Goethe's Literary Essays. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
latter regard as is the first part in its occasional exhibitions of the purest lyrical gift.
Goethe's work was uneven, as was his life. That is what we must expect from the variety which both contained. But through each a great purpose is obviously in process of continuous realization, a purpose which never flags, of presenting the world as a place where man may work out what is directed towards the highest and belongs to what is above Time. It is always the effort that counts, and not any result outside, conceived abstractly and apart from the effort. The quality of the struggle " to conquer life and freedom daily anew " is what constitutes the victory. We are apt to remain with Goethe's poetry and to content ourselves with the enjoyment of its perfection. But that is to miss half the lesson which this man, one of the very greatest sons the earth ever bore, has to teach us. It is his outlook on life as a whole which we must master if we would learn for ourselves what freedom from what is narrow means with him. And this outlook we find at least as much in his criticism as in his lyrics. We have to turn to the Autobiography, to Meister and to the Prose Sayings, if we would find the other half. Beyond these books, too, there remains much else which it would occupy years for the student to discover for himself unaided.
That is why a book such as that to which these lines are written by way of preface may prove a source of help and inspiration to the general reader.
THE THEORY OF ART
ON GERMAN ARCHITECTURE
(1773)
Von Deutscher Baukunst
D. M.
Ervini a Steinbach
As I wandered about at your grave, noble Erwin, in order to pour out my veneration for you at the sacred spot itself, I looked for the stone which bore this inscription: "Anno Domini 1318, XVI. Kal. Febr. obiit Magister Ervinus, Gubernator Fabricae Ecclesiae Argentinensis;" and when I could not find it and none of your countrymen could point it out to me, I became sad of soul, and my heart, younger, warmer, more tender and better than it is now, vowed a memorial to you, of marble or sandstone, as might be in my power, when I came into the peaceful enjoyment of my fortune.
But what need have you for a memorial! You have built the most splendid memorial for yourself; and although the ants who crawl around there do not trouble themselves about your name, yet you have a destiny like that of the builder who heaped up mountains into the clouds.
To few has it been granted to create such mighty ideas in their minds, complete, gigantic, and consistently beautiful down to the last detail, like trees of God: to fewer was it given to find a thousand willing hands to work, to excavate the rocky foundation, to conjure up towering structures upon it, and then when dying to sav to their sons, — I remain with you in the works of mv genius: carry on to its completion in the clouds what I have begun.
What need have you for memorials! and from me! When the rabble utters sacred names, it is either superstition or blasphemy. Those of feeble spirit and taste will always have their head tamed before your mighty work, and genuine souls will come to know you without a guide.
Therefore, honored man, before I venture again my patched-up bark upon the ocean, destined as it is more likely to death than to fame and fortune, see, here in this grove where bloom the names of my loves, I cut yours on a beech-tree which lifts its slender trunk high in the air like your own tower, and I bans' on it too this handkerchief filled with gifts, not unlike that sheet which was let down from the clouds to the holy apostle, full of clean and unclean beasts; for this is full of flowers and buds and leaves, and some dried grass and moss and fungi, which on my walk through these uninteresting regions I coldly gathered as a pastime for my botanical collection, — I dedicate them to death in your honor.
What a trivial style, says the Italian, and passes by. Childishness, lisps the Frenchman, and snaps his finger against his snuff-box a la Grecque. What have you done that you dare to despise?
But you. Italian, you have let the genius of the ancients, arising from its grave, fetter and bind your own.. You crept to beg for artistic knowledge from the splendid relics of the olden time, you patched together palaces from these sacred ruins, and consider yourself the guardian of the secrets of art, because you can give account of the measurements by inch and line of enormous buildings. Had you felt more than you measured, had the spirit of the gigantic structures at which you gazed come to you, you would not have imitated merely because they did it thus and it is beautiful. But you would have created your own designs, and there would have flowed out of them living beauty to instruct you.
Thus upon your shortcomings you have plastered a whitewashing, a mere appearance of truth and beauty. The splendid effect of pillars struck you, you wished to use them in your building and have great rows of columns too; so you encircled St. Peter's with marble passageways, which lead nowhere in particular, so that mother Nature, who despises and hates the inappropriate and the unnecessary, drove your rabble to prostitute that splendor for public " cloaca," with the result that you turn away your eyes and hold your nose before the wonder of the world.
Everything goes the same way: the whim of the artist serves the caprice of the rich man; the writer of travels stands agape, and our beaux esprits, called philosophers, wrest out of formless myths facts and principles of art to be applied to the present day: and their evil genius murders sincere men at the threshold of these mysteries.
More harmful to the genius than examples are rules. Before his time individual men may have worked up individual parts and aspects. He is the first from whose mind come the parts grown together into one ever-living whole. But a school or a rule fetters all the power of his insight and his activity. What is it to us, you modern French philosophical critic, that the first inventor, responding to necessity, stuck four trunks in the ground, bound on them four poles and covered it all with branches and moss? To determine from this what is appropriate for our present needs is like demanding that your new Babylon be ruled by the old despotic patriarchal father-right.
And in addition it is not true that this house of yours is the most primitive form in the world. That with two poles in front crossed at the end, two in back and one lying straight between them for a ridge-pole is, as we can notice every day in the huts in the fields and vineyards, a far more primitive invention, from which you could hardly abstract a principle for your pig-pen.
Thus none of your conclusions are able to rise into the region of truth, but all hang in the lower atmosphere of your system. You wish to teach us what we ought to use, since what we do use, according to your principles cannot be justified.
The column is very dear to you, and in another clime you would be prophet. You say: The column is the first essential ingredient of a building, and the most beautiful. What noble elegance of form, what pure grandeur, when they are placed in a row! Only guard against using them inappropriately; it is their nature to be free and detached. Alas for the unfortunates who try to join the slender shape of them to heavy walls!
Yet it seems to me, dear abbe, that the frequent repetition of this impropriety of building columns into walls, so that the moderns have even stuffed the intercolumnia of ancient temples with masonry, might have aroused in your mind some reflections. If your ears were not deaf to the truth, these stones would have preached a sermon to you.
Columns are in no way an ingredient in our dwellings; they contradict rather the style of all our buildings. Our houses have not their origin in four columns placed in four corners. They are built out of four walls on four sides, which take the place of columns, indeed exclude all columns, and where these are used to patch up, they are an encumbrance and a superfluity. This is true of our palaces and churches, with the exception of a few cases, which I do not need to mention.
Thus your buildings exhibit mere surface, which, the broader it Is extended, — the higher it is raised to the sky, — the more unendurable must become the monotony which oppresses the soul. But Genius came to our aid, and said to Erwin von Steinbach: Diversify the huge wall, which you are to raise heavenward, so that it may soar like a lofty, far-spreading tree of God,