GOETHE: POET OF HUMAN DESTINY
Dr.
K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR
I
feel honoured that I have been Invited to participate in this German Literary
Seminar convened to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the death of Goethe, the
great and supreme and representative German poet “who re-created the literature
of a nation and re-inspired the literature of a continent.” In my college days,
I was an admirer–like most young men of my time of
the English Romantics, and Byron not least. At school I had studied “The
Prisoner of Chillon” as required reading, and followed it up in college with Childe
Harold and Don Juan. But Carlyle’s peremptory exhortation (or
admonition) “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe!” startled and deflated me, and
also stimulated my curiosity. Presently, as a teacher in
Another
German writer who swept me off my feet was Thomas Mann the Nobel Laureate,
whole Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain I read eagerly in H. T.
Lowe-Porter’s translation. And it was sheer excitement to be asked to review
Mann’s Three Essays, the longest of them being a comparative study of
Goethe and Tolstoy, or rather of Goethe-Schiller and Tolstoy-Dostoevsky. On one
side, Goethe and Tolstoy, elemental natures, primordial emanations, titanic
awesome figures thrown up by the Time Spirit: and, on the other, Schiller and
Dostoevsky, creatures of emotion and intuition, gifted visionaries of the soul,
all but saints though a little sicklied over by the pale cast of 19th century
thought! And I was intrigued to read this neatly balanced assessment by Thomas
Mann:
“Clearly
there are two ways of heightening and enhancing human values: one exalts them
to the godlike, and is a gift of Nature’s grace; the other exalts them up to
the saintly, by grace of another power, which stands opposite to her and means
emancipation from her. That other power is the power of the spirit...”
That
let me thinking, and I read, not Faust and War and Peace alone,
but also Joan of Arc and The Idiot. My
studies, however, suffered when I came to
“Goethe,
indeed, is the advocate of a life lived for its own worth; to heal its ills the
resources of the human mind and soul are considered sufficient. Such a message
is addressed to all men; it transcends the bounds of nationality, it is
unmindful of the lapse of time...Thus it is meet that
we in
In
the half-century that has passed since then, another world war has revealed to
us how stark actuality can be worse than the worst nightmare; the fission of
the atom has opened up possibilities of perversion and destruction beyond all
reckoning, and mankind now finds itself perching precariously on the imminent unthinkable.
Two armageddons within a single generation–and a continuing “cold war” of
mutually emasculating attrition! The hydrogen bomb, the neutron bomb, the
devilishly, accurate ICBM, the terrifying prospect of chemical and biological
warfare: the spiraling and insanely wasteful expenditure on “defence”, the
diminishing or vanishing “security!” In this hour of the unpredictable,
“Olympian” Goethe is even more relevant than he was 50, 100 or 150 years ago,
and what Matthew Arnold called Goethe’s “sage mind”, his “wide and luminous
view”, was perhaps never more needed than at the present time.
But,
then, how shall we read Goethe today? He daunts us by his Himalayan dimensions,
by his range and heights alike. Young Aurobindo Ghose greeted him as “a perfect
face...a perfect voice of sweet and serious rhyme”:
“Traveller
with calm, inimitable paces,
Critic
with judgement absolute for all time,
A
complete strength when men were maimed and weak.”
It is said that the
Goethe canon in German–in the
And
yet–and yet–one cannot forget or escape Goethe, nor deny or diminish his fierce
contemporaneity. No doubt it has always been easy to be overpowered by the
outer exuberance or vitality of his life, or to be sidetracked by the elements
of the magical and the supernatural in his masterpiece, Faust. But
Callyle said as early as 1824, in his Preface to his translation of Wilhelm
Meister:
“The
tyro in German may tell us that the charm of Faust is altogether
unconnected with its preternatural import; that the work delineates the fate of
human enthusiasm struggling against doubts and errors from within, against
scepticism, contempt and selfishness from without; and that the witchcraft and
magic, intended merely as a shadowy frame for so complex and mysterious a
picture of the moral world and the human soul, are introduced for the purpose
not so much of being trembled at as laughed at.”
This
was written 8 years before Part II appeared, but there can be no question that
Carlyle’s perceptive comment applies generally to the completed Faust as
well. However fascinating the circumstances of Goethe’s life, however tempting
to muddle up biography with criticism, poetolatry with poetry, and however exciting
to explore the ramifications of the supernatural, the wiser course will be to
read the creative word itself with its evocative pictures of real and the
ideal.
