Dr Albert Schweitzer, Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, in German, 1949

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COMPLETE AUTHORIZED TEXT OF THE LECTURE “GOETHE, HIS PERSONALITY AND HIS WORK” TO BE PRESENTED BY DR. ALBERT SCHWEITZER OF LANBARENE, FRENCH EQUATORIAL AFRICA AT 9 :00 P.M. JULY 6, 1949 AND 10:00 A.M. JULY 8, 1949 AS THE MAIN LECTURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL

GOETHE CONVOCATION AND MUSIC FESTIVAL BEING HELD IN ASPEN, COLORADO JUNE 27 TO JULY 16, 1949.

 

(The complete transcript of Dr, Schweitzer’s lecture is made available in mimeographed form for the sole purpose of assisting newspaper, magazine, and radio correspondents in reporting Dr. Schweitzer’s speech. The copyright for the full text of this speech and all others at the Goethe Convocation is retained by the· Goethe Bicentennial Foundation and reproduction in whole is forbidden as violation of copyright laws except by written permission of an officer of the Foundation. Direct quotes of portions of the lecture are permissible for news reporting purposes.)

 

“GOETHE, HIS PERSONALITY AND HIS WORK”

Address on the bicentennial anniversary of Goethe’s birth at the festival organized by the Goethe Bicentennial Foundation, at Aspen, Colorado.

 

We are gathered together to commemorate the second centenary of the birth of Goethe, Let us devote this hour to taking stock of his life, of his work, of his thought, of what he means to us.

At the time of his death Goethe was famous but not known. His own people had little comprehension of his work. Abroad he was admired in certain quarters as author of WERTHER and of FAUST, but his work as a whole was not appreciated.

How little devotion for Goethe there was in his native city of Frankfort a few years after his death is shown by the fact that the centenary of his birth was not celebrated there because the masses, animated by the revolutionary sentiments of 1848, did not feel inclined to pay homage to one they misjudged as having been the lackey of a prince.

Even he had to admit to himself that his works were not popular. Only GOETZ VON BERLICHINGEN and WERTHER had been successes. The other found no large audience. To Eckermann, his devoted companion who was with him from 1823, he expressed his conviction that his writings were not popular and never could become so.

In this he was mistaken. They have become so. With the years they have found their way to the hearts of men. More and more, not only in his country but throughout the world, he has become a chosen one among poets.

 

For what reason? Because this great poet is at the same time a great master of the natural sciences, a great thinker, a great man. This many-sidedness commands respect and strikes people as something quite special.

And thus it is that in this year of 1949 the bicentenary of his birth is a date for the whole world, whereas the centenary had not ever roused his native town.

 

Goethe -the -Poet

 

What is it that constitutes the special charm of his creation?

Consider first of all his language. Goethe is a man of vision. He expresses himself in imagery, a tendency which he recognized as — even in his youth. He possesses the secret of a word painter. He knows how to bring to our imagination that which comes to his own.

Another special quality lies in the fact that he does not express himself in solemn language laden with sonorities and the glitter of copious adjectives, but in the simple, sober language of every-day life which he knows how to lift to the rank of poetry.

Characteristic also is the rhythm of his poems. The rhythm of his phrase is usually not fashioned like the meter of verse. It is ever in tension with the latter. In this there exists a kind of affinity between GOETHE and BACH. With the latter the themes do not take on the natural rhythm and accents of the sort of measure mentioned but have rhythms and accents of their own. With Goethe, the contrast between the rhythm appropriate to the phrase and that appropriate to metric verse has the effect of giving his written and spoken verses a sort of prose-like quality which is at one simple yet sole= and noble.

As to the content, the distinction and charm of his works reside in the fact that he writes of what he has experienced and of thoughts which are his own. From his youth he is conscious of their completely personal character. He does not hesitate to declare that he considers them as fragments of confessions.

It is not for him, as it is for SCHILLER and some others, to choose just any subject and to make something out of it by familiarizing himself with it and setting it off to advantage. When he tries to produce in this fashion he is not in his element; rather he is like the swan which has left the water and goes waddling on dry land.

