Chapter 1 of 19 · 3981 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

THOMAS MANN

THREE ESSAYS

_Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter_

NEW YORK · ALFRED · A · KNOPF 1929

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1929 SECOND PRINTING NOVEMBER, 1929

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS

_Friedrich und Die Grosse Koalition_ IN REDE UND ANTWORT AND AS _Goethe und Tolstoi_ and _Okkulte Erlebnisse_ IN BEMÜHUNGEN

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I · GOETHE AND TOLSTOY · 3

II · FREDERICK THE GREAT AND THE GRAND COALITION · 143

III · AN EXPERIENCE IN THE OCCULT · 219

GOETHE AND TOLSTOY

At the beginning of our century a man was still living in Weimar, Julius Stötzer by name and schoolmaster by calling, who, as a sixteen-year-old student, had dwelt under the same roof with Dr. Eckermann and only a few steps away from Goethe’s door. Young Stötzer and a schoolmate and fellow-lodger would now and again, with beating hearts, catch gleams and glimpses of the hallowed form as the old man sat by his window. But the lads were possessed by a desire to see him for once close at hand and get a good look at him. They applied to his famulus, their house-mate, and implored him by some means or other to procure them this boon. Eckermann was a kindly soul. One summer day he let the boys in by the back gate to the garden of the illustrious house; and there, hugely confused, they stood and waited for Goethe; who, to their consternation, did actually appear. He was strolling about the garden in a light-coloured house-coat--very probably the famous flannel dressing-gown we wot of--and catching sight of the lads went up to them. There he stood, wafting odours of eau-de-Cologne, with his hands, of course, on his back, and his abdomen to the fore; with that air of a city father beneath which, so we are told, he hid his self-consciousness--and asked the youths their names and what they wanted. Probably all in one breath; which indeed, if it thus happened, so added to the austere effect that they could scarcely get out an answer. However, they stammered something; whereupon the old man bade them be diligent in their tasks--which they were free to interpret as meaning that they would do better to be at them and not stand gaping here--and went his way.

So much for that--it happened in the year 1828.--Thirty-three years afterwards, one day about one o’clock Stötzer--now an experienced and devoted master in the secondary schools--was about to take the second class of the session when a seminary pupil stuck his head in at the door and announced that a stranger wanted to see Herr Stötzer. And without more ado the stranger entered at his heels: a man considerably younger than the schoolmaster, with a thinnish beard, prominent cheek-bones, and small grey eyes, with furrows between the heavy brows. He neglected to introduce or otherwise account for himself; but simply and straightway asked what lessons there were this afternoon, and on hearing that there was first history and then language, professed himself well pleased. He said that he had been visiting schools in southern Germany, France, and England; and sought an acquaintance with those of northern Germany as well. He spoke like a German. You would take him for a schoolmaster, from the comments he made, his well-informed, intelligent questions, and the way he kept putting things down in his notebook. He stopped for the whole of the lesson-hour. The children wrote a theme, an exercise on some subject in their copy-books; and the stranger said he was greatly interested in these compositions--might he take them away with him? “Dear me,” Stötzer thought, “that _is_ naïve.” Who was to reimburse the children for their copy-books? After all, Weimar was a poor city.... He said as much, in politer phrases. But the stranger replied that that might be managed, and went out. Stötzer sent a message to the Director, telling him of the unusual occurrence. And the adjective he used was the correct one--though it was only much later that he understood how correct it had been. For at the moment and on the spot it could not mean much to him, when the stranger came back, with a bundle of writing-paper under his arm, and gave his name to Stötzer and the Director: Count Tolstoy, from Russia. But Schoolmaster Stötzer lived to a ripe old age, and consequently had plenty of time to hear about the gentleman whose acquaintance he had thus made.

