MILLER THE MUSICIAN
Miller (schnell auf- und abgehend). Einmal für allemal! Der Handel wird ernsthaft. Meine Tochter kommt mit dem Baron ins Geschrei. Mein Haus wird verrufen. Der Präsident bekommt Wind, und kurz und gut, ich biete dem Junker aus.
Frau Du hast ihn nicht in dein Haus geschwatzt—hast ihm deine Tochter nicht nachgeworfen.
Miller Hab’ ihn nicht in mein Haus geschwatzt—hab’ ihm’s Mädel nicht nachgeworfen; wer nimmt Notiz davon?—Ich war Herr im Haus. Ich hätt’ meine Tochter mehr koram nehmen sollen. Ich hätt’ dem Major besser auftrumpfen sollen—oder hätt’ gleich alles Seiner Excellenz, dem Herrn Papa stecken sollen. Der junge Baron bringt’s mit einem Wischer hinaus, das muss ich wissen, und alles Wetter kommt über den Geiger.
Frau (schlürft eine Tasse aus). Possen! Geschwätz! Was kann über dich kommen? Wer kann dir was anhaben? Du gehst deiner Profession nach und raffst Scholaren zusammen, wo sie zu kriegen sind.
Miller Aber, sag mir doch, was wird bei dem ganzen Commerz auch herauskommen?—Nehmen kann er das Mädel nicht—Vom Nehmen ist gar die Rede nicht, und zu einer—dass Gott erbarm?—Guten Morgen!—Gelt, wenn so ein Musje von sich da und dort, und dort und hier schon herumbeholfen hat, wenn er, der Henker weiss! was als? gelöst hat, schmeckt’s meinem guten Schlucker freilich, einmal auf süss Wasser zu graben. Gib du Acht! Gib du Acht! und wenn du aus jedem Astloch ein Auge strecktest und vor jedem Blutstropfen Schildwache ständest, er wird sie, dir auf der Nase, beschwatzen, dem Mädel eins hinsetzen, und führt sich ab, und das Mädel ist verschimpfiert auf ihr Lebenlang, bleibt sitzen, oder hat’s Handwerk verschmeckt, treibt’s fort, (die Faust vor die Stirn) Jesus Christus!
Frau Gott behüt’ uns in Gnaden!
Miller Es hat sich zu behüten. Worauf kann so ein Windfuss wohl sonst sein Absehen richten?—Das Mädel ist schön—schlank—führt seinen netten Fuss. Unterm Dach mag’s aussehen, wie’s will. Darüber guckt man bei euch Weibsleuten weg, wenn’s nur der liebe Gott par terre nicht hat fehlen lassen—Stöbert mein Springinsfeld erst noch dieses Capitel aus—he da! geht ihm ein Licht auf, wie meinem Rodney, wenn er die Witterung eines Franzosen kriegt, und nun müssen alle Segel dran und drauf los,—und ich verdenk’s ihm gar nicht. Mensch ist Mensch. Das muss ich wissen.
Frau …
(Miller (walking rapidly to and fro). Once and for all! This business is getting serious. They will start talking about my daughter and the Baron. Our home will lose its reputation. The President is bound to hear about it and—well and good, I am going to forbid the young man to come here any more.
Frau Millerin You didn’t talk him into coming here. You didn’t throw your daughter at his head.
Miller Didn’t talk him into coming here! Didn’t throw the girl at his head! They won’t inquire into that!—I was the master of the house. I should have told the girl. I should have given the Major a piece of my mind—or put the whole thing up to His Excellency Senior. The young Baron will be let off with a warning. I know how that works. And the full storm breaks over the fiddler.
Frau Millerin (sips the last drop from her cup). Nonsense! Idle talk! What can break over you? Who can touch you? You are doing your work and must take students where you can get them.
Miller But tell me, if you can, what is going to come of the whole business?—Marry her … that he can’t, that is out of the question. And a … O my God! Thank you, Madam! Of course, when such a Mr. Sir has helped himself in this place here and that place there, when he has cashed in on the devil knows how much, then it’s only natural that my good man will find it to his taste to go for a change and dig for sweet water. You watch out! You watch out! And if you have an eye peeping out of every knothole and play at being sentry in front of every drop of blood, he will talk her into it right under your nose. He will let her have what it takes, and then he will clear out, and the girl is disgraced for the rest of her life; she is left on the shelf, or she gets to like the taste of it, goes on with it (his fist against his forehead) … Jesus Christ!
Frau Millerin God in his Grace protect us!