Let us examine his attitude towards the subject of FAUST. Here it is a question of material already existing in fixed narrative.

Goethe wants to appropriate this material. It suits him, because he feels himself akin to Faust and likewise to Mephistopheles, through whom he may present the ideas which are at play within himself.

The subject, however, offers difficulties that are almost insurmountable, because of the fact that it has already been solidly shaped by tradition. Being obliged to stick to such material, Goethe has to

make a place in it for the episode of Faust’s love for the fatal Helene whom Mephistopheles, by his power, has called from the abode of the dead for the same reason he must make Faust appear at the Emperor’s court to give there spectacles with the help of Mephistopheles.

Yet at the same time, in order to find himself back again in the traditional Faust, he had to do violence to the traditional material by introducing into it the completely foreign episode of Gretchen. Faust has to render himself guilty by wronging a trusting young girl. And, guilty though he be, he must not be dammed but saved, which again is doing violence to the established tradition, according to which he goes to hell…  Goethe has to let him become guilty in this way because he himself had become guilty by his actions against Frederick of Sesenheim and was convinced that he had found forgiveness.

And all of these difficulties which only let him finish, shortly before his death, the work that he had begun in his youth, must be risked and surmounted somehow or other in order that he may find himself in Faust… and make of this drama a fragment of confessions.

 

Goethe the Master of Natural Sciences

 

Goethe’s penchant for the natural sciences was innate. As a student at Leipzig and Strasbourg be sought the company of those who devoted themselves to the natural sciences. In Strasbourg he began to study anatomy. His first discovery was made in the field of comparative anatomy.

 

In anatomy at that time it was established that the intermaxillary bone (which is placed between and binds the bones that on either side form the maxilla) are found in animals, including even the monkey, but not in man. It was pleasant to see in this a sign of distinction between the structure of man and that of other vertebrates. Goethe could not get used to the idea that, by so shabby a process, nature should want to give man a place by himself. He sets out to check the matter. His research shows him that the intermaxillary bone has rudimentary existence also in man, being fused with the neighboring bones. In 1786 he makes public his proof.

Little by little the anatomists found themselves obliged to recognize the validity of his proof.

As to botany, he got his first acquaintance with it in a practical way, through administrative work which led him to take up agricultural matters. Without delay he endeavors to acquire scientific knowledge in this domain also. The problem of the varied structure of plants fascinates him. In 1788, while in Sicily, he finds a solution for it in the theory that all organs of a plant have their common origin in the leaf, and that they are merely transformations of it. In 1789 he publishes this discovery. This time it is the botanists who, in the course of years, are brought to bow before the poet meddling with the natural sciences.

In 1790 he resorts to the principle of transformation to explain the formation of the skull. He puts forward the hypothesis that the skull is made up of transformed vertebras. A few years later the anatomists on their side put forward this hypothesis. but it is Goethe who has priority in this discovery.

It was the practical approach, as in botany, which led him into the scientific field of mineralogy and geology. In 1777 he was charged with the study and direction of reopening the Ilmenau mines which had formerly produced copper and silver. Zealously he put himself at this job. In the course of his research over a period of years he arrived at the idea that although volcanic activity has something to do with the formation of the earth’s crust, that formation is above all the result of a slow evolution. As to the matter of erratic blocks, he was the first to express the opinion that they had been moved to their positions by the glaciers which formerly covered Europe, and that the moraines were also

the work of glaciers.

Again by the practical approach he is led into the explanation of the phenomena of colors. He gets started through conversations with painters, whom he sees often while in Rome, on how to produce color—effects in paintings. His study leads him to declare against the theory which Isaac Newton had put forth in 1704 that white light was made up of rays of different colors, and that a narrow beam of white light passing through a prism was broken up into those rays. To this theory Goethe opposes his own that colors are not a quality of different rays, but phenomena due to the meeting of light and darkness, of white and black. The predominance of light produces yellow, and predominance of darkness gives blue. Both together produce green. Red is between blue and yellow, of which it is but a modification.