* * * * *

This man, then, who lived in Weimar from 1812 to 1905, and whose life was otherwise no doubt uneventful enough, might boast of having enjoyed one extraordinary privilege: the personal acquaintance of both Goethe and Tolstoy, the two great men whose names form the subject of this essay. Yes, Tolstoy was in Weimar! When he was thirty-three years old--for he was born in the year that saw young Stötzer’s interview with Goethe--Count Leo Nikolaevich came to Germany from Brussels (where he had in the first place met Proudhon and been convinced by him that _la propriété_ is _le vol_, and in the second place had written the story called _Polikuschka_) and visited the city of Goethe. As a distinguished stranger and guest of the Russian Embassy he was admitted to the house on the Frauenplan, which was not then open to the public. We are told, however, that he was more interested in the Fröbel kindergarten, conducted by one of Fröbel’s own pupils, and studied its pedagogic system with the greatest zeal and curiosity.

You see, of course, why I have told you this little tale. It was in hope to render more palatable the “and” at the top of the page, which must have made you lift your eyebrows at first sight. Goethe and Tolstoy. What sort of arbitrary and unseemly combination is that? Nietzsche once reproached us Germans with a peculiar clumsiness in the use of the word “and.” We said “Schopenhauer and Hartmann,” he sneered; we said “Goethe and Schiller” too--he was very much afraid we even said “Schiller and Goethe”! Setting Schopenhauer and Hartmann aside; as far as Goethe and Schiller are concerned, Nietzsche’s highly subjective dislike of moralists and theatre people should not have led him so far astray as to deny a relationship which is not less valid because of the inherent and typical contrast it displays. Its best spokesman, indeed, was its supposedly affronted half! It was hasty of Nietzsche, it was unjustifiably autocratic, thus to mock, and in his mockery to invoke, or assume, an order of merit which is, and must remain, highly controversial, the most controversial thing in the world. It is not on the whole the German way to be hasty in deciding precisely this question of all questions. We instinctively avoid putting ourselves on record, on one side or the other. We prefer a free-handed policy, and so, personally, do I; and I mean to stick to this policy, to support and glorify it, in all that follows. Precisely this policy, and no other, is the meaning of the conjunction when we say “Goethe _and_ Schiller”: where it converts the combination to an antithesis, and combines with the deliberate intention of contrast. No one who has ever come into contact with the sphere of German thought represented by that classic essay which comprehends all the others and makes them superfluous--I mean Schiller’s _Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung_--can fail to find this “and” deeply antithetic. Another precisely similar instance is the conjunction “Tolstoy _and_ Dostoyevsky.” On the other hand, if we deny the “and” its right to point a contrast, and confine its function to asserting essential affinity, essential similarity--what then? Would there not at once take place in our fancy a change of partners? On profound intellectual, nay, rather, on profoundly natural grounds, would not Schiller and Dostoyevsky move together, and on the other side--Goethe and Tolstoy?

You will be feeling far from satisfied. Obviously. You will say: there is something besides quality, there is position, there is rank. All honour, you will say, to antithesis, but things which differ so much in order of greatness really cannot be placed alongside like that. Granted that the one was a European humanist and thorough-paced pagan, while the other was an anarchist, and a primitive oriental Christian to boot. But the German world-poet, whose name one names with the highest, with Dante, with Shakespeare, and the realistic novelist who in our own era and not so long ago ended his enigmatic life, and that truly in a most enigmatic manner; to speak of these two in the same breath--it simply will not do, it is an offence against the aristocratic instinct, it is in bad taste.

