Yet I confess that this forebearance of Goethe’s seems to me today somewhat compromising. As long as he opens his mind and heart through great need to understand everything, it is all right; but if it is through concern for tranquillity and comfort, that is what augments accordingly, in my eyes, the cutting attitude of Nietzsche.
It is not a matter of indifference that Germany alone produced these two great representatives of humanity. Goethe was necessary for Nietzsche to raise himself, not against him, but on him. When I reread Goethe, I see Nietzsche in him already in full strength. You don’t have to squeeze Faust very hard to have the superman spout out; in The Gods, The Heroes of Wieland, I have a presentiment of The Birth of the Tragedy; and lastly, in his Prometheus (I am not speaking only of the Ode that figures also in the volume of his Poetry, but of the little drama to which, a little artificially, he later attached this monologue1), I learned then that nothing great was attempted by man, except in revolt against the gods. None of Goethe’s work exercises my mind more deeply, and that too is because his boldness is so extreme; that is why Goethe could not make up his mind easily, and then only toward the end of his life, to publish that youthful writing. Even the Ode he attached was given to the public without his consent. Here, as though in spite of himself, Goethe joins Nietzsche, or rather precedes him. But as to the state of insubordination that he paints in his Prometheus, Goethe is neither able nor does he wish to maintain it; he has got to return, on leaving the region of the thunder, to a climate where his thought can blossom more comfortably. He who was to attempt in the Second part of Faust a reconciliation between Faust and God by means of a dangerous Christian symbolism, desired, in a spirit of pacifism, to reconcile even with the divinities of Olympus the Titan at first in revolt. The sentence he adds to the monologue: “Minerva tritt auf, nochmals eine Vermittelung einleitend” (Minerva arrives for a new attempt at mediation) makes it sufficiently clear. And his not being able to succeed in finding a satisfactory formula for the reconciliation, or his coming to regard that reconciliation as impossible or vain, is what explains the interruption of that work about which Goethe had, nevertheless, scarcely ceased to think, for it symbolized and resumed admirably the torment of his own mind. I will say more: that peace that he attained in his life, he was doubtless only able to obtain by cheating a little; he could not consent to trickery in a work of art; so it remained incomplete.
If the harsh chastity of Nietzsche drives further a boldness more constant and not less noble, I admire and love in Goethe, companion of his strength, that loving tenderness that causes him to make Prometheus bend over Pandora:
And thou, Pandora,
Holy receptacle of all the gifts
That dispense joy
Under the distant sky
Upon an immense earth;
Everything that causes my being to exult,
That which, in the coolness of the shade,
Showers me with comfort,
And the spring-time joy of the friendly sun
And the warm waves of the Ocean,
If their tenderness has ever caressed my breast
And all that whose pure celestial glow
Has delighted my soul with repose.…
All that, all … My Pandora!1
Even the universality of Goethe and the equilibrium in which he maintains his faculties, are not unaccompanied by a sort of moderation and temperance. Or rather; only moderation permits this happy equilibrium, against which Nietzsche soon sets his face. Dionysus triumphs here. Goethe is a little suspicious of intoxication and prefers to let Apollo dominate. His work, impregnated with rays, has none of those mysterious retreats in which to shelter his supreme agony and his gloom. He can shed gentle tears; he is never heard to sob. Nietzsche will require more of man, it is true; but the example of this thunder-struck Titan, of this Prometheus without Pandora, that indeed is our own fragility which he is recalling. To his anxious question: “What can a man do?” no one has responded better than Goethe.
1 March 1, 1932.
1 In whatever direction man goes and whatever he undertakes, he will always come back to the road that Nature has traced for him in advance.
1 French Countrysides. (Munster: December 1792). And further on: “The farewell formula of pious and kindly Catholics was not unknown or unpleasant to me; it had often been used with me by passing acquaintances, and often, too, by priests, my friends, and I don’t know why I should feel ill-will toward everyone who wishes to draw me into his sphere, the only one where, according to his conviction, one can live and die in peace, in the hope of eternal felicity.” (Ibid; end of the paragraph).
1 To my great surprise, I met, in Germany, eminent and very cultivated men of letters, who had no knowledge or memory of that work and even denied its existence; that is the reason I am quoting at some length. It is to this Prometheus and not to the well-known Pandora that Goethe alludes in the fifteenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit.
1 Und du, Pandora
Heiliges Gefäss der Gaben alle
Die ergötzlich sind
Unter dem weiten Himmel,
Auf der unendlichen Erde,
Alles, was mich je erquickt von Wonnegefühl,
Was in der Schattens Kühle
Mir Labsal ergossen,
Der Sonne Liebe jemals Frühlingswonne,
Des Meeres Laue Welle
Jemals Zärtlichkeit an meinen Busen angeschmiegt,
Und was ich je für reinen Himmelsglanz
Und Seelenruhgenuss geschmeckt …
Das all all … Meine Pandora!
18 THE TEACHING OF POUSSIN
There, all is nought but order and beauty.
BAUDELAIRE.
WHAT has been called “The Criticism of Art” is, of all the literary types, the most dangerous, and rare are the men of letters who can succeed in it, risking themselves in a terrain that is not, strictly speaking, their own. If I dare do it to-day, it is without any presumption whatever and fully conscious of the danger. For, in spite of what is said of it by Félibien, the first of those art critics, who before the end of the seventeenth century wrote: “the light of reason is above what the workman’s hand can execute”—the qualifications of the trade remain of primordial importance, and the man of letters knows nothing about them.