“Hamlet.Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.Horatio.What’s that, my lord?Hamlet.Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?Horatio.E’en so.Hamlet.And smelt so? pah! (Puts down the skull.)Horatio.E’en so, my lord!Hamlet.To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?Horatio.’Twere to reason too curiously to consider so.Hamlet.No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus:—Alexander died; Alexander was buried; Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:O that that earth which kept the world in aweShould patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!”
“Hamlet.Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.
Horatio.What’s that, my lord?
Hamlet.Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ the earth?
Horatio.E’en so.
Hamlet.And smelt so? pah! (Puts down the skull.)
Horatio.E’en so, my lord!
Hamlet.To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
Horatio.’Twere to reason too curiously to consider so.
Hamlet.No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus:—Alexander died; Alexander was buried; Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:O that that earth which kept the world in aweShould patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!”
Observe how Shakespeare here defends, through Hamlet, his own tendency “too curiously” to consider death. To sum up all, however, let us turn to that unparalleled burst of language in theTempest, in which the poet has defeated Time itself by chivalrously proclaiming to all time what Time can do:—
“And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made of; and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.”
This, we contend, is no mere poetic phrenzy, inserted because it was dramatically suitable that Prospero should so express himself at that place; it is the explosion into words of a feeling during which Prospero was forgotten, and Shakespeare swooned into himself. And what is the continuation of the passage but a kind of postscript, describing, under the guise of Prospero, Shakespeare’s own agitation with what he had just written?—
“Sir, I am vexed;Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled:Be not disturbed with my infirmity:If you be pleased, retire into my cell,And there repose:a turn or two I’ll walk,To still my beating mind.”
To our imagination the surmise is that Shakespeare here laid down his pen, and began to pace his chamber, too agitated to write more that night.
In this extreme familiarity with the conception of mortality in general, and perhaps also in this extreme sensitiveness to the thought of death as a matter of personal import, all great poets, and possibly all great men whatever, have to some extent resembled Shakespeare. For these are the feelings of our commonnature on which religion and all solemn activity have founded and maintained themselves. Space and Time are the largest and the outermost of all human conceptions; to stand, therefore, incessantly upon these extreme conceptions, as upon the perimeter of a figure, and to view all inwards from them, is the highest exercise of thought to which a human being can attain. Accordingly, in all great poets there may be discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world figured as a poor little ball pendent in space and moving forward out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. But in this respect Shakespeare exceeds them all; and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more religious, more spiritual, more profoundly metaphysical, than he. Into an inordinate amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of sensible things, infuse the peculiarmoralgerm of Christianity, and you have the religion of Shakespeare. Thus:—
“And our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.”—Tempest.
Here the poetic imagination sweeps boldly round the universe, severing it as by a soft cloud-line from the infinite Unknown.
“Poor soul! the centre of my sinful earth,Fooled by those rebel powers that lead thee ’stray!”Sonnet 146.
Here the soul, retracting its thoughts from the far and physical, dwells disgustedly on itself.
“The dread of something after death,The undiscovered country from whose bournNo traveller returns.”—Hamlet.
Here the soul, pierced with the new and awful thought of sin, wings out again towards the Infinite, and finds all dark.
“How would you be,If He, which is the top of judgment, shouldBut judge you as you are?”—Measure for Measure.
Here the silver lamp of hope is hung up within the gloomy sphere, to burn softly and faintly for ever!
And so it is throughout Shakespeare’s writings. Whatever is special or doctrinal is avoided; all that intellectual tackling, so to speak, is struck away that would afford the soul any relief whatever from the whole sensation of the supernatural. Although we cannot, therefore, in honest keeping with popular language, call Shakespeare, as Ulrici does, the most Christian of poets, we believe him to have been the man in modern times who, breathing an atmosphere full of Christian conceptions, and walking amid a civilization studded with Christian institutions, had his whole being tied by the closest personal links to those highest generalities of the universe which the greatest minds in all ages have everpondered and meditated, and round which Christianity has thrown its clasp of gold.