We put on one side the paganism of the one, the Christianity of the other. Let us leave them there--we may find time to come back to them later on. But as for this aristocratic instinct, if you like to call it that; let me say roundly that so far from offending against it with my parallel, I do it explicit honour. Are you certain you have no delusions--are you sure your perspective is not distorted in this matter of rank and relative greatness? Turgeniev, in his last letter to Tolstoy, written on his death-bed in Paris, in which he conjured his friend to return to literature and stop tormenting himself with theology, Turgeniev was the first to give Tolstoy the title of “the great writer of Russia,” which he has had ever since, and which seems to mean that he holds in the eyes of his countrymen the same rank that the author of _Faust_ and _Wilhelm Meister_ does in ours. Tolstoy himself, as we were saying, was Christian through and through. Yet his humility was not so exaggerated as to prevent him from setting his name boldly beside the greatest, yes, beside the legendary great. He said of _War and Peace_: “Modesty aside, it is something like the Iliad.” He was heard to say the same of his earliest work, _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_. Was that megalomania? To me, frankly, it sounds like plain and simple fact. “_Nur die Lumpe_,” says Goethe, “_sind bescheiden._” A heathen saying. But Tolstoy subscribed to it. He saw himself always of heroic grandeur; and as early as at thirty-seven, writing in his diary, he ranked his own works, the finished and the still to write, with the great literature of the world.

In the judgment, then, of those competent to render it, the great writer of Russia; by his own estimate, the Homer of his time--but that is not all. After Tolstoy’s death Maxim Gorky published a little book of reminiscences, the best book, in my humble opinion, that he has written. It closes with the words: “And I, who do not believe in God, looked at him timidly, for some dark reason looked at him and thought: The man is godlike.” Godlike. Extraordinary. Nobody ever said or thought that of Dostoyevsky, nobody ever could have thought or said it. He has been called a saint; and one might in all sincerity apply the word to Schiller, at least in the Christian sense which it must always connote, if without the specifically Byzantine flavour. But Goethe and Tolstoy, these two, have been found godlike. The epithet “Olympian” is a commonplace. It was not, however, only as a world-renowned old man of commanding intellect that Goethe had it applied to him; it was while he was still young, still the youth, of whose godlike, compelling gaze Wieland sang, that he had the attribute conferred upon him, a thousand times, by his own contemporaries. Riemer relates that at sixty the old man took occasion to make rather acridly merry over it. “The deuce take godlike,” he cried. “What good does it do me to have people say: ‘That is a godlike man,’ when I go by? They behave just as they like, they impose on me just the same. People only call a man godlike when he lets them have their own way!”--As for Tolstoy, you could not say he was Olympian; he was not a humanistic god, of course. He was, Gorky says, more like some sort of Russian god, sitting on a maple throne under a golden lime-tree; pagan, then, with a difference, compared with the Zeus of Weimar, but pagan none the less, because gods _are_ pagan. Why? Because they are of the same essence as nature. One does not need to be a follower of Spinoza--as Goethe was, and had his own good reasons for it--to feel God and Nature as one, and the nobility that nature confers as godlike. “His superhumanly developed individuality is a monstrous phenomenon, almost forbidding, he has something in him of the fabled Sviatogor, whom the earth cannot hold.” Thus Gorky, on Tolstoy. And I cite it in this matter of relative greatness. Gorky, for instance, goes on to say: “There is something about him which always makes me want to shout: ‘Behold what a marvellous man lives upon this earth!’ For he is, so to speak, in general and beyond everything else, a human human being, a man.” That sounds like something we have heard before. It reminds us of--whom?

No, the question of rank, the aristocratic problem, is no problem at all, within the grouping I have chosen. It becomes one only when we change partners: when we take saintly humanity and couple it, by means of the antithetic conjunction, with the godlike; when we say “Goethe and Schiller,” “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” Only then, I think, do we pose the question of aristocracy, the problem in ethics and æsthetics: Which is greater? Which is more aristocratic? I shall not answer either of these. I will let the reader come to his individual conclusion in this matter of value, according to his own taste. Or, less glibly put, according to the conception he has of humanity, which--I must add, _sotto voce_--will have to be one-sided and incomplete to admit of his coming to any decision at all.

