The main speaker of the day, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours. Afterward Lincoln rose and delivered the few brief immortal words that, better than any others, define the American idea of government.
The Gettysburg Address deserves to be read as carefully as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Madison’s Preamble to the Constitution. It refers to those predecessor documents. Four score and seven years before 1863 takes us to the year 1776, the year when “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But could any such nation long endure? That was the question. In particular, could the nation survive the kind of brutal fratricidal war now going on? Lincoln thought it could, said it could, and he persuaded his countrymen that it could.
But they must never, he said, forget what they were fighting for. They would dedicate a cemetery on this day, and remember the brave men, living and dead, who had struggled on this bloody ground. But they must also remember the ideals that had inspired the nation’s fathers. He rededicated himself, and the men and women of his place and time, to a new birth of freedom, and to the proposition that governments of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
The Gettysburg Address is reprinted in many books, but the best place to read it is standing in the Lincoln Memorial, with the great brooding figure of Lincoln as sculpted by Daniel Chester French rising above you.
chapter nine
Romantic Spirits
The twenty-six years from 1789 to 1815 saw the violent deaths of millions. Europe was plagued by almost incessant warfare between Britain and her allies and France and hers. Life was difficult, frightening, and, for most people, short. This period of brutal uncertainty produced in many hearts fear that did not subside for decades. These chaotic years brought about many changes, and Europe, at the end of them, was quite different from what it had been before.
Great things happened and great people lived. Three English poets flashed like bright comets across the literary sky. Byron, Shelley, Keats—no matter how you order the three names, they connote youthful genius. A revolution in America was proclaimed, won, and defended. For a while the idea of un carièrre oeuvre aux talents (a career open to talent, not just birth) seemed to open opportunities for people in all walks of life. This idea didn’t last, but it would resurface in the future. A young Corsican adventurer won an empire, lost it, won it again, and lost it a second time. “Liberty and Equality” was the cry everywhere heard.
The time was short—no more than a human generation—but we can’t forget it.
GOETHE
1749–1832
Faust
The statue of Goethe in Lincoln Park in Chicago bears this inscription: “Goethe. The Master Spirit of the German People.” German though he was, Germans alone cannot claim him. Goethe was also one of the master spirits of mankind.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749. He lived to be eighty-two, dying in 1832 in Weimar, his adopted home for more than fifty years. In those years he lived almost every kind of life, wrote almost every kind of book, and enjoyed almost every kind of triumph.
Goethe’s first truly distinctive publication, the play Götz von Berlichingen, not only was an explosive literary event but also inaugurated an epoch in German cultural history, the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period. Two years later, in 1763, he published The Sorrows of Young Werther, his first novel; it made him famous all over Europe at the age of twenty-four.
If the world approved of him, he did not wholly approve of himself. His education, he felt, was far from complete, and above all he still had much to learn about the realities of life. He accepted an invitation from the Duke of Weimar and went to visit his little dukedom—and stayed for the rest of his life. He was soon made prime minister, but he also became chief inspector of mines, superintendent of irrigation, and supervisor of army uniforms. There was nothing that the Duke did not see fit to ask Goethe to do, and Goethe thought he could never refuse the Duke.
With all of his official duties there was time to write lyric poems, but not major works. In 1786, eleven years after his arrival in Weimar, he fled the city and all of his posts, disguised as a salesman en route to Italy, which he thought held the secret of life. But instead of finding Italy in Italy, he found Greece. He was not wrong; Greece is in Italy, too. From that time on Goethe turned his back on Sturm und Drang and all the other excesses of the Romantic period, insisting that he was a Classical Greek, at least in spirit. Perhaps he was not reckoning with the heart within his breast.
He returned to Weimar, the Duke forgave him, and Goethe lived there as a literary man instead of a politician—with several journeys to Italy and other lands to punctuate the years—for the rest of his long life. He wrote plays, novels, and poems, and studied and experimented in science (his scientific writings alone fill fourteen volumes). He fell in love, over and over—he was always in love with someone, from the time he was fifteen or so until the day he died. Many of his loves were platonic, others were not, but there was never a time when he was not under the influence of some woman, often a pretty, young one.
The story of Faust is very old: the scholar who, bored with his studies and researches, makes a pact with the Devil who, in return for the scholar’s immortal soul, will show him “real life” before he dies. It is a good story and true; it is hard to live deeply in both ways of knowing, experience and book learning. Goethe made of the tale both an inspired folk tale and an account, as he saw it, of the essential questing journey of Western man.
Faust is divided into two parts, written long years apart. Goethe spent more than sixty years (of course there were long interruptions) on this, his masterpiece. The two parts are very different in form and spirit. The first part of Faust is a more or less realistic drama, if one accepts the possibility of the Devil—Mephistopheles—being a character in the play. Faust is tempted from his high studies and, seeking love, descends into the marketplace, where he meets the young, innocent, and beautiful Margaret (Gretchen). He falls in love with her of course, but she also falls helplessly in love with him, so much so that she is ready and willing to give up everything for him, even her own immortal soul. She is quite serious about that, which Faust realizes he was not—this being one of many things he learns from her and from women. At the end of Part One, Gretchen is both condemned and saved, and Mephistopheles snatches Faust away because he knows the battle that is developing between them is not yet over.