And what then, finally, was Goethe’s own mode of activity in a life thus defined in his general philosophy? Like Shakespeare, he was a literary man; his function was literature. Yes, but in what respect, otherwise than Shakespeare had done before him, did he fulfil this literary function in reference to the world he lived in and enjoyed? In the first place, as all know, he differed from Shakespeare in this, that he did not address the world exclusively in the character of a poet. Besides his poetry, properly so called, Goethe has left behind him numerous prose-writings, ranking under very different heads, abounding with such deep and wise maxims and perceptions, in reference to all things under the sun, as would have entitled him, even had he been no poet, to rank as a sage. So great, indeed, is Goethe as a thinker and a critic that it may very well be disputed whether his prose-writings, as a whole, are not more precious than his poems. But even if we set apart this difference, and regard the two men in their special character as poets or artists, a marked difference is still discernible. Hear Goethe’s own definition of his poetical career and aim.
“Thus began that tendency from which I could not deviate my whole life through: namely, the tendency to turn into an image, into a poem, everything that delighted or troubled me, or otherwise occupied me, and to come to some certain understanding with myself upon it, that I might both rectify my conceptions of external things, and set my mind at rest about them. The faculty of doing this was necessary to no one more than to me, for my natural disposition whirled me constantly from one extreme to the other. All, therefore, that has been put forth by me consists of fragments of a great confession.” — Autobiography, vol. i. p. 240.
Shakespeare’s genius we defined to be the genius of universal expression, of clothing objects, circumstances, and feelings with magnificent language, of pouring over the image of any given situation, whether suggested from within or from without, an effusion of the richest intellectual matter that could possibly be related to it. Goethe’s genius, as here defined by himself, was something different and narrower. It was the genius of translation from the subjective into the objective, of clothing real feelings with fictitious circumstance, of giving happy intellectual form to states of mind, so as to dismiss and throw them off. Let this distinction be sufficiently conceived and developed, and a full idea will be obtained of the exact difference between the literary many-sidedness attributed to Shakespeare and that also attributed to Goethe.
GOETHE’S THEORY OF COLORS by John Tyndall
From Popular Science Monthly Volume 17 June 1880
I.
IN the days of my youth, when life was strong and aspiration high, I found myself standing one fine summer evening beside a statue of Goethe in a German city. Following the current of thought and feeling started by the associations of the place, I eventually came to the conclusion that, judging even from a purely utilitarian point of view, a truly noble work of art was the most suitable memorial for a great man. Such a work appeared to me capable of exciting a motive force within the mind which no purely material influence could generate. There was then labor before me of the most arduous kind. There were formidable practical difficulties to be overcome, and very small means wherewith to overcome them, and yet I felt that no material means could, as regards the task I had undertaken, plant within me a resolve comparable with that which the contemplation of this statue of Goethe was able to arouse.
My reverence for the poet had been awakened by the writings of Mr. Carlyle, and it was afterward confirmed and consolidated by the writings of Goethe himself. But there was one of the poet’s works, which, though it lay directly in the line of my own studies, remained for a long time only imperfectly known to me. My opinion of that work was not formed on hearsay. I dipped into it so far as to make myself acquainted with its style, its logic, and its general aim; but having done this I laid it aside, as something which jarred upon my conception of Goethe’s grandeur. The mind willingly rounds off the image which it venerates, and only acknowledges with reluctance that it is on any side incomplete; and believing that Goethe in the “Farbenlehre” was wrong in his intellectual, and perverse in his moral judgments — seeing, above all things, that he had forsaken the lofty impersonal calm which was his chief characteristic, and which had entered into my conception of the godlike in literature — I abandoned the “Farbenlehre,” and looked up to Goethe on that side where his greatness was uncontested and supreme.
But in the month of May, 1878, Mr. Carlyle did me the honor of calling upon me twice; and I, not being at home at the time, visited him in Chelsea soon afterward. He was then in his eighty-third year, and, looking in his solemn fashion toward that portal to which we are all so rapidly hastening, he remembered his friends. He then presented to me, as “a farewell gift,” the two octavo volumes of letterpress and the single folio volume, consisting in great part of colored diagrams, which are here before you. Exactly half a century ago these volumes were sent by Goethe to Mr. Carlyle. They embrace the “Farbenlehre” — a title which may be translated, though not well translated, “Theory of Colors” — and they are accompanied by a long letter, or rather catalogue from Goethe himself, dated the 14th of June, 1830, a little less than two years before his death. My illustrious friend wished me to examine the book, with a view of setting forth what it really contained. This year for the first time I have been able to comply with the desire of Mr. Carlyle; and as I knew that your wish would coincide with his, as to the propriety of making some attempt to weigh the merits of a work which exerted so great an influence in its day, I have not shrunk from the labor of such a review.
