THE "old quarrel of poets and philosophers," of which Plato speaks, is as far off from reconciliation as ever, and in one point of view we cannot wish it to be reconciled. It is far from desirable that poetry should ever become a criticism of life," except in the sense in which beauty is always a criticism upon ugliness, or a good man upon a bad one; and it is quite as undesirable that philosophy should relax any of its effort to produce such a criticism, or, in other words, to set the deeper meaning of things against their superficial appearances. Each does best service by remaining within its own. limits and keeping to its own ways of action. Yet there is undoubtedly a point-and that, indeed, the highest point in both-in which they come into close relations with each other. Hence, at least in the case of the greatest poets, NEW SERIES.-VOL. XLV., No. 2

we are driven by a kind of necessity to ask what was their philosophy. A few words on the general relations of poetry and philosophy may make it easier to express what in this point of view we have to say about Goethe.

The poet, like the philosopher, is a seeker for truth, and we may even say for the same kind of truth. He may not, indeed, like the philosopher, separate the idea or principle from the immediate reality of things, but he must be so eager and passionate in his realism as to get at the ideal in it and through it. He must grasp the world of sense so firmly that it ceases to sting. If he remoulds the immediate facts of the world of experience, it must be by means of forces which are working in it as well as in himself, and which his own plastic genius only brings to clearer manifestation. In some few cases, this poetic

process of "widening nature without going beyond it," has been so successful that it becomes almost a futile curiosity to ask what were the materials which the poet has used, or the bare facts for which he has substituted his creations. The kernel has been so completely extracted that we are not concerned about the husk. If we could learn the circumstances of the Trojan War as a contemporary historian might chronicle them, we should not know nearly so much of the inner movement and development of the Greek spirit as Homer has told us; though we should probably find that Homer's story is nowhere a mere copy of the facts, but that it stands to them in somewhat the same relations in which the Sorrows of Werther' stands to the accidents of Goethe's life in Welzlar, and the suicide of Jerusalem. The facts are changed, and a new world constructed out of the old by the shaping imagination of the poet, but the change is such that it seems to have taken place in the factory of Nature herself. The forces that work underground, and hide themselves from us beneath the appearances of human life, have, by the silent elaboration of poetic genius, forced their way to the surface, and transformed the appearances themselves. Hence the new creation has all the colors of life, and almost shames the so-called facts of every day by the sturdy force and reality of its presence. Thus before Shakespeare's characters most ordinary human beings seem like the shadows of the dead in Homer. It is not that in these dramas a different life is set before us from that which men everywhere lead, but the passions and characters which, in conflict with each other and with circumstance, gradually work out their destiny, are in the poet's mind put into a kind of forcing-house, and made with rapid evolution to show their inner law and tendency in immediate results.

It is indeed only the greatest poets who are capable of thus making themselves, as it were, into organs by which nature reaches a further development. In all but the greatest we find a mixture of such creative reconstruction with what we can only call manufacture. The

* Schiller.

For

failing force of vision obliges them to hold together by mechanical means the elements which do not round themselves into an organic whole. And even to the greatest poets it is not granted to have a complete and continuous vision. Hence, except in the case of short "swallow-flights of song," which can be produced in one lyric burst of feeling, works of pure poetic art must be the result of much patient waiting and watching for the spirit; they cannot be perfected without much self-restraint and critical rejection of every element which is not quite genuine. "That which limits us, the common or vulgar," and which by its presence at once turns poetry into prose, cannot be excluded except by a self-abnegation as great as that by which the scientific man puts aside subjective pre-suppositions and "anticipations of nature.' poetic truth does not lie on the surface any more than scientific truth. The kinds of truth are indeed widely different. The aim of the man of science is to distinguish the threads of necessity that bind together the most disparate phenomena, and in pursuit of these he seems, to one who looks at the immediate result, to be explaining away all the life and unity of the world, and putting everywhere mechanism for organism, even in the organic itself. On the other hand, the poet ignores or endeavors to get beyond the external mechanism of the world; he is ever seeking and finding life even among the dead. But only one who regards the abstractions of science as the ultimate truth of things, can take this process to be a mere play of subjective fancy, or can suppose that any great poetic creation is produced by an imagination which merely follows its own dreams and does not bend to any objective law. It is even harder for the poet to eliminate from his work all that is not living, than for the scientific man to set aside the phantoms of life, the final causes, which disturb the prose of science. In both cases the individual has to put himself aside and let nature speak; but the poet listens for another voice, a I still small voice,' which comes from a further depth. The extreme rarity of poetic works of a high order, in spite of the comparatively frequent appearance of a measure of poetic

sense. It cannot therefore, even in tragedy, go fairly down into the region of conflict and limitation, which, as I have said, is the domain of prose. It shrinks from the abstractions and divisions of science, as fatal to that immediate unity and life which it cannot surrender. Hence its old quarrel with philosophy. Philosophy is, in the end, at one with poetry. It might even be said that ultimately it is nothing more than an attempt to prove that which poetry assumes as given, or to enable us by reflection to recognize as the universal principle of reality that ideal which poetry exhibits to us in special creations. Yet the essential differences of method make it difficult for two such disparate activities to come to any understanding with each other. Plato, in whom the perfect union of these two forms of spiritual life was most nearly realized, is also the writer who most strongly insists on their essential opposition. In truth they may be said to start in opposite directions, and only to coincide in their final goal. For philosophy, whatever ultimately it may do to point toward unity, is obliged to begin by carrying abstraction and division to a further extent than even science. If it aims at a final synthesis, it is on the basis of an unsparing analysis; if it seeks to find a living unity in the world, it is not by restoring the immediate life, which science destroys that it may dissect the dead body. Rather its business is to complete the scientific disintegration that, through death, it may reach a higher life. It is essential to philosophy to separate the spiritual from the natural, the higher life from the lower life, the subject from the object, the universal from the particular, the ideal from the real. Thus it carries us deep into the region of abstraction and division, of contradiction and controversy, and if it also can be said to carry us beyond that region, yet in this respect its work is never complete, and the answer it gives in one age requires to be, if not essentially changed, yet deepened and widened and translated into a new language with the changing experiences of another age. Thus the

element of pure theory must always be a dangerous, and may even be a fatal, element to the poet; for it severs that

which it is his peculiar function to keep united, and even where it reunites, it has to accomplish its synthesis in a region of thought in which the sensuous forms of poetry can hardly breathe and live.

