Thomas Mann: "Goethe"

To read more from The Yale Review's Thomas Mann archival collection, click here. For this essay on Goethe, a task of which I feel so unworthy, I shall fall back upon a memory, a personal experience, to hearten myself for the venture and give it the stamp of authenticity, which is best and final in all things. I recall the emotions that crowded in upon me years ago when I found myself for the first time in Goethe’s childhood home on the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt. Those rooms and stairs I knew perfectly, in style and tone and atmosphere. Here was “ancestry,” as it is recorded in the book of my life, and the beginning, likewise, of something gigantic. I was at home and at the same time I was a late and shy guest in the realm of genius. The homelike and the grand rubbed shoulders. This bourgeois-patrician mansion, now become a museum, where reverence treads softly as at the cradle of a demi-god; this dignified and decorous setting, treasured and held sacred because of the son who left it behind—how far behind!—to grow to austere world stature—I gazed on all this, I breathed it in; and the discord between familiarity and awe in my breast was resolved into that feeling in which humility and self-assertion are one, into smiling love. I cannot speak of Goethe except with love—with a sense of intimacy; if there be offensiveness in this, it is mitigated by the keenest awareness that he is incomparable. I may leave it to those who feel qualified by training and temperament to dwell upon his highest flights, from their purely intellectual standpoint as historians and commentators. It is quite another thing to share in Goethe’s substance, in its human guise; and it is only from the standpoint that I and others like me can speak of Goethe at all. Why deny that recognition, that right of intimacy, transcending the personal and embracing the national? This year the world at large is commemorating that great citizen; but only Germans can do so with the familiarity I have mentioned that comes through being a part of his substance.

The dignified bourgeois setting as the home of one who was to be at home in all that is human; the world greatness with a bourgeois origin: this destiny, the result of good ancestry and tremendous growth, is nowhere found in such a typical form as in Germany; and everything German that has grown up from the bourgeois order to higher spiritual levels is smilingly at home in that Frankfurt birthplace. There are various ways of looking at the figure of this great man and poet (always putting the emphasis upon the man), depending upon the historical standpoint from which we regard him. Thus he appears—to take the most modest view first—as the lord and master of a German cultural epoch, the classical epoch, for which the Germans have been hailed as the nation of poets and thinkers. It was an epoch of idealistic individualism and the source of the German concept of culture; a period which, in Goethe’s own case, cast its humane spell in the peculiar psychological combination of self-development and self-fulfilment with the idea of education, in such a way, moreover, that the idea of education bridged the gap between the inner life of the individual and the social order. To see Goethe thus, as the representative of this classical-humanist epoch of culture, is to take the narrowest view of his personality. A second, much larger, way of regarding him suggests itself: it is that in which Carlyle, one of his first admirers outside Germany, saw him immediately after the great German’s death. There have been men on this earth, Carlyle remarks, who have set up impulses requiring fifteen hundred years for their complete development, impulses, indeed, that even after two thousand years continue to act with all their individual force. From such a standpoint, the age of Goethe extends not only over centuries but over millennia. As a matter of fact, even to Goethe’s contemporaries his personality had something so miraculous about it that they could call him “a divine human being” without any sense of extravagance. There was in this wonderful personality the making of a colossal myth, comparable with those of the greatest human beings who have trod this earth, and no one can say to what proportions his stature will yet grow with the passage of time.

To such men belongs the world-wide acclaim that falls to the lot of legendary figures only, the pride of the race—representatives of timeless humanity, who form the highest justification of mankind face to face with the eternal and the universal. But between these two ways of looking at Goethe, the most intimate and the most sublime, there is a third and intermediate possibility; and for us, who are witnessing the ending of the bourgeois epoch, and who are destined in the throes and crises of the transition to find a path to new worlds, new patterns of life within and without—for us this third approach appears the most direct and natural. We may best see him as the representative of the half millennium that we call the bourgeois age, which extends from the fifteenth century to the close of the nineteenth. As a matter of fact, even to Goethe’s contemporaries his personality had something so miraculous about it that they could call him “a divine human being” without any sense of extravagance. This son of a Frankfurt middle-class family once remarked upon the problems that so gifted a man as Byron had to face owing to his social environment, his high birth and great wealth. A certain middle station, Goethe says, would seem to be more conducive to the growth of talent, “which accounts for the fact that we find all great artists and poets in the middle strata of society.” This was not the only occasion on which he sang the praises of the middle class as a fertile soil of talent; there are countless passages in his conversations in which he ascribes to the bourgeoisie the steadfast human quality which pervades “Hermann und Dorothea,” or, as he himself calls it, “The beautiful, orderly Bildung by which this class is enabled to survive in peace and war.” Goethe tells us: “In Karlsbad somebody once referred to me as a sober poet. By this he meant to convey that for all my poetic activity I continued to be a sensible man according to bourgeois standards. Some regarded this as praise, others as censure. That is not for me to decide; my nature is as he described it, and it must be left to others to judge of its merits.” So we, too, may regard the comment as neither praise nor censure; we simply take it as the dispassionate statement of a critical observer who was certainly no fool.

