move his objections. And the "Critique of Judgment," in which Kant himself undertakes the same task of mediation between freedom and nature, was a book almost entirely to his mind. He de tected the way in which Kant, especially in this final development of his philosophy, points (" as by a side gesture") beyond the limitations which he seems to fix for the intelligence of man, and with a curious turning of the tables, he claimed Kant's account of the "intuitive understanding" as a fit description of the true synthetic method for the discovery of Nature's laws which he had himself followed. On the other hand, he was repelled by the one-sided Idealism of Fichte, who exaggerated that aspect of the critical philosophy with which he was least in sympathy, and he seldom speaks of "the great Ego of Ossmanstadt" without a shade of irony. There is even a trace of malicious satisfaction in the way in which he relates how Fichte had his windows broken by the students of Jena: not the most pleasant way of becoming convinced of the existence of a non-ego." The further development of the ideas of the Critique of Judgment,' by which Schelling brought Idealism, so to speak, into a line with Spinozism, excited his eager interest, and he even speaks of the advance of philosophy as having helped him to reconcile himself to many things that had repelled him at an earlier time, and especially as having considerably changed his view of Christianity. Still, on the whole, except in the case of Spinoza, his attitude to philosophy is that of an outsider who accepts its help when it seems to support his own way of thinking, but disregards it when it does not. And his ultimate view of it seems to be that indicated by the (somewhat ambiguous) aphorism, that man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out wherein it consists.'

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What has just been said may be taken as a summary of Goethe's relations to philosophy. Such a summary, however, can tell us very little about Goethe, unless we are able to bring it into definite relation with the different stages of his intellectual history. In this article we can only attempt to indicate one or two turning-points in that history, and espe

cially to show how it was that, at one of these turning-points, the philosophy of Spinoza gained so great a power over him, and how at a later time it combined itself with other influences to produce that distinctive cast of thought which we trace in all his later works.

The first question we are naturally led to ask about an original genius like Goethe, who has done so much to change the main current of European thought, is as to his relation to the past. Against what had he to revolt--from what had he to free himself, in order to open the way for the new life that was in him? And on the other side, with what already acting forces could he ally himself? Born in the middle of the eighteenth century, he awakened to intellectual life between a lifeless orthodoxy and an external enlightenment which was gradually undermining it, but at the same time reducing itself to a platitude. Looking beyond his own country to France, which had then all the prestige of culture, he found an artificial and aristocratic literature which repelled his youthful sympathies, and a scepticism which stopping short in its development and allying itself with the rising mathematical and physical sciences, was on the way to produce a mechanical theory of the universe. He had soon got by heart the negative lesson of Voltaire, and, like Faust, he found that, while it freed him from all his superstitions, it at the same time made the world empty and barren to him. And the mechanical philosophy which presented itself in the "Systême de la Nature,' as the positive substitute for his lost faith, could not but fill a poet's soul with pious horror. In Goethe's autobiography, though written many years after, we can still see the vehemence of his revolt against a theory which reduced that which appears higher than nature, or rather as the higher nature in nature itself, to aimless and formless matter and motion."

It appeared to us," he declared, “so gray, so Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost. We thought it the very quintessence of old age. All was said to be necessary, and therefore, no God. Why, we asked, should not a necessity for God find its place among other necessities? We confessed, indeed, that we could not withdraw ourselves from the necessary influences of day and

On the other hand, the ordinary teleological theology, with its external world architect and externally determined designs, could not seem to Goethe any more satisfactory than the mechanical philosophy. It had indeed the same fault as that philosophy; for it too substituted an external composition of parts for inner life and development. He had put such theology away from him almost in his boyhood, and he could not return to it. Then as always, he was ready to shoot Voltairian shafts of wit at a doctrine of final causes which made any accidental result of the existence of an object into its end. In this state of mind, the fiery appeals of Rousseau to Nature, as a power within man which is selfjustified against every constraint forced upon him from without, could not but produce the greatest effect on Goethe. All his discontent with an unproductive orthodoxy, and all his distaste for a disintegrating scepticism, combined to make him accept a creed which promised freedom to all the forces of his being. Rousseau seemed to vindicate the claims of everything that had life, and to war only with the dead; and a susceptible poetic nature, doubting of itself, was only too willing to be re-assured by him as to the rightness of its own impulses. The vagueness of this gospel of nature was for a time hidden from Goethe by the very intensity of the poetic impulse within him which responded vividly to every impression from without. See, my friend," he writes in an early letter, what is the beginning and end of all writing, but the reproduction of the world around me by the inner world, which seizes upon everything, binds it together, new creates it, kneads it, and sets it out again in its own form and manner. The rush of youthful inspiration seemed to need no guide, and it spent its force in every direction from which excitement came with what

