was at all what Goethe had in mind. Woman as a symbol on the one hand of Nature and on the other of the human soul, would be much nearer the mark. Thus Santayana, in relating the words specifically to Nature, says that the ewig-weibliche was, for Goethe, “the ideal of something infinitely attractive and essentially inexhaustible.”
I find this a little superficial, for I think there was also the underlying sense of something more than an allegorical relation, indeed of a real connection, in the foundations of the world, between Eva and the goddess Natura. Moreover, Woman (which in this kind of context always means young and attractive woman, though in the statistical nature of things there will always be one or two about who are not managing to combine both attributes) has long been apprehended by the poets and myth-makers of Christian civilisation as a symbol of the soul, and of qualities of soul. I think that the ewig-weibliche stood, in Goethe’s imagination and feeling, first for some real woman, secondlv for Nature, and thirdly for the human soul.
About Goethe’s relations with women, as recorded and as a whole, there was, underlying the poetic lightness of touch, a note of earnestness and reverence that is unmistakable. It is doubtful whether any of the young ladies suffered any lasting harm, and most of them seem to have finished up by getting happily married. The passing pain was something which Goethe at least shared with them. I fancy if I had been a Frauenzimmer living at about that time, I would not have run very fast to avoid a love-affair with Goethe, even if I could have known in advance how it would end. “Never,” wrote Karl Julius Schroer,’ 4 who was at one time Steiner’s teacher, “was the relationship a frivolous one.” And he pointed out that in nearly every case, after the passion had waned, it gave place to a lifelong friendship or mutual regard. Symbols they might be to his imagination, but there was always also a true personal “meeting” and much sincere idealism. Thackeray himself could barely have improved in this last respect on some passages from the letters to Charlotte von Stein.
And then, if, as I said, the quantity of lyrics all of the same kind is at first a little overwhelming, it is the quality after all that really counts, and the only reasonable reflection on the matter is, that you cannot have too much of a good thing. After all, we are not obliged to read them all, however good they are. Meanwhile, one of the reasons why it would be worth while growing old and acquiring some leisure is that one would possibly have time to read the whole of the West-Ostliche Divan, instead of merely dipping into it here and there.
We should rather look on Goethe’s poetry (and I speak now of the whole of it) as one of the arsenals of the fortress of the human soul, now under attack from many different sides, and be thankful for any bit of ammunition or armoury we may find there. For the soul is the Cinderella of 20th century civilisation. She lives on sentiment: of which we are mortally afraid, preferring to rush out of it either to the physical extreme of violence or of appetite on the one side, or on the other to a rarefied and contentless spirituality; or perhaps to try both in turn, like Aldous Huxley. But the old man at Weimar grew wiser and wiser about all this. He knew well enough that the “nostalgia” of which our young politico-intellectuals spend most of their time accusing each other—and which he would have called Sehnsucht—so far from being a weakness, is the most precious sacramental wine of the soul, to be used by the spirit sparingly and with reverence for the purpose of making a man.
4 [Goethe und Marianne Willemer. 1878. Reputed in Goethe und die Ltebe. (Der Kommende Tag A.-G. Verlag., Stuttgart, 1922) ]
It is Goethe’s distinction, and his message to us, that he retained throughout his life both this reverence for the soul, which allowed him to surrender to its varium et mutabile without feeling an ass, and a deep and abiding sense of man’s responsibility of self-consciousness. Only, instead of allowing the consciousness to destroy the soul, he strove to maintain it as a golden thread of self-awareness and self-control passing through all its vicissitudes and growing stronger with the lapse of time and the accumulation of experience. He was in this respect a pioneer, and it is rather our weakness than his if we allow to a few fatuities any substantial weight in the scales on which we weigh the value of “self-culture”. No doubt he specialised somewhat in one particular brand of sentiment. What is infinitely more important is, that the mind which contained as formidable a detached Onlooker as is portrayed in Mephistopheles yet never lost its faculty for simple and reverent feeling, or its sense of the greatness of man. For it is precisely this that we are to-day in such great danger of losing.
