1076
PARTISAN REVIEW
for the second there is no lack of indications under the surface. This,
as he saw himself, was part of the price he paid for remaining a
lyrical poet.
It can only ' have been because he was constituted in this way–
under the necessity, it would almost seem, of correcting his own life
from day to day or even from minute to minute-that the problem
of living so permeates his work, giving it its specifically Goethean
character. The omnipresence of this elementary problem-the problem
of managing life and directing it-may not reveal itself to a casual
glance, but the experienced reader knows that it is there, not only in
the obvious places, such as
Faust
where it comes out on a titanic scale
or
Torquato Tasso
where it is refined upon or
Die Wahlverwandt–
schaften
where it is modernized, but everywhere, even in places
where it does not show. The conclusion must be that the basic state of
disturbance which prompts highly endowed individuals to moralize or
to philosophize or to create in one of the arts was more than usually
acute in Goethe and more than usually persistent. It is here at the
pre-philosophical level rather than in philosophy proper that we must
look for the center or focus which initiated and interrelated every–
thing. A difficult thought and yet a simple one, like so much of
Goethe, who is himself both simple and difficult. It is here too that
we must seek the clue to the influence he acquires over his readers.
There is no other word that fits, though we do not customarily speak
of an author as influencing us. What happens is that the intimate
relation in him between living and writing transfers itself to us as
an intimate relation between living and reading. This is not the way.
we read Homer or Shakespeare. The impact of
King Lear
and the
twenty-fourth book of
The Iliad
is greater. But if we ask, in conclu–
sion, which of the three has the power to change men from what
they were and make them different, the answer must be Goethe, who
alone among very great writers puts himself in this direct personal
contact with those who yield to him.
