Part 8

I confessed in the beginning my tendency to make a matter of intrinsic value out of the matter of size. The greatest German poet must also be the most German one--that is an association more immediate and inevitable than even the causal, it is temporal, it is simply the future tense. And it was sanctioned by a source which will be universally accepted as authoritative. It was Father Jahn, who, _motu proprio_, in the year 1810 declared that Goethe was the most German of poets--quite unperturbed by the fact that Goethe behaved at all times as distantly and unsympathetically toward _deutsche Bruderschaften_ as Tolstoy toward Slavic. And then, in 1813, when he had very nearly succeeded in bringing himself into bad odour as a man without a country, Barnhagen von Ense cried out: “Goethe not a patriotic German? All the freedom of Germania early found a home in his breast, there to become, to our never-sufficiently-to-be-acknowledged advantage, the pattern, the example, and the root of our culture. In the shade of this tree we all live and move. Never did roots thrust firmer and deeper into the soul of our Fatherland, never did shoots more lustily suck strength from its breast. That our youth feel pride in their arms, loftiness in their spirits, hath more reference to him than to many another who may lay claim to great activity therein.”

Good, fine, powerful words. They proceed from the truth that in national matters very little depends on what a man says or the opinions he holds; on what he does, on the other hand, everything. When a man has written _Götz_, _Faust_, _Wilhelm Meister_, the _Sprüche in Reimen_ and _Hermann und Dorothea_--a poem which Schlegel honoured with the epithet “_vaterländisch_”--he can indulge in a bit of cosmopolitan irresponsibility, just as the “great writer of Russia” could indulge in the rationalizing Christian pacifism of his latter period. The national is so much second nature that one may address oneself to the mind without running the risk of literary unrealism; and as nature Goethe always felt the national--we see it, among others, in the famous remark to Eckermann: “National hatred is a queer thing after all. You will always find it keenest and most violent _in the lowest stages of culture_. But there is a stage where it quite disappears, and one stands in a way above the nations and feels the well- or ill-being of a neighbouring people as though it were one’s own. This stage was conformable to my nature, and I had confirmed myself in it long before I reached my sixtieth year.”

Spiritual regeneration. This summons to achieve the spirit is the sentimental imperative of the favourites of nature; just as that of the sons of spirit is the summons to achieve the form. And they respond to it--with more or less of aptitude. Tolstoy’s self-imposed task of shaking off the natural man was but spiritualizing the savage; yet a touching and honourable sight, even alongside of Goethe’s majestic culture. The main thing is that nothing should come too easy. Effortless nature--that is crude. Effortless spirit is without root--or substance. A lofty encounter of nature and spirit as they mutually yearn toward each other--that is man.

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Gorky says of Tolstoy a quite extraordinary and startling thing: he suggests the possibility that Tolstoy, despite the strength of his reason, sometimes hoped, or at least the thought occurred to him, that possibly nature would make an exception, and grant him physical immortality. “The whole broad earth looks toward him: from China, from India, from America, from everywhere stretch hither living, vibrating threads, his soul is for all and for always. Why should not nature break her law, and grant one man physical immortality--why not?” What madness! But even if it is not true, even if the sensible old man never came on such a monstrously presumptuous thought--even so, it is very telling that Gorky should have come on it for him. It shows what seemed to a competent observer to be Tolstoy’s relation to nature and life.--And Goethe? Is it likely that the grey-haired lover of Fraulein von Levetzof never rebelled against the limitations of human life, as Napoleon did at the limitations of human power, when he complained that men had become unbelievers, unwilling to acknowledge him a god, as they had his brother Alexander? Shall we imagine him utterly incapable of the thought which Gorky ascribes to the old Tolstoy: that nature might conceivably hesitate to destroy him, her darling son, as she did all ordinary humankind?

Yet die he did, without warning, at the age of eighty-three. Nature, as it were, tenderly got round him. He had been ailing; he settled down in his arm-chair for a rest and a nap, and he was gone. The passage in which Eckermann describes the appearance of the corpse is famous. “The body lay naked, folded in a white sheet; they had put large pieces of ice round, to keep it fresh as long as possible. Friedrich (the servant) unwrapped the sheet, and I was astounded at the godlike splendour of those limbs. The chest exceedingly powerful, broad and deep; the arms and thighs full and gently muscular; the feet slender and very chaste in form; and nowhere on the body a trace of fat or shrinking or decay. A perfect human being lay in great beauty there before me; and the delight I felt made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had forsaken such a frame.”