Shakespeare, then, we hold to have been essentially a meditative, speculative, and even, in his solitary hours, an abject and melancholy man, rather than a man of active, firm, and worldly disposition. Instead of being a calm, stony observer of life and nature, as he has been sometimes represented, we believe him to have been a man of the gentlest and most troublesome affections, of sensibility abnormally keen and deep, full of metaphysical longings, liable above most men to self-distrust, despondency, and mental agitation from causes internal and external, and a prey to many secret and severe experiences which he did not discuss at the Mermaid tavern. This, we say, is no guess; it is a thing certified under his own hand and seal. But, this being allowed, we are willing to agree with all that is said of him, by way of indicating the immense variety of faculties, dispositions, and acquirements, of which his character was built up. Vast intellectual inquisitiveness, the readiest and most universal humour, the truest sagacity and knowledge of the world, the richest and deepest capacity of enjoying all that life presented: all this, as applied to Shakespeare, is a mere string of undeniable commonplaces. The man, as we fancy him, who of all others trod the oftenest the extreme metaphysic walk which bounds our universe in, he was also the man of all otherswho was related most keenly by every fibre of his being to all the world of the real and the concrete. Better than any man he knew life to be a dream; with as vivid a relish as any man he did his part as one of the dreamers. If at one moment life stood before his mental gaze, an illuminated little speck or disc, softly rounded with mysterious sleep, the next moment this mere span shot out into an illimitable plain, whereon he himself stood—a plain covered with forests, parted by seas, studded with cities and huge concourses of men, mapped out into civilizations, over-canopied by stars. Nay, it was precisely because he came and went with such instant transition between the two extremes that he behaved so genially and sympathetically in the latter. It was precisely because he had done the metaphysic feat so completely once for all, and did not bungle on metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, that he stood forth in the character of the most concrete of poets. Life is an illusion, a show, a phantasm: well then, that is settled, andIbelong to that section of the illusion called London, the seventeenth century, and woody Warwickshire! So he may have said; and he acted accordingly. He walked amid the woods of Warwickshire, and listened to the birds singing in their leafy retreats; he entered the Mermaid tavern with Ben Jonson after the theatre was over, and found himself quite properly related, as one item in the illusion, to thatother item in it, a good supper and a cup of canary. He accepted the world as it was, rejoiced in its joys, was pained by its sorrows, reverenced its dignities, respected its laws, and laughed at its whimsies. It was this very strength and intimacy and universality of his relations to the concrete world of nature and life that caused in him that spirit of acquiescence in things as they were, that evident conservatism of temper, that indifference, or perhaps more, to the specific contemporary forms of social and intellectual movement, with which he has sometimes been charged as a fault. The habit of attaching weight to what are called abstractions, of metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, is almost an essential feature in the constitution of men who are remarkable for their faith in social progress. It was precisely, therefore, because Shakespeare was such a votary of the concrete, because he walked so firmly on the green and solid sward of that island of life which he knew to be surrounded by a metaphysic sea, that this or that metaphysical proposal with respect to the island itself occupied him but little.
How, then,didShakespeare relate himself to this concrete world of nature and life in which his lot had been cast? What precise function with regard to it, if not that of an active partisan of progress, did he accept as devolving naturally onhim? The answer is easy. Marked out by circumstances, and by his own bent andinclination, from the vast majority of men, who, with greater or less faculty, sometimes perhaps with the greatest, pass their lives in silence, appearing in the world at their time, enjoying it for a season, and returning to the earth again,—marked out from among these, and appointed to be one of those whom the whole earth should remember and think of; yet precluded, as we have seen, by his constitution and fortune, from certain modes of attaining to this honour—the special function which, in this high place, he saw himself called upon to discharge, and by the discharge of which he has ensured his place in perpetuity, was simply that ofexpressingwhat he felt and saw. In other words, Shakespeare was specifically and transcendently a literary man. To say that he was the greatestmanthat ever lived is to provoke a useless controversy, and comparisons that lead to nothing, between Shakespeare and Cæsar, Shakespeare and Charlemagne, Shakespeare and Cromwell; to say that he was the greatestintellectthat ever lived, is to bring the shades of Aristotle and Plato, and Bacon and Newton, and all the other systematic thinkers, grumbling about us, with demands for a definition of intellect, which we are by no means in a position to give; nay, finally, to say that he is the greatestpoetthat the world has produced (a thing which we would certainly say, were we provoked to it,) would be unnecessarily to hurt the feelings of Homer andSophocles, Dante and Milton. What we will say, then, and challenge the world to gainsay, is that he was the greatestexpresserthat ever lived. This is glory enough, and it leaves the other questions open. Other men may have led, on the whole, greater and more impressive lives than he; other men, acting on their fellows through the same medium of speech that he used, may have expended a greater power of thought, and achieved a greater intellectual effect, in one consistent direction; other men, too (though this is very questionable), may have contrived to issue the matter which they did address to the world in more compact and perfect artistic shapes. But no man that ever lived said such splendid things on all subjects universally; no man that ever lived had the faculty of pouring out on all occasions such a flood of the richest and deepest language. He may have had rivals in the art of imagining situations; he had no rival in the power of sending a gush of the appropriate intellectual effusion over the image and body of a situation once conceived. From a jewelled ring on an alderman’s finger to the most mountainous thought or deed of man or demon, nothing suggested itself that his speech could not envelope and enfold with ease. That excessive fluency which astonished Ben Jonson when he listened to Shakespeare in person astonishes the world yet. Abundance, ease, redundance, a plenitude of word, sound, and imagery,which, were the intellect at work only a little less magnificent, would sometimes end in sheer braggartism and bombast, are the characteristics of Shakespeare’s style. Nothing is suppressed, nothing omitted, nothing cancelled. On and on the poet flows; words, thoughts, and fancies crowding on him as fast as he can write, all related to the matter on hand, and all poured forth together, to rise and fall on the waves of an established cadence. Such lightness and ease in the manner, and such prodigious wealth and depth in the matter, are combined in no other writer. How the matter was first accumulated, what proportion of it was the acquired capital of former efforts, and what proportion of it welled up in the poet’s mind during and in virtue of the very act of speech, it is impossible to say; but this at least may be affirmed without fear of contradiction, that there never was a mind in the world from which, when it was pricked by any occasion whatever, there poured forth on the instant such a stream of precious substance intellectually related to it. By his powers of expression, in fact, Shakespeare has beggared all his posterity, and left mere practitioners of expression nothing possible to do. There is perhaps not a thought, or feeling, or situation, really common and generic to human life, on which he has not exercised his prerogative; and, wherever he has once been, woe to the man that comes after him! He has overgrown thewhole system and face of things like a universal ivy, which has left no wall uncovered, no pinnacle unclimbed, no chink unpenetrated. Since he lived the concrete world has worn a richer surface. He found it great and beautiful, with stripes here and there of the rough old coat seen through the leafy labours of his predecessors; he left it clothed throughout with the wealth and autumnal luxuriance of his own unparalleled language.
