Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

GOETHE'S 'CRIME' 255
held to be per se blind to the workers' plight, but all inhabitants of the
affluent society are held to suffer almost equally from loss of truth, from
a false consciousness because they are having it so good.
Goethe's 'crime'
Mistrust and indignation felt towards anyone able to afford the good life
derive, however, from emotional complexes that go back a great deal
further than Marxism. Two years after Goethe's death, his English
admirer Carlyle sought to draw the attention of Emerson, the great
American writer, to Goethe's work. In a letter dated November 20, 1834,
Emerson replied to Carlyle:
With him I am becoming better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified
admiration. It is a singular piece of good nature in you to apotheosize him. I
cannot but regard it as his misfortune with conspicuous bad influence on his
genius,-that velvet life he led. What incongruity for genius whose fit
ornaments & reliefs are poverty & hatred, to repose fifty years in chairs of
state . . . the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as
he . .. to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so, but a new &
worse offence. It implies an intellectual defect. ... 2
Few will contest that many people, if not the majority, are diverted
from serious thinking by all those good things which their prosperity
enables them to attain. But we know only too well that the man who
owns no more than one threadbare suit, the man who is hungry or
confined perforce to monotonous food, devotes ever more thought to
daydreams or plans connected with the most elementary necessities of
existence.
In England, of recent years, we have also heard poverty praised in
pseudo-puritan social criticism. Arnold Toynbee and his son Philip
(though left-wing himself) remarked upon this new fashion in social
criticism which they both repudiated.
Philip Toynbee: 'But I think there's a certain weakness in the position
of people like myself who have complained a great deal in the past about
2 The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, edited by Joseph Slater, New York and
London, 1964, pp. lOU.