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This doctrine again, is not in itself or necessarily a doctrine of selfishness, though it may easily be represented so. It may be true that all virtue requires self-denial; but for that very reason we may easily conceive a system of senseless and aimless self-denial setting itself up in the place of virtue. It is not every kind of self-denial that Goethe has in view, but the particular kind by which he has found himself hampered. His indignation is not moved when he sees absistence practised in order to attain some great end; it is the abstinence which leads to nothing and aims at nothing that provokes him. He has given two striking dramatic pictures of it. There is Faust, who cannot tolerate the emptiness of his secluded life; but does it appear that he rebels against it simply because it brings no pleasure to himself, even though it confers benefit upon others and upon the world? The burden of his complaint is that his abstinence does no good to anybody, that the studies for which he foregoes pleasure lead to no real knowledge; and expressly to make this clear, Goethe introduces the story of the plague, which Faust and his father had tried to cure by a drug, which did infinitely more harm than the plague itself. The other picture is that of Brother Martin in “Götz,” the young monk who envies Götz his life so full of movement and emotion, while he is himself miserable under the restraint of his vows. Here, again, the complaint is that no good comes of such abstinence. The life of self-denial is conceived as an utter stagnation, unhealthy even from a moral point of view. It is contrasted with a life not of luxury, but of strenuous energy, at once wholesome and useful to the world.

So far, then, Goethe’s position is identical with that which Protestants take up against monasticism, when they maintain that powers were given to be used, desires implanted in order that they might be satisfied. He does not, any more than they, assert that when some great end is in view it may not be nobler to mortify the desire than to indulge it. But he applies the principle more consistently, and to a greater number of cases than they had applied it. Not against celibacy or useless self-torture only, but against all omission to satisfy desire, against all sluggishness or apathy in enjoyment – understood always that no special end is to be gained by the self-denial – he protests. In his poem, called the “General Confession” (“Generalbeichte”) he calls his followers to repent of the sin of having often let slip an opportunity of enjoyment, and makes them solemnly resolve not to be guilty of such sins in future. Here, at least, the reader may say, selfishness is openly preached; and perhaps this is the interpretation most commonly put upon the poem. Yet it is certainly unjust to pervert in this way an intentional paradox, and, in fact, in that very poem Goethe introduces the most elevated utterance of his philosophy; for the vow which the penitents are required to take is that they will “wean themselves from half-measures and live resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, and the Beautiful!” Goethe, in short, holds, as many other philosophers have done, that an elevated morality may be based on the idea of pleasure not less than on the idea of duty.

This principle, not new in itself, led to very new and important results when it was taken up not by a mere reasoner but by a man of the most various gifts and of the greatest energy. By “pleasure” or “satisfaction of desire” is usually meant something obvious, something passive, merely a supply of agreeable sensations to each of the five senses. In Goethe’s mouth the word takes quite a different meaning. He cannot conceive pleasure without energetic action, and the most necessary of all pleasures to him is that of imaginative creation. The desires, again, for which he claims satisfaction – what are they? Chief among them is the desire to enter into the secret of the universe, to recognize “what it is which holds the world together within.” Such desires as these might be satisfied, such pleasures enjoyed, without any very culpable self-indulgence. And existence would be satisfactory, or, as he calls it, harmonious, if it offered continually and habitually food for desire so understood, which is almost the same thing as capacity. But there are hindrances. The chief of these is the supposition of self denial. Of course every practical man knows that self-denial of a certain kind must be constantly practised in life. The small object must be foregone for the sake of the greater, the immediate pleasure for the sake of the remote, nay, the personal pleasure for the sake of the pleasure which is generous and sympathetic. But the timid superstition which sets up self-denial, divorced from all rational ends, as a thing good and right in itself, which makes us afraid of enjoyment as such, this is the chief hindrance, and against this Goethe launches his chief work “Faust. ” There is another hindrance, less obvious and needing to be dealt with in another way, which Goethe therefore attacks usually in prose rather than in poetry.

