by Will Durant
Goethe fulfilled to the maximum the obligation of the old to serve as a brake upon the energy of the young.
VI. FAUST: PART II
He poured his aging philosophy into Part II of Faust. At the end of Part I he had left his alter ego, broken and desolate, in the power of Mephistopheles—desire punished for its excess. But could that be all, and the sum of wisdom? Faust had not quite lost his wager; the Devil had not yet found for him any delight that could calm his striving and fill his life. Was there anywhere such a fulfillment? Through twenty-four years Goethe struggled to find for the story a continuation and a culmination that should contain or symbolize the conclusions of his thought, and should give to his hero a noble and inspiring end.
At last, aged seventy-eight, he faced the task. On May 24, 1827, he wrote to Zelter, who had grown old with him and was to die with him: “I want quietly to confess to you that … I have gone to work at Faust again. … Tell no one.” The dramatic finale of Byron in the Greek War of Liberation had stirred Goethe; now he could make Byron, as Euphorion [Well-Being], son of Faust and Helen, represent the healing of the torn and questioning modern mind through union with the calm beauty of classic Greece. He labored in the morning hours, achieving at best a page a day, until, in August of 1831, seven months before his death, he announced to Eckermann that the consuming task was complete—fifty-nine years after its first conception. “The happiest man,” he had written, “is he who is able to integrate the end of his life with its beginning.”91 And now he said: “Whatever of life remains to me I can regard henceforth as a gift; and it does not really matter whether I accomplish anything more or not.”92
Only in the assurance of eighty years can one take time to read all of Faust, Part II, today. From the opening scene, in which Faust, awaking in spring fields, describes the sunrise with no word-worn eloquence, the action repeatedly stops for lyric paeans to nature’s beauty or grandeur or terror; it is well done, but too often; Goethe, preaching classic restraint, here sins against “nothing too much.” He poured into the drama almost everything that cluttered his teeming memory: Greek and German mythologies, Leda and the swan, Helen and her train, witches and knights and fairies and gnomes, griffins and pygmies, dryads and sirens, dissertations on “Neptunian” geology, long speeches by heralds, flower girls, garden nymphs, woodcutters, punchinellos, drunkards, pages, seneschals, wardens, a charioteer and a sphinx, an astrologer and an emperor, fauns and philosophers, the cranes of Ibycus, and a “little man” (homunculus) chemically created by Faust’s pupil Wagner. The farrago is more confusing than a tropical jungle, for it adds the supernatural to the natural, and endows everything with oratory or song.
What a comfort it is when, in Act III, Helen appears, still miraculously dia gynaikon— goddess among women—conquering men with the grace of her movement or the glance of her eyes. The story takes on new force, and the chorus rises to a Sophoclean tone, when Helen hears that Menelaus, as punishment for “beauty insolently bold,” has ordered her and her attendant women to be surrendered to the lusts of a “barbarian” horde invading Hellas from the north. Their leader is Faust himself, transformed by Mephistophelean art into a medieval knight, handsome in figure, face, and garb. Goethe reaches the apex of his dramatic art as he describes the meeting of Helen and Faust—classic Greece confronting medieval Germany. Let these two unite!—this is the burden of the tale. Faust, enthralled like all men, lays at Helen’s feet all the wealth and power that magic and war have given him. She yields herself to his entreaties; after all, this was hardly a fate worse than death. But Menelaus approaches with his army and interrupts their bliss; Faust turns in a trice from love to war, calls his men to arms, and leads them to the conquest of Sparta (a memory of the “Franks” conquering the Morea in the thirteenth century).
The scene changes; years have flown by; Euphorion is a happy youth, gladdening Faust and Helen with “caresses, playful banter, sportive calls,”93 leaping recklessly from cliff to cliff, gently cautioned by his parents, dancing wildly with nymphs entranced by his charm (Byron in Italy?); he seizes one of them rapturously, only to have her burst into flame in his arms. Hearing with welcome the tocsin of war, he rushes off, falls from a precipice, and, dying, summons his mother to join him in the nether world.
HELEN [to Faust.]
Woe is me! An ancient adage proves on me its truth—
That fortune weds with Beauty never abidingly.
Asunder rent the bond of life is, as of love,
And, both bewailing, anguished, I say farewell,
Upon thy bosom casting me yet once again.