From 1791 until his death Goethe contended for this theory in a series of publications based on his various observations and experiments. But in vain did he make these sacrifices of time and effort. The studies of FRESNEL, Maxwell and LORENZ on the nature of light, continuing those of Newton, established the correctness of the latter’s theory.

Goethe represents a natural science which wishes to have nothing to do with anything but direct observation. He disapproves of the use of research instruments. Although he cannot ignore the services rendered by microscope and telescope, nevertheless he does not hesitate to as— that man, knowing how to make good use of his senses, is the greatest and most precise observation-instrument imaginable. To use complicated instruments is, in his view, to torture nature to extort confessions, instead of leading her by friendly efforts to yield her secrets.

And Goethe is not only against instruments of precision but also against mathematics. Mathematics has no business coming in except in mechanical problems, in his view. When mathematics chips in to try to explain other phenomena of nature, it can render only a doubtful service.

Actually, as we know today, mathematics has been called upon to play a more and more important part in the natural sciences. This couldn’t be otherwise.

But of the natural sciences still based on direct observation Goethe is one of the great representatives. As a remarkable observer he has helped achieve important progress. in botany and zoology, and he has also well served mineralogy and geology. He was destined, indeed, to become a truth-seeker in the whole domain of the natural sciences,

 

Goethe the Thinker

What is Goethe’s conception of the world and of life? To which philosophy does he belong?

There are two kinds of philosophy: the doctrinarian and the non-doctrinarian.

The doctrinarian does not start from observation of nature, but applies to nature those concepts it has formed about nature, and interprets nature in accordance with them. It is speculative and undertakes to construct systems.

Non-doctrinarian philosophy starts from nature, attaches itself to nature, and strives to interpret nature in accord with ever widening and deepening observations and experiments. This is natural philosophy.

These two currents of thought run side by side throughout the history of the mind.

In antiquity the philosophy of systems was represented by PLATO and ARISTOTLE. In modern times it reached its height at the beginning of the 19th century, with FICHTE, SCHELLING, HEGEL, SCEOPENHAUER, contemporaries of Goethe.

Natural philosophy was born in Ionia, in the Greek world of Asia Minor, It began with THALES, ANAXIMANDER, HERACLITUS, EMPEDOCLES. Their efforts tended to comprehend the origin of life in matter, and its evolution.

Later on, Epicureanism and Stoicism, because of their efforts, also to hold close to nature, have the character of philosophies of nature.

In the Renaissance, when a new flowering of the natural science occurred, there were attempts toward a renewal of natural philosophy. The most remarkable of these was that of Giordano BRUNO. But the Renaissance and the post-Renaissance failed to create a well worked out and convincing natural philosophy. SPINOZA succeeded in reviving the spirit of the natural philosophy of Stoicism even though forced to lend to is the language and the formulae of Descartes.

The young Goethe came under the influence of Giordano Bruno and of Spinoza. Devoting himself to the natural sciences he became, as a thinker, the representative of natural philosophy at a period when the great systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel were the fashion and claimed to be the complete and definitive philosophy. He could scarcely have worse luck.

Brave and modest as he is, he starts studying this doctrinarian philosophy, certain that it has something to teach him. He applies himself dutifully to the reading of Kant; he sits at the feet of Schlick, the prophet of Kant, and lets himself be catechized by him about the celebrated theory of cognition.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel he knows personally. The three have been called by him to the University of Jena. As we learn from his diary he lets Schelling initiate him into his pseudo-philosophy of nature and makes an effort to relish it.

In the end, however, he has to confess that the manner of thinking of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, as well as that of Schopenhauer are alien to him, and that he doesn’t know what to do with it, really because their thinking does not start from the study of nature itself, but applies to it some prefabricated theories.

In the aphorisms of his old age he says: “I have always held myself on guard against philosophy. My point of view has always been that of common sense.”

How an individual by himself and by his own study can arrive at convictions capable of guiding him on the right road throughout his existence: that to Goethe is the question that matters. He reckons that he cannot reach these simple and round convictions except by starting from reality, from the he gains by observing nature and by observing himself.