Man, as Goethe conceives him, is essentially active. The happiness he seeks is not passive enjoyment, but an occupation, a pursuit adapted to his inborn capacities. It follows that a principal condition of happiness is a just self-knowledge. He will be happy, who knows what he wants and what he can do. Here again Goethe gives importance to a doctrine which in itself is obvious enough by the persistent energy with which he applies it. He has been himself bewildered by the multiplicity of his own tastes and aptitudes. He has wanted to do everything in turn, and he has found himself capable to a certain extent of doing everything. Hence the question – What is my true vocation? has been to him exceptionally difficult. In studying it he has become aware of the numberless illusions and misconceptions which hide from most men the true nature of their own aptitudes, and therefore the path of their happiness. He finds that the circumstances of childhood, and especially our system of education, which “excites wishes, instead of awakening tastes,” have the effect of creating a multitude of unreal ambitions, deceptive impulses and semblances of aptitudes. He finds that most men have been more or less misled by these illusions, have more or less mistaken their true vocation, and therefore missed their true happiness. On this subject he has collected a vast mass of observations, and, in fact, added a new chapter to practical morality. This is the subject of “Wilhelm Meister,” not the most attractive nor the most perfect, but perhaps the most characteristic, of Goethe’s works and, as it were, the text-book of the Goethian philosophy. It is said not to be widely popular in Germany. Most English readers lay it down bewildered, wondering what Goethe’s admirers can see in it so extraordinary, and astonished at the indifference to what we have agreed to call morality – that is, the part of morality that concerns the relations of the sexes – which reigns throughout it. I shall touch on this latter point later. Meanwhile, let me remark, that few books have had a deeper influence upon modern literature than this famous novel. It is the first important instance of a novel which deals principally and on a large scale with opinions or views of life. How Wilhelm mistook his vocation, and how this mistake led to many others; how a secret society, the Society of the Tower, taught a doctrine on the subject of vocations, and of the method by which men are to be assisted in discovering their true vocations; how Wilhelm is assisted and by what stages he arrives at clearness – this is the subject of a long and elaborate narrative. It is throughout most seriously instructive; it is seldom very amusing; and we may add that the moral of the story is not brought out with very convincing distinctness. But it has been the model upon which the novel of the present day is formed. Written twenty years before the Waverley Novels, which are in the opposite extreme, since they make no serious attempt to teach anything and dwell upon everything which Goethe disregards, adventure, surprise, costume, it began to produce its effect among us when the influence of the Waverley Novel was exhausted. The idea now prevalent, which gives to the novel a practical as well as an artistic side, the idea which prompts us, when we wish to preach any kind of social or moral reform, to write a novel about it, seems to have made way chiefly through Goethe’s authority.

But the substance of “Wilhelm Meister” is even more important than the form. It presents the whole subject of morality under a new light, and as in this respect it is only the fullest of a number of utterances to the same effect made by Goethe, it can never be fully appreciated when it is considered by itself, but must be judged in the closest connection with his other works and with his life. Every attempt to treat such a subject as morality in an original manner has something alarming about it. Such attempts ought to be laid only before minds strong enough to consider them calmly, and yet of necessity they come to the knowledge of “the weak brethren,” who are frightened or unsettled by them. Moreover, such attempts are always likely to be one-sided. As it is usually an intense perception of something overlooked into the orthodox morality that prompts them, the innovator is apt to be hurried into the opposite extreme, and to overlook in his turn what the orthodox morality has taught rightly. Goethe laid himself open to the charge of immorality. “Wilhelm Meister” was received with horror by the religious world; it was, if I remember right, publicly burnt by Count Stolberg. In England, Wordsworth spoke of it with disgust, and it still remains the book which chiefly justifies the profound distrust and aversion with which Goethe has been and is regarded among those who are Christian either in the dogmatic or in the larger sense. Not unnaturally it must be confessed.

But I do seriously submit that Christians should learn to be less timid than they are. In their absorbing anxiety for “the weaker brethren” they often seem to run the risk of becoming “weak brethren” themselves. We ought not to come to the consideration of moral questions under the influence of panic and nervous fright. It is true that few books seem at first sight more directly opposed than “Wilhelm Meister” to that practical Christianity which we love to think of as beyond controversy, that spirit which, as it breathes from almost all Christian churches and sects alike, strikes us as undoubtedly the essential part of religion. At first sight the book seems secular, heathenish in an extraordinary degree. Let us, then, if we will, warn young people away from it; but let us ask ourselves at the same time how a man so gifted, so serious and also so good natured – for there is no appearance of rancor in the book, which even contains a picture, tenderly and pleasingly drawn, of Christian pietism – could come to take a view so different from that commonly accepted of questions about which we are all so anxious. Such a course may lead us to see mistakes made by modern Christianity, which may have led Goethe also into mistakes by reaction; whereas the other course, of simply averting our eyes in horror, can lead to no good.

We may distinguish between the positive and the negative part of this moral scheme. All that “Wilhelm Meister” contains on the subject of vocations seems valuable, and the prominence which he gives to the subject is immensely important. In considering how human life should be ordered, Goethe begins with the fact that each man has an occupation, which fills most of his time. It seems to him, therefore, the principal problem to secure that this occupation should be not only worthy, but suited to the capacity of the individual and pursued in a serious spirit. What can be more simple and obvious? And yet, if we reflect, we shall see that moralists have not usually taken this simple view, and that in the accepted morality this whole class of questions is little considered. Duties to this person and to that, to men, to women, to dependents, to the poor, to the State – these are considered; but the greatest of all duties, that of choosing one’s occupation rightly, is overlooked. And yet it is the greatest of duties, because on it depend the usefulness and effectiveness of the man’s life considered as a whole, and, at the same time, his own peace of mind, or, as Goethe calls it, his inward harmony. Nevertheless, it is so much overlooked that in ordinary views of life all moral interest is, as it were, concentrated upon the hours of leisure. The occupation is treated as a matter of course, a necessary routine about which little can be said. True life is regarded as beginning when work is over. In work men may no doubt be honest or dishonest, energetic or slothful, persevering or desultory, successful or unsuccessful, but that is all; it is only in leisure that they can be interesting, highly moral, amiable, poetical. Such a view of life is, to say the least, unfortunate. It surrenders to deadness and dulness more than half of our existence.

In primitive times, when the main business of life was war, this was otherwise. Then men gave their hearts to the pursuit to which they gave their time. What was most important was also most interesting, and the poet when he sang of war sang of business too. Hence came the inimitable fire and life of Homeric and Shakspearian poetry. But when war gave place to industry, it seemed that this grand unity of human life is gone. Business, the important half of life, became unpoetical, from the higher point of view uninteresting – for how could the imagination dwell on the labors of the office or the factory? – and all higher interest was confined to that part of life in which energy is relaxed. Goethe’s peculiar realism at once prompts and enables him to introduce a reform here. He denies that business is uninteresting, and maintains that the fault is in our own narrowness and in our slavery to a poetical tradition. It is the distinction of “Wilhelm Meister” that it is actually a novel about business, not merely a realistic novel venturing to approach the edge of that slough of dulness which is supposed to be at the centre of all our lives, but actually a novel about business as such, an attempt to show that the occupation to which a man gives his life is a matter not only for serious thought, but that it is a matter also for philosophy and poetry. That such a novel must at first sight appear tame and dull is obvious; it undertakes to create the taste by which it can be enjoyed, and will be condemned at once by all who are not disposed to give it a serious trial. But the question it raises is the fundamental question of modern life. Comprehensive and practical at once, Goethe’s mind has found out that root of bitterness which is at the bottom of all the uneasy social agitations of the nineteenth century. We live in the industrial ages, and he has asked the question whether industry must of necessity be a form of slavery, or whether it can be glorified and made into a source of moral health and happiness.

