60.ETHE:
THE MAN AND THE MYTH
1065
The Goethe who was loved and hated in the Heine period-roughly
the period preceding 1848-was already the idealized Goethe, the
Goethe who was above the battle, surveying our mortal agony from
the clouds. Here we touch one of the dubious aspects of the myth.
There is only one type of artist who can stay in the clouds or in–
habit Olympus; it is the type that separates art from life and with–
draws from his fellow men. "Goethe's words," says Heine in one of
the wrongest things ever said about
him,
"are childless, such being
the curse that descends on everything that is made by art alone." His
Goethe, we see, is the artist Goethe, the Goethe of the
"Kunstperiode,"
as he called
it.
This may not be exactly what the Germans mean when
they call Goethe a Classic or the age he lived in Classical-they are
probably just following the French-but it is only too easy to pass
from the one set of terms to the other. "Classical," "Olympian," "art
for art's sake"-the idea of perfection is present in each.
The phenomenon is not restricted to Germany. Strich's recently
published
Goethe und die Weltliteratur
(1946) shows how strongly
the Olympian or Parnassian view of Goethe took hold in other coun–
tries. No less a critic than Sainte-Beuve .adopted it, taking
his
cue
from Bettina's book, which he reviewed in 1850 in French translation,
and presenting Goethe as serene and marble-browed and, even in
his
Werther period,
a high-priest of
art.
In an off moment he com–
pares him for impassivity with Fontenelle. On the whole the French
tradition seems to have followed him and not the French tradition
alone.
"If
we look about in the Europe of that time," says Strich,
"the picture of the Olympian Goethe crops up on every hand." Eng–
lish criticism of him may have contributed less to the building-up of
the myth than French or German, but Carlyle, the hero-worshipper,
cannot be wholly exonerated.
In the annals of English literature proper there is no correspond–
ing case. There is no English author who has been similarly enthroned
or elevated. Shakespeare as a person eludes us; Milton and Words–
worth are possibly too vulnerable in their private lives; Boswell's
Johnson,
the nearest English counterpart of Eckermann's
Goethe,
is
not chargeable with Eckermann's bias. The question naturally arises
how useful, how desirable the Goethe myth is. That it produces and
always has produced reaction will not be doubted. In recent years
there is the notable case of Thomas Mann, whose Goethe novel
Lotte