This brings us, by a very natural connexion, to what we have to say of Goethe. For, if, with the foregoing impressions on our mind respecting the character and the function of the great English poet, we turn to the mask of his German successor and admirer, which has been so long waiting our notice, the first question must infallibly be What recognition is it possible that, in such circumstances, we can have left forhim? In other words, the first consideration that must be taken into account in any attempt to appreciate Goethe is that he came into a world in which Shakespeare had been before him. For a man who, in the main, was to pursue a course so similar to that which Shakespeare had pursued this was a matter of incalculable importance. Either, on the one hand, the value of all that the second man could do, if he adhered to a course very similar, must suffer from the fact that he was following in thefootsteps of a predecessor of such unapproachable excellence; or, on the other hand, the consciousness of this, if it came in time, would be likely topreventtoo close a resemblance between the lives of the two men, by giving a special direction and character to the efforts of the second. Hear Goethe himself on this very point:—
“We discoursed upon English literature, on the greatness of Shakespeare, and on the unfavourable position held by all English dramatic authors who had appeared after that poetical giant. ‘A dramatic talent of any importance,’ said Goethe, ‘could not forbear to notice Shakespeare’s works; nay, could not forbear to study them. Having studied them, he must be aware that Shakespeare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, in all its heights and depths, and that, in fact, there remains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do. And how could one get courage to put pen to paper, if one were conscious, in an earnest appreciating spirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable excellencies were already in existence? It fared better with me fifty years ago in my own dear Germany. I could soon come to an end with all that then existed; it could not long awe me, or occupy my attention. I soon left behind me German literature, and the study of it, and turned my thoughts to life and to production. So on and on I went, in my own natural development, and on and on I fashioned the productions of epoch after epoch. And, at every step of life and development, my standard ofexcellence was not much higher than what at such a step I was able to attain. But, had I been born an Englishman, and had all those numerous masterpieces been brought before me in all their power at my first dawn of youthful consciousness, they would have overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do. I could not have gone on with such fresh light-heartedness, but should have had to bethink myself, and look about for a long time to find some new outlet.’”—Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, i. pp. 114, 115.
“We discoursed upon English literature, on the greatness of Shakespeare, and on the unfavourable position held by all English dramatic authors who had appeared after that poetical giant. ‘A dramatic talent of any importance,’ said Goethe, ‘could not forbear to notice Shakespeare’s works; nay, could not forbear to study them. Having studied them, he must be aware that Shakespeare has already exhausted the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, in all its heights and depths, and that, in fact, there remains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do. And how could one get courage to put pen to paper, if one were conscious, in an earnest appreciating spirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable excellencies were already in existence? It fared better with me fifty years ago in my own dear Germany. I could soon come to an end with all that then existed; it could not long awe me, or occupy my attention. I soon left behind me German literature, and the study of it, and turned my thoughts to life and to production. So on and on I went, in my own natural development, and on and on I fashioned the productions of epoch after epoch. And, at every step of life and development, my standard ofexcellence was not much higher than what at such a step I was able to attain. But, had I been born an Englishman, and had all those numerous masterpieces been brought before me in all their power at my first dawn of youthful consciousness, they would have overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do. I could not have gone on with such fresh light-heartedness, but should have had to bethink myself, and look about for a long time to find some new outlet.’”—Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, i. pp. 114, 115.
All this is very clear and happily expressed. Most Englishmen that have written since Shakespearehavebeen overawed by the sense of his vast superiority; and Goethe, if he had been an Englishman, would have partaken of the same feeling, and would have been obliged, as he says, to look about for some path in which competition with such a predecessor would have been avoided. Being, however, a German, and coming at a time when German literature had nothing so great to boast of but that an ardent young man could hope to produce something as good or better, the way was certainly open to him to the attainment, in his own nation, of a position analogous to that which Shakespeare had occupied in his. Goethe might, if he had chosen, have aspired to be the Shakespeare of Germany. Had his tastes and faculties pointed in that direction, there was no reason, special to his own nation, that would have made it very incumbent on him to thwart the tendencyof his genius and seek about for a new outlet in order to escape injurious comparisons. But, even in such circumstances, to have pursued a courseverysimilar to that of Shakespeare, and to have been animated by a mere ambition to tread in the footsteps of that master, would have been death to all chance of a reputation among the highest. Great writers do not exclusively belong to the country of their birth; the greatest of all are grouped together on a kind of central platform, in the view of all peoples and tongues; and, as in this select assemblage no duplicates are permitted, the man who does never so well a second time that which the world has already canonized a man for doing once has little chance of being admitted to co-equal honours. More especially in the present case would too close a resemblance to the original, whether in manner or in purpose, have been regarded in the end as a reason for inferiority in place. As the poet of one branch of the great Germanic family of mankind, Shakespeare belonged indirectly to the Germans, even before they recognised him; in him all the genuine qualities of Teutonic human nature, as well as the more special characteristics of English genius, were embodied once for all in the particular form which had chanced to be his; and, had Goethe been, in any marked sense, only a repetition of the same form, he might have held his place for some time as the wonder of Germany, but,as soon as the course of events had opened up the communication which was sure to take place at some time between the German and the English literatures, and so made his countrymen acquainted with Shakespeare, he would have lost his extreme brilliance, and become but a star of the second magnitude. In order, then, that Goethe might hold permanently a first rank even among his own countrymen, it was necessary that he should be a man of a genius quite distinct from that of Shakespeare, a man who, having or not having certain Shakespearian qualities, should at all events signalize such qualities as he had by a marked character and function of his own. And, if this was necessary to secure to Goethe a first rank in the literature of Germany, much more was it necessary to ensure him a place as one of the intellectual potentates of the whole modern world. If Goethe was to be admitted into this select company at all, it could not be as a mere younger brother of Shakespeare, but as a man whom Shakespeare himself, when he took him by the hand, would look at with curiosity, as something new in species, produced in the earth since his own time.
