Part 4

Very much, yes, precisely as Goethe’s “profound and tranquil contemplation,” his precise and sensuous fancy, the lifelikeness of his characters, stand in relation to the ideal visions of Schiller and the activism of his creations, so the mighty sense-appeal of Tolstoy’s art stands to Dostoyevsky’s sickly, distorted dream-and-soul world. Indeed, the contrast becomes even more pointed by reason of differences between nations and periods. Tolstoy, the realistic novelist, the prince-and-peasant scion of a race still young, displays in his art a sensuousness more powerful, more immediately fleshly in its appeal, than does the German humanist and classicist, bourgeois-born and patrician-bred, in his.

Compared with Eduard and Charlotte, the lovers in the _Wahlverwandtschaften_, Vronsky and Anna are like a fine strong stallion and a noble mare. The comparison is not mine; it has often been made. A certain school of Russian criticism, hostile, of course, and on a low plane, found most offensive Tolstoy’s animalism, his unheard-of interest in the life of the body, his genius for bringing home to us man’s physical being. These critics wrote, for instance, that _Anna Karenine_ reeked with the classic odour of babies’ diapers. They raved at the salaciousness of certain scenes, and ironically reproached Tolstoy for omitting to describe how Anna takes her bath and Vronsky washes himself. They were wrong even in the fact; for Tolstoy does tell us how Vronsky washes, we see him rubbing his red body. And in _War and Peace_ we are vouchsafed a glimpse of Napoleon naked, in the scene where he has his fat back sprayed with eau-de-Cologne. A critic wrote in _Die Tat_ about this book: “Its main theme is the satisfaction of any and every human being within the fold of wedded bliss, conceived in the grossest sense.” And then the same critic, parodying Tolstoy’s style, proposed to him that he write another novel treating of Levin’s love for his cow Pania.

All this, of course, is on a lower plane than the criticism of Goethe which Caroline Herder wrote to Knebel: “Oh, if he would only give some soul to his characters! If only there were not so much philandering in everything that he writes, or, as he himself so likes to call it, so much ‘good feeling.’” But unenlightened comment such as this may very well be illuminating none the less, even though unawares and as it were on false pretences; and these remarks, in their folly, do undoubtedly contain a grain of truth. Caroline’s “philandering” is a mincing, sentimental word to characterize what Goethe wrote; yet it has a certain aptness, if the comparison is between his frank realism and the lofty insubstantiality of Schiller’s world. It is not such a bad joke, either, to make Levin fall in love with his cow. It hits off the fleshliness of Tolstoy’s art as contrasted with the holy soulfulness of Dostoyevsky’s--especially when we remember Tolstoy’s personal passion for one of the preoccupations of farm life--namely, the breeding of cattle and pigs. It is an interest quite proper, of course, to a landed proprietor; yet where so strongly marked as this surely not quite without deeper meaning.

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I am still resolved not to pass judgment. I did, indeed, throw out the question of nobility, the matter of rank. But I am wary of hasty decisions, and even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to my policy of the free hand and my faith in its ultimate fruitfulness. Why should I not be a cautious judge of the swaying battle, when I know that what I called above the arrogance of spirit is one with that great and highly affecting principle which we call freedom?

