Goethe's literary essays

I. On the Selection and Translation of the Essays in this Volume

This book was first suggested to me in 1909, and was virtually completed seven or eight years ago; but the manuscript was mislaid among some old papers, and when it was recovered the European War was at its height. Never again, it then seemed, could I regard my work with the same disinterested temper in which it was begun, for what was recovered was no longer a manuscript but a ghost, no longer a book but a strange spirit returned from an all too irrecoverable past. When I re-read these words from the lips of one who had spent his life “with spirits god-like mild,” and related them to our new and altered world, I understood once more how man forever fashions history to his own meaning, and how it has no life except such as is given to it by his creative mind. Every word I now read assumed a new and heightened significance, a more intimate relation with life; and every word was a call to sympathy and understanding,—the word of a man who had withheld all hate from enemy France, had praised England and its literature, had analyzed the defects of his own countrymen, and had made constant denial of the compatibility of poetry and partisanship. How could I approach work of this kind in the spirit of the fiery national partisan, not to mention that of the mere dryasdust scholar, when every word Goethe uttered shed light and meaning on the warm life about me, and every accent of his voice taught a high forebearance? So when on sick-leave from my regiment at the very end of 1917, to while away the tediousness of convalescence, I played once more with the work begun in the old days when I was still able to live in “the wise man’s only country, Life”; and before I sailed for France, leaving behind me the manuscript as it here stands, I determined that if it were ever published, I should add nothing in the form of preface, introduction, or critical apparatus, but allow Goethe to speak for himself to such hearts as could hear and understand him. Some readers may find a key to that understanding if they begin with the famous passage on “Poetry and Patriotism” on page 251.

No adequate estimate of Goethe’s critical work has yet been achieved; and the sensible but unilluminating chapter on this subject in the late Calvin Thomas’s Goethe is not much more disappointing than the more extended studies in German of Oskar Walzel and Wilhelm Bode. For a complete estimate of Goethe as a critic we should have to ransack all his essays and reviews, his novels and poems, his autobiography and his journals, his letters and conversations, for in all of them he has scattered judgments on books and thoughts on the theory of art. It would almost seem as if his reputation as a critic rests more securely on these casual utterances than on his formal essays and studies. There more than elsewhere Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold recognized “the supreme critic”; there above all we find that mellow wisdom which we have come to associate with Goethe’s name.

In this little volume, however, we have most of Goethe’s successive moods represented by some characteristic utterance,—the young reviewer, the lover of Shakespeare and Gothic art, rebelling against schools and rules but most of all against dullness and formality; the contributor to Wieland’s German Mercury, the collaborator of Schiller in the Horen and in an exchange of letters of incomparable interest, after the life of Weimar and the journey to Italy had mellowed his talents; the student of art and æsthetics in the Propyläen, championing the antique spirit and voicing a protest against the excesses of romanticism; the more thoughtful but still sympathetic student of Shakespeare, enthusiastic in Wilhelm Meister, more temperate in Shakespeare ad Infinitum; the mature reviewer, welcoming the publication of old German and foreign folksongs, and hailing in turn Byron, Manzoni, Carlyle, Niebuhr, and all the young French and German writers of his day; and finally, the literary dictator in his old age, as shown in the careless and incessant wisdom of his recorded conversation. We have here, it is true, a very small part of his extraordinary output, but quite enough to form a just judgment of his place among the great critics. In a career so extended and a mind so active and all-embracing we must expect to find inconsistencies and errors of judgment. Some of the ideas in this volume have only an historical interest; a perverse mind might indeed garner from it an anthology of critical errors. It was not these which won for him from so many the title of “supreme critic,” but rather the sanity, insight, and impartiality of his mind and his extraordinary gift for foreseeing the direction of critical thought.

All of the selections in Part I, except the essay on “German Architecture,” have been taken from Goethe’s Essays on Art, translated by S. G. Ward (Boston, 1845). Wilhelm Meister’s critique of Hamlet has been excerpted from Carlyle’s rendering of Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre. The version of John Oxenford has been used for the selections from the Conversations with Eckermann, and Oxenford’s version, as revised by Miss M. S. Smith, for the selection from Goethe’s Autobiography. The remaining essays were translated by the late Randolph S. Bourne, by Professor F. W. J. Heuser, and by myself. I am indebted to Mr. Bourne for translating the following essays: “On German Architecture,” “Shakespeare ad Infinitum,” “The First Edition of Hamlet,” “Troilus and Cressida,” “The Methods of French Criticism,” “Supplement to Aristotle’s Poetics,” “Tieck’s Dramaturgic Fragments,” “On the German Theatre,” “Didactic Poetry,” “Superstition and Poetry,” “The Theory of a World Literature,” “Byron’s Manfred,” “Byron’s Don Juan,” “Calderon’s Daughter of the Air,” “Molière’s Misanthrope,” “Folksongs again Commended,” and “Laurence Sterne.” Professor Heuser has translated the following: “The Production of a National Classic,” “Epic and Dramatic Poetry,” and “English Reviewers.” I have made material changes and corrections in almost all the translations, but on the whole each translator should be held responsible for the accuracy and style of his own work. For the selection and arrangement of the material, and for the titles given to some of the excerpts, I am alone responsible.

Some of Goethe’s judgments on books, and his maxims on life and art, have already appeared in volumes of selections in English translation; but no other work in any language, so far as I am aware, attempts to include in a single volume the whole range of Goethe’s critical and æsthetic studies. Some of the selections have never before appeared in English.

J. E. S.

Troutbeck, May, 1919.

Since the above was written, I have become greatly indebted to Lord Haldane for contributing the Foreword, and especially to Professor Friedrich Bruns for reading the proofsheets and revising some of the translations. Miss L. Bonino has prepared the Index.

J. E. S.

New York, September, 1921.

II. On the Chronology of Goethe’s Critical Studies

The following chronology of Goethe’s critical activity is intended chiefly to indicate the original sources of the selections in the present volume.