Was this, then, the case? Was Goethe, with all his external resemblance in some respects to Shakespeare, a man of such truly individual character, and of so new and marked a function, as to deserve a place among the highest, not in German literature alone, but in theliterature of the world as a whole? We do not think that anyone competent to give an opinion will reply in the negative.
A glance at the external circumstances of Goethe’s life alone (and what a contrast there is between the abundance of biographic material respecting Goethe and the scantiness of our information respecting Shakespeare!) will beget the impression that the man who led such a life must have had opportunities for developing a very unusual character. The main facts in the life of Goethe are:—that he was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1749, the only surviving son of parents who ranked among the wealthiest in the town; that, having been educated with extreme care, and having received whatever experience could be acquired by an impetuous student-life, free from all ordinary forms of hardship, first at one German town and then at another, he devoted himself, in accordance with his tastes, to a career of literary activity; that, after unwinding himself from several love-affairs, and travelling for the sake of farther culture in Italy and other parts of Europe, he settled in early manhood at Weimar, as the intimate friend and counsellor of the reigning duke of that state; that there, during a long and honoured life, in the course of which he married an inferior housekeeper kind of person, of whom we do not hear much, he prosecuted his literary enterprise with unweariedindustry, not only producing poems, novels, dramas, essays, treatises, and criticisms in great profusion from his own pen, but also acting, along with Schiller and others, as a director and guide of the whole contemporary intellectual movement of his native land; and that finally, having outlived all his famous associates, become a widower and a grandfather, and attained the position not only of the acknowledged king and patriarch of German literature, but also, as some thought, of the wisest and most serene intellect of Europe, he died so late as 1832, in the eighty-third year of his age. All this, it will be observed, is very different from the life of the prosperous Warwickshire player, whose existence had illustrated the early part of the seventeenth century in England; and it necessarily denoted, at the same time, a very different cast of mind and temper.
Accordingly, such descriptions as we have of Goethe from those who knew him best convey the idea of a character notably different from that of the English poet. Of Shakespeare personally we have but one uniform account—that he was a man of gentle presence and disposition, very good company, and of such boundless fluency and intellectual inventiveness in talk that his hearers could not always stand it, but had sometimes to whistle him down in his flights. In Goethe’s case we have two distinct pictures.
In youth, as all accounts agree in stating, he was one of the most impetuous, bounding, ennui-dispelling natures that ever broke in upon a society of ordinary mortals assembled to kill time. “He came upon you,” said one who knew him well at this period, “like a wolf in the night.” The simile is a splendid one, and it agrees wonderfully with the more subdued representations of his early years given by Goethe himself in his Autobiography. Handsome as an Apollo and welcome everywhere, he bore all before him wherever he went, not only by his talent, but also by an exuberance of animal spirits which swept dulness itself along, took away the breath of those who relied on sarcasm and their cool heads, inspired life and animation into the whole circle, and most especially delighted the ladies. This vivacity became even, at times, a reckless humour, prolific in all kinds of mad freaks and extravagances. Whether this impetuosity kept always within the bounds of mere innocent frolic is a question which we need not here raise. Traditions are certainly afloat of terrible domestic incidents connected with Goethe’s youth, both in Frankfort and in Weimar; but to what extent those traditions are founded on fact is a matter which we have never yet seen any attempt to decide upon evidence. More authentic for us, and equally significant, if we could be sure of our ability to appreciate them rightly, are the stories which Goethe himselftells of his various youthful attachments, and the various ways in which they were concluded. In Goethe’s own narratives of these affairs there is a confession of error, arising out of his disposition passionately to abandon himself to the feelings of the moment without looking forward to the consequences; but whether this confession is to be converted by his critics into the harsher accusation of heartlessness and want of principle is a thing not to be decided by any general rule as to the matter of inconstancy, but by accurate knowledge in each case of the whole circumstances of that case. One thing these love-romances of Goethe’s early life make clear—that, for a being of such extreme sensibility as he was, he had a very strong element of self-control. When he gave up Rica or Lilli, it was with tears, and no end of sleepless nights; and yet he gave them up. Shakespeare, we believe (and there is an instance exactly in point in the story of his Sonnets), had no such power of breaking clear from connexions which his judgment disapproved. Remorse and return, self-reproaches for his weakness at one moment followed the next by weakness more abject than before—such, by his own confession, was the conduct, in one such case, of our more passive and gentle-hearted poet. Where Shakespeare was “past cure,” and “frantic-mad with evermore unrest,” Goethe but fell into “hypochondria,” which reasonand resolution enabled him to overcome. Goethe at twenty-five gave up a young, beautiful and innocent girl, from the conviction that it was better to do so. Shakespeare at thirty-five was the abject slave of a dark-complexioned woman, who was faithless to him, and whom he cursed in his heart. The sensibilities in the German poet moved from the first, as we have already said, over a firmer basis of permanent character.