* * * * *

Is it not strangely moving to hear that one man had known them both, the creator of _Faust_ and the “great writer of Russia”? For certainly they belonged to different centuries. Tolstoy’s life covered the greater part of the nineteenth. He is absolutely its son. As an artist he exhibits all of its characteristics, and, indeed, those of its second half. As for Goethe, the eighteenth century brought him forth, and essential traits of his character and training belong to it--a statement it would be very easy to substantiate. Yet on the other hand one might say that just as much of the eighteenth, Goethe’s century, survived in Tolstoy as there had already come to birth of Tolstoy’s, of the nineteenth, in Goethe. Tolstoy’s rationalizing Christianity has more in common with the deism of the eighteenth century than it has with Dostoyevsky’s violent and mystical religiosity, which was entirely of the nineteenth. His system of practical religion--the essence of which was a destructive intellectual force that undermined all regulations, human and divine--had more affinity with the social criticism of the eighteenth century than with Dostoyevsky’s moralizations, although those were, on the one hand, far more profound, on the other far more religious. And Tolstoy’s _penchant_ for Utopias, his hatred of civilization, his passion for rusticity, for a bucolic placidity of the soul--an aristocratic passion, the passion of a nobleman--to all that, the eighteenth century, and indeed the French eighteenth century, can lay claim. And, on the other hand, Goethe. What most astonishes us in that masterpiece of his old age, the sociological novel _Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre_, is the intuition, the keenness and breadth of vision--they seem positively occult, but are simply the expression of a finer organism, the fruit of the most sensitive penetration--which anticipate the whole social and economic development of the nineteenth century: the industrialization of the old cultural and agrarian countries, the triumph of the machine, the rise of the organized labouring classes, the class conflict, democracy, socialism, Americanism itself, with the intellectual and educational consequences of all these.

But when all is said, and whatever the chronological affinity of these two great men, they cannot be called contemporaries. Only four years did the two of them inhabit this mortal sphere together: from 1828, when Tolstoy was born, to 1832, when Goethe died. Which does not prevent them from having one cultural element of their intellectual and spiritual make-up in common, and that a very real and positive one--to say nothing of universally human elements like Homer and the Bible. I mean the element Rousseau.

“I have read the whole of Rousseau, the whole twenty volumes, including the lexicon of music. What I felt for him was more than enthusiasm; it was worship. At fifteen I wore round my neck, instead of the usual crucifix, a medallion with his picture. I am so familiar with some of the passages in his works that I feel as though I had written them myself.” These are Tolstoy’s words, taken from his _Confessions_. And certainly he was Rousseauian more intimately, more personally, more damagingly, so to speak, than was Goethe, who as a man had nothing in common with poor Jean Jacques’s enigmatic and not always ingratiating complexities. Yet hear Goethe (I quote from an early review): “Religious conditions, and the social conditions so narrowly bound up with them; the pressure of the laws, the still greater pressure of society, to say nothing of a thousand other factors, leave the civilized man or the civilized nation no soul of his own. They stifle the promptings of nature, they obliterate every trait out of which a characteristic picture could be made.” That is, from the literary point of view, _Sturm und Drang_. But from the intellectual and historical, it is Rousseauianism. It bears the impress of revolution, even of anarchy; though in the Russian seeker after God that impress is religious and early Christian, whereas in Goethe’s words the humanistic trend can be felt, the irradiation of a cultural and self-developing individualism which Tolstoy would have banned as egoistic and unchristian. But unchristian, egoistic, it is not: it means work on man, on mankind, on humanity, and it issues, as the _Wanderjahre_ shows, in the social world.

