in our own narrowness and in our slavery to a poetical tradition. It is the distinction of “Wilhelm Meister” that it is actually a novel about business, not merely a realistic novel venturing to approach the edge of that slough of dulness which is supposed to be at the centre of all our lives, but actually a novel about business as such, an attempt to show that the occupation to which a man gives his life is a matter not only for serious thought, but that it is a matter also for philosophy and poetry. That such a novel must at first sight appear tame and dull is obvious; it undertakes to create the taste by which it can be enjoyed, and will be condemned at once by all who are not disposed to give it a serious trial. But the question it raises is the fundamental question of modern life. Comprehensive and practical at once, Goethe’s mind has found out that root of bitterness which is at the bottom of all the uneasy social agitations of the nineteenth century. We live in the industrial ages, and he has asked the question whether industry must of necessity be a form of slavery, or whether it can be glorified and made into a source of moral health and happiness.
It is commonly said that “Wilhelm Meister,” seems to make Art the one object of life; but this is not Goethe’s intention. He was himself an artist, and, as the work is in a great degree autobiographical, art naturally comes into the foreground, and the book becomes especially interesting to artists, but the real subject of it is vocations in general. In the later books, indeed, art drops into the background, and we have a view of feminine vocations. The “Beautiful Soul” represents the pietistic view of life; then Therese appears in contrast, representing the economic or utilitarian view; finally, Natalie hits the golden mean, being practical like Therese but less utilitarian, and, ideal like her aunt, the pietist, but less introspective. On the whole, then, the lesson of the book is that we should give unity to our lives by devoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and that the pursuit is assigned to us by Nature through the capacities she has given us. It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleasure that of the satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different in each individual. His system treats every man as a genius, for it regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which it claims the same sort of tender consideration that is conceded to genius. But in laying down such rules Goethe thinks first of himself. He has spent long years in trying to make out his own vocation. He has had an opportunity of living almost every kind of life in turn. It was not till he returned from Italy that he felt himself to have arrived at clearness. What was Goethe’s vocation? Or, since happiness consists in faithful obedience to a natural vocation, what was Goethe’s happiness? His happiness is a kind of religion, a perpetual rapt contemplation, a beatific vision. The object of this contemplation is Nature, the laws or order of the Universe to which we belong. Of such contemplation he recognizes two kinds, one of which he calls Art and the other Science. He was in the habit of thinking that in Art and Science taken together he possessed an equivalent for what other men call their religion. Thus, in 1817, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Reformation, he writes a poem in which he expresses his devout resolution of showing his Protestantism, as ever, by Art and Science.37 It was because his view of Art was so realistic, that he was able thus to regard Art as a sort of twin-sister of Science. But the principle involved in this twofold contemplation of Nature is the very principle of religion itself, and in one sense it is true that no man was ever more deliberately and consciously religious than Goethe. No man asserted more emphatically that the energy of action ought to be accompanied by the energy of feeling. It is the consistent principle of his life that the whole man ought to act together, and he pushes it so far that he seems to forbid all division of labor in science. This is the position taken up in “Faust” which perhaps is seldom rightly understood. Science, according to “Faust,” must not be dry analysis pursued at a desk in a close room; it must be direct wondering contemplation of Nature. The secrets of the world must disclose themselves to a loving gaze, not to dry thinking (trocknes Sinnen), man must converse with Nature “as one spirit with another,” “look into her breast as into the bosom of a friend.” How we should not study is conveyed to us by the picture of Wagner, who is treated with so much contempt. He is simply the ordinary man of science, perhaps we may think the modest practical investigator, of the class to which the advance of science is mainly due. But Goethe has no mercy on him – why? Because his nature is divided, because his feelings do not keep pace with his thoughts, because his attention is concentrated upon single points. Such a man is to Goethe “the dry creeper,” “the most pitiable of all the sons of earth.”
Thus it is, then, that Art and Science taken together, the living, loving, worshipping contemplation of Nature, out of which comes the knowledge of Nature, are to Goethe religion. But is not such a religion wholly different from religion as commonly understood, wholly different from Christianity?
It was, indeed, very different from such Christianity as he found professed around him. In his youth Goethe was acquainted with several eminently religious persons, Fräulein von Klettenberg, the Frankfurt friend of his family, Jung Stilling, and Lavater. He listened to these not only with his unfailing good humor, but at times with more conviction than “Dichtung und Wahrheit” would lead us to suppose. In some of his early letters he himself adopts pietistic language. But as his own peculiar ideas developed themselves, they separated him more and more from the religious world of his time. At the time of his Italian journey and for some years afterwards, we find him speaking of Christianity not merely with indifference, but with a good deal of bitterness. This hostility took rather a peculiar form. As the whole disposition of his mind leads him towards religion, as he can no more help being religious than he can help being a poet, he does not reject religion but changes his religion. He becomes, or tries to become, a heathen in the positive sense of the word; for the description of Goethe as the Great Heathen is not a mere epithet thrown at him by his adversaries. He provoked and almost claimed it in his sketch of Winckelmann, where, after enthusiastic praise of the ancients and of Winckelmann as an interpreter of the ancient world, he inserted a chapter entitled, “Heidnisches,” which begins thus: “This picture of the antique spirit, absorbed in this world and its good things, leads us directly to the reflection that such excellences are only compatible with a heathenish way of thinking. The self-confidence, the attention to the present, the pure worship of the gods as ancestors, the admiration of them, as it were, only as works of art, the submission to an irresistible fate, the future hope also confined to this world, since it rests on the preciousness of posthumous fame; all this belongs so necessarily together, makes such an indivisible whole, creates a condition of human life intended by Nature herself, that we become conscious, alike at the height of enjoyment, and in the depth of sacrifice and even of ruin, of an indestructible health.” Clearly when he wrote this (about 1804) Goethe wished and intended to pass for a heathen. And, indeed, the antique attracts him scarcely at all from the historical side – he is no republican, no lover of liberty – but almost exclusively because it offers a religion which is to him the religion of health and joy.
Is it, then, true that Christianity is a system of morbid and melancholy introspectiveness, sacrificing all the freshness and glory of the present life to an awful future? He makes this assumption, and had almost a right to make it, since the Christianity of his time had almost exclusively this character. He was, however, himself half aware that there was all the difference in the world between the Christianity of his time and original Christianity or Christianity as it might be. And even at the time of his greatest bitterness he drops expressions which show that he does not altogether relinquish his interest in Christianity, but keeps open for himself the alternative of appearing as a reformer rather than an assailant of it. In the third period and the old age his tone is a good deal more conciliating than in the passage above quoted. In the Autobiography he appears, on the whole, as a Christian, and even makes faint attempts here and there to write in a style that Christians may find edifying. He tells us expressly that he had little sympathy with the Encyclopædists, and, in a passage of the “West-östlicher Divan,” he declares with real warmth that he “has taken into his heart the glorious image of our sacred books, and, as the Lord’s image was impressed on St. Veronica’s cloth, he refreshes himself in the stillness of the breast in spite of all negation and hindrance with the inspiring vision of faith.” Again, when in the “Wanderjahre” he grapples constructively, but somewhat too late, with the problems of the nineteenth century, we find him assuming a reformed Christianity38 as the