Goethe’s
long life fell into five periods: the first 26 years (1749-1725), when he made
his soundings and beginnings in different fields; the early years (1775-86) at
Weimar, when he enjoyed Charlotte von Stein’s tranquillising and healing
friendship and love, and wrote the prose version of Iphigenia in Tauris; the
brief sojourn in Italy, the return to Weimar, and the publication in 1808 of
the First Part of the Tragedy of Faust; the next 15 years, when Goethe was
Weimar’s most active and distinguished citizen-institution, and when most of
the Second Part of Faust organically grew out of the First; and the last
period (1823-1832), which was to be immortalised in Conversations with
Eckermann rivalling Faust itself in popularity and described by
Nietzsche as “the best German book there is.” It is scarcely necessary to go
through, say, Emil Ludwig’s the volume biography to realise that Goethe wasn’t
like average humanity, that he was chameleonic, Protean, incalculable,
slippery, volatile, a man of myriad moods and disguises, a phenomenon that was
a siege of contraries and a balance of polarities, now a woodland hurricane
without” and now the calm of a cave’s interior...and even so, and
notwithstanding the multitudinous motions and the distracting
somersaults, the careerings between the heights of exultation and the
nadirs of gloom, the alternations of light and dark, the stirrings of hope and
the icy stretches of negation and despair, Goethe was always himself, and
somehow a wholeness, a wholesomeness, a Mandala, that endured, and endures.
Again,
it is certainly possible to operate the critical microscope and
make pointer readings indicative of change, a shifting of emphasis, or a growth
or a broadening or a heightening in Goethe’s art or thought. Faust,
for example, was for ever 60 years agrowing:
aren’t there, between the First Part and the Second, differences in motivation,
a chastening of sensibility, a mellowing perhaps,–but
also a failure of energy and inspiration? On the other hand, we would
perhaps be misjudging Goethe’s poetic and dramatic art it was close to view Faust
in terms of mere chronological extension and satisfaction. Eckermann records that, on 6 December 1829, after dinner, Goethe
read the first scene of the Second Act of Part 11. “The effect was
great,” writes Eckermann. It is Faust’s study again, and between Parts 1 and
11, the passage of time has made its reckoning, and we learn that Faust’s
former assistant, Wagner, is now a famous man engaged in precipitating a
test-tube Homunculus. A careful reading shows that the interior stitching its
close and convincing, and Goethe himself is reported to have said:
“The
invention of the Second Part is really as old as fifty years”...but
it may be an advantage that I have not written it down till
now when my knowledge of the world is so much clearer. I am like one who in his
youth has a great deal of small silver and copper money; which in the course of
his life he constantly changes for the better, so that at last the property of
his youth stands before him in pieces of pure gold.”
Doubtless
there is growth, but it is like all organic growth, and every tissue tingles
with life in unison with the entirety.
It
may be helpful, I think, to compare Faust with Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri,
an epic of our time on a theme originating in the Veda, but also embodying
his explorations in the occult world stair, the symbol regions of Night,
Twilight and Day, and his intuitions about the mysterious ways of
“There
seems to be some law of life by which it is impossible for a great work
of art to come into being by the arbitrary fiat of a single brain, working
independently of any deep human tradition...(And Faust) had behind it a huge
agglomeration of mythological tradition and mediaeval legend...”
As
one reads and re-reads Faust and tries to plumb its significances, as
one views the wily and vast tentacles of its comprehension, one knows
that this epic drama is verily built out of the stuff of Gotthe’s whole life,
and of all life. Poetry like the Ramayana, the Iliad, the Divine
Comedy, Hamlet,
“Yes,
Goethe goes much deeper than Shakespeare; he had an incomparably greater
intellect than the English poet and sounded problems of life and thought
Shakespeare had no means of approaching even. But he was certainly Dot a
greater poet; I do not find myself very ready to admit either that he was
Shakespeare’s equal...Shakespeare was a supreme poet and one might almost say,
nothing else; Goethe was by far the greater man and the greater
brain, but he was a poet by choice, his Mind’s choice among its many high and
effulgent possibilities, rather than by the very necessity of his
being. He wrote his poetry as he did everything else with a great skill and an
inspired subtlety of language and effective genius, but it was only part of his
genius and not the whole.”
Perhaps,
for one who can read Goethe only in translation, this sovereignty of genius
transcending the poetry can be something of an advantage, for one must needs
concentrate more on the backgrounds, situations, characters and the
thought-universe than on the ineluctable verbal and matrical wizardry. In
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the focus was on the plight of the renaissance
intellectual who had found the freedom of his mind and rejected the
infallibility of the Church. But that uncharted freedom could only induce
viperous doubt and the feeling of isolation and insecurity, and it was this
mental unease or disease that drove Doctor Faustus to his doom. Goethe’s Faust
was cast on a subtler and more complex mould representative of
universal Man with his wide-ranging potentialities. Having mastered philosophy,
jurisprudence, medicine, and “saddest of all”, theology, Faust
wonders: To what end? Apara Vidya (knowledge of
phenomena), without Para Vidya (knowledge of reality), can be as dangerous as avidya
or ignorance. Beneath or beyond the deserts of academic
futility or puerility, is it possible to locate the Raja-Vidya, the
King-Knowledge, that holds the worlds together, and
thus embrace Certainty? Faust poses the overwhelming question:
The
life Divine, that bliss of god-like being,
Dar’st
thou, but now a worm, make it thy goal?
