GOETHE: THE MAN AND THE MYTH
1075
and so on his science. His science in its turn drew his lyricism into
objective channels and led to the wealth of philosophical verse that
crowned his late life.
As
Gunther Muller puts it in his
Kleine Goethe–
biographie
(1947) -the first life of Goethe to place this emphasis–
there was no compulsion exerted by the one on the other, the poet
brought life into the science, the scientist brought law into the poetry.
He reminds us also that in effecting single-handed this reunion of
science and poetry Goethe was recovering for civilization what it lost
two thousand years ago with the decline of antiquity. Whether this
claim is absolutely justified or only partially, it accords wonderfully
with the temper of Goethe's late verses where, though the voice that
speaks is modern, the tradition in which it speaks seems to be that
of the early world. Take the group of poems called
«Gott und Welt"
or the sequence called
«Urworte, Orphisch,"
or, better still, one or
other of his nameless little snatches of philosophy in rhyme, which
are at once so disarmingly easy and so endlessly suggestive and which
he alone in modern times was able to write.
Here we seem to be reaching a terminus, but there is yet a word to
say.
If
Goethe's life was not centered in poetry, neither was it centered
in science, but in something that belonged to both and brought the two
together. To say that this something was philosophy is right enough,
as far as it goes, but is nevertheless not adequate. For while it could
be argued that Goethe was a true philosopher, just as true a philo–
sopher, whether in psychology or
~etaphysics,
as his contemporary
Kant, or
if
less so, then only in the sense that he was not willing to fix
his thoughts in a system but preferred to keep them fluid, the con–
trast between them in their personal relation to philosophy is so
great that we have to start differentiating as soon as we compare.
Kant philosophized out of what must have been, or rather notoriously
was, a well-regulated life; his conduct of himself did not, so far as we
can judge, interfere with his reflective vocation; personal questions
did not impinge on abstract. In this he was not unlike our current
conception of a philosopher. But Goethe was different, more nervous,
more problematic, more modern, closer inwardly to Rousseau or to
Nietzsche. In all his eighty years his life never came to equilibrium,
but continually pestered him and drove him through unrest to do the
things he did. We have only to read the letters that he wrote up to the
age of forty to see how true this was of the first half of his life, and
