Goethe: Poet of Human Destiny

I feel honoured that I have been Invited to participate in this German Literary Seminar convened to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the death of Goethe, the great and supreme and representative German poet “who re-created the literature of a nation and re-inspired the literature of a continent.” In my college days, I was an admirer–like most young men of my time ­of the English Romantics, and Byron not least. At school I had studied “The Prisoner of Chillon” as required reading, and followed it up in college with Childe Harold and Don Juan. But Carlyle’s peremptory exhortation (or admonition) “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe!” startled and deflated me, and also stimulated my curiosity. Presently, as a teacher in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), I felt I could spare the money needed to buy Goethe in translation. Thus my copy of Albert G. Latham’s rendering of Faust in the Everyman’s Library is dated 8 June 1930; and the two volumes of Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister are dated 14 October 1930. Not long after I secured Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, with an Introduction by Havelock Ellis. That was a period in my life when I knew the “importance of being earnest”, and it was not surprising that I tried assiduously to cultivate Goethe, though alas! only at second hand. My attempts to learn German by myself were to prove abortive, but with the purblindness characteristic of all love, I seem to have indulged in my infatuation for Goethe. A sudden interest in the dramatic renaissance in Europe–Ibsen, Bjornson, Maeterlinck, Strindberg–took me also to Hebbel and Hauptmann and Ernst Toller. Besides, I found that the war novels of Zwelg and Remarque were a revelation, and Emil Ludwig’s biographies were more gripping than popular fiction.

Another German writer who swept me off my feet was Thomas Mann the Nobel Laureate, whole Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain I read eagerly in H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation. And it was sheer excitement to be asked to review Mann’s Three Essays, the longest of them being a comparative study of Goethe and Tolstoy, or rather of Goethe-Schiller and Tolstoy-Dostoevsky. On one side, Goethe and Tolstoy, elemental natures, primordial emanations, titanic awesome figures thrown up by the Time Spirit: and, on the other, Schiller and Dostoevsky, creatures of emotion and intuition, gifted visionaries of the soul, all but saints though a little sicklied over by the pale cast of 19th century thought! And I was intrigued to read this neatly balanced assessment by Thomas Mann:

“Clearly there are two ways of heightening and enhancing human values: one exalts them to the godlike, and is a gift of Nature’s grace; the other exalts them up to the saintly, by grace of another power, which stands opposite to her and means emancipation from her. That other power is the power of the spirit...”

That let me thinking, and I read, not Faust and War and Peace alone, but also Joan of Arc and The Idiot. My studies, however, suffered when I came to Madras in June 1931 for a post-graduate course in English as a “private candidate”, which meant a temporary check on my uninhibited reading. But to my great joy I was able to attend the Rev. P. E. Burckhardt’s Goethe Centenary Memorial Lecture is the Madras University on 22 March 1932, with the Vice-Chancellor, Mr. K. Ramunni Menon, in the chair. In his excellent address, Dr. Burckhardt referred to Geothe’s more important works–Sorrows of Werther, Iphigenia in Tauris, Torquato Tasso and, of course, Faust–and stressed how Goethe’s message was relevant to India:

“Goethe, indeed, is the advocate of a life lived for its own worth; to heal its ills the resources of the human mind and soul are considered sufficient. Such a message is addressed to all men; it transcends the bounds of nationality, it is unmindful of the lapse of time...Thus it is meet that we in India should also remember him and gather here on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death.”

In the half-century that has passed since then, another world war has revealed to us how stark actuality can be worse than the worst nightmare; the fission of the atom has opened up possibilities of perversion and destruction beyond all reckoning, and mankind now finds itself perching precariously on the imminent unthinkable. Two armageddons within a single generation–and a continuing “cold war” of mutually emasculating attrition! The hydrogen bomb, the neutron bomb, the devilishly, accurate ICBM, the terrifying prospect of chemical and biological warfare: the spiraling and insanely wasteful expenditure on “defence”, the diminishing or vanishing “security!” In this hour of the unpredictable, “Olympian” Goethe is even more relevant than he was 50, 100 or 150 years ago, and what Matthew Arnold called Goethe’s “sage mind”, his “wide and luminous view”, was perhaps never more needed than at the present time.