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passion which is shown in the letters and poems of this time of storm and stress. From some of the worst dangers of such a time, Goethe was saved by the genuineness of his poetic impulse. But such a living at random, with all sails set and no hand on the helm, could not long be possible even to genius. In his case it resulted in a crisis of sensibility, the image of which is preserved for us in the Sorrows of Werther, work in which he at once expressed the passions and illusions of his youth, and freed himself from them.

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Nature' is the obvious rallying cry of a new generation striving to free itself from the weight of the ideas and institutions of an earlier time. Such a cry may often be the expression of a very artificial and sophistical state of mind, which, beginning in the desire to throw off that which is really oppressive, ends in a fretful revolt against the most necessary conditions of human life. The vague impulse of youth which refuses to limit itself or give up its "natural right to all things," the vain demand of the heart to find an outward world which corresponds to its wants, the rebellion of passion against the destiny which refuses it an immediate satisfaction, the hatred of the untamed spirit for everything of the nature of convention and rule-each and all of these feelings readily disguise themselves under the name of a desire to return to nature. But in truth such a longing can least of all be satisfied with the siniple rustic and domestic life which it seems to admire. When it cries out-"O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint !"-it forgets that knowledge would be fatal to such bliss. The selfabsorbed, self-conscious spirit, preying upon itself in its isolating individualism, is least of all capable of that simple union with others for which it pines, of that contentment with natural pleasures which it loves to express. Rude nature would terrify it most of all, if it could once fairly come in contact with her. The discontent of the sentimentalist with the world is merely a way of expressing what is really the inner selfcontradiction of his own state. The exaggerated image of self stands between him and the world, and gives rise to an infinite craving which spurns every finite

satisfaction. His joy is, in the language of Goethe, a fruit which is "corrupted ere it is broken from the tree."

This strange emotional disease which vexes the modern world has had its literary representatives in most European nations, who have expressed it with national and individual modifications. From Rousseau, whose whole individuality and character was absorbed by it, it received its first and most complete expression. In this country, Byron combined it with the fervor of an active temperament, and draped it in a somewhat theatrical costume. Goethe, in his "Werther," gave to it a purer rendering, combining it with the domestic sentiment and reflective self-analysis of his nation. But, while Rousseau and even Byron were permanent victims of the self-contradictory state of feeling which they expressed, Goethe, in his Werther,' found a true æsthetic deliverance from it. He cured himself, so to speak, by painting his disease. He exorcised the spectre that barred his way to a higher life by forcing it to stand to be painted. 'Werther' was his demonstration to himself of the emptiness and unworthiness of a state of mind whose only legitimate end was suicide. This, indeed, was not understood at the time. Goethe was haunted through life by the "viel-beweinter Schatten"-by a constant demand for sympathy from those whose malady he had so perfectly described and who expected to find in him a fellow-sufferer. But for him, the writing of the book was the beginning of recovery. In his Autobiography, he complains of those who sought a direct moral lesson in a work of art, and who imagined that Werther' was intended to justify the sentimentality and the suicide of the hero. For himself, however, it had a lesson, the reverse of that which lies on the surface of it-the lesson that rebellion against the conditions of human life is not only futile, but irrational. In these limiting conditions, he is never, weary of preaching, lies the way to freedom. From the law that binds all men, he only can be freed who overcomes himself." How far this lesson was revealed to Goethe in the mere rebound from Wertherism, and how far he owed it to any external teaching, we cannot now disentangle. It is sufficient

to say that he seemed to himself to find it in the pages of Spinoza. Goethe's apprenticeship," to use his own metaphor, was ended when Spinoza took in his inner life that place which had hitherto been filled by Rousseau. The passage in the "Dichtung und Wahrheit" in which this is expressed is familiar, but it is necessary to quote it here once

more :