Receive, Persephone, the child and me.
(She embraces Faust; her corporeal part vanishes; robes and veil remain in his arms.)
So ends the third and finest act of this second Faust. This was the part that Goethe wrote first, which he called Helena, and which for a time he thought of as a separate and finished whole; he might have done well to leave it so. Here, by some heroic draft upon his surviving powers, Goethe rose for the last time to the peak of his poetry, mingling drama with music as in Periclean days, and raising to life and blood the figures of a complex allegory for the healing of the modern mind’.
From that height Faust II slips down to a war between an emperor and a contender for the Holy Roman throne. Faust and Mephistopheles, using their magic arts, win the war for the emperor; Faust asks and receives, as reward, great stretches of the Empire’s northern coast, with such land as he can wrest from the sea. In Act V Faust, a hundred years old, is master of a vast domain, but not yet of himself. The cottage of a peasant couple, Philemon and Baucis, obstructs the view from his mansion; he offers them a better home elsewhere; they refuse; he asks Mephistopheles and his agents to drive them out; meeting resistance, they set fire to the cottage; the old couple die of fright. Faust is soon haunted by visions of avenging Furies—gray hags named Want, Guilt, Care, Need, and Death. Care breathes into his face and blinds him. A partly unselfish thought raises him out of despair: he orders Mephistopheles and his devils to dike the sea, drain the swamps, and build, on the new land, a thousand homes amid green fields; he visions this reclaimed terrain, and feels that if he could “with a free people stand on a free soil,” he would at last say to such a moment, “Tarry a while, thou art so fair.”94 He hears the sounds of picks and spades, and thinks that his grand design is progressing; actually the devils are digging his grave. Exhausted, he falls dying to the ground; Mephistopheles gloats over him as a horde of devils prepares to take Faust’s soul to hell; but a host of angels swoops down from heaven, and while Mephistopheles is distracted with admiration of their legs they “bear aloft the mortal remains of Faust.” In heaven Faust, new-clothed in a transfigured body, is greeted by a glorified Gretchen, who begs the Virgin Mother: “Grant me to teach him!” The Virgin bids her lead him upward, and a Chorus Mysticus ends the play:
Alles Vergängliche
1st nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche
Hier wirds Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche
Hier ist es getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
Everything transitory
Is only a symbol;
The ever unfinished
Here is completed;
The indescribable
Is here accomplished;
The eternal womanly
Draws us upward and on.
VII. FULFILLMENT: 1825 – 32
In 1823 Johann Peter Eckermann, aged thirty-one, became Goethe’s secretary, and began to note the old man’s conversation for posterity. The resultant Gespräche mit Goethe (three volumes, 1836-48)—partly revised by Goethe—contains more wisdom than is to be found in most philosophers.
In September, 1825, Weimar celebrated the semicentennial of Karl August’s accession. Goethe attended the ceremony. The Duke grasped his hand, and murmured to him, “Together to the last breath.”95 On November 7 the court celebrated the fiftieth annive
rsary of Goethe’s coming to Weimar, and the Duke sent him a letter which was also’made a public proclamation:
With profound pleasure I would mark the fiftieth return of this day as the jubilee not only of the premier servant of my state but of the friend of my youth, who has accompanied me through all the mutability of life with unchanged affection, loyalty, and steadfastness. I owe the happy outcome of my most important undertakings to his circumspect counsel, his ever-living sympathy and beneficent service. To have attached him permanently to myself I regard as one of the highest ornaments of my reign.96
Now came those sadly aging years when friend after friend disappears. On August 26, 1826, two days before Goethe’s seventy-seventh birthday, Charlotte von Stein, eighty-four years old, sent her last known letter to her lover of half a century before: “All my best wishes and blessings on this day. May the guardian angels in the heavenly parliament command that all that is good or beautiful be granted to you, my very dear friend. I continue to remain yours in hope and without fear, while I beg of you for myself your freely given kindness during the brief span that remains to me.”97 She died on January 6, 1827. Hearing of it, Goethe wept. On June 15, 1828, the Duke died, and Weimar knew that its golden age was ending. Goethe prepared for his turn by working feverishly on Faust. But he was not next in line. His only surviving child, August, after forty years of failure, twenty of dissipation, died in Rome, October 27, 1830. A post-mortem showed a liver five times the normal size. When the news was brought to Goethe he said, “Non ignoravi me mortalem genuisse—I was not unaware that I had begotten a mortal.”98 “I tried to absorb myself in work,” he wrote; “I forced myself to continue Volume IV of Poetry and Truth.”99
At eighty he began to narrow his interests. In 1829 he stopped reading newspapers. “I can’t begin to tell you,” he wrote to Zelter, “the time I have gained, and the things I have accomplished, during the six weeks that I have left all French and German papers unopened.”100 “Fortunate is he whose world lies in his home.”101 He enjoyed love and care from August’s widow, Ottilie, and he took delight in her children. Sometimes, however, he withdrew even from them, and sought full privacy, praising solitude as the nurse and test of a well-furnished mind.