But, then, how shall we read Goethe today? He daunts us by his Himalayan dimensions, by his range and heights alike. Young Aurobindo Ghose greeted him as “a perfect face...a perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme”:

“Traveller with calm, inimitable paces,
Critic with judgement absolute for all time,
A complete strength when men were maimed and weak.”

It is said that the Goethe canon in German–in the Weimar edition–comprises 133 volumes. Everything about Goethe is on a big scale! He lived to be over 80, and he survived unscathed the hectic years of the French Revolution and Napoleon's ascendancy. His letters to Charlotte von Stein alone number fifteen hundred. Goethe was poet, dramatist, novelist, naturalist, thinker, man of affairs, adept in statecraft, friend, lover, conversationalist, all rolled into one. To put it in another way, he was Aristotle, Lucretius, Giordano Bruno, Shakespeare, Spinoza. Kant and Darwin–bits of them all forged into a Man. He took serious interest in botany, mineralogy, geology; “I have attempted,” he told Eckermann, “natural science in nearly every department.” He was a man of divers languages and knowledges, even as he was a ventriloquist of many moods. In the result, he can baffle the most hard-headed German scholar, and as for others like me with small English and no German, he can be quite overwhelming. My venturing to draw near that Colossus–can it be anything more than a leaky small bucket trying to understand a deep well of perennial waters?

And yet–and yet–one cannot forget or escape Goethe, nor deny or diminish his fierce contemporaneity. No doubt it has always been easy to be overpowered by the outer exuberance or vitality of his life, or to be sidetracked by the elements of the magical and the supernatural in his masterpiece, Faust. But Callyle said as early as 1824, in his Preface to his translation of Wilhelm Meister:

“The tyro in German may tell us that the charm of Faust is altogether unconnected with its preternatural import; that the work delineates the fate of human enthusiasm struggling against doubts and errors from within, against scepticism, contempt and selfishness from without; and that the witchcraft and magic, intended merely as a shadowy frame for so complex and mysterious a picture of the moral world and the human soul, are introduced for the purpose not so much of being trembled at as laughed at.”

This was written 8 years before Part II appeared, but there can be no question that Carlyle’s perceptive comment applies generally to the completed Faust as well. However fascinating the circumstances of Goethe’s life, however tempting to muddle up biography with criticism, poetolatry with poetry, and however exciting to explore the ramifications of the supernatural, the wiser course will be to read the creative word itself with its evocative pictures of real and the ideal.

Goethe’s long life fell into five periods: the first 26 years (1749-1725), when he made his soundings and beginnings in different fields; the early years (1775-86) at Weimar, when he enjoyed Charlotte von Stein’s tranquillising and healing friendship and love, and wrote the prose version of Iphigenia in Tauris; the brief sojourn in Italy, the return to Weimar, and the publication in 1808 of the First Part of the Tragedy of Faust; the next 15 years, when Goethe was Weimar’s most active and distinguished citizen-institution, and when most of the Second Part of Faust organically grew out of the First; and the last period (1823-1832), which was to be immortalised in Conversations with Eckermann rivalling Faust itself in popularity and described by Nietzsche as “the best German book there is.” It is scarcely necessary to go through, say, Emil Ludwig’s the volume biography to realise that Goethe wasn’t like average humanity, that he was chameleonic, Protean, incalculable, slippery, volatile, a man of myriad moods and disguises, a phenomenon that was a siege of contraries and a balance of polarities, now a woodland hurricane without” and now the calm of a cave’s interior...and even so, and notwithstanding the multitudinous motions and the distracting somersaults, the careerings between the heights of exultation and the nadirs of gloom, the alternations of light and dark, the stirrings of hope and the icy stretches of negation and despair, Goethe was always himself, and somehow a wholeness, a wholesomeness, a Mandala, that endured, and endures.

Again, it is certainly possible to operate the critical microscope and make pointer readings indicative of change, a shifting of emphasis, or a growth or a broadening or a heightening in Goethe’s art or thought. Faust, for example, was for ever 60 years agrowing: aren’t there, between the First Part and the Second, differences in motivation, a chastening of sensibility, a mellowing perhaps,–but also a failure of energy and inspiration? On the other hand, we would perhaps be misjudging Goethe’s poetic and dramatic art it was close to view Faust in terms of mere chronological extension and satisfaction. Eckermann records that, on 6 December 1829, after dinner, Goethe read the first scene of the Second Act of Part 11. “The effect was great,” writes Eckermann. It is Faust’s study again, and between Parts 1 and 11, the passage of time has made its reckoning, and we learn that Faust’s former assistant, Wagner, is now a famous man engaged in precipitating a test-tube Homunculus. A careful reading shows that the interior stitching its close and convincing, and Goethe himself is reported to have said:

“The invention of the Second Part is really as old as fifty years”...but it may be an advantage that I have not written it down till now when my knowledge of the world is so much clearer. I am like one who in his youth has a great deal of small silver and copper money; which in the course of his life he constantly changes for the better, so that at last the property of his youth stands before him in pieces of pure gold.”