One
cannot fail to recall here Hamlet’s percipient, if also lacerating
speculations:
“What
a piece of work is man t How noble in reason! How
infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express
and admirable! in action, how like
an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the
paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust!”
It is permissible to view Man as the theatre–the battlefield, the Kurukahetra–where the intestine struggle between growth, metamorphosis, evolution towards the Divine and stagnation at the level of the animal or descent to the reptile’s worm’s or insect’s is being fought. The Earth and Man are the theatre of evolutionary possibility, whereas Heaven and Hell, God and Evil, seem alike static, the former in terms of Perfection, the latter as termless Negation (or damnation). Mephistopheles, of course, must necessarily scoff at all human aspiration for a higher life and hope of realising it, and so he tells Faust:
The
Whole but for a God is made.
He
thrones at ease amid eternal splendour;
Us hath He thrust in Stygian shade;
Your
needs alone with Day and Night are stayed.
In
Sri Aurobindo’s poem, too, Death the spirit of Negation tries to dampen Savitri’s
spirit:
Thy
words are large murmurs in a mystic dream,
For
how in the soiled heart of man could dwell
The
inarticulate grandeur of thy dream-built God,
Or
who can see a face and form divine
In
the naked two-legged worm thou callest man?
O
human face, put off mind-painted masks:
The
animal be, the worm that Nature meant ...
The
way Savitri, guided by her Mind of Light and sustained by the power of her
Yoga, reclaims the Soul of the World that is Satyavan, and ensures the earth’s
ultimate transformation into a New Heaven and a New Earth,
is the heart of the modern epic fully in consonance with the Indian spiritual
tradition. But Faust is structured and tissued otherwise.
Faust’s initial predicament as a scholar; his burrowing discontent, his restless
hankering and his reckless gamble with life; his experiments
with variegated experience, his strivings, strayings, stumblings, revivings and
new beginnings; his travels in the little world with its individual or private
destinies, and in the great world with its far-flung collective histories; his
twin dream-sequences comprising Europe’s past, the classical Walpurgis Night
with its projection of the evolutionary theme in its several dimensions
(geological, biological, psychological, artistic), and the Helen-sequence with
its evocation of the immortal heroine of poetry and legend; and his final
successful (if also partly flawed) spurt of socially creative activity
that promises to satisfy his inmost self, yet ensures his escape from the claws
of Mephistopheles: all, all is integrated with the 1000-year old Western
civilisation. And it is surely significant that, like Beatrice in The Divine
Comedy, it is Gretchen (Margaret) who guides Faust to the higher spheres:
Grant
me to teach him! Radiant-shining,
Still
dazzles him the new-sprung day.
It
is true that Faust is a “sinner”, and Margaret is far more sinned against than
sinning. But the Lord concedes at the outset that the freedom to aspire implies
also the risk of failure. Margaret is redeemed at the end of Part I, and
Fault at the end of Part II–but their paths of redemption are not identical.
Margaret
has loved greatly, and erred too, but since Love is the supreme virtue, she is
definitively saved. As for Faust, although he
has used his God-given “reason” and divine discontent, not always
wisely and often wrongly and perversely he too has never–in all the singular
vicissitudes of his life – ceased to aspire, to
move on, seeking new existential realms for striving, achieving (or falling).
In this he distantly reminds us of Rohita, who is exhorted to push for ever
forward by God Indra:
To
move forward is the way to immortality,
The
moving itself is the fruit of nectar.
Look
up and see how the Sun-God
...
has started on his
non-stop journey...
So,
on you go, on you go: charai veti, charai veti!
(Aitareya
Brahmana: Tagore’s translation)
That
is the way continually to experiment and evolve, and fare forward hoping for
integral knowledge and integral realisation, Faust is a Western variant of this
ancient Indian ideal of perpetual striving and progressive evolution and
growth.