Miller And we need it! What else can such a windbag be driving at? The girl is pretty—slender—and dangles a good-looking leg. Let the upstairs be as the upstairs will. That’s easily overlooked in women, as long as the dear Lord didn’t forget anything on the ground floor. Let my young racer find out about this feature of the story—hey there! and he will catch on the way old Rodney does when he smells a Frenchman around, and it’s “Set all sails, and off we go”—and I cannot even blame him for it. A man is a man. I know how that works.
Frau Millerin …)*
This opening of Schiller’s “middle-class tragedy” Luise Millerin—written 1782-1783—takes place in a petty bourgeois setting, a room in the musician’s home. The stage directions emphasize the point by specifying: Frau Millerin, still in her nightgown, sits at a table and drinks her coffee. In keeping with this is the language of the two speakers, especially of the husband, whose good-natured and blustering character cannot, in these excited moments, do enough in the way of flavorful and hearty petty-bourgeois colloquialisms. Despite his profession, he is by no means an “artist” but rather a better-than-average craftsman, and no violence would be done to the style if an actor made him speak in dialect (Swabian). He has a heart and a head, but his views are completely bourgeois. A few lines further on, in the continuation of the first scene, which we have not included in our quotation, he becomes even more excited at the thought that the Baron’s love may have made his daughter so proud that in the end “she turns me down a fine upright son-in-law who would have fitted in with my clientele so nicely.” This is the atmosphere in which the tragedy takes place. It is not only Miller’s family and Secretary Wurm who breathe this petty-bourgeois air. The conflict as such is bourgeois, and even the two persons of rank, the President and his son, have nothing about them to remind us of the heroic exaltation, the aloofness from the everyday, which characterized the French tragedy of the great period. The son is noble, full of sentiment, and idealistic. The father is diabolic and imperious, and in the end sentimental too. Neither is sublime in the sense of French classicism. For that the locale—a small German town, the capital of an absolute ruler—is much too narrow.
Schiller was not the first to take such or similar settings and conflicts tragically. The sentimental middle-class novel and the middle-class tragedy (referred to in our preceding chapter as the comédie larmoyante) had evolved long before in England and France. In Germany, where the Christian-creatural mixture of styles had survived through the seventeenth century and where even later it had not been completely displaced by the influence of French classicism, the evolution of middle-class realism assumed exceptionally vigorous forms. The influence of Shakespeare joined forces with that of Diderot and Rousseau; the narrow and disrupted domestic conditions furnished arresting subjects; works were produced which were at once sentimental, narrowly middle-class, realistic, and revolutionary. The first German work in this genre, Lessing’s youthful play, Miss Sara Sampson (1755), written under English influence and set in England, does not, it is true, contain elements of contemporary politics. But his Minna von Barnhelm, published twelve years later, plunges into the most contemporary events. In book 7 of part 2 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (Jubiläumsausgabe, 23, 80), Goethe calls the play “the first theatrical production drawn from meaningful life and having a specifically contemporary content.” He also points out a particularly timely feature of the play, which a modern reader will hardly notice but which may be assumed to have contributed not a little to the stir which the play made in its time: “the bitter tension with which Prussians and Saxons faced each other during this [the Seven Years’] war,” a tension which “could not be resolved through its [the war’s] termination,” so that Lessing’s work “was to achieve in a picture” the restoration of peace among the people. Now Minna von Barnhelm, to be sure, is a comedy and not a middle-class tragedy; its subject matter is distinguished from that of middle-class tragedies by its design, by its setting, by the independence of the leading female character, and the noble rank of both hero and heroine. Nevertheless, in its sentimental seriousness, in the simple straightforwardness of its conception of honor, and in its language there is something middle class and sometimes almost homespun, so that one tends to think of the noble principals (often also of the German nobles of the time in general) as living in an environment of middle-class domesticity. There is no doubt that Goethe is right when (in accordance with his own direct impression when the work had appeared during his student days at Leipzig) he says in the same passage: “It was this production which successfully opened the prospect into a higher and more meaningful world beyond the literary and bourgeois world to which the art of writing had been confined.” Yet this superior outlook, which sets contemporary history before the reader’s or auditor’s eyes, has by no means caused the abandonment of the simplicity, the almost bourgeois sentiment, of the human attitudes. It is precisely the direct connection of both spheres which gives the work its particular charm. In Emilia Galotti the political tone appears in an entirely different but not less significant way. Here the major theme of the middle-class tragedy—the seduction of an innocent victim—is linked to the political phenomenon of absolutism in a petty state. However, the element of contemporary politics in Emilia Galotti remains weak and not really revolutionary. The setting is not a German but an Italian principality, and although we are specifically told that the Galotti family has neither rank nor title, their position and behavior, especially in the case of Odoardo, the father, do not impress us as middle class but rather as pronouncedly military and noble.
The final connection of sentimental middle-class realism with idealistic politics and concern for human rights was not established until the Sturm und Drang period. Traces of it are to be found in almost all the authors of this latter generation: in Goethe, Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Lenz, Leisewitz, Klinger, and many others, even in Johann Heinrich Voss. Of the works which have remained alive to the present day, Luise Millerin is the most significant for our problem because it undertakes to apprehend the practical contemporary present directly and to base the particular case on the general conditions. The sentimentally bourgeois and robust or idyllic realism, which in other cases is often expressed in historical or fantastic or personal and unpolitical subjects, with the result that a basic and direct apprehension of the reality of the time is not achieved, is here applied, unequivocally and without restraint, to the author’s own experience of the political present. A familiar milieu, a timely and indeed revolutionary political interest, distinguish this tragedy from Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, as well as from the other middle-class dramas of the period insofar as they are known to me. In its day and age it represents an extreme case of the literary rendering of reality in terms of principles and problems.
The very first words take us forcefully into the practical situation. The son of the all-powerful minister of a German prince pays court to a girl of petty-bourgeois background. He often comes to the home of her parents. We are later told that he writes her letters which are full of feeling, that he is concerned about her education, and gives her presents. The mother, a woman of limited intelligence, is delighted with her daughter’s aristocratic lover and takes such pride in him that she fails to recognize the danger inherent in the situation. The father does recognize it. He fears he may become involved with the minister; he fears the worst for his daughter’s reputation, for her earthly happiness and eternal bliss; for “marry her … that he can’t!” He can only seduce her. And then “the girl is disgraced for the rest of her life; she is left on the shelf, or she gets to like the taste of it. …” He knows how this sort of thing must end; he knows it by virtue of his homespun common sense. He does not blame the minister’s son. “A man is a man.” But he loves his daughter and wants to save her. He intends to go and see the minister and tell him the whole story, although to do so goes against his nature; he is not the sort of man who meddles in matters of love. But the danger is too great. However, he never takes the desperate step; things go too fast. In the very next scene he is forced to conclude that it is too late; his daughter is too deeply enmeshed.
The world here revealed to the spectator is desperately narrow, both spatially and ethically. A petty-bourgeois parlor; a duchy so small that (as we are repeatedly told) it is only an hour’s drive to the border; and class dictation of propriety and ethics in its most unnatural and pernicious form. In the court circle everything is permissible—not, however, as a noble freedom but as impertinence, corruption, and hypocrisy. Among the people we find the most unenlightened conception of virtue; a girl who yields to a man who cannot marry her according to the rules of the prevailing order of society would be considered a whore and would be despised. The prevailing order of society is viewed by the duke’s subjects—including Luise herself—as “a general and eternal order.” Servile submission is everywhere a matter of Christian duty; and the powers that be take advantage of the situation, especially the minister, a miserable petty tyrant to whom, it is true, Schiller tries to give certain imposing traits, a certain grandeur of conduct; but there is no inner justification whatever for doing so, since his crimes and intrigues serve nothing but the most narrowly personal goal, namely that of attaining and keeping a position of power simply as such, not as the expression of any will to practical accomplishment or of any feeling of a practical vocation to fill such a position.
The situation of Miller and his family is, then, portrayed tragically, realistically, and in terms of contemporary history. Middle-class realism and tragedy, at least so it seems at first sight, is no longer merely a skimming of the froth from the surface of social life in view of rendering a sentimentally tragic private destiny; instead the whole sociopolitical depth of the age is stirred up. We seem to be dealing with a first attempt to make an individual destiny echo the fullness of contemporary reality. To understand Luise’s tragic fate, the contemporary auditor must visualize the social structure within which he lives. And yet we feel that this tragic realism—compared with either the medieval and figural or the modern and practical type of realism—somehow falls short of genuine and total reality. Luise Millerin is much more a political and even a demagogic play than a truly realistic one.
A political play it certainly is. H. A. Korff (Geist der Goethezeit, 1, 209-211) has written some excellent pages on the point. I shall summarize his argument; Although the subject matter bears no necessary but only an accidental relation to the idea of political freedom, the play is nevertheless, more than any other, a dagger thrust to the heart of absolutism. A stark light is cast upon the criminal procedures of the tyrannical princely governments; subjects have no rights whatever; they depend upon the arbitrary favor or disfavor of the prince, his favorites, and his mistresses; and from the course of events we infer with dismay the inner bondage and dependence of the ruled and recognize in it the psychological explanation for the possibility of tyrannical princely government.
All this is undeniable, and we can only regret that Schiller knew much more clearly against what than for what he was fighting, and that one might easily conclude from the play that all would be well if only a few of the leading characters were decent fellows instead of dissipated scoundrels. As it stands, the play could not but exert a significant political influence. But it is precisely the strong and bold coloration of the revolutionary tendency which impairs the genuine character of the realism. By this I do not mean to say that the reality of life in the small absolutistic principalities was better than Schiller represents it to be. But it was different and it presented itself less melodramatically. At the time when Schiller wrote Luise Millerin, he had not yet attained his full stature and maturity in artistic creation. It is a tempestuous, an inspired and inspiring, a very effective, and yet—when we look a little more closely—a fairly bad play. It is a melodramatic hit written by a man of genius. For a serious work the action is too calculated, too full of intrigue, and it is often improbable. To keep it going, the characters (with the exception of Miller) had to be portrayed in an altogether too naive technique of black and white. Utterances and decisions are sometimes unexpected and insufficiently motivated; the dialogue is often excessively rhetorical and sentimental, and when it tries to be witty, pointed, and refined, it usually turns out to be stilted, hard to understand, and quite often unintentionally funny. A case in point is the great scene between the Lady and Luise (4, 7) in which almost every word is unnatural. Yet the fact that Schiller’s artistic sense was not fully developed when the play was written is not the decisive factor. The inadequacy of the realism lies above all in the very genre of middle-class tragedy as it had developed during the eighteenth century. It was a genre wedded to the personal, the domestic, the touching, and the sentimental, and it could not relinquish them. And this, through the tone and level of style which it implied, was unfavorable to a broadening of the social setting and the inclusion of general political and social problems. And yet it was in just this way that the break-through to things political and generally social was achieved: for the touching and, in essence, wholly personal love-alliance now no longer clashed with the opposition of ill-willed relatives, parents, and guardians or with private moral obstacles, but instead with a public enemy, with the unnatural class structure of society. In earlier chapters we have described how, in French classicism of the seventeenth century, love rose to rank highest among tragic subjects withdrawn from everyday reality, and how subsequently, in the Western European beginnings of the novel of manners and of the comédie larmoyante, love reestablished contact with the ordinary reality of life, but lost some of its dignity in the process. It became clearly erotic and at the same time touching and sentimental. It was in this form that the revolutionaries of the Sturm und Drang seized upon it, and following in Rousseau’s footsteps, again gave it the highest tragic dignity, without abandoning any of its bourgeois, realistic, and sentimental elements. As the most natural and the most immediate of all things, it came to be sublime, in any life and in any setting. Its simplest and purest form appeared to be a condition of natural virtue, and its freedom in the face of mere convention was considered an inalienable natural right.
In this way love, in Schiller’s Luise Millerin, became the point of departure for the revolutionary in politics, for a politically founded realism. However, the basis furnished by a love story was too narrow, and the sentimentally touching style was unsuitable for the production of a genuine reality. The accidental, personal, and touching features of the specific case claim too much of our attention. To make the conflict sufficiently sharp, the minister and Wurm had to be portrayed as unmitigated scoundrels. If they were not, if, furthermore, the minister did not happen just at this time to be confronted with the necessity of making sure of the prince’s mistress by marrying her to a member of his own family, a solution or at least a delay would be possible. As for conditions in general throughout the principality, we are given only isolated and not always clearly understandable details. These are always gruesome, whether they concern the sale of subjects of the principality as soldiers to be sent to America or conditions at court, as in the great discussion between Ferdinand and the Lady (2, 3). They are always presented with hair-raising rhetorical pathos; they always give the impression that the duke and his court have no function whatever, but simply bleed the people by their extravagance and abuse them for their vicious pleasures. We hear and sense practically nothing of inner problems, historical complications, the function of the ruling class, the causes of its moral decline, nor of practical conditions in the principality. This is not realism, it is melodrama; it is very well adapted to release a strong, emotionally political effect; but it is in no way an artistic statement of the reality of the time. It is a caricature even where it depicts real conditions and events, because it detaches them from their roots, deprives them of their inner essence, overilluminates them both as a result of enthusiasm and in the service of propaganda. And the one motif which is probably of cardinal importance for the comprehension of the social structure, a motif which is also stressed by H. A. Korff—the inner lack of freedom of the subjects of the principality, who, in their stuffy, narrow, and misguided attitude of piety toward the burden laid upon them, acknowledge it as an eternal right—this motif does not come out clearly enough. Luise’s failure, which is due to her lack of inner freedom (3, 4), is misinterpreted by Ferdinand, because the involved action demands a fit of jealousy on his part, which is entirely improbable after all that has happened; and so the auditor’s interest is immediately diverted from the motif underlying her failure—as in general Luise is represented as so touchingly innocent, so filled with noble sentiments, that her essential narrowness and pusillanimity are not spontaneously recognized by the auditor; only the analytical critic of her character and Schiller’s art becomes conscious of them. For even in this scene she produces the impression of being a self-sacrificing heroine, and even when she is taken in by Wurm’s absurd scheme, she is still “great and awe-inspiring.”
Nevertheless, the play is highly important in connection with our study—if only because, among the better known works of German classicism and romanticism, it has remained the only one of its kind. In the age of Goethe no further attempts were made toward the tragic treatment of an average contemporary bourgeois milieu on the basis of its actual social situation. The excellent characterization of the musician Miller especially, so much more homogeneous and natural than that of his daughter, remained quite unapproached in its level of style. Schiller himself, and the trend of German literature in general, turned away from realism in the sense of a concrete portrayal of contemporary political and economic conditions, with its forceful mixing of styles. Mixing of styles, which had been enthusiastically taken up under the influence of Shakespeare, appears almost exclusively in subjects from history or the realm of poetic fantasy; when applied to the present, it remains within the narrowest, unpolitical sphere or, as idyl or irony, aims exclusively at the personal. The combination of a forceful realism with a tragic conception of the problems of the age simply does not occur. This is the more striking and, if you will, the more paradoxical since it was precisely the German intellectual development during the second half of the eighteenth century which laid the aesthetic foundation of modern realism. I refer to what is currently known as Historism.
Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development. Now we know that the insights which I have just enumerated and which, taken all together, represent the intellectual trend known as Historism, were fully developed during the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany. To be sure, elsewhere and earlier there were trends which prepared for Historism and affected the form under which it established itself; but the fact remains that it was thus formed and established in Germany during the age of Goethe. We need not elaborate this, because much excellent material has been published on the subject. Friedrich Meinecke’s book on the origins of Historism (Munich and Berlin, 1936) is the finest and most mature treatment I know. In the Germany of those days the revolt against the classicistic and rationalistic taste of France was also carried further than anywhere else. In the process the thing we call separation of styles, the exclusion of realism from high tragedy, was overcome, and this is a basic prerequisite both for a historical and for a contemporary realism of tragic dimensions. And yet at least the second of these, a contemporary realism, did not achieve complete development. Even the literary treatment of historical subjects, which had been begun with so much sensory truth in Goethe’s early works, relapsed through Schiller’s later development into a kind of separation of styles. Schiller’s dualistic genius, which made a sharp separation between ideas and the sensory, increasingly asserted itself, and in his later years his interest went much more to the workings of the moral sense in man and to the freedom which builds upon it than to man’s individuality as embedded in the sensory and the historical.
However, we are here more immediately concerned with realism in the treatment of contemporary subjects, and we shall try to determine the causes which prevented its full development in what appears to be such a favorable aesthetic situation. These causes are to be sought in contemporary conditions themselves and in the relation to them of the leading German writers and, more generally, of the leading classes in Germany. In this connection we shall have to deal especially with Goethe, partly because of his dominant influence and partly too because no other writer was endowed with so much natural talent for grasping the sensory and real.
Contemporary conditions in Germany did not easily lend themselves to broad realistic treatment. The social picture was heterogeneous; the general life was conducted in the confused setting of a host of “historical territories,” units which had come into existence through dynastic and political contingencies. In each of them the oppressive and at times choking atmosphere was counterbalanced by a certain pious submission and the sense of a historical solidity, all of which was more conducive to speculation, introspection, contemplation, and the development of local idiosyncrasies than to coming to grips with the practical and the real in a spirit of determination and with an awareness of greater contexts and more extensive territories. The origins of German Historism clearly show the impress of the conditions under which it was formed. Justus Möser based his ideas on his penetrating study of the historical development of a very restricted territory, that of the cathedral chapter of Osnabrück. Herder, on the other hand, saw the historical in its broadest and most general implications, yet at the same time in its profound particularity; but he represented it so little concretely that he is of no help toward a grasp of reality. The work of these men already announces the basic tendencies which German Historism was long to retain: local particularism and popular traditionalism on the one hand, and all-inclusive speculation on the other. Both these tendencies are far more concerned with the extra-temporal spirit of history and the completed evolution of what is in existence than with the presently visible germs of the concrete future. Such, in all essentials, the position remained, down to Karl Marx; and that it remained such was due in no small measure to the fact that concrete futurity, which, pressing in from abroad, announced itself more and more imperatively from the last decades of the eighteenth century, aroused horror and revulsion in the majority of outstanding Germans. The French Revolution with all its emanations, the upheavals in its wake, the germs of a new social structure which irresistibly developed from it in spite of all opposition, encountered a passive, defensive, and irresponsive Germany. And it was not only the imperiled powers of the past which met the Revolution in a hostile spirit, it was also the youthful German intellectual movement. And here we find Goethe.
Goethe’s attitude toward the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the wars of liberation, and the dawning tendencies of the nineteenth century is known. It resulted from his solid bourgeois background, from his deepest inclinations and instincts, and finally from his education, which led him ever more to respect slowly evolving forms and to abhor formless ferment and everything recalcitrant to orderly disposition. His political attitudes do not interest us here as such, but only indirectly insofar as they determined his manner of treating contemporary subjects in his literary works.
Those among his works which are wholly or in part and directly or indirectly concerned with events of the Revolution all have one thing in common: they avoid entering into the dynamic forces at work. They sometimes present individual symptoms in the most concrete fashion, as well as such reflections and consequences of the Revolution as are visible in the fates of emigrants, of border districts affected, and of other individuals, families, and groups; but as soon as the whole is at issue, Goethe turns to generalities and ethical principles, sometimes in a disgruntled mood, sometimes in a spirit of cheerfully pessimistic worldly and political wisdom. Thus he writes in his Annals for 1793: “It will be set to the credit of an active, productive mind, of a truly patriotic man intent upon furthering literature at home, if he is frightened by the upheaval of everything that exists, while not the slightest premonition of something better, or only of something else, which is to result from it finds voice in him. His reaction will be shared if he finds it vexatious that such influences extend to Germany, that addle-headed and indeed unworthy individuals usurp the leadership.” It was precisely his “vexation” which prevented him from devoting to the social restratification an interest of so lovingly genetic a kind as he did to so many other subjects—an interest of a kind which alone (as he knew better than anyone else) leads to “premonitions finding voice.” In a very fine passage of his book on Historism (2, 579), Meinecke explains what it was that appealed to Goethe in the historical: the slow emergence and growth of historical entities through inner urgencies, the development of what is individual from what is typical, and the intervention of unpredictable powers of destiny in such developments. The situation, Meinecke continues, is that Goethe was certainly always aware of the general and vital current of history but that he drew from it only those phenomena which—because he loved them—he could master directly by the cognitional principles which were most peculiarly his own. Here, Meinecke concludes, Goethe’s selective principle in regard to history is clearly illuminated, in precisely the sense in which it is contained in the regretful epilogue, “Cursory Description of Conditions at Florence,” in the appendix to his translation of Benvenuto Cellini. There Goethe says: “Had Lorenzo [the Magnificent] lived longer, and could a progressive, gradual development of the situation as laid down have taken place, the history of Florence would represent one of the most beautiful of phenomena; but it would seem that in the course of earthly things we shall but seldom experience the fulfillment of beautiful possibilities.”
In these explanations, however, I think Meinecke fails to clarify one thing: it seems to me that those parts of history which Goethe ignored, he could have “mastered directly by the cognitional principles which were most peculiarly his own”—if he had loved those parts of history. His personal dislike prevented him from applying those principles, and that is why the phenomena did not reveal their secret to him. The dynamics of opposing social forces and the economic substratum of Florentine history, which he ignored or touched upon but lightly (I am paraphrasing Meinecke here), the civic unrest which he censured as proof of “the infirmities of a badly administered and badly policed state”—these are things which he dislikes, and therefore he turns his back on them. Or at least, when he felt compelled to take up such matters, he ceased to be an observer of the dialectically tragic, and became a classicistic moralist. At such moments, I believe, he no longer senses “the general and vital current of history.” For him, the “fulfillment of beautiful possibilities” lies entirely in the flowering of aristocratic cultures in which significant individuals can develop unimpeded, and the principle of order which is present to his mind in such connections is comparatively eudemonistic. It is his aversion to everything violent and explosive—which after all is also a result of the general and vital current of history—that explains why when confronted with the explosive and violent he did not probe beyond the symptomatic, the personal, and the moralistic; why he ascribed so great an importance to the Affair of the Necklace, with its elements of anecdote and intrigue, though after all it was only a symptom of certain conditions in the highest circles and did not reveal anything at all essential about the historical forces at work in the revolutionary crisis; why he was long inclined to see in the remarkable figure of Napoleon a “conclusion” which solved “the riddle in so decisive and unexpected a fashion” (Campaign in France, near the end); why finally (to quote, from among many, a particularly emphatic utterance) he wrote in the Wanderjahre in connection with a polemic against “prevailing opinions” in the sciences: “State and Church may be able to show cause why they should declare themselves dominant, for they are dealing with the recalcitrant masses, and as long as order is maintained it does not matter by what means; but in the sciences the most absolute freedom is necessary. …” (Wanderjahre, book 3, chapter 14.) Such attitudes and utterances interest us in the present connection not so much immediately in that they illustrate Goethe’s conservative, aristocratic, and anti-revolutionary views, but rather mediately because they explain how Goethe’s views prevented him from grasping revolutionary occurrences with the genetico-realistic-sensory method peculiar to him on other occasions. He disliked them. He tried harder to get rid of them than to understand them, and ridding himself of them meant assuming toward them a moralistic attitude in part condemnatory and in part serenely philosophical. For him, they represented the vulgar which subdues us all, “the vile … [which] is in power, whatever else you may be told.”
This agrees with the fact that his other works of a serious nature, insofar as they depict contemporary social conditions, present the destinies of their characters on a solid basis of bourgeois class-consciousness without giving us much of an impression of the underlying political and economic movements of the period. Time and place are often alluded to in the most general way, and the reader feels that in spite of the graphic concreteness of many details he is—as far as the political and economic whole is concerned—being conducted through an indeterminate and unidentifiable landscape. By far the most realistic is Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Jacobi—as Goethe tells us in his Annals for 1795—thought that in that work “the realism, pertaining as it does to an inferior social stratum, is not edifying.” Other contemporaries and later readers were charmed by just that realism; but we must not let this blind us to the fact that it is confined to a very narrow domain. Concrete political and politico-economic conditions receive no expression. The contemporary reshuffling of social strata hardly appears. To be sure, it is mentioned in one place. The occasion is as follows: A group of upper-class people is taking precautionary measures against revolutionary disturbances. Since “at this time it is extremely inadvisable to own property in only one place, to invest one’s money in only one locality,” they scatter to all parts of the world, acquire holdings everywhere, and “guarantee each other’s existence in case a state revolution should definitely drive one or another of them from his estates” (book 8, chapter 7). Such precautionary measures can hardly be understood in terms of the novel itself, for the other and especially the earlier parts give no inkling of a politico-social unrest which could justify a plan for security so unusual at the period. The middle-class world lies before the reader’s eyes in an almost timeless calm. As we read of Wilhelm’s father, his grandfather, the father of his friend Werner, their habits, their collections, their affairs, their views, we have the impression of a perfectly peaceful society which changes only very gradually, in the course of successive generations. It is a completely undisturbed and unshaken class structure which appears, for example, in the letter which young Wilhelm writes to his friend Werner to justify his intention of becoming an actor. There we read (book 5, chapter 3):
… I do not know how it is in other countries, but here in Germany only the nobleman has the possibility of a certain generalized personal culture, if this term is permissible. A bourgeois can achieve great merit; at a pinch he can even cultivate his mind; but his personality will be lost, try as he may. …
Since the nobleman in ordinary life knows no barriers, since he can be turned into a king or a kinglike figure, it follows that he can everywhere appear before his equals with a calm mind. He can press ahead in all spheres, whereas nothing is more becoming to the bourgeois than a pure and settled awareness of the limits set for him. He may not ask himself, “What are you?” but only, “What have you? What understanding, what knowledge, what skills, what fortune?” While the nobleman gives everything by presenting his person, the bourgeois gives nothing through his personality and is not supposed to. The former may and should “appear to be”; the latter must only “be” and what he attempts to “appear to be” is ridiculous or insipid. The former is expected to act a part, perform a function, the latter must do his share and produce results; he must develop specific skills to make himself useful, and it is taken for granted beforehand that his nature is not and should not possess harmony, because, in order to make himself useful in one way, he must neglect everything else.
This differentiation is not the fault of the noblemen’s arrogance or of the bourgeois’ conformability, but results from the very structure of society. Whether or not this state of affairs is going to change and if so, what it is that is going to change, is of little interest to me. However that is, as things now stand I must think of myself and of how I can protect and realize what I feel as an irreplaceable need.
