Sie ist mein einziges Begehren!
In that splendid cry which was to sum up his ethics (I mean: Pierre Louys’) however admirable it seemed to me, I could not consent to see only a restriction. Nor Goethe either, it seemed to me; for he knew very well that Chiron would not have been able to devote himself to botany, medicine and Achille’s education, if he had always had Helen on his back. Goethe, too, knew how to shake his shoulders. His biography, that I read not long after in a German translation of Lewes’ book, informed me on that subject; I read it with such lively interest that I can not exactly say whether, since, when I think of Goethe, it is of the work or the man himself that I am thinking. There is no example in all literature, of a more perfect fusion, and it is for that reason that his teaching is so insistent. However consecrated may be the lives of certain authors, they remain apart from their productions. With Goethe there is constant interpenetration. Every one of his poems is an act; and, reciprocally, his life looks to us like a masterpiece, one of the finest. No matter which of Goethe’s pages I read, I can not forget him, as I sometimes happen to forget Shakespeare when I read Macbeth or Othello. It is not the flower alone that I admire here; but, with it, the entire plant that bears and nourishes it, and from which I can not detach it. And if I yield here to the naturalist’s need, I find that too in Goethe. However intellectual he may be, Goethe never loses sight of the phenomenal world. An unwavering instinct guides him, and only lets him think, anti-mystic that he is, in accordance with the laws of the perceptible world. The instinct of the naturalist is lacking in most of our “intellectuals” to-day; and that is where, I believe, Goethe could best instruct us, but where he is the least understood, and the least heeded. And that is where, doubtless, I feel myself most like him.
I did not read, at that early period of my life, all of the Second part of Faust, but better yet Faust’s monologue on his awakening amidst an exultant nature, those lines in which the participation of the outer world appears so active that I understood immediately, to the point of embarrassment, that up to that moment (I was eighteen years old), I had only opened my soul to God; I understood He could speak to me through my senses, if the screen of books was not interposed between nature and me, and if I permitted a direct and permanent contact, a physical communion, to be established between my being and the whole of the surrounding universe.
I also read Helen’s monologue:
Bewundert viel und viel gescholten …
How many times I repeated those words later on, exulting in that persuasion that the admiration of another goes hand in hand with blame, that one can not deserve praise without also provoking insult, and that he does not truly love the laurel who does not also love its bitterness.
My memory of the first reading of Torquato Tasso, which I made not long after, remains inseparable from Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea dug a metaphysical pit under the replies in the dialogue between the poet and the man of action. It is of no importance whether Goethe himself was conscious of that deep significance or not. Is it not the property of a perfect work of art to permit of more being seen in it than the artist planned to put into it? In that dialogue two universes confront each other; action opposes the dream and pure contemplation.… And I loved to find time and time again in the whole life of Goethe, those antagonisms that he maintained knowingly within him, which invited him to find satisfaction only in the struggle, and not to seek repose, not to admit there was any other than the one found in death. And it was because he knew that:
On all the summits, repose
and because he did not want repose but struggle that he preferred, to the superhuman summits of the sublime both in art and in his life, the sunny slopes where grow the grain and vine, that should nourish man and that may intoxicate him.
For nothing is more treacherously untrue of Goethe’s image than the serene picture that is commonly painted of him (in France at least). That sort of superior felicity where he maintains himself impassible and smiling in a region inaccessible to storms, is not his. His Spinozism does not go so far as to try to separate him from the passions that the Ethics helped him to understand better. On the contrary, at first he abandons himself to all of them, knowing how to learn from them, and only seeks to free himself when he has nothing more to learn from them. His aim, if he had any other than that of simply living as fully as possible, was culture, not happiness. That is what Michel Arnaud demonstrated excellently, in the pages he published in 1900 and 1901 in l’Ermitage under the title: The Wisdom of Goethe. I have just reread those pages; it seems to me that no one has since written anything more reasonable on Goethe, or anything better. Doubtless the conversations I had at that time with Michel Arnaud helped me to penetrate still further into the hidden recesses of the one toward whom so many natural affinities inclined me. But is it right to speak here of influence? If I allowed myself to be taught so willingly by Goethe, it was because he taught me about myself. And if I make a pun out of the word Recognition, it is because I recognize him in me constantly: each thought I could have, if not born of him, at least gained confidence from him. He did not turn me from my way, and in order to meet him, I did not turn aside from myself. The reading I did from his work blazed the trail of my existence. I have come across a copy of Dichtung und Wahrheit in which, along the margin of the considerations on the history of the Hebrew people (Book IV) I wrote in penciclass="underline" “This whole passage admirable. I read it in the casino at Biskra on February 27, 1895” … And I confess that, on rereading it to-day, however fine that passage still seems to me, I don’t understand very well any more what pleased me so much in it at that time. It is certain that, on that day when I felt the need of going into detail, I had a sort of revelation. Perhaps I had simply found out how to absorb new confidence from that thought so simple and so simply expressed: “Der Mensch mag sich wenden, wohim er will, er mag unternehmen, was es auch sei, stets wird er auf jenen Weg wieder zurückkehren, den ihm die Natur einmal vorgezeichnet hat.”1 Yes, it was especially that which Goethe gave to me: confidence. And, in the diary which I kept at that time, I read at about the same date: “Nothing will have given me more assurance in life than the contemplation of the great figure of Goethe.” I had also to free myself from the trammels of a Puritan morality that, for a time, had been well able to stiffen me and teach me resistance, but of which I now felt only the resistance and embarrassment, with the result that, the force of resistance which it had given me I was resolved to use against that very morality. Nothing was better calculated to help me than the reading of the Roman Elegies. I was delighted to understand them so well. I memorized whole passages of them and recited them to myself all day long; they scanned the rapid beating on my eager heart. I never tired of wondering at the legitimacy of pleasure with the astonishment of someone who, up to that day, had stumbled everywhere against prohibitions and forbidden things. What impunity! What freedom! I was to make a part of me that tranquil and harmonious blossoming in joy. And that nothing was more powerfully opposed to the Christian ideal is what the zealous defenders of the Church did not fail to perceive. It amused me to see them deny that Goethe had talent, the gift of persuasion or eloquence, when the glorious example of his life was enough to convince me that he had not lost his way, and that only those in France could deny the splendor of his writings, who did not read them in his language, but only in a disillusioning translation. However the denial that I was not surprised to see them register in respect to Goethe, I was pleased not to note in Goethe as regards them. It was natural they should not be able to accept the ethics of Goethe. It was natural that Goethe, anxious to admit everything, to understand everything, should write in speaking of them: “It is generally clear that others have just as much right to exist in their way of life, as I in mine.”1 Thus culture accepts Catholicism as a fertile stage in humanism, of that humanism which religious faith must oppose.