It is scarcely necessary even to mention the high hopes of the French
themselves, the confident anticipation of an Age of Reason when all men
should be brothers and the earth bring forth all her treasures, but it
is well worth noting the attitude of Goethe, an attitude the more
significant because, in a sense, Goethe always stood outside the French
Revolution. But he, like the best of its votaries--and this is less
known than it should be--desired the development of all men every whit
as much as he desired the high culture of a few. It was for the double
goal that he worked. 'Only through all men,' he writes in a notable
passage, 'only through all men, can mankind be made.'[72] All good lies
in Man, he tells us again, and must be developed, 'only not in one man,
but in many'. Goethe, the so-called aristocrat, has given us here as
true a formula for the democratic faith as could well be found. And to
him, as to Shelley and to Wordsworth, Poetry and Science were not
enemies but friends dearer than sisters. Those three, Shelley,
Wordsworth, and Goethe, foreshadowed a new poetry of science that has
never yet been achieved, though fine work has been done by Tennyson,
Whitman, Sully Prudhomme, and Meredith.
Goethe, moreover, again like Shelley and the French, broke with all
ideals of mere self-abnegation. In his poem, 'General Confession', he
makes his disciples repent of ever having missed an opportunity for
enjoyment and resolve never so to offend again. Here, as often, Goethe
comes into the closest touch with our modern feeling. We, too, can never
return to the Franciscan ideal of poverty, celibacy, and obedience as
the highest life for man on earth. We have done with self-denial except
as the means to a human end. We are still in the tide of what I would
call the Modern Renascence; we claim the whole garden of the world for
our own, the tree with the knowledge of good and evil included, reacting
even from Christian ideals if they can make no room for that. But, after
all, the characteristic of the belief dominant a century ago was exactly
that such room could be made, that Hellenism could be combined with
Christianity, and self-development with self-denial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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