Let there be no misunderstanding. Nobody asserts that Goethe and Tolstoy were, so to speak, four-square; that by contrast with the morbid geniuses Schiller and Dostoyevsky they were “normal” in the common acceptation of the word. Even the genius most endowed by nature is never natural in the philistine sense; that is to say, normal, healthy, and according to rule. In his physical there must always be something high-strung and irritable, prone to crises and disease, in his psychical always something foreign to the average man, affecting him uncannily--something almost psychopathic; though the philistine must not be allowed to put it like that.... No; what I refer to here is that _sense-endowment_ possessed by the noble race of Antæus and celebrated by Goethe’s Faust in the words he addresses to the Earth-Spirit:

_Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles, Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet. Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich, Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu geniessen. Nicht Kalt staunenden Besuch erlaubst du nur, Vergönnest mir, in ihre tiefe Brust Wie in den Busen eines Freunds, zu schauen_....

“Power to feel and to enjoy nature.” Tolstoy’s sense-endowment, as an individual, must have been that of a noble, highly sensitive animal, most perfectly equipped by nature and strengthened and sublimated by the contemplative power and awareness of the human being. His eyes, the small, keen grey eyes under the bushy brows, were like a falcon’s. They saw everything. They were capable of analysis so penetrating as sometimes to seem fantastic. A critic once wrote of him: “You are sometimes capable of saying ‘such and such things about the constitution of a certain man indicated that he wanted to travel to India.’” His sense of smell, it seems, was especially penetrating. The fact plays no small part in the sensuous atmosphere of his writing, and appears to have conflicted at times with his own human feeling. “However much I dislike to speak of it,” he says in his _Recollections_, “I can still remember the characteristic sharp odour which was personal to my aunt, probably in consequence of some carelessness in dress.”

I have already spoken of Goethe’s sensitiveness to weather conditions. It was due to his almost exaggerated sense-endowment; and became positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar he felt the earthquake of Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment which enables them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The animal in us transcends; and all transcendence is animal. The highly irritable sense-equipment of a man who is nature’s familiar goes beyond the bounds of the actual senses and issues in the suprasensual, in natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and proudly justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His mood was sometimes priapic--a thing which of course does not happen with Tolstoy, in whose nature the element of antique culture was missing. In him the voice of sexual desire spoke in no classic accents; it revelled Russianly in its strength; yet at the same time it always had a moral cast, was at all times followed, probably even accompanied, by profound remorse. Tolstoy’s comrades from his Sebastopol period bear witness to the fury with which even at that time the battle between sensual and spiritual impulses raged within him. According to them young Count Tolstoy was a glorious comrade, the life and soul of his battery, overflowing with high spirits. When he was away, they were disconsolate. “We would hear nothing of him,” says the narrator, “for a whole day, for two or three days. At last he would come back, the very picture of the prodigal son; gloomy, knocked up, out of sorts with himself. He would take me aside and begin to confess. He confessed everything, simply everything, his gambling, his carousing, where he had spent his days and nights--and, would you believe it, his remorse and suffering were as deep as though he had committed some great crime. His despair went so beyond all bounds that it was painful to behold. That was the sort of man he was. He was, in a word, very remarkable, and, to tell the truth, I never did quite understand him.”

That we can well believe. The remorse and suffering to which the young officer was a witness sprang of course from that conflict within Tolstoy’s own breast which afterwards gave him such unrivalled power to stir the conscience and prick man’s fear of God awake. But the depth of his moral necessity is a precise measure of the violence of his instincts; and though his natural man bore heavier and heavier on his Christianity as time went on, so that he craved surcease from its stings, yet he never, up till the end, attained to peace. Tolstoy in sex matters held out as long as Goethe, who mocked himself thus:

_Alter, hörst du noch nicht auf? Immer, Mädchen!_

But his state of mind toward woman, whom he had early learned to regard, after the manner of the Fathers, as _instrumentum diaboli_, had long since assumed such a form that an experience like that of Goethe with Ulrike was unthinkable. Stranger still--or no, in a man of his parts and magnificence it is only what we should expect--we find not a trace of cant or prudishness or even delicacy in all his recorded utterances on this subject. On the contrary, they are all of a pagan frankness that borders on the cynical. He goes walking by the sea with Gorky and Anton Tschekof, and suddenly he levels at Tschekof a question about the latter’s youth, using a crude Biblical word with rather startling effect. Anton Pavlovich is confused; he pulls at his little beard and mutters something in reply. The old man lets him stammer awhile, then, looking out to sea, delivers himself in four words, of a confession of his own, in good round terms, ending with a very low and vulgar peasant word. “When they come from his rugged lips,” says Gorky, “words like that lose their barrack-room flavour and sound quite simple and natural.”

