1070
PARTISAN REVIEW
be tempted to call him the victim of his poetry rather than the
mru:;ter of
it,
in the sense in which Racine or Shakespeare or even
Schiller were mru:;ters. It wru:; not poetic virtue that kept him from
completing
Faust
for nearly sixty years, but something much more
fallible and human. And while in this case, and in others, he turned
his weakness into strength and by waiting got a quality into his work
that other poets seldom get, this does not entitle us to idealize him or
to see him ru:; other than he plainly was. On the contrary, by idealizing
him we are simply putting a barrier between ourselves and our golden
opportunity and shutting off all or part of the rich reality.
But the stronger reason for distrusting the Goethe myth is that
it
has the whole of his life-philosophy- all that he learned and all that
he taught-against it. He pre-eminently is the moral exponent of
trial and error, of finding the right road by taking the wrong. This
is what happens to Wilhelm Meister-in a novel that Goethe worked
at on and off for half a century- and it is what happens more signally
to Faust, who, while moving towards a great and worthy goal, blund–
ers grossly and never learns not to blunder. When Goethe wrote the
famous line:
Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt
which means that, try ru:; he may, man will never eliminate error unless
by sheer inertia which is worse than error, he wru:; not excluding him–
self and warning others but was speaking right out of his bitter ex–
perience. Consider how frequently this essentially autobiographical
poet creates weak characters rather than strong, especially when they
are men and the link with himself is close. Faust may be an exception
for, whether we call him a strong character or not, we can agree that
there was something strong in him that continually reasserted itself
and ultimately carried him through. But think of the gallery of weak–
lings: Weislingen, the turncoat and libertine, in
Got:;. von Berliching–
en;
Werther, the sentimentalist, whose strongest .act is to shoot him–
self; Egmont, the dreamer, who ineptly and blindly throws away his
life where a shrewder mind would have survived, or rather did sur–
vive; Tasso, whose sensibilities are so overwrought that it is an
open question whether he will collapse or not; Eduard in
Die Wahl–
verwandtschaften
whose self-indulgence condemns him; and, to cap
the list, Goethe himself in his
'Trilogie der Leidenschaft"
reduced by