If
in the Margaret story Goethe has metamorphosed an obscure girl into a tragic
heroine and further lifted her to the throne of sanctity, he presents in Iphigenia
in Tauris a pure and brave heroine, rather akin to Andromeda in Sri
Aurobindo’s Perseus the Deliverer. Unlike the Andromeda of
Euripides, Corneille and Kingsley, Sri Aurobindo’s
heroine is a puissant power of consciousness in her own right,
the symbol and force of flaming compassion. She will not permit the two
strangers cast on the Syrian shore to be sacrificed to Poseidon, and thus she
risks death by being exposed to the sea monster. Perseus, however, rescues her
in time. It is possible that, in writing his Perseus, and enlarging the
role and heightening the character of Andromeda, Sri Aurobindo had Goetbe”s Iphigenia
in Tauris in mind, for there is the same distance from Euripides in
both modern creations. As Priestess of Diana’s Grove, Iphigenia
has spent long years of loneliness till – after the end of the Trojan War and
the killing of Agamemnon and Clyraemnestra – her
brother Orestes and his friend Pylades take refuge in her Grove. Since
Iphigenia has refused to marry King Thoas, he now threatens to revive the custom
of sacrificing strangers to Diana, and the first victims will be Orestes and
Pylades. When the proposal comes from the latter that she should by a deceitful
ruse help all of them to escape, taking with them Diana’s image as well,
Iphigenia agrees at first but anon recoils from the lie and declares
uncompromisingly:
Detested
falsehood: it does not relieve
The
breast like words of truth;
It
comforts not,
But
in a torment in the forger’s heart
And
like an arrow which a God directs
Files back and wounds the archer.
King Thoas too rises
to the occasion, and all ends happily. What is remarkable in Goethe’s Iphigenia
is the richness of her inner life, its marble immaculateness and beauty and
strength. Goethe told Eckermann that the play “is rich in internal but poor in
external life; the point is to make the internal life come out.” The power of
the radiance of her inner life is to be inferred from its decisive alchemic
action on the conventional King Thoas himself!
Iphigenia
certainly, but also Princess Leonora of Torquato Tasso, Mignon of Wilhelm
Meister, and of course Margaret, are variations of the Blessed Feminine,
and Goethe–like Shakespeare himself–had every reason to feel happy with his
marvellous women characters. “My idea of women is not abstracted from the
phenomenon of actual life,” he once explained to Eckermann, “but has been born
with me, or arisen in me ... they are all better than could be found in
reality.” But the representative male of the species, Faust, remains Goethe’s
massive achievement, for in some extraordinary parallel movement,
Faust travelled and grow with the poet, and filled the wide spaces of
his life. It was Goethe’s intention that the Faust of the final scene should be
exactly 100 years old. Pointing to the seminal passage (in the last Act) spoken
by the Angels–
Delivered
is the noble spirit
From
the control of evil powers;
Who
ceaselessly doth strive will merit
That
we should save and make him ours:
If
Love celestial never cease
To
watch him from its upper sphere;
The
children of eternal peace
Bear
him to cordial welcome there
–
(Mrs. Fuller’s translation)
Goethe remarked: “In
these lines is contained the key to Faust’s salvation. In Faust himself there is an activity that becomes constantly higher
and purer to the end, and from above there is eternal love coming to his aid.”
Aspiration and effort and striving from below, and an answering divine Grace
from above: this chimes perfectly with the cardinal faith of all religions.
By
August 1831, Part II of Faust was “sewed together quite complete,” and
Goethe was “extremely happy,” for the sustained and, sublime aim of his life
had been fulfilled at last. What if he had taken more than six decades over its
composition? His growing and evolving mind and sensibility had been invaded by
a multitude of impressions of a sensuous, animate, exciting, enlightening and
distracting kind: he had set in motion characters (superhuman, human and
subhuman) in action involving heaven, earth and hell, as also mythology,
history, poetry, fantasy and dream, and all the Rasas and undertones of Dawani:
and all had been cast together, kneaded, seasoned, moulded and touched with
the promethean fire of the Imagination, so that the nectaread news of the
Devil’s defeat and Man’s redemption can come through and abide with us for
ever.
In
one of his obiter dicta, Goethe boldly proclaimed that “poetry is the universal
possession of mankind,” and that beyond the notion of “national” literature,
“the epoch of world literature is at hand.” After more than a century and a
half, modern technology has reduced the old world of the sprawling continents
and heaving oceans to the containment of the Global Village, while the art of
translation makes available to all mankind the manifold riches of indubitable world-literature.
We are now conceivably near the threshold of the Planetary Age and for us a
vast symbolic epic drama like Faust, comprehending as it does all the
earth’s and humanity’s past and present and also throwing out prophetic hints
about the evolving unfolding Future, must take its place among the elemental
indispensible classics that can bring us safely through our perils and
perplexities and charge us with the Hope unconquerable and the Faith abiding.
And so let me conclude, as Faust does, with the Word of the Chorus
Mysticus that sounds like the unstruck melody of the Voice Divine itself:
All
things corruptible
Are
but shadows;
Earth’s
inadequacy
Here
finds fulfilment;
The
ineffable is here
New
fashioned with love;
And
the Eternal Feminine
Acts as our guide and saviour.
* Keynote address given
on 22 March 1982 at Max Mueller Bhavan, Madras, Inaugurating the German
Literary Symposium, Dr. C. Huehener, Consul-Gencral of the Federal Republic of
Germany, presiding.