C.F.
_ PART FOUR
O
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
1749-1832 Faust
Goethe is often called "the last Universal Man." He possessed the sort of nonspecialized mind that no longer exists, and the lack of which may be leading us to disaster. This colossus lived a long and superbly favored life. He loved plurally. He wrote, brilliantly or tediously, in every possible form. Creative artist, government administrator, scientific researcher, and theorist, he was fantastically versatile. He invented German literature, and then for half a century dominated it. Like his contempo- rary Napoleon, he was more a force of nature than a man.
Perhaps more than either he was a process. One key to Goethe is a pair of words: change (he might have said metamor- phosis) and development. Although he felt both himself and nature to be wholes, his sense of himself, as well as of nature, was evolutionary. He outgrew women, ideas, experiences, only to incorporate what they had taught him into a new, larger, ever- growing Goethe. "I am like a snake," he said. "I slough my skin and start afresh." Perhaps we should speak of Goethe as we do of some great country, like the United States. At any moment he is the sum of a complex historical past and the potentialities of an incalculable future. In his lifelong emphasis on growth, change, striving, activity, and the conquest and understanding of the world Goethe was himself what we have come to call a Faustian man, typifying a major aspect of our modern Western life-feeling.
His dramatic masterpiece grew as Goethe himself did. As a small boy in his native Frankfurt he saw a puppet show based on the old folk-character Faust. From that day to a few months before his death, when he finished Part 2, Faust continued to
develop in his mind and on his writing table. Part 1 was started in his early twenties and completed almost thirty years later. Neither part is really a play for the stage. Both are changing visions of life, written, as Goethe's own career was conceived, in many different tonalities and styles, from the obscene to the sublime.
Part 1 is the simpler and less profound of the two, and the easier of access. It is familiar to us partly because its legend has attracted so many writers and composers. The Faust-Margaret love story inspired Gounod's famous opera.
Part н deals with an individual soul, the seeker Faust: his intellectual disillusionments and ambitions; the temptations put in his way by the fascinating, all-denying Mephistopheles; his seduction of Margaret; and the promise of redemption through love. Part 2 deals with the "great world," not of the individual Faust but of Western humanity. It is really a kind of historical phantasmagoria, with the legendary Helen, whom we met in Homer [2,3], symbolizing the Western classical world and Faust himself symbolizing the modern or post-Renaissance Western world. Heaven, Hell, and Earth are the settings of Faust as they are of The Divine Comedy [30]. But Goethe is not as clear as Dante, and many of his meanings are still being quarreled over.
In translation Goethe, like Moliиre [46], is not entirely sat- isfactory reading. Yet some acquaintance, however superficial, must be made with this European titan who has influenced hundreds of writers, including the greatest modems, such as Thomas Mann [107].
C.F.
63
WILLIAM BLAKE
1757-1827 Selected Works
Once, William Blake tells us, he walked to the end of the heath and touched the sky with his finger. At four he screamed upon
perceiving God's head at the window. He saw angels in boughs and the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. His wife once remarked placidly, "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise." Perhaps an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Blake felt himself on ali fours with spirits. He is the supreme type, at least in modern times, of the visionary poet.
Toward this strange, baffling man of streaky genius one has a choice of attitudes. You may put him down as a faker, though the sweetness and honesty of his whole life belie it. Some of his contemporaries, quite celebrated then, quite forgotten now, called him a harmless lunatic. A psychologist will talk of Blake's "eidetic vision," which is simply a specialized ability to project into the externai world images we usually hold in our minds. Many children have this power, Joan of Are may have had it, and rationalists cite it when trying to explain the visions of saints and even Jesus. Finally you can ponder Blake's sly and, from the viewpoint of the professional artist and poet, quite practical advice to his friends: "Work up imagination to the state of vision."
It doesn't matter. By the pragmatic test Blake is a success. His paintings, drawings, and engravings, though not of the highest order, are beautiful and moving. His finest verse, of which there is not a great deal, is original and unforgettable. His ideas, long mocked or neglected, appeal with increasing force to those who have lost faith in materialistas ability to bring happiness to the race.
Blake was that rare thing, a completely spontaneous human being. "A man without a mask," a friend called him. Living and dying in poverty, he was probably one of the most energetically joyful men of his time. He had some secret of ecstasy denied to most of us, and at times it stimulated odd behavior: He and his wife were once discovered in their little arbor, stark naked, reading Paradise Lost aloud. To the visitor he called out cheer- ily, "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know."
In his rejection of most of the institutions of his time (as well as in his crankiness) he resembles other figures we shall
meet, such as Thoreau [8o], Nietzsche [97], and Lawrence [113]. His romanticism is a far deeper thing than that of the romantic poets who followed him—Wordsworth [64], Keats, Shelley. "Man is ali imagination," he tells us. "God is man and exists in us and we in him.,> And again: "We are led to believe a lie when we see with, not through, the eye."
His scorn of what is called common sense led him to champion freedom of ali kinds, in the religious, political, and sexual spheres. Calmly, in a memorable sentence, he anticipates Freud [98]: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." For him "Exuberance is Beauty.,> Nonconformists of ali stripes love to quote "Damn braces. Bless relaxes." He hated ali those virtues arising out of measure and calculation: "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."
Blake has the defect of his qualities. His interior world was so vivid that he often lost touch with the exterior world. He may wrap piercing truth in a cloud of frenzy. But the cloud is there; he can be a bad communicator. His private mythology is contained in the so-called Prophetic Books. Scholars keep on trying to unravel them. To most of us they will seem like delir- ium interrupted by gorgeous eloquence.
Blake's nature mingled high natural intelligence and piercing intuition. In his aphorisms and his best verse the two ele- ments are held in balance. His poetry is not artless—Blake was an excellent craftsman with his pen as well as with his pencil and graver. But in the best sense it is childlike—that is, pure, flowing, simple in diction, wildly imaginative. T. S. Eliot's [116] severe and just judgment is really a tribute: "Dante [30] is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius."