(Leader, 21 July 1855)
PERHAPS MR LEWES’S Life of Goethe, which we now see advertised, may throw some new light on the structure and purpose of the much-debated novel – Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In the meantime, we are tempted by the appearance of a new translation to give the opinion which our present knowledge enables us to form on one or two aspects of this many-sided work.
Ask nineteen out of twenty moderately-educated persons what they think of Wilhelm Meister, and the answer will probably be – ‘I think it an immoral book; and besides, it is awfully dull: I was not able to read it.’ Whatever truth there may be in the first half of this judgement, the second half is a sufficient guarantee that the book is not likely to do any extensive injury in English society. Parents may let it lie on the drawing-room table without scruple, in the confidence that for youthful minds of the ordinary cast it will have no attractions, and that the exceptional youthful mind which is strongly arrested by it is of too powerful and peculiar a character to be trained according to educational dogmas.
But is Wilhelm Meister an immoral book? We think not: on the contrary, we think that it appears immoral to some minds because its morality has a grander orbit than any which can be measured by the calculations of the pulpit and of ordinary literature. Goethe, it is sometimes said, seems in this book to be almost destitute of moral bias: he shows no hatred of bad actions, no warm sympathy with good ones; he writes like a passionless Mejnour,1 to whom all human things are interesting only as objects of intellectual contemplation. But we question whether the direct exhibition of a moral bias in the writer will make a book really moral in its influence. Try this on the first child that asks you to tell it a story.
As long as you keep to an apparently impartial narrative of facts you will have earnest eyes fixed on you in rapt attention, but no sooner do you begin to betray symptoms of an intention to moralize, or to turn the current of facts towards a personal application, than the interest of your hearer will slacken, his eyes will wander, and the moral dose will be doubly distasteful from the very sweetmeat in which you have attempted to insinuate it. One grand reason of this is, that the child is aware you are talking for it instead of from yourself, so that instead of carrying it along in a stream of sympathy with your own interest in the story, you give it the impression of contriving coldly and talking artificially. Now, the moralizing novelist produces the same effect on his mature readers; an effect often heightened by the perception that the moralizing is rather intended to make his book eligible for family reading than prompted by any profound conviction or enthusiasm. Just as far from being really moral is the so-called moral dénouement, in which rewards and punishments are distributed according to those notions of justice on which the novel-writer would have recommended that the world should be governed if he had been consulted at the creation. The emotion of satisfaction which a reader feels when the villain of the book dies of some hideous disease, or is crushed by a railway train, is no more essentially moral than the satisfaction which used to be felt in whipping culprits at the cart-tail. So we dismiss the charge of immorality against Wilhelm Meister on these two counts – the absence of moral bias in the mode of narration, and the comfortable issues allowed to questionable actions and questionable characters.
But there is another ground for the same accusation which involves deeper considerations. It is said that some of the scenes and incidents are such as the refined moral taste of these days will not admit to be proper subjects for art, that to depict irregular relations in all the charms they really have for human nature, and to associate lovely qualities with vices which society makes a brand of outlawry, implies a toleration which is at once a sign and a source of perverted moral sentiment. Wilhelm’s relation to Mariana, and the charm which the reader is made to feel in the lawless Philina, many incidents that occur during Wilhelm’s life with the players, and the stories of Lothario’s loves in the present, preterite, and future, are shocking to the prevalent English. It is no answer to this objection to say – what is the fact – that Goethe’s pictures are truthful, that the career of almost every young man brings him in contact with far more vitiating irregularities than any presented in the experience of Wilhelm Meister; for no one can maintain that all fact is a fit subject for art. The sphere of the artist has its limit somewhere, and the first question is, Has Goethe overstepped this limit, so that the mere fact of artistic representation is a mistake? The second: If his subjects are within the legitimate limits of art, is his mode of treatment such as to make his pictures pernicious? Surely the sphere of art extends wherever there is beauty either in form, or thought, or feeling. A ray of sunlight falling on the dreariest sandbank will often serve the painter for a fine picture; the tragedian may take for his subject the most hideous passions if they serve as the background for some divine deed of tenderness or heroism, and so the novelist may place before us every aspect of human life where there is some twist of love, or endurance, or helplessness to call forth our best sympathies. Balzac, perhaps the most wonderful writer of fiction the world has ever seen, has in many of his novels overstepped this limit. He drags us by his magic force through scene after scene of unmitigated vice, till the effect of walking among this human carrion is a moral nausea. But no one can say that Goethe has sinned in this way.
Everywhere he brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity – mixed and erring, and self-deluding, but saved from utter corruption by the salt of some noble impulse, some disinterested effort, some beam of good nature, even though grotesque or homely. And his mode of treatment seems to us precisely that which is really moral in its influence. It is without exaggeration; he is in no haste to alarm readers into virtue by melodramatic consequences; he quietly follows the stream of fact and of life; and waits patiently for the moral processes of nature as we all do for her material processes. The large tolerance of Goethe, which is markedly exhibited in Wilhelm Meister, is precisely that to which we point as the element of moral superiority. We all begin life by associating our passions with our moral prepossessions, by mistaking indignation for virtue, and many go through life without awaking from this illusion. These are the ‘insupportables justes, qui du haut de leurs chaises d’or narguent les misères et les souffrances de l’humanité’.2 But a few are taught by their own falls and their own struggles, by their experience of sympathy, and help and goodness in the ‘publicans and sinners’3 of these modern days, that the line between the virtuous and vicious, so far from being a necessary safeguard to morality, is itself an immoral fiction. Those who have been already taught this lesson will at once recognize the true morality of Goethe’s works. Like Wilhelm Meister, they will be able to love the good in a Philina, and to reverence the far-seeing efforts of a Lothario.