It may seem rather a humorous business, almost by way of a joke, to point out in a man of Goethe’s stature traits that one can call bourgeois in the common, ordinary sense of the word. Yet it is possible to carry the observation of the petty and the external to a higher level where even such trifles acquire significance. Take, for example, his outward manner of living, the attention he gave to dress, his taste for elegance, the neatness and cleanliness of everything that passed through his hands, as attested by his friends. These are the simplest and most natural habits of good breeding, formed in the nursery. In the words of one of Goethe’s contemporaries, “he showed no sign of the eccentric behavior so often found in men of genius; he was simple and courteous.” There was nothing solemn or pompous about him, no pose of priestly dignity. He could make fun of himself, and provided nothing weighed on his mind, he was quite capable of a childlike or fatherly good nature. It gave him the most genuine pleasure to do people kind turns, and to show them little attentions. With sympathetic solicitude he came to the aid of those who found difficulty in adjusting themselves to life, and then he was wont to harp on his favorite idea of “well-being,” a thoroughly bourgeois idea, surely. This idea raised to a higher spiritual significance we find in “Dichtung und Wahrheit,” where Goethe analyzes the sense of well-being and finds it rooted in the periodic regularity of outward things—the interchange of day and night, the succession of the seasons, of flowers and fruit, and all else that comes at regular intervals. Where that even rhythm in nature and in life’s phenomena falters, Goethe feels there is actual disease and danger, and he regards this as the chief reason for suicide. To this lighter side of the picture belongs also the bourgeois emphasis that Goethe laid upon good living, on both food and drink, taking offense when on occasion he felt himself neglected in such matters; and certainly his close friendship with Zelter owed part of its relish to the delicious young Teltow carrots that found their way to Goethe’s table. As business man and head of his household, he is keen, distrustful, and tenacious. For all that he is a poet, he drives a sharp bargain, and he exacts the maximum profit from his literary output.

We find in Goethe, too, a bourgeois love of order, inherited from his father, and, as in his father’s case, this degenerates, when he grows old, into decidedly pedantic habits and a whimsical mania for collecting. In “Dichtung und Wahrheit” he says that one of his father’s principles, which became a hobby, was to carry through at all costs anything once undertaken. When a book was selected for reading in the family circle, it had to be read to the bitter end, no matter how boring it turned out to be; and his father insisted in all other affairs that a thing once begun be completed, however arduous, or even pointless, the task. One must not underestimate the habit-forming effect of such discipline. It was Goethe’s nature to tire easily, to be restless and to pursue a diversity of interests; of these tendencies that ethical imperative to finish work begun certainly acted as a necessary corrective. From a point of view that is above practical and social considerations, it may not matter whether an artist possesses the middle-class virtues of patience, industry, and tenacity that make one carry through a project and put the final touches to it. But the egoism of the artist’s dream and self-gratification must be offset by social impulses or, if you like, by a bourgeois sympathy and desire to render service—if it is to result in a rounded work. And who knows whether “Faust,” infinite in its inner scope, would have reached even the stage of external completion that it has if the bourgeois father had not implanted in the boy’s mind the pedagogical imperative to finish things? “The half-artist,” says Goethe to Eckermann, “is always in a hurry to have done and takes no pleasure in the work. Genuine, truly great talent, on the contrary, finds its highest happiness in the working out of the idea.” “One should not be concerned with the thought of getting through,” he says, “just as one travels, not for the sake of arriving, but for the sake of travelling.” “There are excellent people,” he remarks at another time, “who can do nothing extemporaneously or superficially. Their natures demand a state of calm and deep absorption in the thing under consideration. Such talents often provoke our impatience, in so far as they rarely satisfy our desires of the moment.