It is chiefly, however, the Goethe of later life that the world remembers and thinks of. The bounding impetuosity is then gone; or rather it is kept back and restrained, so as to form a calm and steady fund of internal energy, capable sometimes of a flash and outbreak, but generally revealing itself only in labour and its fruits. What was formerly the beauty of an Apollo, graceful, light, and full of motion, is now the beauty of a Jupiter, composed, stately, serene. “What a sublime form!” says Eckermann, describing his first interview with him. “I forgot to speak for looking at him: I could not look enough. His face is so powerful and brown, full of wrinkles, and each wrinkle full of expression. And everywhere there is such nobleness and firmness, such repose and greatness. He spoke in a slow, composed manner, such as you would expect from an aged monarch.” Such is Goethe, as he lasts now in the imagination of the world. Living among statues, books, and pictures; daily doingsomething for his own culture and for that of the world; daily receiving guests and visitors, whom he entertained and instructed with his wise and deep, yet charming and simple, converse; daily corresponding with friends and strangers, and giving advice or doing a good turn to some young talent or other—never was such a mind consecrated so perseveringly and exclusively to the service ofKunstandLiteratur. One almost begins to wonder if it was altogether right that an old man should go on, morning after morning, and evening after evening, in such a fashion, talking about art and science and literature as if they were the only interests in the world, taking his guests into corners to have quiet discussions with them on these subjects, and always finding something new and nice to be said about them. Possibly, indeed, this is the fault of those who have reported him, and who only took notes when the discourse turned on what they considered the proper Goethean themes. But that Goethe far outdid Shakespeare in this conscious dedication of himself to a life of the intellect is as certain as the testimony of likelihood can make it. Shakespeare did enjoy his art; it was what, in his pensive hours, as he himself hints, he enjoyed most; and whatever of intellectual ecstasy literary production can bring must surely have been his in those hours when he composedHamletand theTempest. But Shakespeare’s was precisely one of those mindswhose strength is a revelation to themselves during the moment of its exercise, rather than a chronic ascertained possession; and from this circumstance, as well as from the attested fact of his carelessness as to the fate of his compositions, we can very well conceive that literature and mental culture formed but a small part of the general system of things in Shakespeare’s daily thoughts, and that he would have been absolutely ashamed of himself if, when anything else, from the state of the weather to the quality of the wine, was within the circle of possible allusion, he had said a word about his own plays. If he had not Sir Walter Scott’s positive conviction that every man ought to be either a laird or a lawyer, casting in authorship as a mere addition if it were to be practised at all, he at least led so full and keen a life, and was drawn forth on so many sides by nature, society, and the unseen, that Literature, out of the actual moments in which he was engaged in it, must have seemed to him a mere bagatelle, a mere fantastic echo of not a tithe of life. In his home in London, or his retirement at Stratford, he wrote on and on, because he could not help doing so, and because it was his business and his solace; but no play seemed to him worth a day of the contemporary actions of men, no description worth a single glance at the Thames or at the deer feeding in the forest, no sonnet worth the tear it was made to embalm. Literature wasby no means to him, as it was to Goethe, the main interest of life; nor was he a man so far master of himself as ever to be able to behave as if it were so, and to accept, as Goethe did, all that occurred as so much culture. Yet Shakespeare would have understood Goethe, and would have regarded him, almost with envy, as one of those men who, as being “lords and owners of their faces,” and not mere “stewards,” know how to husband Nature’s gifts best.
“They that have power to hurt and will do none,That do not do the thing they most do show,Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,They rightly do inherit Heaven’s graces,And husband nature’s riches from expense;They are the lords and owners of their faces,Others but stewards of their excellence.”—Sonnet 94.
If Goethe attained this character, however, it was not because, as it is the fashion to say, he was by nature cold, heartless, and impassive, but because, uniting will and wisdom to his wealth of sensibilities, he had disciplined himself into what he was. A heartless man does not diffuse geniality and kindliness around him, as Goethe did; and a statue is not seized, as Goethe once was, with hæmorrhage in the night, the result of suppressed grief.
That which made Goethe what he was—namely, his philosophy of life—is to be gathered, in the form of hints, from his various writings and conversations. We present a few important passages here, in what seems their philosophic connexion, as well as the order most suitable for bringing out Goethe’s mode of thought in contrast with that of Shakespeare.
