Maxims and Reflections. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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to that section of the book, they would form a keen and clear review of Goethe's scientific achievements, and an emphatic testimony to his wonderful anticipations of later theories.
Between a maxim, an aphorism, and an apophthegm, and in a more obvious degree, between these and an adage and a proverb, the etymologist and the lexicographer may easily find a distinction. But they are, one and all, fragments of the wisdom of life, treasured up in short, pithy sentences that state or define some general truth of experience; and perhaps with an adage and a maxim, enjoin its practice as a matter of conduct. In the literature of every age there have been writers who, instead of following a less severe method, thus briefly record the lessons taught them by a wide view of the doings of men; from the dim, far-off beginnings of Ptah Hotep the Egyptian to the authors of the Proverbs of Solomon and the Book of Wisdom, from Theognis and Plutarch downwards to our own time. They give us the shrewdest of their thoughts, detached from the facts which gave them birth. But the professed writers of maxims are not the only or always the best authors of them. There is no great writer who is not rich in wise sentences; where we have the advantage of seeing for ourselves the train of thought that induced and the occasion that called them forth. Terse and pregnant sayings are scattered innumerably through the pages of the finest poets, the great orators, philosophers, and historians, wherever they touch the highest level of truth and insight; be it in the lofty interpretation of life, the defence of action or policy, the analysis of character and conduct, or the record of progress; and then it is that large ideas and wide observations take on imperceptibly the nature of maxim or aphorism, illumining, like points of light, whole fields of thought and experience. And the test of their value is that they lose little or nothing by being deprived of their particular context and presented as truths of general import. A collection of proverbs, shrewd sayings, and pointed expressions, taken from the whole range of Greek and Latin literature, was made by the industry of Erasmus in his great folio of Adagia; and perhaps some future student, as diligent as he, may gather up the aphoristic wisdom in the writings of modern times. Goethe himself has in all his great works a wealth of aphorism unsurpassed by any other writer whatever, even though it be Montaigne or Bacon or Shakespeare; and sayings of his not to be found in this collection are some of the best that he uttered.
The besetting sin of the maxim-writer is to exaggerate one side of a matter by neglecting another; to secure point and emphasis of style, by limiting the range of thought; and hence it is that most maxims present but a portion of truth and cannot be received unqualified. They must often be brought back to the test of life itself, and confronted and compared with other sides of the experience they profess to embody. And when a maxim stands this trial and proves its worth, it is not every one to whom it is of value. To some it may be a positive evil. It makes the strongest appeal to those who never see more than one aspect of anything, hardening their hearts and blunting their minds; and even to those who could make a good use of it, there are times when it may mislead and be dangerous. Maxims in their application seem to need something of the physician's art: they must be handled with care, and applied with discretion. Like powerful drugs they may act with beneficent effect on a hardy constitution; they may brace it to effort, or calm the fever of a misguided activity; but great is the mischief they work where the mind is weak or disorganised. As a medicine may save a man at one time that would kill him at another, so the wise counsel of to-day may easily become the poisonous suggestion of to-morrow.
With writers who depend for effect on mere qualities of style and ignore the weightier matters of depth and truth of observation, Goethe has nothing in common; nor with those who vainly imagine that insight is a kind of art, with a method that may be learned and applied. By constant practice a man of literary talent may, it is true, attain a fair mastery of language terse and attractive, and then set himself, if he will, to the deliberate creation of aphoristic wisdom or a philosophy of proverbs; mistaking the dexterous handling of a commonplace for the true process of discovery. The popular literature of the last generation supplies a terrible instance of the length to which the manufacture of maxims can thus be carried, for a time with immense success; and we have seen how a few years suffice to carry them and their author to obscurity. How different is the true process! The maxim that increases knowledge and enriches literature is of slow and rare appearance; it springs from a fine faculty of observation which is in no one's arbitrament, and only less rare than the gift of utterance which adds charm to a thought that itself strikes home with the power of impregnable truth. No amount or intensity of effort will alone produce it; but to the mind of genius it comes like a sudden revelation, flashing its light on a long course of patient attention. "What we call Discovery," says Goethe, "is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth. It is a synthesis of world and mind, giving the most blessed assurance of the eternal harmony of things."
It is, then, depth and truth and sanity of observation which chiefly mark these sayings of Goethe. It is no concern of his to dazzle the mind by the brilliance of his wit; nor does he labour to say things because they are striking, but only because they are true. He is always in contact with realities, always aiming at truth; and he takes a kindly and a generous view of the world. He has none of the despair that depresses, none of the malice that destroys. There are writers who profess to honour a lofty ideal by a cynical disparagement of everything that falls short of it; who unveil the selfish recesses of the heart as a mistaken stimulus to its virtues; who pay their tribute to great work by belittling human endeavour. Goethe shows us a more excellent way. Touched with a profound feeling of the worth of life, the wisdom of order, the nobility of effort, he gives us an ideal to pursue and shows us the means of pursuing it. Out of the fulness of a large experience, unique in the history of literature, he unfolds the scheme of a practicable perfection, and enforces the lessons he has learned from the steady, passionless, and undaunted observation of human affairs.
To Goethe these sayings were merely reflections or opinions; it is his literary executors and his editors who called them by more ambitious titles, so as to challenge a comparison with certain other famous books of wise thought. They are the reflections of a long life rich in all the intellectual treasures of the world, in its versatility amazing, in its insight well-nigh fathomless; a life that, in his own words, approached the infinite by following the finite on every side. Such a man need only speak to utter something important; and we on our part need only remember how wide was the range of his knowledge, how full and complete his existence, to set the utmost value on his reflections at the end of it. But that he knew nothing of the pinch of poverty and was spared the horrors of disease, that he suffered no great misfortune, and basked in the bright side of the world, free from the ills that come to most men, there was no page of the book of life that was not thrown open to him. The things of the mind, the things of art, the things of nature – in their theory and in their practice he had worked at them all; regarding them as so many varied manifestations of an eternal Idea in itself inscrutable and here unattainable. There was no kind of literature with which he was unfamiliar, whether it was ancient or modern, of the East or of the West; and the great spiritual influences of the world, Hebraism, Hellenism, Christianity, Mediævalism, – at one or another time in his life he was in touch with them all, and found his account in them all. In matters of learning he was occupied with nothing but what was actual and concrete; it was only to abstract studies, to logic, metaphysics, mathematics, that he was indifferent; in his own phrase, he never thought about thinking. There was hardly any branch of the natural science of his day that he did not cultivate, that he did not himself practise; geology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, anatomy, meteorology, optics; and he made some remarkable discoveries and the strangest prophecies. To Art he gave a life-long devotion. While still a youth, he wrote an important essay on Gothic architecture; he engraved, drew, painted, and for a time took up sculpture. In all the higher forms of Art, with the single exception of music, he had so much practical interest that he often doubted whether in following Literature he had not mistaken, or at least unduly narrowed, the sphere of his activity. He was little abroad, but no one ever profited more by his travels than Goethe. Twice he went to Italy, and what a change of mind was produced by that change of sky! Rome was to him a new birth, a new conception of life. And besides Literature, Science, and Art, he busied himself with Administration, with the duties of the Court, with the practical details of the Theatre; but out of them all he learned something himself and taught something to others. He lived the fullest life granted to man. He had a youth of the wildest enthusiasm and romance; a prime of a classic austerity, of a calm earnestness;