The average reading of the late Mr. Buckle is said to have amounted to three volumes a day. But they could not have been volumes like those of the “Farbenlehre.” For the necessity of halting and pondering over its statements was so frequent and the difficulty of coming to any undoubted conclusion regarding Goethe’s real conceptions was often so great as to invoke the expenditure of an inordinate amount of time. I can not even now say with confidence that I fully realize all the thoughts of Goethe. Many of them are strange to the scientific man. They demand for their interpretation a sympathy beyond that required or even tolerated in severe physical research. Two factors, the one external and the other internal, go to the production of every intellectual result. There is the evidence without and there is the mind within on which that evidence impinges. Change either factor, and the result will cease to be the same. In the region of politics, where mere opinion comes so much into play, it is only natural that the same external evidence should produce different convictions in different minds. But in the region of science, where demonstration instead of opinion is paramount, such differences ought hardly to be expected. That they nevertheless occur is strikingly exemplified by the case before us; for the very experimental facts which had previously converted the world to Newton’s views, on appealing to the mind of Goethe, produced a theory of light and colors in violent antagonism, to that of Newton.
Goethe prized the “Farbenlehre” as the most important of his works. “In what I have done as a poet,” he says to Eckermann, “I take no pride, but I am proud of the fact that I am the only person in this century who is acquainted with the difficult science of colors.” If the importance of a work were to be measured by the amount of conscious labor expended in its production, Goethe’s estimate of the “Farbenlehre” would probably be correct. The observations and experiments there recorded astonish us by their variety and number. The amount of reading which he accomplished was obviously vast. He pursued the history of optics, not only along its main streams, but on to its remotest rills. He was animated by the zeal of an apostle, for he believed that a giant imposture was to be overthrown, and that he was the man to accomplish the holy work of destruction. He was also a lover of art, and held that the enunciation of the true principles of color would, in relation to painting, be of lasting importance. Thus positively and negatively he was stimulated to bring all the strength he could command to bear upon
this question.
The greater part of the first volume is taken up with Goethe’s own experiments, which are described in nine hundred and twenty paragraphs duly numbered. It is not a consecutive argument, but rather a series of jets of fact and logic emitted at various intervals. I picture the poet in that troublous war-time, walking up and down his Weimar garden, with his hands behind his back, pondering his subject, throwing his experiments and reflections into these terse paragraphs, and turning occasionally into his garden-house to write them down. This first portion of the work embraces three parts, which deal respectively with — Physiological or Subjective Colors, with Physical or Prismatic Colors, and with Chemical Colors and Pigments. To these are added a fourth part, bearing the German title “Allgemeine Ansichten nach innen”; a fifth part, entitled “Nachbarliche Verhältnisse,” neighboring relations; and a sixth part, entitled “Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe,” sensuously-moral effect of colors. It is hardly necessary to remark that some of these titles, though doubtless pregnant with meaning to the poet himself, are not likely to commend themselves to the more exacting man of science.
The main divisions of Goethe’s book are subdivided into short sections, bearing titles more or less shadowy from a scientific point of view: Origin of White; Origin of Black; Excitement of Color; Heightening; Culmination; Balancing; Reversion; Fixation; Mixture real; Mixture apparent; Communication actual; Communication apparent. He describes the colors of minerals, plants, worms, insects, fishes, birds, mammals, and men. Hair on the surface of the human body he considers indicative rather of weakness than of strength. The disquisition is continued under the headings: How easily Color arises; How energetic Color may be; Heightening to red; Completeness of Manifold Phenomena; Agreement of Complete Phenomena; How easily Color disappears; How durable Color remains; Relation to Philosophy; Relation to Mathematics; Relation to Physiology and Pathology; Relation to Natural History; Relation to General Physics; Relation to Tones. Then follows a series of sections dealing with the primary colors and their mixtures. These sections relate less to science than to art. The writer treats, among other things, of — Æsthetic Effects; Fear of the Theoretical; Grounds and Pigments; Allegorical, Symbolical, and Mystical Use of Colors. The headings alone indicate the enormous industry of the poet; showing at the same time an absence of that scientific definition which he stigmatized as “pedantry” in the case of Newton.