Schiller’s loftiest boast is the freedom of the singer. But Goethe’s attitude toward the conception of freedom is at all times cautious, not only in the political field, but consistently, fundamentally, and in every connexion. Of Schiller he says: “In his latter years, when he had had enough of freedom in a physical sense, he went over to it in the realm of the ideal, and I might almost say that it killed him; for it caused him to make demands on his physical powers that were altogether too much for them. I have great respect for the categorical imperative, I know how much good can come of it; but one must not carry it too far, for then this idea of the ideal freedom certainly leads to no good.”--I confess that this habit of using Schiller’s heroic life to point a warning against exaggerations in the use of the categorical imperative has always made me smile. To confront the moral with the natural is always humorous. But in other places where this child of God expresses himself about heroes and saints his words have quite a different ring and bear witness frankly and sincerely to the nobility of spirit. He declared one day that he passed for an aristocrat, but that Schiller was at bottom much more of a one than he. The remark bears directly upon the problem of aristocracy: certainly not in the political field, nor yet to the fact that Schiller had spoken of the “eternally blind,” to whom one must not lend Heaven’s torches of light; no, it has immediate reference to the aristocracy of spirit, which Goethe was at the moment comparing with his own, the aristocracy of nature, and finding it the more lofty of the two. “Nothing disturbed him,” he says admiringly, “nothing constrained him, nothing distracted the flight of his thoughts. He was as great at the tea-table as he would have been in the council-chamber.” This admiring wonder rises from the depths of Goethe’s Antæus-nature, which had no consciousness at all of a freedom like that, of such independence and unrestraint. Rather he knew himself to be constantly conditioned by a hundred circumstances; influenced, obligated, willingly indeed, with a certain pride in his earth-bound aristocracy, yet influenced and obligated none the less. Pantheistic necessity was the fundamental feeling of his existence. It is not enough to say he did not believe in the freedom of the will. He denied the conception, he denied that such a thing was even conceivable. “We belong to the laws of nature,” he says, “even when we rebel against them; we are working with her, even when we work against her.” That dæmonic determinism of his whole being was often felt by others. They said he was possessed, and not able to act voluntarily. His earth-bound state manifested itself, for instance, in such sensitiveness to weather that he called himself a regular barometer. And we may not take it that he felt his dependence, which amounted to compulsion, as personally lowering, or that his will had ever rebelled against it. The will is the spirit: nature is by way of being mild and easy-going. Thus the aristocrat in bondage may feel a noble pride as he bends the knee to the dark power to which he belongs and which guides him so well; and yet be capable, as Goethe’s case shows at least, of a gesture of elegant homage before the aristocracy of freedom. “_Denn hinter ihm_,” says Goethe in the Epilogue to _The Bell_, with reference to Schiller:

_Denn hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine._

Truly this is homage which breathes a spirit of the most profound resignation. For what _is_ “_das Gemeine_”? Nothing else than the natural, from the point of view of spirit and of freedom. For freedom is spirit; it is release from nature, rebellion against her; it is humanity conceived as emancipation from the natural and its bondage, this emancipation being the thing that is actually human and worthy of humanity. Here we see the question of aristocracy flowing together with that of human dignity. Which is finer, which worthier of humanity, freedom or bonds, self-will or submission, the moral or the natural? If I refuse to answer, it is in the conviction that this question can never be answered with finality.

But, on the other hand, the moral “sentimentalist” can be no “sentimentalist” at all if he does not on his side display an even livelier and profounder eagerness to pay homage to the aristocracy which is of nature. Unquestionably there is a certain charming humility in the attitude of spirit toward nature, a delicate readiness, often quite unrequited, to pay her respect, which is one of the greatest and most touching phenomena of the higher life. Dostoyevsky read Tolstoy’s early work _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_ in Siberia, in the periodical called _The Contemporary_, and was so taken with it that he inquired on all sides after the anonymous author. “Calm, deep, clear, yet unfathomable as nature is unfathomable, that is the impression it leaves,” he writes. “There it is, and everything, even the smallest detail, shows the beautiful unity of the temperament from which it flows.”--No, these are not Dostoyevsky’s words, though they might have been. It is Schiller who writes thus, about _Wilhelm Meister_, in that letter in which, for the first time, he apostrophizes Goethe as “Dearest Friend”: an emotional form of address, in which, so far as I know, Goethe never explicitly acquiesced. Dostoyevsky wrote the profoundest and most loving of all existing critiques of _Anna Karenine_; a masterpiece of enthusiastic exposition, which Tolstoy, perhaps, never even read (he never did read criticisms of his works), to say nothing of his ever feeling impelled to write reviews of anything by Dostoyevsky. When Feodor Michaelovich died, Tolstoy is said to have said: “I loved that man very much.” But his consciousness of the fact came a little late in the day; for while Dostoyevsky was alive Tolstoy never troubled his head about him; while afterwards, in a letter to Strachof, Dostoyevsky’s biographer, he compared him with a horse, who seemed a splendid creature and worth a thousand roubles, until suddenly he went lame, and then the fine strong animal was not worth a groschen. “The longer I live,” he said, “the more I think of men who are not lame.” But this horse-philosophy, as applied to the author of _The Brothers Karamazof_ does not seem quite happy, to put it mildly.

We know, and we rejoice to know, that in the case of Goethe and Schiller nature’s attitude to spirit was altogether more brotherly and dignified, and on a higher plane. But if Goethe played here too the part of Hatem, the richly bestowing and receiving one, he did not after all take from the dear friend more than he gave him, to say nothing of all he gave by virtue of his mere existence, unconsciously, involuntarily. Was not Schiller’s part in the relationship, after all, that of service? I think so, myself, simply because it lies in the nature of the thing, because Schiller did not in the least need, to keep him fruitful, the meed of praise, love, inspiration, which he bestowed upon Goethe. And I note that such a letter as his famous first one, which knit the bond between them, in which with kindly hand he “gave the sum” of Goethe’s life, he never did get from Goethe in return.

