Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Victorian portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was in the main a moralist's one; he interested us less then as a poet than as a teacher. But we can hardly revert nowadays to that old standpoint; we have come to realize that it is no business of the supreme artist to teach. At the same time it may be said in defence of that opinion that Goethe was more than the supreme artist; much of his activity lay in fields where teaching is the main object. Our change of attitude lies rather in the fact that the lessons the generation of sixty years ago drew from his works are no longer vital lessons to us, who, in our practical life, have to face other intellectual problems than they. Goethe was a leader to a generation which stood, like himself, on the brink of a new era; and that generation naturally sought guidance from him as to what attitude they should take to the new problems. But the world has not developed as Goethe believed it would develop; society has refused to march forward by such undevious ways and on such clearly marked-out lines to a golden age of contented socialism, as were foreshadowed in the Wanderjahre.

A new individualism has taken possession of the nations, the Romantic individualism which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but dimly grasped has become the all-pervading and all-powerful idea of the last hundred years. The individual life and poetry of the little nations of Europe have developed in direct defiance of the cosmopolitan principles of "world literature"; barriers of nationality, in taste, in art, in literature, in ideas, have been set up, which neither stream nor electricity has been able to break down. Goethe could obviously have had no presentiment of this development, so different is it from that cosmopolitan community of thought which dominated the Europe in which he lived.

It is interesting to note that seventy years after the publication of Robertson Goethe and the Twentieth Century late twentieth-century scholars are again interested in Goethe the poet and the teacher. Some of the authors of these essays do argue - contrary to Robertson -that the world has indeed developed "as Goethe believed it would." We can no longer state that "we have swung back again to optimism." Pessimism and individualism seem now to be here to stay.

Modern science and philosophy, contrary to Robertson's statement, do again "walk amiably hand in hand." It is still true - now much more than in the early years of this century - that "a new individualism has taken possession of the nations," but through electronics and mass communication we may be closer to Goethe's concept of "world literature" than Robertson ever thought possible. Goethe is, indeed, world literature, for he casts his giant shadow across national boundaries, through space and time, influencing Federico Garcia Lorca in Spain, Jean-Luc Godard and Michel Tournier in France, Michael Tippett in England, Mikhail Bulgakov in Russia, Hans Henny Jahnn in prewar Germany, Ulrich Plenzdorf in the German Democratic Republic, and virtually all of us around the world. And as "the problem of individual life is, more or less, the same in all ages," the problems of the individual lives of Faust and Wilhelm Meister, of Werther, Iphigenie and Thoas, strike us as timeless.

Yet the very fact that Goethe did approach science as intuitive philosopher and poet - close to Einstein's concept of the thought-experiment - placed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe far ahead of his time, in our time of advanced physics, of Jung and Freud, of psychology and psychiatry, and of test-tube babies and genetic engineering, as the authors of these essays demonstrate. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is indeed our contemporary in spirit; his is the timelessness of all the ages.