GOETHE'S GENIUS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21141, 26 March 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

GOETHE'S GENIUS.

THE TRIUMPH OF FAUST.

BY 51A TANG A.

The centenary of Goethe's death may not have elaborate celebration outside Germany, yet " Faust " at least will be taken from many a shelf, tho dust blown off its edges, and some absorbing hours bo j given to its re-perusal. If so, a spur will be applied to literary appreciation, and thought be prompted afresh about deep things of life as ho knew and wrote them. Its story is readily recalled. Has not this and that company, schooled in grand opera, kept it alive? But the fabric of the \jpera story, poignant as it is and suggesting a sombre mystery, holds little more than a sensuously human interest; to get tho deeper, sadder, yet finally heartening truth you must read in quiet and ponder long and purstiingly. A strange, strong life this penetrative thinker had. He played many parts, and in some won memorable distinction. Lover he often was; from Grefchcn to Christiana they came, the objects of an affection often wayward, but at times and. at, last greatly disciplined, and touched his heart to fire. In the main, they inspired the poet in him, and thus enriched letters and life for a great host. But memory has less grip of them than of him as a. man apart, grappling with fierce yet elusive themes till ho wrested conclusions in whose enwrapping shelter others could rest as well as he. Lover, but lawyer too, and courtier, traveller, prized friend of comrade-souls, Minister of State with energy for agriculture and mining, and throughout maturing years a pathfinding student of the natural sciences. All these activities, however, pale beside the burning z°al for quests that led him on and on in the labyrinth of mansoul, until he found and blazed a pathway to the shining tableland where certitude walks unafraid. A Universal Mind. He remains Germany's supreme man of letters and a. universal mind for every mortal's grateful company. " Our Greatest, has departed," sighed Carlyle when Goethe died. "He was the soul of his century," wrote Emerson. Homage they all gave him in the day of his proved power. He was a prophet with honour in his own country. Weimar, where Schiller, Herder and Wieland also lived and wrote, became a place of literary pilgrimage because of his presence there. Heine, already at twenty-five one of the most influential writers of that time, went thither with the rest, and years afterwards, writing of his talk with Goethe, said he involuntarily looked at his side for the eagle of Zeus and was I nearly addressing him in Greek. Napoleon, having read a French translation of " Werther," expressed a desire to meet him. " Voila un homme!" exclaimed the emperor to others when the meeting took place at Erfurt, and he begged Goethe to come to Paris, promising him a royal welcome. On his last birthday, Wordsworth, Southey, Scott and others joined with Carlyle in sending him what may be regarded as virtually a national gift. The great became greater by contact with him, and lesser folkadded a cubit to their stature as his genius reached and awoke them. Hife " habitual reference to interior truth," as Emerson put the fact, had an enlarging mission everywhere. Every day became spacious under his spell, and the soul got elbow-room. Science was served. Botany profited by his skilful thought about a leaf, anatomy by his suggestive ideas on the skull as a development of vertebrae, and optics took from him a revising theory of primary colours. And literature received a deathless heritage of lyrical beauty, never to be surpassed. Problems of the Inner Life. These things abide in history as a permanent tribute to his many-sided genius. But they mean less than his impact on the urgent problems of the inner life. In this he was still more creative, still more a benefactor of his kind. To bring good face to face with evil in the arena of the soul, to give t'iiem leave and room and imperious - injunction to have out their agelong quarrel in that essential field, to watch with unshaded eyes their point and thrust, and to award the fight unerringly to what is truest and best in man—this was his satisfaction after travail. Others had watched as diligently as he, but none among mortals with such penetrative ardour and thoroughness. How ho used the Faust legend is well remembered, and how he wrought his will upon it through all his life, until at last his final judgment was given in his greatest work, needs little telling. His " Faust " will live, an unveiling of much that is dark to generation on generation of those who pass this way of earth, a clarion inspiration to trust in the invincibility of valiant good. It gets its appeal by reason of a 'close fitting of moral truth to the things of everyday experience. Take his Mephistopheles. In the thought of all times the Devil has had an ample place, yet so occult as to elude grips. But Goethe was no mere player with shadowy words. Ho would bring the fiend out of hiding. So the Devil becomes, in his firm handling, real to a degree—modern, European—corporeal in a way that no myth could embody, the spirit of evil. Horns, cloven hoof, arrowhead tail and fire of brimstone give place to the mien and dress and manners of a gentleman, at home in Vienna or Heidelberg." He does not grow in a book or look out of a picture. He occupies a dire place in the most real of all settings—the human mind—yet is no longer vaporous. Goethe tracks him to his lair, identifies him in the shadow of inhuman coldness and unbelief, and thrusts him into the open, not as a fancy found out but, a more terrifying and tangible enemy than ever myth had been able to make him. At the revelation of this organic horror there is prompted an instinctive recoil, but Goethe s drama carries thought on to the issue of tho struggle to which all wholesome human nature is committed. Faust's bargain takes us to the depth of perversity, only to find the foot of a ladder of emergence and victory. The Man Behind the Drama. There was a man behind, within, this powerful drama: Goethe is more than playwright and artist. There seems to gather in him all the essential elements of our manifold human spirits, and he gives light and voice to dark and incoherent things known more or less to all of us. And to do this is genius beyond a doubt. Nothing in any literature, ancient or modern, is more fraught with truth and power. Goethe may bo by many forgotten, by as many negfected, but he gave to the world —in " Faust " and much else—an imperishable legacy of literature devoted to the ait that matters most of all, tho art of living. Even before the climax of his great drama there is significant promise of triumph over besetting evil. 1' aust, about to end in despair the unhappy life in which he has become spent, is suddenly uplifted to courage by tho chorus of women and angels heard on an hast'-i Day. Tho victorious denouement is still far away, hut if, is seen for a tiansfiguring moment. Ihe truth shines out like a meteor: none who can be so affected need deem himself beyond recovery. "Oh. stay! Thou art so fair!" is to be Faust's word of utmost, irretrievable yielding to evil. It is never so spoken. So long as there is responsiveness lo good in any measure it cannot be. 'I o have set that hope more firmly in his own and the coming time is Goethe's fadeless crown.