Goethe’s Thoughts of Death.—“We had gone round the thicket, and had turned by Tiefurt into the Weimar-road, where we had a view of the setting sun. Goethe was for a while lost in thought; he then said to me, in the words of one of the ancients,‘Untergehend sogar ist’s immer dieselbige Sonne.’(Still it continues the self-same sun, even while it is sinking.)‘At the age of seventy-five,’ continued he, with much cheerfulness, ‘one must, of course, think sometimes of death. But this thought never gives me the least uneasiness, for I am fully convinced that our spirit is a being of a nature quite indestructible, and that its activity continues from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to set only to our earthly eyes, but which, in reality, never sets, but shines on unceasingly.’”—Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, vol. i. p. 161.Goethe’s Maxim with respect to Metaphysics.—“Man is born not to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.”—Ibid.vol. i. p. 272.Goethe’s Theory of the intention of the Supernatural with regard to the Visible.—“After all, what does it all come to? God did not retire to rest after the well-known six days of creation, but, on the contrary, is constantly active as on the first. It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year, if He had not the plan of founding a nursery for a world of spirits upon this material basis. So He is now constantly active in higher natures to attract the lower ones.”—Ibid.vol. ii. p. 426.Goethe’s Doctrine of Immortality.—“Kant has unquestionably done the best service, by drawing the limits beyond which human intellect is not able to penetrate, and leaving at rest the insoluble problems. What a deal have people philosophised about immortality! and how far have they got? I doubt not of our immortality, for nature cannot dispense with theentelecheia. But we are not all, in like manner, immortal; and he who would manifest himself in future as a greatentelecheiamust be one now.... To me the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work on incessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit.”—Ibid.vol. ii. pp. 193, 194, and p. 122.Goethe’s Image of Life.—“Child, child, no more! The coursers of Time, lashed, as it were, by invisible spirits, hurry on the light car of our destiny; and all that we can do is, in cool self-possession, to hold the reins with a firm hand, and to guide the wheels, now to the left, nowto the right, avoiding a stone here, or a precipice there. Whither it is hurrying, who can tell? and who, indeed, can remember the point from which it started?”—Egmont.Man’s proper business.—“It has at all times been said and repeated that man should strive to know himself. This is a singular requisition; with which no one complies, or indeed ever will comply. Man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals—to the world around him; and he has to know this so far, and to make it so far serviceable, as he requires for his own ends. It is only when he feels joy or sorrow that he knows anything about himself, and only by joy or sorrow is he instructed what to seek and what to shun.”—Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, vol. ii. p. 180.The Abstract and the Concrete, and the Subjective and the Objective.—“The Germans are certainly strange people. By their deep thoughts and ideas, which they seek in everything, and fix upon everything, they make life much more burdensome than is necessary. Only have the courage to give yourself up to your impressions; allow yourself to be delighted, moved, elevated—nay, instructed and inspired by something great; but do not imagine all is vanity if it is not abstract thought and idea.... It was not in my line, as a poet, to strive to embody anything abstract. I received in my mind impressions, and those of a sensual, animated, charming, varied, hundred-fold kind, just as a lively imagination presented them; and I had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically to round off and elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the same impressions inhearing or reading my representation of them.... A poet deserves not the name while he only speaks out his few subjective feelings; but as soon as he can appropriate to himself and express the world he is a poet. Then he is inexhaustible, and can be always new; while a subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material, and is at last ruined by mannerism. People always talk of the study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except that it says ‘Turn your attention to the real world, and try to express it, for that is what the ancients did when they were alive?’ Goethe arose and walked to and fro, while I remained seated at the table, as he likes to see me. He stood a moment at the stove, and then, like one who has reflected, came to me, and, with his finger on his lips, said to me, ‘I will now tell you something which you will often find confirmed in your own experience. All eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective; we see this not merely in poetry, but also in painting and much besides. Every healthy effort, on the contrary, is directed from the inward to the outward world, as you will see in all great eras, which have been really in a state of progression, and all of an objective nature.’”—Ibid.vol. i. pp. 415, 416, and pp. 283, 284.Rule of Individual Activity.—“The most reasonable way is for every man to follow his own vocation to which he has been born and which he has learnt, and to avoid hindering others from following theirs. Let the shoemaker abide by his last, the peasant by his plough, and let the king know how to govern; for this is also abusiness which must be learned, and with which no one should meddle who does not understand it.”—Ibid.vol. i. p. 134.Right and Wrong: The habit of Controversy.—“The end of all opposition is negation, and negation is nothing. If I callbadbad, what do I gain? But, if I callgoodbad, I do a great deal of mischief. He who will work aright must never rail, must not trouble himself at all about what is ill done, but only do well himself. For the great point is not to pull down, but to build up; and in this humanity finds pure joy.”—Ibid.vol. i. p. 208.Goethe’s own Relation to the Disputes of his Time.—“‘You have been reproached,’ remarked I, rather inconsiderately, ‘for not taking up arms at that great period [the war with Napoleon], or at least co-operating as a poet.’ ‘Let us leave that point alone, my good friend,’ returned Goethe. ‘It is an absurd world, which knows not what it wants, and which one must allow to have its own way. How could I take up arms without hatred, and how could I hate without youth? If such an emergency had befallen me when twenty years old, I should certainly not have been the last; but it found me as one who had already passed the first sixties. Besides, we cannot all serve our country in the same way; but each does his best, according as God has endowed him. I have toiled hard enough during half a century. I can say that, in those things which nature has appointed for my daily work, I have permitted myself no relaxation night or day, but have always striven, investigated, and done as much, and that as well, as I could. If everyone can say the same of himself, it will prove well with all. I will not say what I think. There ismore ill-will towards me hidden beneath that remark than you are aware of. I feel therein a new form of the old hatred with which people have persecuted me, and endeavoured quietly to wound me, for years. I know very well that I am an eyesore to many; that they would all willingly get rid of me; and that, since they cannot touch my talent, they aim at my character. Now, it is said that I am proud; now, egotistical; now, immersed in sensuality; now, without Christianity; and now, without love for my native country and my own dear Germans. You have now known me sufficiently for years, and you feel what all that talk is worth.... The poet, as a man and citizen, will love his native land; but the native land of hispoeticpowers andpoeticaction is the good, noble, and beautiful: which is confined to no particular province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms wherever he finds them. Therein he is like the eagle, who hovers with free gaze over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence whether the hare on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in Saxony.’”—Ibid.vol. ii. pp. 257, 258, and p. 427.