These general considerations may serve as an introduction to a few remarks on Goethe's attitude toward philosophy and its influence on his intellectual development. Goethe owed much to particular philosophers; we can often trace in his work indications of the study of Plato, and still more of Spinoza. Nor could he at any time withdraw himself from the influence of the great contemporaneous movement of idealistic thought, to which his own mental development moved in parallel lines, and on which it frequently reacted. But toward philosophy in general he preserved throughout his life a self-defensive attitude-a sort of armed neutrality. While he welcomed sugges

tions from it which were kindred with his own way of thinking, and even willingly appropriated many of its results, he always tried to keep his mind from being influenced by its methods and processes. He shrank from it, at first by a kind of instinct, and afterward with a distinct conviction, that any nearer approach would be dangerous to that intuitive process of imagination which was the source of his own strength. Such reserve and self-limitation was very characteristic of Goethe; for, notwithstanding his many-sidedness, no one ever realized more distinctly the necessity of keeping within his own province. That each one must know himself in the sense of knowing his work, and must refuse to allow himself to be drawn away from it to interests and pursuits which lie beyond the range of his faculty, was for him the first maxim of self-culture. His obedience to it has often subjected him to serious moral charges, on the ground that his pursuit of self-culture involved a narrow selfabsorption and a selfish indifference to the interests of his nation or of humanity. Such a view might appeal to expressions like the following in a letter to Lavater: The passion to lift the pyramid of my being, the basis of which is assigned and established for me, as high as possible into the air, outweighs every

thing else, and permits me scarcely for one moment to forget it." But we must interpret an exaggerated phrase like this by Goethe's often-expressed conviction that we necessarily become bunglers and meddlers when we interfere with that which lies beyond the "orbit fixed for our existence by eternal laws. Activity that does not advance our own self-culture will, he holds, be useful to no other man. For him, as for Plato, all the virtues were summed up in each one doing his own business and avoiding to interfere with that which is the business of others. On this principle we can, at least, partly explain what gave so much offence to the patriotism of his countrymen-his attitude during the war of liberation. In the Awakening of Epimenides,' a poem which was written after the victory over Napoleon, and in which he expresses a kind of penitence for his silence during the national struggle, he suggests the excuse that the part he was called by his nature to play was, not to share in the war, but to prepare for the higher civilization that should arise after the war was ended.

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Epimenides, who represents Goethe, is made to say: "I am ashamed of the hours of rest; it would have been a gain to suffer with you; for the pain you have borne makes you greater than I." But the answer of the priest is: "Blame not the will of the Gods that thou hast gained many a year; they have kept thee in quietness so that thy feeling may be pure (dass du rein empfinden kannst). And so thou art in harmony with the future days to which history offers our pain and sorrow, our endeavor and our courage.

It was a similar feeling that made Goethe generally keep philosophy, as it were, at arm's length, while at the same time he recognized the points of contact which it offered to him. In a letter to Jacobi he says:

You can easily imagine my attitude to philosophy. When it lays itself out for division I cannot get on with it; indeed I may say that it has occasionally done me harm by disturbing me in my natural course. But when it unites, or rather, when it elevates and confirms our original feeling as though we were one with Nature, and elevates it into a peaceful intuition that under its external σύγκρισις and διάκρισις a divine life is present to us, even if we are not permitted to lead such a

life ourselves then it is welcome to me, and you may reckon upon my sympathy."

From this we may explain the charm which he found in the one philosophical work from the influence of which he never tried to withdraw himself-the "Ethics of Spinoza.' That strange book, in which the soul of poetry is clothed in the body of geometry, took hold of Goethe at an early period, so soon as he had begun to emerge out of thestorm and stress" of his youth; and through all his subsequent life he continued to refresh and strengthen himself with its doctrine of all-embracing unity and disinterested love. The extreme antagonisin of Spinoza's methods of thinking and expression to his own contributed to the attraction. in Spinoza his intellectual complement, whom he could enjoy without being in any way tempted to go beyond himself.

He saw

His all-reconciling peace contrasted with my all-agitating endeavor; his intellectual method was the opposite counterpart of my poetic way of feeling and expressing myself; and even the inflexible regularity of his logical procedure, which might be considered in

adapted to moral subjects, made me his most passionate scholar and his devoted adherent. Mind and heart, understanding and sense were drawn together with an inevitable elective affinity, and this at the same time produced an

intimate union between individuals of the most different type."

Goethe never attempted to master the Spinozistic philosophy as a system; he tells us, indeed, that he never even read the Ethics through at one time. But he kept reading in it, as people read in the Bible, to get strength and inspiration, and to confirm himself in those principles that gradually had become almost identified with his consciousness of himself. No other philosophy ever came so close to him: though his early association with Herder brought him indirectly under many philosophic influences, and in particular we often find him using the ideas and language of Leibnitz. To the Critical philosophy, in which the subject seemed to be set against the object and the ideal separated from the real, he at first felt an instinctive repulsion. But at a later time, intercourse with Schiller, who professed himself a Kantian but who tried to soften Kant's sharp contrast between the moral and the natural, did something to re