What two ideas does the very sound of Rousseau’s name inevitably evoke--aside, that is, from the idea of nature, which is, of course, first and foremost? Why, naturally, the idea “education” and the idea “autobiography.” Jean Jacques Rousseau was the author of _Émile_ and of the _Confessions_. Now, both these elements, the pedagogic and the autobiographic, are present in full strength in Goethe as in Tolstoy; they cannot be dissociated from the work or the life of either. It is as an amateur pedagogue that Tolstoy has been introduced in this essay; and we know that for long years he was nothing else, that he forced into this channel the whole violence of the passion that was in him, and wrestled theoretically and practically to the very verge of exhaustion with the problem of the Russian primary school. As for Goethe, it is needless to say that his was a pedagogic nature in the fullest sense of the word. The two great monuments of his life, one in poetry and one in prose, the _Faust_ and the _Wilhelm Meister_, are both creative treatments of the theme of education. And whereas in the _Lehrjahre_ the idea is still that of the individual forming himself--“for to form myself, just as I am, was darkly, from my youth up, my purpose and my desire,” says Wilhelm Meister--in the _Wanderjahre_ the educational idea is objectivated, and issues in social, even in political concepts; while at the heart of the work is, as you know, the stern and beautiful Utopia of the _Pedagogic Province_.

The second association, the autobiographic, the confessional, is of course easy to attest in both authors. That all of Goethe’s works represent “fragments of one great confession” we should know ourselves even if he did not tell us; and is not _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, next to the _Confessions_ of Saint Augustine and Rousseau, the most famous autobiography in the world? Well, and Tolstoy too wrote confessions: I mean in the main a book with that title, laid down throughout on the line of the great self-revelations that runs from the African saint to Strindberg, the son of the servant. But Tolstoy is in the same case with Goethe: not by virtue of one book alone is he autobiographical. Beginning with the _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_, throughout the whole body of his work, he is autobiographical to an extent that makes it possible for Merezhkovsky, the great Russian critic, to say: “The artistic work of Leo Tolstoy is at bottom nothing else than one tremendous diary, kept for fifty years, one endless, explicit confession.” Yes, and this critic adds: “In the literatures of all times and peoples there will hardly be found a second example of an author who reveals his personal and private life, often in its most intimate aspects, with such open-hearted sincerity.” Well--open-hearted.... I may be allowed a comment upon the somewhat euphemistic epithet. One might, if one wanted to be invidious, use a different adjective to characterize this sincerity--an adjective that would suggest what Turgeniev had in mind when he once ironically referred to the shortcomings inevitable in a great writer: by which, obviously, he meant the lack of certain restraints, the absence of a customary reserve, discretion, decency, shame, or, on the positive side, the domination of a definite claim on the love of the world--an absolute claim, indeed, in that it is all one to the revealer whether he reveal virtues or vices. He craves to be known and loved, loved because known, or loved _although_ known; that is what I mean by an absolute claim on love. And the remarkable thing is that the world acknowledges and honours the claim.

“A life that is romantic has always self-love at the bottom of it.” I like this saying; and subjoin that self-love is also always at the bottom of all autobiography. For the impulse a man feels to “fixate” his life, to exhibit its development, to celebrate his own destiny in set literary form and passionately invoke the sympathy of his contemporaries and posterity, has for a premise the same uncommonly lively sense of his own ego which, according to that penetrating saying, is at the bottom of a life full of romantic happenings. Subjectively, for the man himself, but also objectively for the world at large. Of course, this love of self is something different, something stronger, deeper, more fruitful, than any mere self-complacency or self-love of the ordinary kind. In the finest instances it is what Goethe in the _Wanderjahre_ calls “_Ehrfurcht vor sich selbst_,” and celebrates as the highest form of awe. It is the grateful and reverent self-absorption of the darling of the gods, that rings with incomparable sincerity from the lines:

_Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen, Ihren Lieblingen ganz: Alle Freuden, die unendlichen, Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz._

It is a proud and naïve interest in the mystery of high preferment, tangible superiority, perilous privilege, whose standard-bearer the chosen one feels himself to be; it is a craving to bear witness, out of the deeps of experience, how a genius is shaped; a desire to link together, by some miracle of grace, joy, and service; it was this desire which brought forth _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ and in the truest sense inspires all great autobiography.