But is it a danger ? Might it not be rather a good thing? Do we not owe most of our miseries to this idea, promulgated at the Renaissance and confirmed with acclamation by the Romantics, that man is great? What signs precisely is he showing of it? Si monumentum requiris circumspice—at Guernica, at Warsaw, at Hiroshima, or, for that matter, at almost any bookstall. Is not all this because we have forgotten that man is not great; that only God is great ? Has man in fact any such responsibility to be fully conscious as has been suggested, or indeed any responsibility at all except to be good and obedient ?
Questions of this sort are being asked with some force in the 20th century by the sincerest and most devout Christians; they are being asked with uncompromising sincerity and often with great intellectual force; and they are being listened to. I think that any substantial revival of Christianity which may occur in the near future is likely to be one which implies this interpretation of history; one, that is to say, which rejects in toto as error that Renaissance affirmation of the spiritual value of experience which has been called Faustian, and as blasphemous the Romantic conception of man as a creative being. And I shall be surprised if we do not see, in the forthcoming bi-centenary year, some swingeing attacks on Goethe as the high priest of the twin heresies of pantheism and humanism.
“God,” says Carlyle in one of his Essays, “or the godlike in man,” he adds casually, as if the two were very much the same thing. And I doubt if Goethe would have been much more cautious. The theological writers of the 20th century have certain advantages which he lacked. They have seen for themselves whither the postulate that God is to be found only in man may lead in art, literature and society; and in politics how easily individual self-culture degenerates into its national counterpart. And they are pretty sure that man is not the place to look for Him.
The subject is clearly not one which can be pursued here at the length it deserves. Two things, however, may be observed. First, that if it be blasphemy to conceive of God as “in” man, in the sense of being a part of his nature—some vague aspiration or higher Self—yet to conceive of Him as “outside” man, in the same mode as objects perceived through the senses are “outside,” is idolatry. Second, that such words as “in” and “outside,” “pantheism” and “humanism” are in such a context war-cries rather than instruments of thought. Through Rudolf Steiner there was revealed the process of that gradual entrusting of the Cosmic Intelligence to man, of which the Incarnation of the Word was the central event, and which is the meaning of history. At least either this was so or he was under a very strange and ingenious delusion.
The revelation must speak for itself to those who will be at pains to acquaint themselves with it. It is as remote from the vague evolutionary humanism of the Victorian intellectuals and their poet-manufactured God as it is from the precise, changeless Augustinian thearchy which is more often imagined to-day by the like combination of moral earnestness with intellectual integrity. None who have once been made aware of that revelation can be in any doubt about the reality of the responsibility of which I spoke earlier in this article or the sense in which it is correct to speak of man as great. Great he is, and greater he must become, for good or evil, and the only effect of his voluntarily denying his own greatness must be to make him permissively and involuntarily great for evil—as in the case of the Hindu stationmaster who, preferring humility to responsibility and looking always for immediate guidance, once telegraphed to his Terminus : Man-eating tiger on up-platform stop what do?
But to return to Goethe and our imaginary neophyte. Let him lay aside all such considerations as I have been advancing and merely proceed, undeterred by the obstacles, to a closer acquaintance with the man. At a certain point he is likely to meet with a startling experience. Those obstacles which I began by stressing do not indeed disappear. But they suddenly dwindle in size; so much so as to seem quite irrelevant. The sheer size of Goethe’s soul is suddenly impressed on him. If the water is a little brown, it is rather with sheer velocity and force and quantity than with mud. Aloof, self-contained, whole at any moment and seeming at rest in itself, on closer inspection what we were investigating under the impression that it was a brook turns out to be a roaring wall of water, a veritable Niagara.