"Our physical as well as our social life, morality, custom, knowledge of the world, philosophy, religion yea, many an accidental occurrence-all tell us that we must renounce. So much is there which belongs to our inmost being, which we cannot develop and form outwardly so much that we need from without to the completion of our being is withdrawn from us and, again, so much is forced on us which is both alien and burdensome. We are

In

deprived of that which is toilsomely won, of that which is granted by kindly powers, and ere we can see the meaning of it, we find ourselves compelled to give up our personality, first by fragments, and then completely. such cases it is usual to pay no attention to any one who makes faces at the sacrifice exacted of him; rather, the bitterer the cup, the sweeter must be one's bearing, in order that the unconcerned spectator may not be annoyed by a grimace.

·

"To solve this hard problem, Nature has furnished man with a rich provision of force, activity, and toughness. But what most often comes to his help is his unconquerable levity. By this he becomes capable of renouncing particular things at each moment if he can only grasp at something new in the next. Thus unconsciously we are constantly renewWe put one passion ing our whole lives. amusements, hobbies, we prove them all one in place of another; business, inclinations, after another, only to cry out that all is vanity.' No one is shocked at this false, nay, blasphemous, speech; nay, every one thinks that in uttering it he has said something wise and unanswerable. Only a few men there are who anticipate such unbearable feelings, and in order to escape from all partial renunciations, perform one all-embracing act of renunciation. These are the men who convince themselves of the existence of the eternal, of the necessary, of universal law, and who seek to form conceptions which cannot fail them, yea, which are not disturbed, but rather confirmed, by the contemplation of that which passes away. But as there is something superhuman in this attitude of mind, such persons are commonly held to be inhuman, without God and aliens to the world, and it is much if men refrain from decorating them with horns and claws."

in some respects against Goethe's moral attitude, but there is one point in which it is scarcely possible to praise it too much. No one ever acted more faithfully on the resolve to make the best of circumstances, and to put behind him with resolute cheerfulness the blasphemous speech that all is vanity." It is easy in one way to make too much of one's own life, but it is not easy to make enough of it in Goethe's sense of living in the present, and drawing all the good out of it. Where men do not live from hand to mouth, nor are the victims of one narrow interest, their self-occupation is often a dreaming about the past and the future, which isolates them from other men and from the world. They are always losing to-day, because there has been a yesterday, and because to-morrow is coming." "They little suspect what an inaccessi ble stronghold that man possesses who is always in earnest with himself and the things around him." To be "always in earnest' with little things as well as great, with the minutest facts presented to his observation as with the most important issues of life, to throw the whole force of his being into a court mask (when that was the requirement of the hour) as into a great poem or a scientific discovery; to be, in short, always intent upon the nearest duty,' was Goethe's practical philosophy. With this was combined a resolute abstinence from complaint, or even from thought about what is not given by nature and fortune, and an eager and thankful acceptance of what is so given. In one way, this "old heathen,' as he calls himself, is genuinely pious; he is always acknowledging his advantages and opportunities, and almost never speaking of hindrances; and he seems constantly to bear with him a simple-hearted confidence in the goodness and justice of the Power which has brought him just what it has brought, and refused just what it has refused. He belongs to the order of which he speaks in the second part of "Wilhelm Meister," the order of those who "cheerfully renounce" whatever is not granted to them, and who come back through a kind of stoicism to an optimism which begins on a higher level. With this is connected an ungrudging spirit in the

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recognition of the excellences of others, and an unenvious readiness to further every one in his own way. It was this pliant strength, and the faith on which it rests, that attracted to Goethe the admiration and almost worship of a man so different as Carlyle, who, in all superficial interests, was at an opposite pole of thought and temperament.