To be a realist in order to win through to true spirituality this is Goethe’s key-note.

The fundamental idea which matters and should be reached is in nature there is matter and spirit, the two together, The spirit acts upon matter as an organizing and perfecting force. It manifests itself

in the evolution taking place and which we are able to record in nature.

Looking with the eyes of the spirit upon nature, such as it is within ourselves, we find that in us also there is matter and spirit. Searching into the phenomena of the spirit in us, we realize that we

belong to the world of the spirit, and that we must let ourselves be guided by it. The whole philosophy of Goethe consists in the observation of material and spiritual phenomena outside of ourselves and within us and in the conclusions that can be drawn from this.

The spirit is light that struggles with matter which represents darkness. What happens in the world and within ourselves is the result of this encounter.

This philosophy of nature seems quite modest besides the perfect cognition of which the great systems boast. It must resign itself to remain always incomplete because of the fact that we have at our dis—- only an incomplete knowledge of nature. But such as it is, it is true. And truth is, according to Goethe, the highest value of all. “It is truth that is wisdom”, he thinks.

One affirmation which he feels able to risk after his own experience of the simple philosophy of nature, is that his knowledge, incomplete though it be, suffices to lead us through life.

What are at present those elements of the idea of the world and of life to which natural philosophy leads?

First and foremost, Goethe acknowledges that elementary and obscure forces, trying to manifest themselves in their own way, are at

work both in nature and in ourselves. He calls them “demoniac”. These demoniac forces of nature he sets out in Welpurgis Night, and he embodies them in Mephistopheles.

In history they manifest themselves through men. These men, according to the description he gives of them in “Poetry and Truth” do not always excel by their spirit nor by their talents; seldom do they

commend themselves by their kindness. Yet a prodigious force emanates from them. The crowd is attracted by them.

The demoniac nevertheless does not necessarily work evil. According to circumstances, he may also work toward good.

This fundamental natural element that man bears within himself by birth – it is his fate. He cannot release himself from it. ”That which belongs to us, we cannot separate ourselves from it”, says Goethe in “Maxims and Reflections”.

Goethe wrestled with the problem of destiny and liberty, as is the common fate of us all.

In his bitterest work, “Elective Affinities”, he stages two women and two men whose lives are fatally determined by a love against which they should, but cannot, defend themselves.

In general, it is true, Goethe keeps the conviction that in a goodly number of cases we are capable of mastering our destiny by the attitude we adopt towards events. Men must do his utmost to get the

upper hand over the demoniac. We are, as he expresses it in his conversation with Eckermann on March 18^th, 1831, in the situation of those who play a game where draughts maneuver on a checker-board according to the cast of the dice. The result depends largely on the cast of dice, yet the way the player handles the draughts means something too in the outcome of the game.

The painful events in our life have also a meaning for our internal evolution.

The two basic ideals of an attitude profoundly human are purity and kindness.

The ideal of purity takes form with Goethe in his struggle with himself in the first Neimarian period. Purity, according to him, means that man frees himself from hypocrisy, from cunning, from falsehood, from anger, and transforms himself into 3 simple and honest being.

The ideal of purity is proclaimed in “Iphigenia” and in “Tasso”.

Man’s supreme manifestation of the spirit is kindness. The spirit does not let man simply assert and impose himself over other beings, but obliges him to have consideration for them. The spirit in this fashion brings order into the chaos of relations. The man who really finds himself cannot do otherwise than let himself be guided by love. This latter is the divine element in him. Thus the hymn in which Goethe exalts the true human attitude is entitled: “The Divine”. It begins thus:

 

“May man be generous, helpful and good!

For that alone distinguishes him from all the beings that are known to us.”

 

A curious fact to be noted: Goethe does not pay attention to the first manifestations of moral sentiments in beings inferior to man, sentiments which reveal themselves in the devotion with which they take care of their offspring. It is only their anatomic evolution, not their spiritual, to which he applies himself.