His face now showed its eighty years: deep wrinkles across the forehead and around the mouth; silver hair receding; eyes quiet and wondering; but his stature was erect and his health was good. He prided himself on having avoided coffee and tobacco, both of which he condemned as poisons. He was vain of his looks and his books, honestly relished praise, gave it frugally. When, in 1830, a young poet sent him a volume of verse, Goethe acknowledged it caustically: “I have glanced through your little book. Since, how ever, in an epidemic of cholera, one must protect oneself against weakening influences, I have laid it aside.”102 Mediocrity offended him. He grew more and more irritable as the years threw him back into himself, and he admitted as much: “Everyone who, judging by my work, considered me amiable, found himself greatly deceived when he came in contact with a man of coldness and reserve.”103 Visitors described him as slow to thaw, a bit formal and stiff, perhaps out of embarrassment, or grudging time taken from his tasks. Yet many of his letters show tenderness and consideration.
He was now famous throughout Europe. Carlyle acclaimed him, long before Goethe’s death, as one of the great figures in world literature. Byron dedicated Werner to him; Berlioz dedicated The Damnation of Faust to “Monseigneur Goethe”; kings sent him gifts. But in Germany his reading public was small, the critics were hostile, his rivals belittled him as a pompous councilor affecting to be a poet and a scientist. Lessing condemned Götz and Werther as romantic trash; Klopstock scorned Hermann und Dorothea as commonplace, and Iphigenie as a “stiff” imitation of the Greeks. Goethe reacted with repeated expressions of contempt for Germany—for its climate, scenery, history, language, and mind. He complained that he had “to write in German, and thereby … squandered life and art on the worst material.”104 He told his friends that “these fools of Germans” had quite deserved their defeat by Napoleon at Jena,105 and Germany had the laugh on him when the allies overcame Bonaparte at Waterloo.
Detached from the main (Romantic) stream of literature in his old age, he consoled himself with deepened contempt of the world and man. “Viewed from the heights of reason, all life looks like some malignant disease, and the world like a madhouse.”106 “A few days ago,” he wrote to Zelter on March 26, 1816, “I came upon a copy of the first edition of Werther, and that long-silenced song began to rise again. It was hard for me to understand how a man could endure the world for forty years when he had seen its absurdity even in his youth.”107 And he looked for no substantial betterment in the future. “Men exist only to trouble and kill one another; so was it, so is it, so will it ever be.”108 Like most of us after sixty, he thought that the new generation was degenerate. “The incredible arrogance in which the young are growing up will show its results in a few years in the greatest follies. … Yet much is stirring that in after years may be cause for rejoicing.”109
On March 15, 1832, he caught a cold while out driving. On the eighteenth he seemed recovered, but on the twentieth the infection had sunk into his chest, catarrhal fever consumed him, and his face was distorted with pain. On the twenty-second he noted that spring had begun; “perhaps this will help me to get well.” The room had been darkened to ease his eyes; he protested, “Let in more light.” Still oppressed by the gloom, he ordered his valet, “Open the blind of the other window, so that more light may come in.” These were apparently his last words. He had asked Ottilie, “Little woman, give me your little paw.” He died in her arms and holding her hand, at noon, March 22, 1832, aged eighty-two years and seven months.110
Eckermann saw the corpse on the next day.
