Goethe on Jeremy Bentham

From Johann Peter Eckerman: Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life (New York: Penguin Classics, 2022 [1848, 1836])

Wednesday 3 February 1830*

We talked about Le Globe and Le Temps, and this led us on to the subject of French literature and writers.

‘Guizot,’ said Goethe at one point, ‘is a man after my own heart – sound and rock-solid. He has a great depth of knowledge, combined with an enlightened liberalism that is completely non-partisan and knows its own mind. I look forward to seeing what role he will play in the Chambers, to which he has just been elected.’

‘People who appear to have just a passing acquaintance with him,’ I replied, ‘have told me he is rather pedantic.’

‘It all depends,’ countered Goethe, ‘what sort of pedantry these people are talking about. All eminent men who live a life of regular routine according to fixed principles, who have reflected deeply and treat life as a serious business, can very easily be taken for pedants by superficial observers. Unlike his mercurial compatriots, Guizot is a far-sighted, calm and dependable man, who cannot be too highly regarded on that account and who is just the kind of man the French need.

‘Villemain,’ Goethe went on, ‘is perhaps the more brilliant speaker; he has a knack for developing a subject clearly, starting from the basics; he is never at a loss for telling turns of phrase that hold the attention of his listeners and rouse them to loud applause; but he is far more superficial than Guizot, and far less practical.

‘As for Cousin, he does not have a great deal to say to us Germans, in that the philosophy which he is introducing to his countrymen for the first time is something we have been familiar with for many years. But for the French he is a very important figure, who will point them in an entirely new direction.

‘Cuvier, the great naturalist, is to be admired for his powers of exposition and his style. Nobody is better at explaining something than him. But he has almost no philosophy. He will turn out students who are very well informed, but there will be few deep thinkers among them.’

It was especially interesting to me to hear all this, as it coincided very closely with Dumont’s views on the men in question. I promised Goethe that I would copy out the relevant passages from Dumont’s manuscripts, so that he could compare them at some point with his own views.

The mention of Dumont brought us on to the subject of his relationship with Bentham, prompting the following observation from Goethe:

‘It’s a real mystery to me,’ he said, ‘how a rational, reasonable and practical man like Dumont could have become the disciple and loyal devotee of a fool like Bentham.’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ I replied, ‘Bentham was really two persons in one. I would distinguish between Bentham the genius, who devised the principles that Dumont rescued from oblivion by developing and elaborating them; and Bentham the passionate enthusiast, who, in his obsession with utility, overstepped the limits of his own theory and became a radical in both politics and religion.’

‘But that’s something else I find mystifying,’ replied Goethe, ‘the idea that an old man can end the career of a long lifetime by becoming a radical in his last days.’

I tried to resolve this contradiction by arguing that Bentham, convinced of the merits of his theory and his principles of legislation, and given the impossibility of introducing them without a complete change in England’s system of government, was more apt to let himself be carried away by his passionate zeal because he had little contact with the outside world and was not in a position to judge the danger of a violent revolution.

‘Dumont, on the other hand,’ I went on, ‘who is less passionate and more clear-sighted, never approved of Bentham’s extremism, and was never going to make the same mistake himself. He also had the advantage of applying Bentham’s principles in a country that could almost be regarded as new at that time, following recent political events – namely, Geneva; and there the experiment was very successful and showed the value of those principles.’

‘Dumont,’ replied Goethe, ‘is just a moderate liberal, as all sensible people are and should be, and as I am myself. I have tried to act in that spirit throughout the course of a long life.

‘The true liberal,’ he went on, ‘seeks to do as much good as he can with the means at his disposal; but he knows better than to try and eradicate the often unavoidable ills by immediate recourse to fire and sword. He endeavours to eliminate failings in public life gradually, through careful, considered action, without taking forcible measures that often do more harm than good. This is an imperfect world, and he contents himself with the good until time and circumstances enable him to achieve something better.’

Wednesday 17 March 1830*

Spent a couple of hours at Goethe’s this evening. I brought with me the copy of Gemma von Art which the Grand Duchess had asked me to return, and told him all the things I liked about the play. ‘I’m always glad,’ he replied, ‘when something new comes out that shows genuine originality and talent.’ Then, picking up the book in both hands and looking at it a little askance, he added: ‘But it always bothers me when I see dramatists writing plays that are far too long to be performed as written. This is a mistake, and it takes away half the pleasure I would otherwise feel. See what a great tome this Gemma von Art is!’

‘Schiller,’ I ventured, ‘didn’t do much better, and yet he is a very great dramatist.’

‘Yes, he was sometimes guilty of that,’ replied Goethe. ‘His early plays especially, written in the full bloom of youth, seem to go on for ever. He had too much on his mind, and too much that he wanted to say: it was more than he could cope with. Later on, when he became aware of this failing, he took endless trouble, and tried to overcome it by study and hard work; but he never really succeeded. To truly master one’s subject matter, and keep it at arm’s length, and focus only on what is absolutely necessary, requires the strength of a poetic giant, and is harder than people think.’

Councillor Riemer was announced and entered the room. I made as if to leave, knowing that this was the evening when Goethe generally did some work with Riemer. But Goethe asked me to stay, which I was very glad to do; and as a result I sat in on a conversation full of high spirits, irony and Mephistophelian caprice on Goethe’s part.

‘I hear Sömmerring has died,’ Goethe began, ‘and scarcely a paltry seventy-five years old, too. How feckless people are, that they don’t have the heart to hold out longer than that! My friend Bentham, that ultra-radical fool, has the right idea; he’s still going strong, and yet he’s a few weeks older than I am.’

‘One could add,’ I remarked, ‘that he is like you in another respect, too, because he is still working with all the energy of youth.’

‘That’s as may be,’ replied Goethe, ‘but we are at opposite ends of the chain. He wants to tear things down, and I want to preserve them and build them up. To be so radical at his time of life is the height of folly.’

‘I think one must distinguish,’ I countered, ‘between two kinds of radicalism. The one kind wants to tear everything down and clear the ground in order to rebuild in the future, whereas the other confines itself to pointing out the weaknesses and mistakes of a government in the hope of bringing about reform without recourse to violence. Had you been born in England, you would certainly have belonged to the second category.’

‘What do you take me for?’ rejoined Goethe, who now adopted the mien and tone of his Mephistopheles. ‘So you’re saying it would have been my job to seek out abuses, and then name and shame the guilty, when in fact, as an Englishman, I would have been living off abuses myself? Had I been born in England, I would have been a wealthy duke, or rather a bishop, with an income of £30,000 a year.’

‘Very nice,’ I said, ‘but what if, by some chance, you hadn’t won the big money, but had drawn a blank instead? The world is full of losers.’

‘Not everyone, my good friend,’ replied Goethe, ‘is cut out to be a winner. Do you really think I would have been foolish enough to draw a blank? First and foremost, I would have supported the Thirty-Nine Articles, and championed them against all comers, especially the Ninth Article, which for me would have been an object of special attention and tender devotion. I would have dissembled and lied, so much and for so long, in verse and in prose, that my £30,000 a year would have been assured. And then, having once attained this eminence, I would have spared no effort to stay on top. In particular, I would have done my utmost to make the dark night of ignorance even darker, if that were possible. Oh, how I would have sought to cajole the good, gullible masses and browbeat the darling schoolchildren, to stop anyone noticing, or even having the courage to remark, that my brilliant situation rested on a foundation of the most shameful abuses!’

‘In your case,’ I replied, ‘people would at least have been able to comfort themselves with the thought that you had attained such eminence by sheer talent. In England it is often the most stupid and incompetent people who are in possession of the greatest worldly wealth, which they owe not to their own merits, but to patronage, chance, and above all to an accident of birth.’

‘In the end,’ said Goethe, ‘it is all the same whether great worldly possessions are acquired by seizure or by inheritance. The first usurpers were certainly men of genius, who exploited the ignorance and weakness of others. The world is so full of fools and idiots that one doesn’t need to go to a madhouse to find them. Which reminds me that the late Grand Duke, who knew that I had an aversion to madhouses, once tried to trick me by arranging a surprise visit to one of these places. But I smelled a rat in good time, and told him I felt no need to see the fools who were locked up inside, when there were quite enough of them running around on the outside. “I am perfectly willing,” I said, “to follow Your Highness to hell if need be, but not into a madhouse.”

‘What fun it would be to rework the Thirty-Nine Articles in my own way, and astonish the gullible masses!’

‘You could give yourself the pleasure,’ I said, ‘even without being a bishop.’

‘No,’ replied Goethe, ‘I shall keep quiet; you need to be very well paid to lie like that. Without the prospect of a bishop’s mitre and my £30,000 a year, I couldn’t agree to take it on. Though as it happens, I have already tried my hand at this kind of thing. At the age of sixteen I wrote a dithyrambic poem about Christ’s descent into hell, which was actually published, but never became well known; I came across it again only the other day. The poem is full of orthodox bigotry, and will do me very well as my passport to heaven. You know it, Riemer, don’t you?’

‘No, Your Excellency,’ replied Riemer, ‘I don’t know it. But I do remember that you fell seriously ill in the first year after my arrival, and while you were delirious you suddenly recited some beautiful verses on that very subject. These were no doubt recollections from that poem of your early youth.’

‘That is very likely,’ said Goethe. ‘I know of a case where an old man of humble condition, lying at death’s door, suddenly began reciting the most beautiful Greek aphorisms. People were quite certain that the man didn’t understand a word of Greek, and were utterly amazed by this, therefore; some cunning individuals were already looking to capitalize on the credulity of these fools, when it was unfortunately discovered that the old man had been forced in his early youth to learn all kinds of Greek sayings by heart, in the presence of a boy of noble family, who, they hoped, would be inspired by his example. He had learned Greek – proper, classical Greek – purely by rote, without understanding a word, and had not given it another thought for fifty years, until finally, in his last illness, that jumble of words suddenly began to stir and come alive again.’

Goethe then returned, with the same malice and irony, to the enormous salaries paid to senior members of the English clergy, and related the story of his encounter with Lord Bristol, the Bishop of Derby.

‘Lord Bristol,’ said Goethe, ‘came through Jena, wished to make my acquaintance, and sent word to me to come and visit him one evening. He liked to be brutally direct on occasion, but if one responded with equal directness he was affability itself. In the course of our conversation he proceeded to lecture me about Werther, trying to make me feel guilty for encouraging people to commit suicide. “Werther,” he said, “is a thoroughly immoral, execrable book!” “Stop right there!” I cried. “If you are going to talk about poor Werther in that manner, what do you have to say about the great rulers of this earth, who, with a single stroke of the pen, send a hundred thousand men into battle, eighty thousand of whom will kill each other and incite each other to murder, arson and pillage? You give thanks to God after such atrocities and sing a Te Deum! And what about when your sermons on the horrors of the torments of hell so terrify the frail brethren in your congregations that they lose their minds and end their wretched days in a madhouse! Or when you sow the pernicious seed of doubt in the minds of your Christian parishioners with many of your orthodox, rationally untenable dogmas, so that these souls, strong and weak in equal measure, lose themselves in a labyrinth from which their only escape is death! What do you say to yourselves then, and what hellfire sermons do you preach to yourselves? And now you want to call a writer to account and condemn a work which, misunderstood by a handful of halfwits, has freed the world from maybe a dozen idiots and good-for-nothings, who couldn’t do anything better than blow out what little light was left to them! I would have thought I had done mankind a real service and deserved your thanks; instead of which, here you are, trying to make out that this little good deed of mine is a crime, while you lot, the priests and the princes, get away with murder!”

‘This outburst had an excellent effect on my bishop. He became as meek as a lamb, and from then on, throughout the rest of our conversation, he conducted himself with the utmost courtesy and the most delicate tact. I subsequently spent a very good evening with him. Offensive as he could sometimes be, Lord Bristol was an intelligent man of the world, perfectly well able to converse on all manner of subjects. When I left, he accompanied me so far in person, and then asked his abbé to do the honours from that point. When I emerged on to the street with the latter, he exclaimed: “You said just the right thing there, Herr von Goethe, and it went down very well with my Lord Bishop. You understood exactly how to find your way to his heart. If you hadn’t been quite so direct and blunt, I’m sure you wouldn’t be going home as pleased as you are now.”’

‘You’ve had to put up with quite a lot on account of your Werther,’ I observed. ‘Your brush with Lord Bristol reminds me of your discussion with Napoleon on the subject. Wasn’t Talleyrand there, too?’

‘He was there, yes,’ replied Goethe. ‘But I had no reason to complain about Napoleon. He was most gracious towards me, and treated the subject in a manner befitting such a brilliant mind.’

From Werther the conversation turned to novels and plays in general, and their moral or immoral effect on the public. ‘Things would have to be pretty bad,’ said Goethe, ‘for a book to be more immoral than real life, where every day we see, or at least hear about, one scandal after another. Even with children, we don’t need to worry too much about the effect a book or play might have on them. As I say, everyday life teaches us more than the most instructive book.’

‘And yet,’ I remarked, ‘we try to be careful around children, not to say things in their presence which we think they should not hear.’

‘That is very laudable,’ said Goethe, ‘and I do the same myself. But I think such precautions are pointless. Children are like dogs: they have such an acute and delicate sense of smell that they detect and sniff out everything – especially the bad things. They also know exactly how things are between any given friend of the family and their parents, and since they don’t generally hide their feelings they serve as an excellent barometer of where we stand in the favour – or disfavour – of their family.

‘Someone had once spoken ill of me in society, and I felt the matter was so serious that I needed to find out where this attack had come from. People here were generally very well disposed towards me; I racked my brains, but couldn’t work out who might be the source of this malicious gossip. Then it suddenly dawned on me. One day, in the street, I encountered a group of small boys of my acquaintance who didn’t say hello to me, as they normally did. That was all I needed, and I soon discovered, by following this trail, that it was their parents who had been wagging their tongues at my expense in such a nasty way.’