One must -remark that Goethe’s ethics do not permit him an enthusiasm such, for example, as that of his English contemporary, Jeremiah Bentham, his senior by a few weeks, who died in the same year as Goethe. Bentham invites men to make efforts without ceasing to realize the greatest possible happiness for the greatest number. Goethe does not admit this excessively utilitarian principle as one fundamental for ethics anymore, indeed, than he admits the categorical imperative of Kant.

He does not want the individual to be obliged to put his life in this fashion into harmony with the supreme good of society, as Bentham demands- whom, for this reason, he treats as an old fool. Goethe’s principle is: “Do good for the pure love of good.” For each one of us, he believes, destiny reserves an ethical activity conformable to one’s own character and to the circumstances of one’s life, One must bring out such disposition for good as is within him. By this individual practice of good on the part of a great number, the well-being of society is realized more naturally and more completely than by a procedure that would make men slaves of a single end identical utilitarian principle.

Every one of us has his particular task in this world to fulfill. The course of our life and our reflection will let us know the proper way of serving which has been destined for us. Through his experience and his reflections Wilhelm Meister, in Goethe’s great Novel, is led to place himself as a physician at the disposal of a group of emigrants.

The notion of the world and of life includes, for Goethe, also the idea of forgiveness. He has the certainty that no human being, in whatever way he may have become guilty, need to lose hope.

The grace of redemption by practicing service is given to man. The message of pardon that he wants to proclaim in “Iphigenia” is, according to one of his remarks written in 1827: “Every human shortcoming may be expiated by pure human virtues”.

If love is the very essence of spirit, God can only be conceived as the fullness of love. Goethe confesses: “I consider faith in the love of God as the only foundation of my salvation.”

This idea of the world and of life men must practice by action. Any slight inclination toward a fundamentally contemplative attitude is considered by Goethe as an aberration. This view leads him in Faust to do violence to the text of the first verse of Et. John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word” (in Greek, the Logos), by translating it, ”In the beginning was action,”

Unceasingly Goethe exalts action. “The domain assigned to human reason,” he says, “is that of work and action. Being active, reason rarely risks going astray,” Or again, “The salvation of man is to devote himself to daily work, while combining with it meditation.”

But what is duty? Goethe replies, What the day demands,” It is for us to open our eyes, to realize our immediate duties and to assume them. In doing this we become men capable of disclosing what in the way of tasks is still to be achieved.

Let Goethe speak:

“You will ask him what each day demands,

What each day demands he will tell you,

Take pleasure in your own work,

Value that done by others.

Above all abstain from hatred,

And the rest to God entrust,”

And again:

“To yourself be faithful,

To others too be faithful.”

 

Let us now take up the question of Goethe’s religion.

His religion is identical with his conception of the world and of life, which of itself and in itself is ethical and religious. Jesus in announcing and incarnating God’s love only reveals to us. Goethe feel that at which we must arrive by our own reflection.

The true religion for Goethe is not that of dogmas about Jesus and about his work, but the religion of the love which he proclaimed. In that is the knowledge acquired by the religious rationalism of the

18th century. Goethe makes it his own.

When still a young student at Leipzig he was content with – religion announced by Jesus. A little story will show this. One morning the young student happened to be sitting in the living room of the

engraver Stock’s family, where he was beginning to get some practice in this art. The tutor of the two young girls, Dorothee and Marie, while giving them their lesson in religion made them read aloud from the book of Esther. Suddenly the young student flew into a passion and vehemently reproached the tutor for having this story read to the girls. He took the Bible himself, opened it at the Sermon on the Mount, and said to Dorothee, “Read us this, it is the Sermon on the Mount; we shall all listen to you.” The poor child being full of emotion and incapable of doing the reading, Goethe did it in her stead.

That Goethe at times, especially in the years following his first stay in Italy, took pleasure in calling himself a pagan does not mean that he considered himself as irreligious, but only that he was satisfied with a religion which was not dogmatic Christianity.

He asked of those who teach religion that they recognize it as their duty to lead their flocks more and more from religion of dogma to pure religion.