Goethe’s Thoughts of Death.—“We had gone round the thicket, and had turned by Tiefurt into the Weimar-road, where we had a view of the setting sun. Goethe was for a while lost in thought; he then said to me, in the words of one of the ancients,
‘Untergehend sogar ist’s immer dieselbige Sonne.’(Still it continues the self-same sun, even while it is sinking.)
‘At the age of seventy-five,’ continued he, with much cheerfulness, ‘one must, of course, think sometimes of death. But this thought never gives me the least uneasiness, for I am fully convinced that our spirit is a being of a nature quite indestructible, and that its activity continues from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to set only to our earthly eyes, but which, in reality, never sets, but shines on unceasingly.’”—Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, vol. i. p. 161.
Goethe’s Maxim with respect to Metaphysics.—“Man is born not to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out where the problem begins, and then to restrain himself within the limits of the comprehensible.”—Ibid.vol. i. p. 272.
Goethe’s Theory of the intention of the Supernatural with regard to the Visible.—“After all, what does it all come to? God did not retire to rest after the well-known six days of creation, but, on the contrary, is constantly active as on the first. It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year, if He had not the plan of founding a nursery for a world of spirits upon this material basis. So He is now constantly active in higher natures to attract the lower ones.”—Ibid.vol. ii. p. 426.
Goethe’s Doctrine of Immortality.—“Kant has unquestionably done the best service, by drawing the limits beyond which human intellect is not able to penetrate, and leaving at rest the insoluble problems. What a deal have people philosophised about immortality! and how far have they got? I doubt not of our immortality, for nature cannot dispense with theentelecheia. But we are not all, in like manner, immortal; and he who would manifest himself in future as a greatentelecheiamust be one now.... To me the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work on incessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit.”—Ibid.vol. ii. pp. 193, 194, and p. 122.
Goethe’s Image of Life.—“Child, child, no more! The coursers of Time, lashed, as it were, by invisible spirits, hurry on the light car of our destiny; and all that we can do is, in cool self-possession, to hold the reins with a firm hand, and to guide the wheels, now to the left, nowto the right, avoiding a stone here, or a precipice there. Whither it is hurrying, who can tell? and who, indeed, can remember the point from which it started?”—Egmont.
Man’s proper business.—“It has at all times been said and repeated that man should strive to know himself. This is a singular requisition; with which no one complies, or indeed ever will comply. Man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals—to the world around him; and he has to know this so far, and to make it so far serviceable, as he requires for his own ends. It is only when he feels joy or sorrow that he knows anything about himself, and only by joy or sorrow is he instructed what to seek and what to shun.”—Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, vol. ii. p. 180.
The Abstract and the Concrete, and the Subjective and the Objective.—“The Germans are certainly strange people. By their deep thoughts and ideas, which they seek in everything, and fix upon everything, they make life much more burdensome than is necessary. Only have the courage to give yourself up to your impressions; allow yourself to be delighted, moved, elevated—nay, instructed and inspired by something great; but do not imagine all is vanity if it is not abstract thought and idea.... It was not in my line, as a poet, to strive to embody anything abstract. I received in my mind impressions, and those of a sensual, animated, charming, varied, hundred-fold kind, just as a lively imagination presented them; and I had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically to round off and elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the same impressions inhearing or reading my representation of them.... A poet deserves not the name while he only speaks out his few subjective feelings; but as soon as he can appropriate to himself and express the world he is a poet. Then he is inexhaustible, and can be always new; while a subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material, and is at last ruined by mannerism. People always talk of the study of the ancients; but what does that mean, except that it says ‘Turn your attention to the real world, and try to express it, for that is what the ancients did when they were alive?’ Goethe arose and walked to and fro, while I remained seated at the table, as he likes to see me. He stood a moment at the stove, and then, like one who has reflected, came to me, and, with his finger on his lips, said to me, ‘I will now tell you something which you will often find confirmed in your own experience. All eras in a state of decline and dissolution are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective; we see this not merely in poetry, but also in painting and much besides. Every healthy effort, on the contrary, is directed from the inward to the outward world, as you will see in all great eras, which have been really in a state of progression, and all of an objective nature.’”—Ibid.vol. i. pp. 415, 416, and pp. 283, 284.
Rule of Individual Activity.—“The most reasonable way is for every man to follow his own vocation to which he has been born and which he has learnt, and to avoid hindering others from following theirs. Let the shoemaker abide by his last, the peasant by his plough, and let the king know how to govern; for this is also abusiness which must be learned, and with which no one should meddle who does not understand it.”—Ibid.vol. i. p. 134.
Right and Wrong: The habit of Controversy.—“The end of all opposition is negation, and negation is nothing. If I callbadbad, what do I gain? But, if I callgoodbad, I do a great deal of mischief. He who will work aright must never rail, must not trouble himself at all about what is ill done, but only do well himself. For the great point is not to pull down, but to build up; and in this humanity finds pure joy.”—Ibid.vol. i. p. 208.
