THE GOETHE AND PHILOSOPHY. HE “old quarrel of poets and philosophers," of which Plato speaks, is as far off from recon ciliation as ever, and in one not wish it to be reconciled. point of view we can It is far from desir able that poetry should ever become "a criticism of life," except in the sense in which beauty is always a criticism upon ugliness, or a good man upon a bad one; and it is quite as undesirable that philosophy should relax any of its effort to produce such a criticism, or, in other words, to set the deeper meaning of things against their superficial appearances. Each does best service by remaining within its own limits and keeping to its own ways of action. Yet there is undoubtedly a point-and that, indeed, the highest point in both-in which they come into close relations with each other. Hence, at least in the case of the greatest poets, we are driven by a kind of necessity to ask what was their philosophy. A few words on the general relations of poetry and philosophy may make it easier to express what in this point of view we have to say about Goethe. The poet, like the philosopher, is a seeker for truth, and we may even say for the same kind of truth. He may not, indeed, like the philosopher, separate the idea or principle from the immediate reality of things, but he must be so eager and passionate in his realism as to reach the ideal in it and through it. He must grasp the world of sense so firmly that it ceases to sting. If he remoulds the immediate facts of the world of experience, it must be by means of forces which are working in it as well as in himself, and which his own plastic genius only brings to clearer manifestation. In some few cases, this poetic process of "widening nature without going beyond it,"1 has been so successful that it becomes almost a futile curiosity to ask what were the materials which the poet has used, or the bare facts for which he has substituted his creations. The kernel has been so completely extracted that we are not concerned 1 Schiller. about the husk. If we could learn the circumstances of the Trojan War as a contemporary historian might chronicle them, we should not know nearly so much of the inner movement and development of the Greek spirit as Homer has told us; though we should probably find that Homer's story is nowhere a mere copy of the facts, but that it stands to them in somewhat the same relations in which the "Sorrows of Werther' stands to the accidents of Goethe's life in Welzlar, and the suicide of Jerusalem. The facts are changed, and a new world constructed out of the old by the shaping imagination of the poet, but the change is such that it seems to have taken place in the factory of Nature herself. The forces that work underground, and hide themselves from us beneath the appearances of human life, have, by the silent elaboration of poetic genius, forced their way to the surface, and transformed the appearances themselves. Hence the new creation has all the colours of life, and almost shames the so-called facts of every day by the sturdy force and reality of its presence. Thus before Shakespeare's characters most ordinary human beings seem like the shadows of the dead in Homer. It is not that in these dramas a different life is set before us from that which men everywhere lead, but the passions and characters which, in conflict with each other and with circumstance, gradually work out their destiny, are in the poet's mind put into a kind of forcing-house, and made with rapid evolution to show their inner law and tendency in immediate results. It is indeed only the greatest poets who are capable of thus making themselves, as it were, into organs by which nature reaches a further development. In all but the greatest we find a mixture of such creative reconstruction with what we can only call manufacture. The failing force of vision obliges them to to hold together by mechanical means the elements which do not round themselves into an organic whole. And even to the greatest poets it is not granted to have a complete and continuous vision. Hence, except in the case of short "swallow-flights of song,' which can be produced in one lyric burst of feeling, works of pure poetic art must be the result of much patient waiting and watching for the spirit; they cannot be perfected without much self-restraint and critical rejection of every element which is not quite genuine. "That which limits us, the common or vulgar," and which by its presence at once turns poetry into prose, cannot be excluded except by a self-abnegation as great as that by which the scientific man puts aside all subjective pre-suppositions and "anticipations of nature." For poetic truth does not lie on the surface any more than scientific truth. The kinds of truth are indeed widely different. The aim of the man of science is to distinguish the threads of necessity that bind together the most disparate phenomena, and in pursuit of these he seems, to one who looks at the immediate result, to be explaining away all the life and unity of the world, and putting everywhere mechanism for organism, even in the organic itself. On the other hand, the poet ignores or endeavours to get beyond the external mechanism of the world; he is ever seeking and finding life even among the dead. But only one who regards the abstractions of science as the ultimate truth of things, can take this process to be a mere play of subjective fancy, or can suppose that any great poetic creation is produced by an imagination which merely follows its own dreams and does not |