Nor would it be easy to point to any particular source from which the impression is derived. There is no single production of Goethe’s pen—not even Faust—which overwhelms us with an unquestioned sublimity, as do the Divine Comedy, King Lear or Paradise Lost. It is the whole man, the life, character and works taken together, which weigh upon us, the even-balanced soul weathering its own storms, the deep earnestness and reverence apparent beneath whatsoever Leichtfertigkeiten (“an habitual reference to interior truth” Emerson called it), the wisdom of the head untired and untiring wielded by the ever-youthful heart.
No, this is not the kind of strength which would have failed to grapple with a tragic destiny had it been called upon to do so. And, in the eye of God, may that not be perhaps the easier task? Comfort, success, prosperity and adulation need some handling. Moreover, if Goethe’s external life was an easy on by our standards we may reflect that we have no right to assume that the good life will always consist of that drab sacrifice punctuated by spasmodic heroism which we have learnt to accept and approve. As a teacher even of a practical way of life, he may yet speak very pertinently, if not to our children, at least to our children’s children. For us, mean while, the lesson is, that such a man has in fact existed at all. There is strength to be drawn from the mere contact with his strength. We are reminded that the human soul has indeed the latent power and breadth and universality which are already beginning to be required of her in the discharge of responsibilities now dimly seen to be “global” and in fact cosmic; and that, as the light of art is put out, so neither is democracy well served nor God well praised by denying her greatness.
Aloof? There is some conflict on the point. They say his friends did not find him so in the end, and his servant, according to Eckermann, adored him. Moreover he stood well with children. Schiller, after their first meeting, wrote :—
“I believe, indeed, he is an egoist in an unusual degree. He has the talent of conquering men, and of binding them by small as well as great attentions: but he always knows how to hold himself free. He makes his existence benevolently felt but only like a god, without giving himself:
this seems to me a consequent and well-planned conduct which is calculated to ensure the highest enjoyment of self-love. …“
Yes Schiller, a year or two later, loved the man this side idolatry and wrote of him as being “still more loved as a man than admired as an author.” Lewes, in his Life, in seeking to answer the charge, admits its wide currency. “Men might,” he says, “learn so much from his works had not the notion of his coldness and indifference disturbed their judgment.”
It cannot be denied that, whatever it may have signified to meet Goethe in the flesh, the impression made by the record on posterity (and that is really all that the 20th century can be concerned with) is very commonly one of aloofness, and of a certain chill, repelling rather than repellent. Waterfalls make all sorts of chuckling and endearing noises, but if you listen attentively to Niagara the predominant refrain of its thunder is Noli me tangere ! “Goethe,” said Emerson, in an essay not exactly conspicuous for lack of enthusiasm, “can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the sake of culture. He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be his portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed : of a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having one test for all men—What can yow teach me ?“
How unobtrusively judicious is that “to be his portion ! For the third time we touch this question of “self-culture.” . . . Mein Geist . . . Mein Geist … it is as easy to keep on saying as Lord ! Lord ! And yet the spirit that roared down the Niagara of Goethe’s soul never did become quite “his” spirit. For that, by virtue of the paradox at the heart of creation, only befalls those who are most vividly aware that it is not theirs—that the Lord hath chosen Sion to be an habitation for himself. Then indeed it becomes theirs and, in the mysterious chemistry of the paradox, turns sweet in all the majesty of its strength. This was a consummation which Goethe never achieved. “The old Eternal Genius” (it is Emerson speaking again) “who built the world has confided himself more to this man than to any other.” And yet the colossal soul was somehow not quite a sublime spirit.
That Goethe was not doctrinally a Christian is obvious enough, though his early phase of pietism was taken, as he too all else, seriously, and its influence was lifelong; though he attained to that deep respect for the Christian religion, which he expressed towards the end of Wilhelm Meister. What is more important for literature is a certain Christianising element in the soul, which is only partly and perhaps not necessarily dependent on doctrine at all, and which, as Clutton Brock once pointed out in a brief essay, is detectable in a man’s writings more as a kind of subtle flavour than anything else. Perhaps it is something to do with the soul’s most secret attitude to suffering and death. Whatever it is, it is (to give an example) conspicuously absent from Milton’s writings. It is lacking also from Goethe’s. And this, lack makes itself felt here and there in the numberless little touches which have combined to build up that impression of coldness. It would have made impossible, for instance, or must at least have modified the tone of, those unpleasing expressions of contempt for large numbers of his fellow creatures, including practically all Germans ; just as, in his life, it would have ruled out the morganatic connection—domestically “aloof”—with Christiane Vulpius.
