Thus hindrance after hindrance to our regarding Goethe as a great prophet of the higher life and of the true religion disappears. There remains one which is not so easily removed. What surprises the English reader in “Wilhelm Meister” is not merely the prominence given to Art, or the serious devotion to things present and to the present life, but also the extraordinary levity with which it treats the relations of men and women. The book might, in fact, be called thoroughly immoral, if the use of that word which is common among us were justifiable. More correctly speaking, it is immoral throughout on one point; immoral, in Goethe’s peculiar, inimitable, good-natured manner. The levity is the more startling in a book otherwise so remarkably grave. Every subject but one is discussed with seriousness; in parts the solemnity of the writer’s wisdom becomes quite oppressive; but on the relations of men and women he speaks in a thoroughly worldly tone. Just where most moralists grow serious, he becomes wholly libertine, indifferent, and secular. There is nothing in this novel of the homely domestic morality of the Teutonic races; a French tone pervades it, and this tone is more or less perceptible in the other writings of Goethe, especially those of the second period, with the exception of “Hermann und Dorothea.” On this subject, the great and wise thinker descends to a lower level; he seems incapable of regarding it with seriousness; or if he does treat it seriously, as in the Elective Affinities, he startles us still more by a certain crude audacity.
It seems possible to trace how Goethe fell into this extraordinary moral heresy. Starting from the idea of the satisfaction of desire, and with a strong prejudice against all systems of self-denial, he perceived, further, that chastity is the favorite virtue of mediævalism, that it is peculiarly Catholic and monastic. Then, as his mind turned more and more to the antique, he found himself in a world of primitive morals, where the woman is half a slave. He found that in the ancient world friendship is more and love less than in the modern – to this point, too, Winckelmann had called his attention – and, since he had adopted it as a principle that the ancients were healthy-minded and that the moderns are morbid, he jumped to the conclusion that the sentimental view of love is but a modern illusion. He accustomed his imagination to the lower kind of love which we meet with in classical poetry, the love of Achilles for Briseis, of Ajax for Tecmessa. In his early pamphlet against Wieland (“Götter, Helden und Wieland,” 1773), we find him already upon this train of reasoning, and his conclusions are announced with the most unceremonious plainness. How seriously they were adopted may be seen from the “Roman Elegies,” written fifteen years later. Among the many reactions which the eighteenth century witnessed against the spirit of Christianity, scarcely any is so startling and remarkable as that which comes to light in these poems. Here the woman has sunk again to her ancient level, and we find ourselves once more among the Hetaeræ of old Greek cities. After reading these wonderful poems, if we go through the list of Goethe’s female characters we shall note how many among them belong to the class of Hetaeræ – Clärchen. Marianne, Philine, Gretchen, the Bayadere. And if we turn to his life, we find the man, who shrank more than once from a worthy marriage, taking a Tecmessa to his tent. The woman who became at last his wife was spoken of by him in a letter to the Frau von Stein, as “that poor creature.” She is the very beauty celebrated in the “Roman Elegies.”
This strange moral theory could not but have strange consequences. Love, as Goethe knows it, is very tender, and has a lyric note as fresh as that of a song-bird; but it passes away like the songs of spring. In his Autobiography, one love-passage succeeds another, each is charmingly described, but each comes speedily to an end. How far in each case he was to blame is matter of controversy. But he seems to betray a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental Sultan. “I was in that agreeable phase,” he writes, “when a new passion had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared.” About Friederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating, bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the deepest impressions and to receive new ones; and he never looks back. A curious insensibility, which seems imitated from the apparent insensibility of Nature herself, shows itself in his works by the side of the deepest pathos. Faust never once mentions Gretchen again, after that terrible prison scene; her remembrance does not seem to trouble him; she seems entirely forgotten, until, just at the end, among the penitents who surround the Mater Gloriosa, there appears one who has borne the name of Gretchen. In like manner – this shocked Schiller – when Mignon dies she seems instantly forgotten, and the business of the novel scarcely pauses for a moment.
We are also to remember that Goethe was a man of the old régime. If he who had such an instinctive comprehension of feminine character, at the same time treats women in this Oriental fashion, we are to remember that he lived in a country of despotic Courts, and also that he was entirely outside the movement of reform. Had he entered into the reforming movement of his age, he might have striven to elevate women, as he might have heralded and welcomed some of the ideas of 1789, and the nationality movements of 1808 and 1813. He certainly felt at times that all was not right in the status of women (“Der Frauen Schicksal ist beklagenswerth”), and how narrowly confined was their happiness (“Wie enggebunden ist des Weibes Glück,”), as he certainly felt how miserable was the political conditions of Germany. Nevertheless he did not take the path either of social or of political reform. He worked in another region, a deeper region. He was a reformer on the great scale in literature, art, education, that is, in culture, but he was not a reformer of institutions. And as he did not look forward to a change in institutions, his views and his very morality rested on the assumption of a state of society in many respects miserably bad.
But the effect of this aberration upon Goethe’s character as a teacher and upon his influence has been most disastrous. And inevitably, for as it has been the practice in the Christian world to lay all the stress of morality upon that very virtue which Goethe almost entirely repudiates, he appears not only to be no moralist but an enemy of morality. And as he once brought a devil upon the stage, we identify him with his own Mephistopheles, though, in fact, the tone of cold irony is not by any means congenial to him. He has the reputation of a being awfully wise, who has experienced all feelings good and bad, but has survived them, and from whose writings there rises a cold unwholesome exhalation, the odor of moral decay. It is thought that he offers culture, art, manifold intellectual enjoyment, but at the price of virtue, faith, patriotism.
If I have taken a just view, the good and bad characteristics of his writings stand in a different relation. It is not morality itself that he regards with indifference, but one important section of morality. And he is an indifferentist here, partly because he is a man formed in the last years of the old régime, partly because he is borne too far on the tide of reaction against Catholic and monastic ideas. Nevertheless, he remains a moralist; and in his positive teaching he is one of the greatest moral teachers the world has ever seen. In his life he displayed some of the greatest and most precious virtues, a nobly conscientious use of great powers,