Goethe’s own Relation to the Disputes of his Time.—“‘You have been reproached,’ remarked I, rather inconsiderately, ‘for not taking up arms at that great period [the war with Napoleon], or at least co-operating as a poet.’ ‘Let us leave that point alone, my good friend,’ returned Goethe. ‘It is an absurd world, which knows not what it wants, and which one must allow to have its own way. How could I take up arms without hatred, and how could I hate without youth? If such an emergency had befallen me when twenty years old, I should certainly not have been the last; but it found me as one who had already passed the first sixties. Besides, we cannot all serve our country in the same way; but each does his best, according as God has endowed him. I have toiled hard enough during half a century. I can say that, in those things which nature has appointed for my daily work, I have permitted myself no relaxation night or day, but have always striven, investigated, and done as much, and that as well, as I could. If everyone can say the same of himself, it will prove well with all. I will not say what I think. There ismore ill-will towards me hidden beneath that remark than you are aware of. I feel therein a new form of the old hatred with which people have persecuted me, and endeavoured quietly to wound me, for years. I know very well that I am an eyesore to many; that they would all willingly get rid of me; and that, since they cannot touch my talent, they aim at my character. Now, it is said that I am proud; now, egotistical; now, immersed in sensuality; now, without Christianity; and now, without love for my native country and my own dear Germans. You have now known me sufficiently for years, and you feel what all that talk is worth.... The poet, as a man and citizen, will love his native land; but the native land of hispoeticpowers andpoeticaction is the good, noble, and beautiful: which is confined to no particular province or country, and which he seizes upon and forms wherever he finds them. Therein he is like the eagle, who hovers with free gaze over whole countries, and to whom it is of no consequence whether the hare on which he pounces is running in Prussia or in Saxony.’”—Ibid.vol. ii. pp. 257, 258, and p. 427.
Whoever has read these sentences attentively, and penetrated their meaning in connexion, will see that they reveal a mode of thought somewhat resembling that which we have attributed to Shakespeare, and yet essentially different from it. Both poets are distinguished by this, that they abstained systematically during their lives from the abstract, the dialectical, and the controversial, and devoted themselves, with true feeling and enjoyment, to the concrete, the real, and theunquestioned; and so far there is an obvious resemblance between them. But the manner in which this characteristic was attained was by no means the same in both cases. In Shakespeare, as we have seen, there was a metaphysical longing, a tendency towards the supersensible and invisible, absolutely morbid, if we take ordinary constitutions as the standard of health in this respect; and, if, with all this, he revelled with delight and moved with ease and firmness in the sensuous and actual, it was because the very same soul which pressed with such energy and wailing against the bounds of this life of man was also related with inordinate keenness and intimacy to all that this life spheres in. In Goethe, on the other hand, the tendency to the real existed under easier constitutional conditions, and in a state of such natural preponderance over any concomitant craving for the metaphysical, that it necessarily took, German though he was, a higher place in his estimate of what is desirable in a human character. That world of the real in which Shakespeare delighted, and which he knew so well, seemed to him, all this knowledge and delight notwithstanding, far more evanescent, far more a mere filmy show, far less considerable a shred of all that is, than it did to Goethe. To Shakespeare, as we have already said, life was but as a little island on the bosom of a boundless sea: men must needs know what the island contains, and act as those who have to till andrule it; still, with that expanse of waters all round in view, and that roar of waters ever in the ear, what can men call themselves or pretend their realm to be? “Poor fools of Nature” is the poet’s own phrase—the realm so small that it is pitiful to belong to it! Not so with Goethe. To him also, of course, the thought was familiar of a vast region of the supersensible outlying nature and life; but a higher value on the whole was reserved for nature and life, even on the universal scale, by his peculiar habit of conceiving them, not as distinct from the supersensible and contemporaneously begirt by it, but rather, if we may so speak, as a considerable portion, or even duration, of thequondam-supersensible in the new form of the sensible. In other words, Goethe was full of the notion of progress or evolution; the world was to him not a mere spectacle and dominion for the supernatural, but an actual manifestation of the substance of the supernatural itself, on its way through time to new issues. Hence his peculiar notion of immortality; hence his view as to the mere relativeness of the terms right and wrong, good and bad, and the like; and hence also his resolute inculcation of the doctrine, so unpalatable to his countrymen, that men ought to direct their thoughts and efforts to the actual and the outward. Life being the current phase of the universal mystery, the true duty of men could be but to contribute in their various ways to the furtherance of life.
And what then, finally, was Goethe’sownmode of activity in a life thus defined in his general philosophy? Like Shakespeare, he was a literary man; his function was literature. Yes, but in what respect, otherwise than Shakespeare had done before him, did he fulfil this literary function in reference to the world he lived in and enjoyed? In the first place, as all know, he differed from Shakespeare in this, that he did not address the world exclusively in the character of a poet. Besides his poetry, properly so called, Goethe has left behind him numerous prose-writings, ranking under very different heads, abounding with such deep and wise maxims and perceptions, in reference to all things under the sun, as would have entitled him, even had he been no poet, to rank as a sage. So great, indeed, is Goethe as a thinker and a critic that it may very well be disputed whether his prose-writings, as a whole, are not more precious than his poems. But even if we set apart this difference, and regard the two men in their special character as poets or artists, a marked difference is still discernible. Hear Goethe’s own definition of his poetical career and aim.