The principal complaint which he makes about dogmatic Christianity is that God is imagined as being outside of nature instead of being thought of as being in, and manifesting himself in, nature. Goethe

does not want to give up the identity of God and Nature along the lines of Spinoza’s “Deus sive, Natura” (God or Nature), because only this concept of an imminent God permits man to be at once pious and truthful.

The objection that this pantheism seems to exclude the notion of a God who is personality does not touch Goethe. He believes that the spirit is personality in a manner that we cannot imagine.

As to immortality, Goethe confesses: “I have the firm conviction that the spirit is a being of an indestructible nature.”

Several times he declares that on the ultimate questions which man faces he can only talk with God alone.

He sums up his thoughts about the limits of our knowledge in these words: “The greatest happiness of the thinking man is to have explored what is explorable, and to revere with serenity the unexplorable.”

He stands up energetically against the claim of religion to be allowed to underestimate the knowledge acquired through research and reflection. “It would not be worthwhile,” he says, “to attain 70 years if all the wisdom of the world were but foolishness before God.”

His concept of religion may be found set down in these words.

“In a whisper a God speaks in our heart; very low and very close. He lets us know what is to be chosen and what is to be shunned.” Above all virtues stands just one thing: ceaseless effort towards the heights of the struggle with ourselves, the insatiable desire to progress in purity, wisdom, goodness, love.”

 

Such are the elements of Goethe’s philosophy, During his lifetime it did not attract attention. It was a small tree growing in the shadow of the great systems of Fichte, Schulling and Hegel. But towards the middle of the 19th century these great systems crumbled because they could not hold their own before those natural sciences that were flowering more and more. The little tree of Goethe’s philosophy remains standing. Freed from the shadow that had retarded it, it now thrives and grows into a real tree. More and more Goethe’s philosophy gains in importance, although it had not been expounded by him in its entirety, but rather in fragments.

The fact is that his philosophy has nothing to fear from the natural sciences. for it starts out from them and in harmony with them.

It therefore represents the type of philosophy that has a future. It reckons with the feet that, since our knowledge of the universe remains incomplete, this will also necessarily be the case with philosophy. It was for this reason that Goethe had been bent on making the experiment as to whether man, setting out from reality and continuously keeping reality in mind, remaining truthful without flinching, can by his study and reflection reach convictions which will permit him to work out his existence in true spirituality.

Goethe feels he has succeeded. The result of his studies and of his meditations on the world and man he gives to us as something that he himself has lived through. These sentences of profound and practical wisdom of life constitute an unique spiritual treasure that has been bequeathed by one man to his fellow-men.

A final question. Do the thoughts that Goethe has communicated to us have also the benefit of the weight of his personality?

What exactly is this personality?

Those who undertake to criticize Goethe will find things to criticize. He made mistakes. His way of living was strange and disconcerting for us in many ways.

We don’t understand, for instance, why, living with Christiane Vulpius as husband and wife, he let 18 years pass before making her legally his wife and giving her before the world the position she in reality already held. How could he for so long endure a situation that involved, for him and especially for her, so many difficulties and so many humiliations?

How, in general, can we understand the spirit of indecision that he showed on more than one occasion?

And that lack of naturalness of which he also gave proof. At the death of Karl August, his prince and his friend, instead of paving the last honors to him as he should have done if only in his capacity as Prime Minister, he asks the Prince’ s son and successor to be excused from taking part in the funeral ceremonies and to be permitted to go to the country the better to master the sorrow, into which he has been thrown by this bereavement. He does not even participate in the drafting of the necrology.

And, why, having the kindest of feelings in his heart, does he sometimes like to affect coldness? Why again does he occasionally let himself go in sarcasms which would seem to be spoken by the spirit of Mephistopheles? Let us stop here in the enumeration of his peculiarities.