One utterance of Schiller’s to Goethe has always delighted me, it seems to characterize the relationship so wonderfully. I mean the passage in a letter where he warns Goethe against Kant, his own spiritual master and his idol. Goethe, he tells him, can only be a Spinozan; his beautiful simple nature would be at once vitiated by contact with a philosophy of freedom. It is no more and no less than the problem of irony which we catch sight of here: without exception the profoundest and most fascinating in the world. For we see here that nothing is more foreign to spirit than a desire to convert nature to itself. It warns nature against itself. To the moral “sentimentalist,” all that is nature seems beautiful and highly worth preserving. Knowledge feels that life is beautiful; and this is the feeling of the moral for the simple, of the holy for the divine, of nature for spirit; and in this peculiarly absolute judgment of values resides the ironic god, resides Eros. Spirit accordingly enters into a relationship with nature which is in a sense erotic, in a sense determined by male-female sex-polarity. And by virtue of the relation it can venture to abase itself and dare the ultimate self-surrender, without thereby resigning any of its own nobility. Indeed, it will always retain the accent of a certain tender contempt. In Hölderlin’s lines precisely this emotional irony is immortalized:

_Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste, Hohe Tugend versteht, wer in die Welt geblickt, Und es neigen die Weisen Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich._

On the other hand, this simple nature too has an ironic mood, which is one with the objectivity of its character and precisely coincides with the conception of poetry, inasmuch as it lifts itself above its subject, above joy and grief, good and bad, death and life, to play freely with them. Goethe speaks of this mood in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, with reference to Herder.

It is plain that what kept Goethe apart from Schiller so long was, more than anything else, the latter’s prepossessions on the subject of freedom: his conception of human dignity, which was entirely based on the dictatorship of spirit--that is, was entirely revolutionary in character--which conceived in this emancipated sense all humanity, all nobility, all human nobility--and that, to a nature like Goethe’s, must have seemed both odious and insulting to nature. It is, for instance, certain _a priori_ that Goethe took the greatest umbrage at the famous essay _Über Anmut und Würde_. In it occur things like the following: “Movements which have as principle only animal sensuousness belong only, however voluntary we may suppose them to be, to physical nature, which never reaches of itself to grace. If it were possible to have grace in the manifestations of physical appetites and instincts, grace would no longer be either capable or worthy to serve as the expression of humanity.” That one might describe as idealistic malice of spirit against nature, and so Goethe must have regarded it. For it is audacious to assert that grace cannot come out of the sensuous, nor nature reach to grace. Grace, then, is not a manifestation worthy of humanity; for that desire can express itself with charm, and instinct with grace, is a “charming” fact of experience. And when Schiller goes on to say: “Grace is a beauty not given by nature, but produced by the subject itself ... it is the beauty of form under the influence of free will; it is the beauty of those particular phenomena which the person himself determines. The architectonic beauty does honour to the author of nature; grace does honour to him who possesses it. That is a gift, this is a personal merit”--the moral distinction he draws between talent and personal merit becomes a consummate affront to Goethe’s vital consciousness and his aristocratic feeling. “Fools never think,” says Goethe, “how fortune and merit are linked together.” What he means by “fortune” is what Schiller calls “nature” and “talent,” and distinguishes from free human merit. While Goethe, half-maliciously, half-paradoxically going about to deprive the word “merit” of the moralistic flavour that clings to it, likes to talk about “inborn merit.” Everybody is free to call this a logical contradiction. But there are cases where logic is confronted by a metaphysical certainty higher than itself; and Goethe, who on the whole was certainly no metaphysician, undoubtedly felt the problem of freedom to be a metaphysical one. That is to say, an undemonstrable intuition told him that freedom, and therewith merit and demerit, were not a matter of the empirical but of the intelligible world; that, to speak with Schopenhauer, freedom does not consist in _operari_ but in _esse_. Herein lies the humbleness of his aristocracy, the aristocracy of his humility; both of them so categorically opposed to Schiller’s idealistic evaluations, his personal and moral pride in his freedom. Goethe, when he wants to characterize the principle which composes his essential nature, speaks humbly and gratefully of a “gift of fortune.” But the conception of a “gift,” of “grace,” is more aristocratic than one might think. What it means is the indissoluble union of fortune and merit, a synthesis of freedom and necessity, in short “inborn merit”; and the gratitude, the humility, carry with them that metaphysical consciousness of being at all times and absolutely certain of the favour of destiny.