Again, he says: “If Leo Nikolaevich were a natural scientist, he would certainly evolve the most ingenious hypotheses, and make the greatest discoveries.” Gorky has not here in mind Tolstoy’s remarkable sense-equipment; but I am inclined to associate the two ideas. Nor, it would appear, has he Goethe in mind when he ascribes to Tolstoy a latent genius for the natural sciences; but I have. To me it seems a pertinent fact that Goethe, in Venice--this was in 1790, at the time of those amorous adventures celebrated in the _Epigrams_--saw a broken sheep-skull on the Lido, and had that morphological insight into the development of all the bones of the skull out of the vertebræ which shed such important illumination upon the metamorphosis of the animal body. When Gorky says that Tolstoy, if he had gone in for it, would have made brilliant discoveries in the field of natural science, there can be no doubt of his meaning. He has in mind that initiated sympathy with organic life which those must possess who are her favoured sons--a sympathy not far from Eros, and in which Goethe’s biologic intuitions have their source; for example, his incredibly sure-footed anticipation of the cell theory.

Does it not find expression, this sympathy, in the youthful Goethe’s Ganymede-pathos? “_Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne sich an mein Herz drängt deiner ewigen Wärme heilig Gefühl._”... “_Aufwärts an deinen Busen, alliebender Vater!_” Does it not find expression in his pantheism, which is only the objectivation of his feeling, in such wise that his own utter surrender gives him to know the divine not as something from without, but as irradiating him through and through? In any case, this organic sympathy, this living interest, is entirely directed toward life, toward the “_ewige Wärme_”; whereas--and what could be more characteristic of the difference between these two, nature’s great children?--Tolstoy’s strongest, most tormenting, deepest, and most productive interest has to do with death. It is the thought of death which dominates his thoughts and writing, to such an extent that one may say no other great master of literature has felt and depicted death as he has--felt it with such frightful penetration, depicted it so insatiably often. Tolstoy’s poetic genius for questioning death is the pendant to Goethe’s intuition in the field of natural science; and sympathy with the organic is at the bottom of both. Death is a very sensual, very physical business; and it would be hard to say whether Tolstoy was so interested in death because he was so much and so sensually interested in the body, and in nature as the life of the body, or whether it was the other way about. In any case, in his fixation with death, _love_ comes into play too: for the fear of death, this source of Tolstoy’s poetry and his feeling for religion, is fear of the love of nature, it is the negative, naturalistic other side of Goethe’s Ganymede-impulse.

“_Du führst_,” says Goethe-Faust to the Earth-Spirit:

“_Du führst die Reihe der Lebendigen Vor mir vorbei und lehrst mich meine Brüder Im stillen Busch, in Luft und Wasser kennen._”

“My brothers.” We know that it was Goethe who took in all seriousness the idea of “man’s close relation to the beast,” and that before science had got far enough on to do so; his possession by this thought, this profound and true intuition, shows us the child of nature in all his sympathy with the organic. Schiller’s humanity, his conception of man, which was at bottom emancipatory, haughtily inimical to nature, would have found little pleasure in such a conception; and one does not discover ideas to which one is unsympathetic; that is to say, ideally unsympathetic. There is not such a thing as an assumptionless science. Scientific discoveries are always the result of an ideal assumption: the mediæval statement “_Credo ut intellegam_” is eternally right. Belief is the organ of knowledge; and without the preconceived, previsioned idea of a unified plan on which is based the development of the higher vertebrate world, including man--in the plant world the conception of the “primitive plant”--Goethe never would have found the _os intermaxillare_ in man. I may speak of the amusing contradiction between his discovery and the humanistic explanation he gave it. He says that the intermaxillary bone is variously shaped, in animals, according to circumstance and necessity; but that when it came to man, the highest in the scale, it hid itself for shame, “afraid of betraying an animal voracity.” Ideal human pride might retort that it was truly inhuman to spy out the shamefaced hidden bone and bring it to the light.

Yet how remarkable and significant it is to see Goethe’s medical and biological interest being seasoned from the start with the humanistic, with his concern with man and his beauty! And consequently with art too; since art with Goethe was a humanistic discipline, and all the disciplines and faculties of human endeavour, human wisdom, human power, were seen by him as variations and adumbrations of one and the same great compelling and enchanting interest and concern, which is man. To study humanity from the angle of medicine and the natural sciences did not lie in his family tradition, as it did in Schiller’s and Dostoyevsky’s, both of whom were sons of physicians, and neither of whom gave a thought to man’s physical side. On the other hand, we know that ever since his Leipsic days Goethe had occupied himself with medicine, associated every day with medical men in Strasburg, worked in the dissecting-rooms, spent time in the obstetrical clinic and the clinic for internal diseases. The spirit in which he pursued these studies, the kind of interest he took in them, is clear from the fact that he himself later in life lectured to young artists in the academy on the bony structure of the body. The same thing comes out even plainer in the words he puts into the mouth of Wilhelm Meister in the _Wanderjahre_, when the hero takes his surgical training. His primary interest is in anatomy; and we get some very curious information on the point of previous preparation in a quite different field of activity.