It is commonly said that “Wilhelm Meister,” seems to make Art the one object of life; but this is not Goethe’s intention. He was himself an artist, and, as the work is in a great degree autobiographical, art naturally comes into the foreground, and the book becomes especially interesting to artists, but the real subject of it is vocations in general. In the later books, indeed, art drops into the background, and we have a view of feminine vocations. The “Beautiful Soul” represents the pietistic view of life; then Therese appears in contrast, representing the economic or utilitarian view; finally, Natalie hits the golden mean, being practical like Therese but less utilitarian, and, ideal like her aunt, the pietist, but less introspective. On the whole, then, the lesson of the book is that we should give unity to our lives by devoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and that the pursuit is assigned to us by Nature through the capacities she has given us. It is thus that Goethe substitutes for the idea of pleasure that of the satisfaction of special inborn aptitudes different in each individual. His system treats every man as a genius, for it regards every man as having his own unique individuality, for which it claims the same sort of tender consideration that is conceded to genius. But in laying down such rules Goethe thinks first of himself. He has spent long years in trying to make out his own vocation. He has had an opportunity of living almost every kind of life in turn. It was not till he returned from Italy that he felt himself to have arrived at clearness. What was Goethe’s vocation? Or, since happiness consists in faithful obedience to a natural vocation, what was Goethe’s happiness? His happiness is a kind of religion, a perpetual rapt contemplation, a beatific vision. The object of this contemplation is Nature, the laws or order of the Universe to which we belong. Of such contemplation he recognizes two kinds, one of which he calls Art and the other Science. He was in the habit of thinking that in Art and Science taken together he possessed an equivalent for what other men call their religion. Thus, in 1817, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Reformation, he writes a poem in which he expresses his devout resolution of showing his Protestantism, as ever, by Art and Science.37 It was because his view of Art was so realistic, that he was able thus to regard Art as a sort of twin-sister of Science. But the principle involved in this twofold contemplation of Nature is the very principle of religion itself, and in one sense it is true that no man was ever more deliberately and consciously religious than Goethe. No man asserted more emphatically that the energy of action ought to be accompanied by the energy of feeling. It is the consistent principle of his life that the whole man ought to act together, and he pushes it so far that he seems to forbid all division of labor in science. This is the position taken up in “Faust” which perhaps is seldom rightly understood. Science, according to “Faust,” must not be dry analysis pursued at a desk in a close room; it must be direct wondering contemplation of Nature. The secrets of the world must disclose themselves to a loving gaze, not to dry thinking (trocknes Sinnen), man must converse with Nature “as one spirit with another,” “look into her breast as into the bosom of a friend.” How we should not study is conveyed to us by the picture of Wagner, who is treated with so much contempt. He is simply the ordinary man of science, perhaps we may think the modest practical investigator, of the class to which the advance of science is mainly due. But Goethe has no mercy on him – why? Because his nature is divided, because his feelings do not keep pace with his thoughts, because his attention is concentrated upon single points. Such a man is to Goethe “the dry creeper,” “the most pitiable of all the sons of earth.”

Thus it is, then, that Art and Science taken together, the living, loving, worshipping contemplation of Nature, out of which comes the knowledge of Nature, are to Goethe religion. But is not such a religion wholly different from religion as commonly understood, wholly different from Christianity?

