Lecture II

Wagner types believe they are able to transplant themselves quite easily into the spirit of a wise man; that is, when somebody before them has already done the exercise! It is a pity that we cannot put to the proof what the critics would have to write about Hamlet if it had been written today and were to be performed for them by some large municipal theater, or if a drama of Sophocles should be presented for them at this very moment. Perhaps no impression would be made on these gentlemen even by what Sophocles had to do to convince his relatives of his greatness in his advanced old age of ninety-one. His relatives had had to wait so long for their inheritance that they tried to prove he had become feeble-minded and could no longer manage his property. He had no other way to protect himself than by writing the Oedipus in Colonna, thus proving that he was not yet in his dotage. Whether this would work with present-day critics I do not know, but at that time it did help. Anyone who enters deeply into the tragedy of the ninety-one year old Sophocles, however, will be able to estimate how difficult it is to find the way to a human individuality and how such an individuality is bound up in the most complicated fashion with world events! Many things could be adduced to show under what deep layers we must penetrate in order to understand the world. But how much is alive, even in the earliest parts of Faust, of that wisdom that is necessary for an understanding of the world! This wisdom must be attributed to the peculiar course of Goethe's destiny which reveals to us in a real sense that nature and the work of the spirit are a unity in human development and that an illness not only has an external significance but may also possess spiritual meaning.