I happen to have an irresistible propensity for the very kind of harmonious development of my nature which is denied me by my birth. …
This too is a significant fragment of the great confession. Goethe too was a burgher’s son in that class-conscious social order. He too was irresistibly inclined toward such a harmonious development of his nature. His ideal of personal development too was rooted in the classconscious and aristocratic concept of a lofty and unspecialized universality and of “appearance,” although in his hands it became an all-inclusive dedication to individual details. He too, like Wilhelm Meister, sought his own particular way out of his bourgeois class, without concerning himself with whether and how the constitution of society might one day change. And he found the way that corresponded to his desires much more quickly and surely than Wilhelm Meister, who hoped to attain his goal by becoming an actor; he found it when, in opposition to his father’s instinctive mistrust, he obeyed the summons of the Duke to Weimar and there, within the narrowest frame, created for himself a universal position which was perfectly suited to him. When, seventeen years later, he was on his way back from the campaign in France—where he had most impressively been made aware that “from here and today a new epoch in the history of the world begins”—he received in Trier a letter from his mother: an uncle of his, who had been a magistrate (in consequence of which his closest relatives had not been eligible for the Frankfurt council), had died; and now the question was presented to him whether he would accept the position of a Frankfurt city councillor if he should be elected. There could be no doubt in his mind; he must refuse—he had long since decided otherwise about his life. It is instructive to read the arguments he presented on this occasion and the reasons he gave (Kampagne in Frankreich, Trier, October 29). The passage concludes with the following sentences:
For how was I to prove myself actively effective in the very special circle for which—possibly more than for any other—a man must be trained loyally and step by step? For so many years I had accustomed myself to affairs commensurate with my talents and furthermore of a kind which were hardly likely to be demanded for urban needs and purposes. Indeed, I was justified in adding that, if only burghers are received into the Council, that condition was now so foreign to me that I had to consider myself essentially a non-native. …
The immobility of the social background in the Wahlverwandtschaften is even more pronounced than in Wilhelm Meister. In contrast, the most vivid contemporary movement is to be found in the autobiographical works. The most varied scenes, events, and conditions of public life are presented with sensory truth. But their succession is determined by the course of Goethe’s own life and development, and each of them becomes a subject of representation less for its own sake than by virtue of its importance for Goethe. The real interest—manifest in dynamic and genetic treatment—attaches especially to personal matters and the intellectual movements in which Goethe participated, while public conditions are seen, though often graphically and vividly, as established and quiescent.
We are left with the conclusion that Goethe never represented the reality of contemporary social life dynamically, as the germ of developments in process and in the future. Where he deals with the trends of the nineteenth century, he does so in general reflections, and these are almost always value judgments: they are predominantly mistrustful and disapproving. The technical development of machinery, the progressively conscious participation of the masses in public life, were distasteful to him. He foresaw a shallowing of intellectual life; he saw nothing to make up for such a loss. He also, as we know, remained aloof from the political patriotism which, if conditions had been more favorable at the time, might well have led to a unification of the social situation in Germany. If that had happened then, perhaps too the integration of Germany into the emerging new reality of Europe and the world might have been prepared more calmly, have been accomplished with fewer uncertainties and less violence. He deplored the political condition of Germany, but he did so dispassionately and accepted it as a fact. In a polemic essay (Literarischer Sansculottismus, Jubiläumsausgabe, 36, 139) he explains that classical national works can arise only where the author “finds in the history of his nation great events and their consequences in a felicitous and significant union.” In Germany, he continues, this is not the case. “One need but consider our position [i.e., the position of German writers] as it was and is, and examine the conditions under which German writers pursue their careers, one will then easily find the point of view from which they should be judged. Nowhere in Germany is there a center of social savoir vivre where authors might congregate and, in their several domains, develop in one common manner and in one common direction. Born in scattered places, subjected to most different forms of education, generally left only to themselves and the impressions of very different conditions. …” Yet his regret over this state of affairs is only half-hearted, for in a passage which occurs shortly before, he had said: “But on the other hand the German nation should not be blamed if its geographic situation holds it closely together while its political situation partitions it. We shall not wish for upheavals which might prepare classical works in Germany.” This essay, it is true, was written before 1795, but in later years too he would not have “wished for upheavals” which might have been able to create “a center of social savoir vivre” in Germany.
It is utterly silly to wish that Goethe might have been different from what he was. His instincts, his inclinations, the social position which he created for himself, the limits which he imposed upon his activities, all these things are part of him. None of them can be thought away without disrupting the whole. But as we look back upon all that has happened since, we are yet tempted to imagine what effect might have been exerted upon German literature and German society, if Goethe, with his vigorous sensuality, his mastery of life, his far-reaching and untrammeled vision, had devoted more interest and constructive effort to the emerging modern structure of life.
The fragmentation and limitation in the realm of realism which we have noted remained the same in Goethe’s younger contemporaries and in the following generations. Until toward the end of the nineteenth century the most important works which undertook to treat contemporary social subjects seriously at all remained in the genres of semi-fantasy or of idyl or at least in the narrow realm of the local. They portray the economic, the social, and the political as in a state of quiescence. This applies equally to such different and important writers as Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jeremias Gotthelf, Adalbert Stifter, Hebbel, Storm—the social realism in Fontane still does not go very deep, and the political current in Gottfried Keller is pronouncedly Swiss. Perhaps Kleist, and Büchner later, might have been able to bring about a change in direction, but they had no opportunity to develop freely and they died too young.
* For this new version the translator is indebted to his friend Dr. Alexander Gode v. Äsch, his gratitude to whom for admirable advice and unstinted assistance on this and other occasions he welcomes this opportunity of acknowledging.