Goethe's storm and stress" period -the period of unconditioned effort to break through all limitations," as he calls it was ended with "Werther,' and with it began a movement toward limit and measure, which culminated at the period of his Italian journey. If in this new phase of thought Nature was still worshipped, it was no longer regarded as a power that reveals itself at once in the immediate appearances of the outward world, or the immediate impulses of the human spirit. It was now the natura naturans of Spinozaie., as Goethe conceived it, a plastic organizing force which works secretly in the outward and especially in the organic world, and which in human life reveals itself most fully as the ideal principle of art. Clinging, as an artist, to the external, Goethe now sees that the truth of nature does not lie immediately on the surface, but in a unity which can be grasped only by a penetrative insight. Demanding, as a poet, that the ideal should not be separated from the sensuous, he is now conscious that the poetic truth of the passions shows itself, not in their immediate expression, but only when their conflict leads to their purification," and so reveals a higher principle. Hence, though, even more decidedly than at an earlier time, he rejects the Christian faith, which he regards as breaking the sacred bond of Nature and Spirit, and setting the one against the other, it is an idealized materialism which he opposes to it. What he fears and abhors in religion and in philosophy is the idea of a godless nature and an unnatural God," a mechanical world. order and an external world-architect or world-governor who "lets the world. swing round his finger." "It befits Him to move the world from within, to cherish nature in Himself, and Himself in nature, so that what lives and moves

* Schelling.

Fatherland, in the course of their own lives and that of their fellow-citizens-because, in

of a power which manifests itself in the facts of nature, though only to an eye which can penetrate through the apparent chaos to the point where it may be seen as a cosmos. The great modern ideas of organism and development have taken hold upon him, and he regards the artistic faculty as simply the highest expression of the shaping principle which works underground in nature. His fundamental ideas might be summed up in the pregnant words of Shakespeare, that

"Nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so o'er the art, Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes.'

He had come, he tells us, to regard his own indwelling poetic power as simply and entirely nature," and as with him every idea rapidly changed itself into an image," he sought to express his religious attitude by a new rendering of the old myth of Prometheus. He too, like Prometheus, had a consciousness of "the god within him" which made him independent of the gods above; for his poetic faculty seemed to him something higher than his individual will and impulses something that might claim kindred with the productive force of nature itself.

Such a view of things we may call in a special sense Hellenic, since it was in ancient Greece that the higher spiritual interests of man seemed most directly to connect themselves with the gifts of nature. The Greeks were led by an almost unconscious impulse to idealize the natural without ever breaking with it or opposing the spiritual to it. Thus they showed themselves artists not only in art, but in life, and escaped the painful division of the modern mind.

"The modern," writes Goethe,

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can

scarcely bend his thoughts upon any object without throwing himself into the infinite, in order finally, if things go well with him, to return to a limited point; but the ancients, without traversing any such circuitous path, felt all their individual requirements satisfied within the limits of the beautiful world. Wherefore are their poets and historians the wonder of those who understand, the despair of those

who would imitate them, but because the dramatis persone whom they had to set on the stage took so deep an interest in their own immediate selves, in the narrow sphere of their

themselves upon the present? Hence it could not be difficult for writers who were filled with a kindred spirit to make such a present eternal. What actually happened had for them that

we

magic value which are scarcely able to attach to anything but that which is thought and felt. They clung so closely to what is nearest, what is truest and most real, that even their fancy pictures have bone and marrow. Man and what is human were most highly prized, and all man's inward and outward relations to the world were exhibited as For

powerfully as they were apprehended. not yet were thought and feeling dismembered by abstraction; not yet had that scarcely remediable division been produced in the sound nature of man. "'*

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Most

These words bear the impress of the change by which Goethe passed from what is usually called the romantic to the classic school of art. From his earliest years indeed he had felt the charm of Greek art and poetry; but the productions of his youth were animated. by another spirit. "Götz von Berlichingen," his first important dramatic work, was one of the earliest expressions of that passion for mediæval ideals which afterward went so far in Germany and other countries; and his first essay on art was an enthusiastic tribute to the glories of Strasburg Cathedral. of the poetic works attempted or sketched out in this period, such as "The Wandering Jew" and the first outline of Faust," show the same bent of mind; and in "Werther' the endless lament of modern sentimentalism over the separation of the real from the ideal reached its ne plus ultra of expression. But with this work Goethe, as we have seen, made a return upon himself, and almost violently rejected from him the ideas and methods of romanticism. became the sworn enemy of all formless and chaotic productions, and insisted with growing emphasis upon the necesIt is a susity of form and measure. perficial indication of this that he began to versify his dramatic works, even those that had at first been composed in prose, and in many cases to select classic subjects and use classic metres. The same change showed itself in other contemporaneous writers, as, for example, in Schiller, • whose Götter Griechen

* Goethe's

Essay on Winckelmann."

He