GOETHE VERSUS SHAKESPEARE
633
If
the Helena episode should suggest to superficial readers a
wish to return to a past age, or a conviction that the contemporary
world lacks any such exemplary unity as could be found
in
former
ages, the poet's answer is clearly that, confronted with this lack of
unity, r.e fashions a whole world out of himself. At the moment of
composition, he does repair the damage of a lifetime. Perhaps this
damage, which T. S. Eliot considers irreparable, is not as unique a
feature of our age as he supposes. "Decadence," Nietzsche once wrote,
"belongs to all epochs of mankind" ; and it may well be the mark
of the great poet that he goes beyond mirroring the damage and
creates a perspective
in
which it is transcended.
In an age of intolerance and terror, Goethe's singular tolerance
and freedom from fear are apt to seem remote. We turn to Dostoev–
sky. Not to
his
pamphlets, steeped in bigotry, but to
his
novels in
which we encounter terror in congenially crushing proportions. We
also find a world, whole and overwhelming- and new to us as if
it were the poet's own creation. Yet it is not, and here may be the
reason why these novels- and admittedly I know none greater- seem
to move
us
more than people who grew up in Dostoevsky's culture.
What strikes us as original and fresh is really reaction: flight into
a past which does not happen to be ours; acceptance of a
Weltan–
schauung
which, though new to us, is long irrevocable. For us this
novelist explodes horizons and unwittingly advances tolerance-sim–
ply by forcing us to measure our values against his. Yet in his own
context he belongs with those who despair of the damage and of our
whole modern world and try to conjure up the dead. That he did
all this with a range of human sympathies which his worse judgment
fortunately could not cure and with a passion which not only sur–
passes that of all other cultural necromancers but appropriates each
character in turn- that raises
him
above
all
other literary artists of
the past one hundred years.
But
if
we would find passion, not less intense for being free
from terror, and scope and unity outside the pale of dogma, nor
purchased by a sacrifice of
vision- one
world in which our modern
multiplicity is
formed- then
we should look to Goethe. Here criticism,
as in Mephistopheles, does not respect tradition or propriety, and
yet his analysis is not unmindful of its limits, which are recognized
in humor. No occasion is left from which irreverent reflection might