The body lay naked, wrapped only in a white sheet. … The valet drew aside the sheet, and I was astonished at the godlike magnificence of the limbs. The breast was powerful, broad, and arched; the arms and thighs were full, and softly muscular; the feet were elegant, and of the most perfect shape; nowhere on the whole body was there a trace either of fat or of leanness or decay. A perfect man lay in great beauty before me; and the rapture which the sight caused me made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had left this abode.111
So ended a great age, from Frederick’s somber triumph in 1763 through Lessing and Kant, Wieland and Herder, to Schiller and Goethe. Not since Luther had the German mind been so active, so various, so rich in independent thought. It was no disaster for Germany that it was not an expanding empire like Britain’s, absorbed in conquest and trade; nor a centralized monarchy like the French, falling apart through the failure of government; nor a despotism like Russia’s, gorging itself with land or stupefying itself with holy water. Politically, Germany was not yet born, but in literature she was challenging, and in philosophy she was leading, the Western world.
CHAPTER XXV
The Jews
1715-89
I. THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
“The Jews,” said Rousseau,
afford an astonishing spectacle. The laws of Solon, Numa, and Lycurgus are dead; those of Moses, much more ancient, continue to live. Athens, Sparta, and Rome have perished and left no offspring on the earth. But Zion, destroyed, has not lost her children; they are preserved, they multiply, they spread throughout the world. … They mingle with all peoples, yet are not confused with them; they have no rulers, yet they are always a people. … What must have been the force of a legislator capable of effecting such marvels! Of all the systems of legislation now known to us, only this one has undergone all tests, has always been steadfast.1
Perhaps the Mosaic Code owed its survival not so much to its inherent wisdom as to its service in maintaining order and stability in communities living dangerously amid hostile creeds and alien laws. In the Dispersion the synagogue had to be both church and government, and the rabbis held their people together through all vicissitudes by giving the sanction of a proud rel
igious faith to a code that regulated every phase of Jewish life. The Pentateuch became the constitution—the Talmud became the supreme court—of an invisible state stronger even than human hate.
Anti-Semitism lost some of its religious bases as orthodoxy declined. An enlightened minority saw the absurdity and cruelty of punishing an entire people, generation after generation, for the ancient sin of a handful of individuals collected on his way from Temple to court by an old priest who resented the admiration given to Christ by the great majority of those who knew of him. Careful readers of the Gospels remembered that Jesus had always remained loyal to Judaism even while critical of its pious hypocrites. Those who had learned some history were aware that almost every people in Christendom had at one time or another persecuted heretics, not by one crucifixion but by wholesale massacre, inquisitions, or pogroms.
Voltaire knew all this.2 He repeatedly denounced the Christian persecution of the Jews. His epic Henriade spoke of
Madrid’s and Lisbon’s horrid fires,
The yearly portion of unhappy Jews
By priestly judges doomed to temporal flames
For thinking their forefathers’ faith the best.
He praised the Jews’ “sober and regular way of life, their abstinence, their toil.” He recognized that European Jews had taken to trade because, prohibited from owning land, they had been “unable to establish themselves permanently”—securely—“in any country.”3 Yet Voltaire became violently anti-Semitic. He had unfortunate dealings with Jewish financiers. When he went to England he carried letters of exchange on the London banker Medina, who meanwhile went bankrupt owing Voltaire twenty thousand francs.4 In Berlin, as we have seen, he employed Abraham Hirsch to buy depreciated bonds in Saxony, planning to import them (illegally, as Hirsch warned him) into Prussia and there have them redeemed at a sixty-five-percent profit.5 Philosopher and financier quarreled, went to court, and ended with mutual hate. In his Essai sur les moeurs Voltaire let himself go; he described the ancient Hebrews as “a petty nation, a brigand people, atrocious, abominable, whose law is the law of savages, and whose history is a tissue of crimes against humanity.”6 A Catholic priest protested that this was a ridiculously savage indictment.7 Isaac Pinto, a learned Portuguese Jew, published in 1762 Reflections criticizing the anti-Semitic passages in the article “The Jews” in the Dictionnaire philosophique; Voltaire admitted that he had been “wrong to attribute to a whole nation the vices of some individuals,” and promised to alter the offending passages in future printings; but this slipped his mind.8 French writers in general sided against Voltaire in this matter.9 Rousseau spoke of the Jews with understanding sympathy.10