In connection with this subject, Goethe charged himself with all kinds of kindred knowledge. He refers to ocular spectra, quoting Boyle, Buffon, and Darwin; to the paralysis of the eye by light; to its extreme sensitiveness when it awakes in the morning; to irradiation — quoting Tycho Brahe on the comparative apparent size of the dark and the illuminated moon. He dwells upon the persistence of impressions upon the retina, and quotes various instances of abnormal duration. He possessed a full and exact knowledge of the phenomena of subjective colors, and described various modes of producing them. He copiously illustrates the production by red of subjective green, and by green of subjective red. Blue produces subjective yellow, and yellow subjective blue. He experimented upon shadows, colored in contrast to surrounding light. The contrasting subjective colors he calls “geforderte Farben,” colors “demanded” by the eye. Goethe gives the following striking illustration of these subjective effects: “I once,” he said, “entered an inn toward evening, when a well-built maiden, with dazzlingly white face, black hair, and scarlet bodice and skirt came toward me. I looked at her sharply in the twilight, and when she moved away, saw upon the white wall opposite a black face with a bright halo round it, while the clothing of the perfectly distinct figure appeared of a beautiful sea-green.” With the instinct of the poet, Goethe discerned in these antitheses an image of the general method of nature. Every action, he says, implies an opposite. Inhalation precedes expiration, and each systole has its corresponding diastole. Such is the eternal formula of life. Under the figure of systole and diastole the rhythm of nature is represented in other portions of the work.
Goethe handled the prism with great skill, and his experiments with it are numberless. He places white rectangles on a black ground, black rectangles on a white ground, and shifts their apparent positions by prismatic refraction. He makes similar experiments with colored rectangles and disks. The shifted image is sometimes projected on a screen, the experiment being then “objective.” It is sometimes looked at directly through the prism, the experiment being then “subjective.” In the production of chromatic effects, he dwells upon the absolute necessity of boundaries — ”Gränzen.” The sky may be looked at and shifted by a prism without the production of color; and if the white rectangle on a black ground be only made wide enough, the center remains white after refraction, the colors being confined to the edges. Goethe’s earliest experiment, which led him so hastily to the conclusion that Newton’s theory of colors was wrong, consisted in looking through a prism at the white wall of his own room. He expected to see the whole wall covered with colors, this being, he thought, implied in the theory of Newton. But to his astonishment it remained white, and only when he came to the boundary of a dark or a bright space did the colors reveal themselves. This question of “boundaries” is one of supreme importance to the author of the “Farbenlehre”; the end and aim of his theory being to account for the colored fringes produced at the edges of his refracted images.
Darkness, according to Goethe, had as much to do as light with the production of color. Color was really due to the commingling of both. Not only did his white rectangles upon a black ground yield the colored fringes, but his black rectangles on a white ground did the same. The order of the colors seemed, however, different in the two cases. Let a visiting-card, held in the hand between the eye and a window facing the bright firmament, be looked at through a prism, then supposing the image of the card to be shifted upward by refraction, a red fringe is seen above and a blue one below. Let the back be turned to the window and the card so held that the light shall fall upon it; on being looked at through the prism, blue is seen above and red below. In the first case the fringes are due to the decomposition of the light adjacent to the edge of the card, which simply acts as an opaque body, and might have been actually black. In the second case the light decomposed is that coming from the white surface of the card itself. The first experiment corresponds to that of Goethe with a black rectangle on a white ground; while the second experiment corresponds to Goethe’s white rectangle on a black ground, Both these effects are immediately deducible from Newton’s theory of colors. But this, though explained to him by physicists of great experience and reputation, Goethe could never be brought to see, and he continued to affirm to the end of his life that the results were utterly irreconcilable with the theory of Newton.
In his own explanations Goethe began at the wrong end, inverting the true order of thought, and trying to make the outcome of theory its foundation. Apart from theory, however, his observations are of great interest and variety. He looked to the zenith at midnight, and found before him the blackness of space, while in daylight he saw the blue firmament overhead; and he rightly adopted the conclusion that this coloring of the sky was due to the shining of the sun upon a turbid medium with darkness behind. He by no means understood the physical action of turbid media, but he made a great variety of experiments bearing upon this point. Water, for example, rendered turbid by varnish, soap, or milk, and having a black ground behind it, always appeared blue when shone upon by white light. When, instead of a black background, a bright one was placed behind, so that the light shone, not on, but through the turbid liquid, the blue color disappeared, and he had yellow in its place. Such experiments are capable of endless variation. To this class of effects belongs the painter’s “chill.” A cold, bluish bloom, like that of a plum, is sometimes observed to cover the browns of a varnished picture. This is due to a want of optical continuity in the varnish. Instead of being a coherent layer it is broken up into particles of microscopic smallness,
which virtually constitute a turbid medium and send blue light to the eye.
Works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Page 349