It was, indeed, very different from such Christianity as he found professed around him. In his youth Goethe was acquainted with several eminently religious persons, Fräulein von Klettenberg, the Frankfurt friend of his family, Jung Stilling, and Lavater. He listened to these not only with his unfailing good humor, but at times with more conviction than “Dichtung und Wahrheit” would lead us to suppose. In some of his early letters he himself adopts pietistic language. But as his own peculiar ideas developed themselves, they separated him more and more from the religious world of his time. At the time of his Italian journey and for some years afterwards, we find him speaking of Christianity not merely with indifference, but with a good deal of bitterness. This hostility took rather a peculiar form. As the whole disposition of his mind leads him towards religion, as he can no more help being religious than he can help being a poet, he does not reject religion but changes his religion. He becomes, or tries to become, a heathen in the positive sense of the word; for the description of Goethe as the Great Heathen is not a mere epithet thrown at him by his adversaries. He provoked and almost claimed it in his sketch of Winckelmann, where, after enthusiastic praise of the ancients and of Winckelmann as an interpreter of the ancient world, he inserted a chapter entitled, “Heidnisches,” which begins thus: “This picture of the antique spirit, absorbed in this world and its good things, leads us directly to the reflection that such excellences are only compatible with a heathenish way of thinking. The self-confidence, the attention to the present, the pure worship of the gods as ancestors, the admiration of them, as it were, only as works of art, the submission to an irresistible fate, the future hope also confined to this world, since it rests on the preciousness of posthumous fame; all this belongs so necessarily together, makes such an indivisible whole, creates a condition of human life intended by Nature herself, that we become conscious, alike at the height of enjoyment, and in the depth of sacrifice and even of ruin, of an indestructible health.” Clearly when he wrote this (about 1804) Goethe wished and intended to pass for a heathen. And, indeed, the antique attracts him scarcely at all from the historical side – he is no republican, no lover of liberty – but almost exclusively because it offers a religion which is to him the religion of health and joy.

Is it, then, true that Christianity is a system of morbid and melancholy introspectiveness, sacrificing all the freshness and glory of the present life to an awful future? He makes this assumption, and had almost a right to make it, since the Christianity of his time had almost exclusively this character. He was, however, himself half aware that there was all the difference in the world between the Christianity of his time and original Christianity or Christianity as it might be. And even at the time of his greatest bitterness he drops expressions which show that he does not altogether relinquish his interest in Christianity, but keeps open for himself the alternative of appearing as a reformer rather than an assailant of it. In the third period and the old age his tone is a good deal more conciliating than in the passage above quoted. In the Autobiography he appears, on the whole, as a Christian, and even makes faint attempts here and there to write in a style that Christians may find edifying. He tells us expressly that he had little sympathy with the Encyclopædists, and, in a passage of the “West-östlicher Divan,” he declares with real warmth that he “has taken into his heart the glorious image of our sacred books, and, as the Lord’s image was impressed on St. Veronica’s cloth, he refreshes himself in the stillness of the breast in spite of all negation and hindrance with the inspiring vision of faith.” Again, when in the “Wanderjahre” he grapples constructively, but somewhat too late, with the problems of the nineteenth century, we find him assuming a reformed Christianity38 as the religion of the future.

May we then regard Goethe as one who in reality only opposed the corruptions of Christianity even when he seemed to oppose Christianity itself? Certainly other worldliness does not now appear, at least in England, as a necessary part of Christianity. Surely that contrast between the healthy spirit of antiquity and the morbidness of Christianity, which was like a fixed idea in the mind of Goethe’s generation, need not trouble us now. Those sweeping generalizations belonged to the infancy of the historical sciences. Mediævalism does not now seem identical with Christianity. The sombre aspect of our religion is clearing away. Christian self-denial now appears not as the aimless, fruitless mortification of desire which Goethe detested, but as the heroic strenuousness which he practiced. The world which Christians renounce now appears to be, not the universe nor the present life, but only conventionalism and tyrannous fashion. With such a religion, Goethe’s philosophy is sufficiently in harmony. According to these definitions the spirit even of “Wilhelm Meister” is not secular. Even his avowal of heathenism comes to wear a different aspect, when we find him writing thus of the religion of the old Testament: “Among all heathen religions, for to this class belongs that of Israel as much as any, this one has great points of superiority,” &c. (he mentions particularly its “excellent collection of sacred books”). So that, after all, Goethe may only have been a heathen as the prophet Isaiah was a heathen!