There is, in Goethe’s case, an amazing bit of evidence on this point, which I cannot refrain from quoting. Speaking of Bentham, he says it is the height of madness for the man, at his age, to be so radical. He is answered that if His Excellence had been born in England he could hardly have escaped being a radical and reformer. Whereat Goethe, with Mephistophelian mien: “What do you take me for? You think I would be spying out abuses and tacking names on to them? I, who if I had been born in England would have been living on abuses? If I had been born in England I should have been a duke, or better still a bishop with revenues of thirty thousand pounds sterling.”--“Very fine. But suppose Your Excellence had not drawn the big prize in the lottery; suppose you had drawn a blank?” To which Goethe: “Not everybody, my dear friend, is _made for the big prize_. Do you think I should have played such a foolish trick (_sottise_) as to draw a blank?”

All that, of course, is in jest. But is it only in jest? Does it not rather voice that deep metaphysical certainty that never and under no circumstances should he or could he be other than favoured and privileged, ever other than well-born? And in this certainty is there not after all something like a consciousness of freedom of the will, if only of freedom after the event? Really, it is priceless. To be born into the world a starving revolutionary, an idealistic “sentimentalist,” that he calls a _sottise_. Is that the irony the children of God wreak on the children of spirit? If there be such a thing as inborn merit, then there is inborn demerit as well; and if it is a _sottise_ to come into the world an average man, or poor, or sick, or stupid, then the criminal is indeed not only empirically but metaphysically culpable. For merit and reward, guilt and punishment, are conceptions that belong together. And one punishment at least, all those merit who have committed the _sottise_ of drawing a blank in life’s lottery: that of eternal destruction; whereas the chosen ones get eternal life too at the end. “_Wer keinen Namen sich erwarb, noch Edles will, gehört den Elementen an; so fahret hin!_” But as the possibility of nobly aspiring and achieving a name is not a matter of empirical freedom of the will, this “_so fahret hin_” is a piece of gross heartlessness. And if the conception of election by grace, to which that of metaphysical depravity corresponds, is a Christian conception, at any rate it shows Christianity turning its aristocratic side outwards.

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I said awhile back that it seemed to me not accidental that Schiller and Dostoyevsky were sick men and did not, like Goethe and Tolstoy, arrive at a reverend length of days. Rather I was inclined to regard their poor health as fundamental to their characters. Quite as symbolic is the further external fact, that the two great realists and creative artists were of upper station, born to a privileged social status, whereas the heroes and saints of the idea, Schiller and Dostoyevsky, one the son of a Swabian army surgeon and the other of a Moscow hospital physician, were the children of modest people and spent all their days in pinched and homely, one might almost say undignified circumstances. I call this biographical fact symbolic, because it testifies to the Christianity of the spirit, whose kingdom, as the Scriptures say, is not of this world--in personalities as little as in the realm of the ideal and the artistic. Wherein it opposes a perpetual contrast to the kingdom of nature and nature’s favourites, whose rank and essence are quite and entirely “of this world,” the physical, pagan world. Therein lies their “realism.” And they were, both Tolstoy and Goethe, realists enough to feel a naïve enjoyment in their privileged status, yes, in a sort to lay stress upon it and show themselves imbued by a consciousness of it; which would impress one as curiously unenlightened were it not plain that they themselves regard it in a symbolic sense and even rather childishly assimilate it in their own minds to their consciousness of their higher, extra-social, human aristocracy. Goethe’s patrician birth was so dear to him that his patent of nobility, when he had it in his hands, meant “nothing, simply nothing.” “We Frankfort patricians,” he said, “always felt ourselves like nobility.” But in the same conversation and connexion, by way of refuting a slur upon himself as the obsequious servant of royalty, he puts it thus: “Yes, I felt so much at ease (_so wohl in meiner Haut_), and so very much the aristocrat, that if they had made me a prince it would not have surprised me.” I may say in passing that it would have become him to be a prince. Had he taken up Napoleon’s invitation to transfer his activity to Paris, had he written there the _Cæsar_ Napoleon wanted him to write, in which he need only have given vent to the hatred he had felt as a youth for the “base, the contemptible murder,” the Emperor would certainly have made him a prince, as by his own account he would have done for Corneille as well. My point is to show how, in Goethe’s mind, the consciousness of his social position lay very close to that of his nobility as a human being, as a child of God. The two flow together in one and the same consciousness of nobility, or “inborn merit.”