Doubtless there is growth, but it is like all organic growth, and every tissue tingles with life in unison with the entirety.

It may be helpful, I think, to compare Faust with Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, an epic of our time on a theme originating in the Veda, but also embodying his explorations in the occult world stair, the symbol regions of Night, Twilight and Day, and his intuitions about the mysterious ways of Providence. The story of Savitri’s struggle with Death forthe rescue of Satyavan (or Lord of Truth) is as old as–or even older than–the Mahabharata,and the ambrosial myth is part of the still living faith of Indian womanhood. But as rendered by Sri Aurobindo, the Savitri legend becomes also a recordation of the vicissitudes of the conflict between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, love and death, human survival and general annihilation–an issue that is yet to be concluded. Faust too harks , not alone to the mediaeval legend of the hapless scholar who sold his soul to the Devil (the “fable” of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus), but to far earlier times. In John Cowper Powys’s words:

“There seems to be some law of life by which it is impossible fora great work of art to come into being by the arbitrary fiat of a single brain, working independently of any deep human tradition...(And Faust) had behind it a huge agglomeration of mythological tradition and mediaeval legend...”

As one reads and re-reads Faust and tries to plumb its significances, as one views the wily and vast tentacles ofits comprehension, one knows that this epic drama is verily built out of the stuff of Gotthe’s whole life, and ofall life. Poetry like the Ramayana, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Faust and Savitri, seems to seize life’s totality and charge it with incandescence, an alchemic feat beyond the capacity of religion or science. What we may hope to receive from such poetry that it is built out of “all those strange symbolic legends of figures, forms, culminations and catastrophies of the remote past” is neither the Truth of dogmatic religion nor the shifting “truths” of experimental science but the total Truth of the cosmos, with its seeming paradoxes and inherent integrality. There was in Goethe an insatiable openness to experience, a native audacity ofexploration of possibility and a power of human curiosity doubled with the flair for bold intellectual formulation that made him measure up to the greatest creators that have ever lived. When once asked how Goethe stood in relation to Shakespeare, Sri Aurobindo answered:

“Yes, Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly Dot a greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was Shakespeare’s equal...Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might almost say, nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater brain, but he was a poet by choice, his Mind’s choice among its many high and effulgent possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his being. He wrote his poetry as he did everything else with a great skill and an inspired subtlety of language and effective genius, but it was only part of his genius and not the whole.”

Perhaps, for one who can read Goethe only in translation, this sovereignty of genius transcending the poetry can be something of an advantage, for one must needs concentrate more on the grounds, situations, characters and the thought-universe than on the ineluctable verbal and matrical wizardry. In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the focus was on the plight of the renaissance intellectual who had found the freedom of his mind and rejected the infallibility of the Church. But that uncharted freedom could only induce viperous doubt and the feeling of isolation and insecurity, and it was this mental unease or disease that drove Doctor Faustus to his doom. Goethe’s Faust was cast on a subtler and more complex mould representative of universal Man with his wide-ranging potentialities. Having mastered philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and “saddest of all”, theology, Faust wonders: To what end? Apara Vidya (knowledge of phenomena), without Para Vidya (knowledge of reality), can be as dangerous as avidya or ignorance. Beneath or beyond the deserts of academic futility or puerility, is it possible to locate the Raja-Vidya, the King-Knowledge, that holds the worlds together, and thus embrace Certainty? Faust poses the overwhelming question:

The life Divine, that bliss of god-like being,
Dar’st thou, but now a worm, make it thy goal?

One cannot fail to recall here Hamlet’s percipient, if also lacerating speculations:

“What a piece of work is man t How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust!”