“By a peculiar method, which no one would guess, I had already made good progress in knowledge of the human frame; and this was during my theatrical career. When you come down to it, the physical man, after all, plays the principal rôle there--a fine man, a fine woman! If the manager is lucky enough to have got hold of these, the writers of comedy and tragedy are assured. The free footing upon which such society lives makes their associates more familiar with the peculiar beauty of the uncovered limbs than any other relationship; different costumes often oblige them to make visible what otherwise is generally concealed. On this point I might have much to say, as also of physical defects which the sensible actor must recognize in himself or others, in order, if not to correct, at least to hide them. In this way I was sufficiently prepared to give consistency to the anatomical course which taught me to know the outer parts more accurately, whilst the inner parts too were not strange to me, inasmuch as a certain perception of them had always been present to me.”

This is, I repeat, a significant bit of information. We learn, not only that the acquaintance with the human form, which Wilhelm owed to the “free footing” of theatrical life, was a happy preparation for his anatomical studies; but also that both, his leaning to the theatre and his interest in medicine, were expressions of one and the same profound interest, his sympathy with the organic and its highest revelation, the human form--an interest, and a sympathy, not far removed, as I said, from Eros. For instance, when Wilhelm Meister, one day in the dissecting-room, finds that his subject is “the most beautiful female arm that ever twined itself about a young man’s neck”--and cannot bring himself to mutilate with his instruments this “glorious manifestation of nature.” Out of this incident there comes about his acquaintance with that remarkable man, the “plastic anatomist,” a sculptor who prepares from wax or other material anatomical dissections possessing the fresh colour and appearance of the natural subjects, in the hope of employing his ingenuity and fertility of method to make the demonstrations more valuable to students and medical practitioners the world over. There follow the most pregnant conversations upon the association of plastic art and anatomical knowledge, and the two intertwine in the most wonderful way when the master “cast in a shaped mass the beautiful torso of a youth and now was skilfully trying to divest the ideal form of the epidermis, to change the beautiful shapes of life into a veritable preparation of muscular tissue.”

Here the prose work of Goethe’s later period refers to his own youthful thoughts and experiences as a student. He had early discovered and stated that a knowledge of nature and a knowledge of art reciprocally heighten each other. “As I observe nature,” he wrote from Rome, “so I now observe art, and win what I have so long striven after, a perfect conception of the highest that has been accomplished by man; and _my soul gets formed_ more on this side and looks into a freer field.” “Architecture and sculpture and painting are to me now like mineralogy, botany, and zoology,” he says in a letter to Herder. And again: “We can finally rival nature by the use of art only when we have learned from her, at least to some extent, the way she proceeds in the formation of her works.... The human form cannot be comprehended merely by looking at the surface of it; one must lay bare its inwardness, disjoin its parts, observe the connexion between them, note the dissimilarities, be instructed in the action and counter-action, print upon one’s mind the hidden and dormant and basic features of a phenomenon, if one wants really to see and imitate it as it moves, a beautiful, indivisible whole, in living waves before our eyes.” These are Goethe’s words, and who could doubt their truth? Who would deny that it advantages the artist to have knowledge of something beneath the skin, so that he can paint what is not seen as well as what is: in other words, if he stand to nature in another relation besides the lyrical, if, for example, he is a physician on the side, a physiologist, an anatomist, and quietly knows what he knows about the _dessous_ as well? The envelope of a human body consists not only of the mucous membrane and cornea of the epidermis, but underneath one has to imagine the corium with its oil and sweat glands, blood-vessels and tubercles, and under that again the adipose tissue, the upholstery that lends the form its charm. But what the artist knows and thinks tells too: it flows into his hand and has its effect; it is not there and yet somehow it is, and just this it is that gives perspicuousness. Art, I repeat, is only one humanistic discipline among others; all of them, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, theology, even the natural sciences and technology as well, are only variations and subspecies of one and the same high and interesting theme--toward which we can never take up a sufficiently varied and many-sided attitude, for it is man; and the _human form_ is the summary of them all, it is, to speak with Goethe, “the _non plus ultra_ of all human knowledge and activity, the alpha and omega of all things known unto us.”

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Autobiography, and education. The two conceptions meet again when we envisage this idea of the human form, this loftiest expression of our sympathy with the organic. Yes, in view of this idea, so genuinely creative, the two conceptions flow into one humane whole: the pedagogic element resides, consciously or unconsciously (and if unconsciously, so much the better), in the autobiographic; it follows from it, it grows out of it.