What is Goethe’s own opinion of himself? He believed that he possessed the total of all contradictions which human nature can gather together within itself. He was pleased to find that he felt disposed to joy as well as to melancholy, that he was both flighty and ponderous, that frigidity was combined with a warm heart. In his old age he opines that all in all it is certainly better to live in Goethe than with Goethe…

He was therefore neither a harmonious personality nor an ideal personality. And yet his contemporaries who knew him well speak of him with high praise. Knebel, who lived with Goethe at Woimar, writes about him to the theologian LAVATER in Zurich: “I very well know that he is not amiable every day; he has his unpleasant side, of which I have had experience. But, taken as a whole he is remarkably good, He is surprising, even in kindness.”

Schiller, on his side, in a letter to the Countess Schimmelmann in 1800, judges him thus: “It is not the remarkable aptitudes of his mind that bind me to him. If in my eyes he did not possess as a man the greatest value of all those whom I have personally come to know would content !!myself with admiring his genius from a distance.”

As to us who, thanks to the great mass of information which we possess about him, can see his existence spread out before us in a way not equaled in the case of any other of the remarkable men of the past we cannot do otherwise than to consider him as a great, deep, imposing and, despite ell of his peculiarities, sympathetic personality.

What first of all strikes us in him is that profound seriousness which marks him from his youth on.

In this deep gravity he is occupied with himself from adolescence to old age. He has it at heart to overcome that quick-tempered nature which always wants to get the upper hand of him. Already in the year at Leipzig, his passionate character and his power to keep himself under control manifested themselves together. This feature of his character is also shown in the detailed and interesting psychological portrait that KESTNER draws of him at Wetzlar, in 1772.

At Weimar he is set on mastering himself completely. His soul-searching, which at that period he confided to his diary, illustrates this, as does also his wish at that time: “May the idea of purity become always more clear in me.”

Through this continuous control of himself, however, his behavior at length takes on something stiff and artificial which is susceptible of interpretation as pride. His large and impressive eyes and the severe features of his face – the whole a heritage on his mother’s side from his grandmother Textor – contribute to making him appear as the Olympian which at bottom he is not.

Yet immediately he realizes that he is not dealing with visitors coming simply for curiosity’s sake, but with people who have some right to his interest, he abandons his Olympian attitude and shows himself affable. One of those who had this experience, the Austrian poet GRILLPARZER. gives the impression made upon him by the aged Goethe in these words, which are both charming and true: “He looked half like a king and half like a father.”

Another fundamental feature of Goethe’s character is his truthfulness. He writes to LAVATER on February 22nd, 1776, that he wants to become true like nature. In everything, including his daily business with men, he tried to remain always absolutely true and sincere, even at the price of being accused of a lack of amiability.

Intrigue also was completely foreign to him. It is that which constitutes the innate nobility of his being.

Enamored of truth as he is, this man is at the sane time a humble man, not only before God but also before men. Of this humility which he feels in himself he writes to HERDER on January 31st, 1787,

from Rome. As soon as he is in the presence of any human value whatever he silences the consciousness of his own. He then has no other desire but to appreciate and to learn. Such is his attitude towards the artist whose company he keeps in Rome, such is his attitude towards Schiller.

To the letter he submits himself spiritually to an almost incredible degree. Find what humility he can show in his intercourse with men in general.

The testimonies about his kindness abound. From his physician Vogel we know that Goethe put at his disposal whatever was needed to help those whom in his practice the doctor thought it necessary to aid. In many cases Goethe sacrificially gave his time and effort to render service to those whom. circumstances revealed to him as needing his brotherly love. As an administrator he had at heart the improvement of living conditions of those populations which were living under poor physical conditions.

The need to serve dominates him. He avoids no duty that devolve or seems to devolve upon him; he has no tendency to avoid any responsibility. Always he commits himself to the very limits of his possibilities.

And all these qualities are developed by a continuous effort to perfect himself such as is rarely seen in other personalities which are the object of public attention.

Such is Goethe, the poet, the scientist, the philosopher and the man, towards whom our thoughts are particularly directed at this time. Among us here and among those who are afar off there are those

who think of him with gratitude for what he has given then in his so simple and so deep ethical and religious wisdom,

With joy I acknowledge myself to be one of their number.

 

Albert Schweitzer

6-7-49 (July 6, 1949)