However this may be, when a man, so richly gifted otherwise, displays the rarest of all manly qualities – viz., the power and persistent will to make his life systematic, and place all his action under the control of a principle freely and freshly conceived, he rises at once into the highest class of men. It is the strenuous energy with which Goethe enters into the battle of life, and fights there for a victory into which others may enter, that makes him great, that makes him the teacher of these later ages, and not some foppish pretension of being above it all, of seeing through it and despising it. But just because he conceived the problem in his own manner, and not precisely as it is conceived by the recognized authorities on the conduct of life, he could take little interest in the controversies which those authorities held among themselves, and therefore passed for indifferent to the problem itself. He did not admit that the question was to form an opinion as to the conditions of the life after death, though he himself hoped for such a future life, for he wanted rather rightly to understand and to deal with the present life; nor did he want what is called in the schools a philosophy, remarking probably that the most approved professors of philosophy lived after all much in the same way as other people. It seemed to him that he was more earnest than either the theologians or the philosophers, just because he disregarded their disputes and grappled directly with the question which they under various pretexts evaded – how to make existence satisfactory.
He grasps it in the rough unceremonious manner of one who means business, and also in the manner which Rousseau had made fashionable. We have desires given us by God or Nature, convertible terms to him; these desires are meant to receive satisfaction, for the world is not a stupid place, and the Maker of the world is not stupid. This notion that human life is not a stupid affair, and that the fault must be ours if it seems so, that for everything wrong there must be a remedy,35 is a sort of fundamental axiom with him, as it is with most moral reformers. Even when he has death before his mind he still protests. “‘He is no more!’ Ridiculous! Why ‘no more?’ ‘It is all over.’ What can be the meaning of that? Then it might as well never have existed. Give me rather an eternal void.” And this way of thinking brings him at once, or so he thinks, into direct conflict with the reigning system of morality, which is founded not on the satisfaction, but on the mortification of desire. He declares war against the doctrine of self-denial or abstinence. “Abstain, abstain! – that is the eternal song that rings in every ear. In the morning I awake in horror, and am tempted to shed bitter tears at the sight of day, which in its course will not gratify one wish, not one single wish.” So speaks Faust, and Goethe ratifies it in his own person, when he complains that, “we are not allowed to develop what we have in us, and are denied what is necessary to supply our deficiencies; robbed of what we have won by labor or has been allowed us by kindness, and find ourselves compelled, before we can form a clear opinion about it to give up our personality, at first in instalments, but at last completely; also that we are expected to make a more delighted face over the cup the more bitter it tastes, lest the unconcerned spectator should be affronted by any thing like a grimace.” He adds that this system is grounded on the maxim that “All is vanity,” a maxim which characteristically he pronounces false and blasphemous. That “all is not vanity” is indeed almost the substance of Goethe’s philosophy. “His faith,” so he tells the Houri who, at the gate of Paradise, requires him to prove his orthodoxy, “has always been that the world, whichever way it rolls, is a thing to love, a thing to be thankful for.”36
This doctrine again, is not in itself or necessarily a doctrine of selfishness, though it may easily be represented so. It may be true that all virtue requires self-denial; but for that very reason we may easily conceive a system of senseless and aimless self-denial setting itself up in the place of virtue. It is not every kind of self-denial that Goethe has in view, but the particular kind by which he has found himself hampered. His indignation is not moved when he sees absistence practised in order to attain some great end; it is the abstinence which leads to nothing and aims at nothing that provokes him. He has given two striking dramatic pictures of it. There is Faust, who cannot tolerate the emptiness of his secluded life; but does it appear that he rebels against it simply because it brings no pleasure to himself, even though it confers benefit upon others and upon the world? The burden of his complaint is that his abstinence does no good to anybody, that the studies for which he foregoes pleasure lead to no real knowledge; and expressly to make this clear, Goethe introduces the story of the plague, which Faust and his father had tried to cure by a drug, which did infinitely more harm than the plague itself. The other picture is that of Brother Martin in “Götz,” the young monk who envies Götz his life so full of movement and emotion, while he is himself miserable under the restraint of his vows. Here, again, the complaint is that no good comes of such abstinence. The life of self-denial is conceived as an utter stagnation, unhealthy even from a moral point of view. It is contrasted with a life not of luxury, but of strenuous energy, at once wholesome and useful to the world.
So far, then, Goethe’s position is identical with that which Protestants take up against monasticism, when they maintain that powers were given to be used, desires implanted in order that they might be satisfied. He does not, any more than they, assert that when some great end is in view it may not be nobler to mortify the desire than to indulge it. But he applies the principle more consistently, and to a greater number of cases than they had applied it. Not against celibacy or useless self-torture only, but against all omission to satisfy desire, against all sluggishness or apathy in enjoyment – understood always that no special end is to be gained by the self-denial – he protests. In his poem, called the “General Confession” (“Generalbeichte”) he calls his followers to repent of the sin of having often let slip an opportunity of enjoyment, and makes them solemnly resolve not to be guilty of such sins in future. Here, at least, the reader may say, selfishness is openly preached; and perhaps this is the interpretation most commonly put upon the poem. Yet it is certainly unjust to pervert in this way an intentional paradox, and, in fact, in that very poem Goethe introduces the most elevated utterance of his philosophy; for the vow which the penitents are required to take is that they will “wean themselves from half-measures and live resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, and the Beautiful!” Goethe, in short, holds, as many other philosophers have done, that an elevated morality may be based on the idea of pleasure not less than on the idea of duty.
This principle, not new in itself, led to very new and important results when it was taken up not by a mere reasoner but by a man of the most various gifts and of the greatest energy. By “pleasure” or “satisfaction of desire” is usually meant something obvious, something passive, merely a supply of agreeable sensations to each of the five senses. In Goethe’s mouth the word takes quite a different meaning. He cannot conceive pleasure without energetic action, and the most necessary of all pleasures to him is that of imaginative creation. The desires, again, for which he claims satisfaction – what are they? Chief among them is the desire to enter into the secret of the universe, to recognize “what it is which holds the world together within.” Such desires as these might be satisfied, such pleasures enjoyed, without any very culpable self-indulgence. And existence would be satisfactory, or, as he calls it, harmonious, if it offered continually and habitually food for desire so understood, which is almost the same thing as capacity. But there are hindrances.