It is permissible to view Man as the theatre–the battlefield, the Kurukahetra–where the intestine struggle between growth, metamorphosis, evolution towards the Divine and stagnation at the level of the animal or descent to the reptile’s worm’s or insect’s is being fought. The Earth and Man are the theatre of evolutionary possibility, whereas Heaven and Hell, God and Evil, seem alike static, the former in terms of Perfection, the latter as termless Negation (or damnation). Mephistopheles, of course, must necessarily scoff at all human aspiration for a higher life and hope of realising it, and so he tells Faust:

The Whole but for a God is made.
He thrones at ease amid eternal splendour;
Us hath He thrust in Stygian shade;
Your needs alone with Day and Night are stayed.

In Sri Aurobindo’s poem, too, Death the spirit of Negation tries to dampen Savitri’s spirit:

Thy words are large murmurs in a mystic dream,
For how in the soiled heart of man could dwell
The inarticulate grandeur of thy dream-built God,
Or who can see a face and form divine
In the naked two-legged worm thou callest man?
O human face, put off mind-painted masks:
The animal be, the worm that Nature meant ...

The way Savitri, guided by her Mind of Light and sustained by the power of her Yoga, reclaims the Soul of the World that is Satyavan, and ensures the earth’s ultimate transformation into a New Heaven and a New Earth, is the heart of the modern epic fully in consonance with the Indian spiritual tradition. But Faust is structured and tissued otherwise. Faust’s initial predicament as a scholar; his burrowing discontent, his restless hankering and his reckless gamble with life; his experiments with variegated experience, his strivings, strayings, stumblings, revivings and new beginnings; his travels in the little world with its individual or private destinies, and in the great world with its far-flung collective histories; his twin dream-sequences comprising Europe’s past, the classical Walpurgis Night with its projection of the evolutionary theme in its several dimensions (geological, biological, psychological, artistic), and the Helen-sequence with its evocation of the immortal heroine of poetry and legend; and his final successful (if also partly flawed) spurt ofsocially creative activity that promises to satisfy his inmost self, yet ensures his escape from the claws of Mephistopheles: all, all is integrated with the 1000-year old Western civilisation. And it is surely significant that, like Beatrice in The Divine Comedy, it is Gretchen (Margaret) who guides Faust to the higher spheres:

Grant me to teach him! Radiant-shining,
Still dazzles him the new-sprung day.

It is true that Faust is a “sinner”, and Margaret is far more sinned against than sinning. But the Lord concedes at the outset that the freedom to aspire implies also the risk offailure. Margaret is redeemed at the end of Part I, and Fault at the end of Part II–but their paths of redemption are not identical.

Margaret has loved greatly, and erred too, but since Love is the supreme virtue, she is definitively saved. As forFaust, although he has used his God-given “reason” and divine discontent, not always wisely and often wrongly and perversely he too has never–in all the singular vicissitudes of his life – ceased to aspire, to move on, seeking new existential realms for striving, achieving (or falling). In this he distantly reminds us of Rohita, who is exhorted to push for ever forward by God Indra:

To move forward is the way to immortality,
The moving itself is the fruit of nectar.
Look up and see how the Sun-God
... has started on his non-stop journey...
So, on you go, on you go: charai veti, charai veti!
(Aitareya Brahmana: Tagore’s translation)

That is the way continually to experiment and evolve, and fare forward hoping for integral knowledge and integral realisation, Faust is a Western variant of this ancient Indian ideal of perpetual striving and progressive evolution and growth.

If in the Margaret story Goethe has metamorphosed an obscure girl into a tragic heroine and further lifted her to the throne of sanctity, he presents in Iphigenia in Tauris a pure and brave heroine, rather akin to Andromeda in Sri Aurobindo’s Perseus the Deliverer. Unlike the Andromeda of Euripides, Corneille and Kingsley, Sri Aurobindo’s heroine is a puissant power of consciousness in her own right, the symbol and force of flaming compassion. She will not permit the two strangers cast on the Syrian shore to be sacrificed to Poseidon, and thus she risks death by being exposed to the sea monster. Perseus, however, rescues her in time. It is possible that, in writing his Perseus, and enlarging the role and heightening the character of Andromeda, Sri Aurobindo had Goetbe”s Iphigenia in Tauris in mind, for there is the same distance from Euripides in both modern creations. As Priestess of Diana’s Grove, Iphigenia has spent long years of loneliness till –­ after the end of the Trojan War and the killing of Agamemnon and Clyraemnestra – her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades take refuge in her Grove. Since Iphigenia has refused to marry King Thoas, he now threatens to revive the custom of sacrificing strangers to Diana, and the first victims will be Orestes and Pylades. When the proposal comes from the latter that she should by a deceitful ruse help all of them to escape, taking with them Diana’s image as well, Iphigenia agrees at first but anon recoils from the lie and declares uncompromisingly:

Detested falsehood: it does not relieve
The breast like words of truth;
It comforts not,
But in a torment in the forger’s heart
And like an arrow which a God directs
Files and wounds the archer.

King Thoas too rises to the occasion, and all ends happily. What is remarkable in Goethe’s Iphigenia is the richness of her inner life, its marble immaculateness and beauty and strength. Goethe told Eckermann that the play “is rich in internal but poor in external life; the point is to make the internal life come out.” The power of the radiance of her inner life is to be inferred from its decisive alchemic action on the conventional King Thoas himself!

Iphigenia certainly, but also Princess Leonora of Torquato Tasso, Mignon of Wilhelm Meister, and of course Margaret, are variations of the Blessed Feminine, and Goethe–like Shakespeare himself–had every reason to feel happy with his marvellous women characters. “My idea of women is not abstracted from the phenomenon of actual life,” he once explained to Eckermann, “but has been born with me, or arisen in me ... they are all better than could be found in reality.” But the representative male of the species, Faust, remains Goethe’s massive achievement, for in some extraordinary parallel movement, Faust travelled and grow with the poet, and filled the wide spaces of his life. It was Goethe’s intention that the Faust of the final scene should be exactly 100 years old. Pointing to the seminal passage (in the last Act) spoken by the Angels– 

Delivered is the noble spirit
From the control of evil powers;
Who ceaselessly doth strive will merit
That we should save and make him ours:
If Love celestial never cease
To watch him from its upper sphere;
The children of eternal peace
Bear him to cordial welcome there
– (Mrs. Fuller’s translation)

Goethe remarked: “In these lines is contained the key to Faust’s salvation. In Faust himself there is an activity that becomes constantly higher and purer to the end, and from above there is eternal love coming to his aid.” Aspiration and effort and striving from below, and an answering divine Grace from above: this chimes perfectly with the cardinal faith of all religions.

By August 1831, Part II of Faust was “sewed together quite complete,” and Goethe was “extremely happy,” for the sustained and, sublime aim of his life had been fulfilled at last. What if he had taken more than six decades over its composition? His growing and evolving mind and sensibility had been invaded by a multitude of impressions of a sensuous, animate, exciting, enlightening and distracting kind: he had set in motion characters (superhuman, human and subhuman) in action involving heaven, earth and hell, as also mythology, history, poetry, fantasy and dream, and all the Rasas and undertones of Dawani: and all had been cast together, kneaded, seasoned, moulded and touched with the promethean fire of the Imagination, so that the nectaread news of the Devil’s defeat and Man’s redemption can come through and abide with us for ever.

In one of his obiter dicta, Goethe boldly proclaimed that “poetry is the universal possession of mankind,” and that beyond the notion of “national” literature, “the epoch of world literature is at hand.” After more than a century and a half, modern technology has reduced the old world of the sprawling continents and heaving oceans to the containment of the Global Village, while the art of translation makes available to all mankind the manifold riches of indubitable world-literature. We are now conceivably near the threshold of the Planetary Age and for us a vast symbolic epic drama like Faust, comprehending as it does all the earth’s and humanity’s past and present and also throwing out prophetic hints about the evolving unfolding Future, must take its place among the elemental indispensible classics that can bring us safely through our perils and perplexities and charge us with the Hope unconquerable and the Faith abiding. And so let me conclude, as Faust does, with the Word of the Chorus Mysticus that sounds like the unstruck melody of the Voice Divine itself:

All things corruptible
Are but shadows;
Earth’s inadequacy
Here finds fulfilment;
The ineffable is here
New fashioned with love;
And the Eternal Feminine
Acts as our guide and saviour.

* Keynote address given on 22 March 1982 at Max Mueller Bhavan, Madras, Inaugurating the German Literary Symposium, Dr. C. Huehener, Consul-Gencral of the Federal Republic of Germany, presiding.