West-Eastern Divan. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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СКАЧАТЬ looked Eastward: Southey, Shelley or Byron. From Byron's East, indeed, it was as remote as possible.

      If he became a Romantic poet again it was in his own original and incomparable fashion. He felt profoundly hostile to the neo-Catholic party in the Romantic School, and in the Divan some shrewd thrusts are delivered against them by the old Pagan – the old Pagan who was in spirit more religious than they who had found, like Hafiz, the secret of being " selig " without being "fromm," which fact they never could admit nor understand.

      Goethe turned to the East as to a refuge from the strife of tongues, as well as from the public strife of European swords. There the heavens were boundless, and God – the one God – seemed to preside over the sand- waste. There Islam – submission to God's will– seemed to be the very rule of life.

      Before all else the merchandise which Goethe sought to purchase in the East was wisdom and piety and peace. These the Persian Hafiz had somehow found. Hafiz – gay but also wise – possessed of inward piety, did not pursue with zeal the outward practices of religion. The special quality, as Goethe perceived, of the Persian poet was his spontaneity; he was a true poetic fount: " wave welling after wave", like Goethe's own lyrical impulses in his earlier days, when song seemed to possess him rather than to be held in possession. There was another circumstance in common with them. Hafiz – a contemporary of our own Chaucer – had seen Timur, that scourge of God, sweep over Persia with his hordes and spread his conquests from Delhi to Damascus. Another Timur had arisen in Europe in the nineteenth century whose name was Napoleon.

      Hafiz could not stay the conqueror's career; but at least he could give the world the joy of his Ghazels – so likewise Goethe.

      With a strange and happy return upon him of the creative impulse of youth, urging him to swift and spontaneous jets of song, Goethe, in the early morning of 25th July 1814, started in his carriage from Weimar for the Rhine, Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. It was seventeen years since he had visited the scenes of his childhood and youth. Something of enchantment was added by this revival of the past to the Indian summer of Goethe's sixty-fifth year. (With an arrangement of certain pieces of the West-Eastern Divan, as indicated by Burdach, we can make out a kind of diary of the days of travel.)

      The central motive of the poems is, in truth, love. First there is benignant charity extended to man as man; secondly, there is the charming relation of the old sage, poet and toper of wine to the boy-cupbearer, blooming in beauty, eager, as a boy may be, for wisdom, a relation which is lightly touched with humour; and last, there is the passionate love of man and woman exhibited in that ideal pair, Hatem and Zuleika.

      During his visit to Frankfurt in the autumn of 1814 Goethe had the pleasure of personal intercourse with his friend, the Banker Willemer – a man of generous heart and cultured intelligence. Marianne, his third wife – a woman of thirty – had bright social gifts and graceful cultivation, besides good humour and good sense. She became model for the Zuleika of the West-Eastern Divan, accepted her part as Zuleika with pride and pleasure, and played up to it with spirit, not without a sense of humour. The poems are poems of passionate love, but in the relation of Goethe and the good Marianne – a relation absolutely honest – the passion was born for the imagination merely, from a friendship which was of the happiest kind and which endured without interruption up to Goethe's last days, though after 1815 they never met again.

      A few beautiful poems in the collection are Marianne's, e.g., the song to the East Wind and the lovelier song to the West Wind (which every German singer knows in a beautiful musical setting).

      The secret of Marianne's contribution to the Divan was well kept. She disclosed the facts not long before her tranquil death at the age of seventy-six.

      Loeper, in his very elucidating Foreword to the Divan, notes that we find in it only the expression of the active, living side of the Orient; it shows forth the submission to God, but not the Fatalism of the East. The urge in it is all towards joy, towards life, towards love, out of the depths of a serene and composed spirit.

      From out the narrow room and narrow local surroundings of his home the poet takes his Hegira into the open world, into the freedom of Nature, as well as also into the freedom of human intercourse, in foreign towns, in the market-places, the taverns.

      When the book came to light in 1819, in the epoch of the Byron Welt-Schmerz, it must have seemed as though it were a protest against all enmity towards the world and humanity – inasmuch as it is wholly free from all trace of self-torturings or of immersion in subjectivity. Goethe's world herein knows no such melancholy, for the pain and sorrow and the longing that it may contain have tangible objects and are never otherwise than sound and sane.

      The calm Indian-summer radiance illumines it all.

      E. D. D.

      December 1913.

      I. MOGANNI NAMEH. BOOK OF THE SINGER

       Twenty years I let go past,

       Joying in what life provides;

       A train, each lovely as the last,

       Years' fair as 'neath the Barmecides.

       I. HEJIRA

      NORTH and West and South up-breaking!

      Thrones are shattering, Empires quaking;

      Fly thou to the untroubled East,

      There the patriarchs' air to taste!

      What with love and wine and song

      Chiser's fount will make thee young.

      There, 'mid things pure and just and true,

      The race of man I would pursue

      Back to the well-head primitive,

      Where still from God did they receive

      Heavenly lore in earthly speech,

      Nor beat the brain to pass their reach.

      Where ancestors were held in awe,

      Each alien worship banned by law;

      In nonage-bounds I am gladly caught –

      Broad faith be mine and narrow thought;

      As when the word held sway, and stirred

      Because it was a spoken word.

      Where shepherds haunt would I be seen,

      And rest me in oases green;

      When with the caravan I fare,

      Shawl, coffee, musk, my chapman's ware,

      No pathway would I leave untraced

      To the city from the waste.

      And up and down the rough rock ways

      My СКАЧАТЬ