There is one aspect of experience which the creator of Faust never really succeeded in expressing and that is what ha been well called “costingness.” The recoveries are too complete; the regrets banished too easily-so that if, in a fairly deep sense, he learned everything, we are sometimes affected with an uneasy suspicion that, in the deepest sense of all, he learned nothing. So, in the love-poems, matchless treasury as they are of pure and tender passion, there is one stop that is never opened. Nowhere has Goethe expressed that blend of earthly passion with the last selfless love of spirit for spirit which has moved not only Shakespeare, but a score of meaner talents, to music.
Nay, if you read this line, remember
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe!
is an infinity beyond his reach. When he did once move away from is true métier as a singer of love-songs, namely, the expression of passion in what I have tentatively called the adolescent mood, he moved not in this direction, but into the delighting, but far from venerable, pagan amorism of the Rōmische Elegien.
The two things in Goethe to which Rudolf Steiner continually drew attention were, first by a long way, his method of knowledge. Goethe’s view of the limited value of purely abstract theorising about Nature was part of a conception of man’s whole relation to Nature which is of religious as well as of scientific importance. Steiner himself taught that the Incarnation was an historical event which reached to the foundations not of human nature alone but of the whole earth; and that since that time, the mind which, in cognition, approaches Nature with imagination and reverence, will find, not the amorphous deity of the Pantheists, but the Christ Himself in His cosmic aspect. In Goethe’s attitude he found just such an approach, and it was on the positive value of this that he was concerned to dwell. For, however it. may have been for Goethe himself, the importance for humanity as a whole of precisely this rare and new thing must far outweigh the question whether he had a right under standing of historical Christianity, of Christian doctrine, or of the Christ Himself in His personal aspect. For these we can look elsewhere.
The second thing was that transmutation of experience into wisdom and strength, which has been both admired and criticised as “self-culture.” It is, I believe, true that there were no more passionate students of the mass of observations accumulated by the Ptolemaic astronomers than those who had themselves come to accept the Copernican system. The geocentric, but faithful and accurate, data spoke to the heliocentrically thinking reader a language unknown to those who had originally collected them. The outstanding impression which Steiner’s work and personality make on those acquainted with them is his deep sense of responsibility, of his own responsibility to mankind and, still more, of man’s responsibility to the Universe. I believe that the pain he suffered from his knowledge of the latter, combined with his actual observation of our feebleness and inadequacy, was something which it is impossible for most of us to imagine. Consequently, when he saw in Goethe the rare spectacle of a human soul at least struggling towards something like the fullness of stature which will one day be required of it, if, Christ-filled, it is to carry the burden of cosmic tensions, his thankfulness far outweighed any questions about the egocentricity of this particular soul. We must remember that he also taught reincarnation. There are remarks scattered here and there which suggest that he felt Goethe’s limitations sharply enough, but they are so few and far between as to show that he also never considered it was these that mattered.
This positive attitude is clearly the only wise one; but since, if you hope to extricate people from error, you must first do justice to their truth, I have thought fit to dwell at some length on the limitations both real and supposed. Rudolf Steiner’s life was neither sheltered nor leisured. It was one in which poverty played no inconsiderable part, in which selflessness was at all times paramount, which must have been, at all events in his later years, one of almost uninterrupted suffering. Yet the finger points tranquilly to that other life in Frankfurt, in Strassburg, in Rome, in Weimar. These are bad times for a philosophy of joyous experience; yet it would be surprising indeed if we looked carefully where that finger points and found no elixir.