The Unread Giant

GOETHE: THE POET AND THE AGE Volume 1: The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790) by Nicholas Boyle. Oxford University Press, $37.50.

IN APRIL OF 1984 the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit arranged with leading newspapers in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Italy to conduct polls among their readers to determine the ten most important European writers. The only condition imposed was that the respondents could not vote for writers of their own nationality. Thus the French could not vote for Rousseau or Racine, the Italians for Boccaccio or Manzoni. When the votes were tallied, Shakespeare, not surprisingly, had four first-place votes out of five, the highest possible score. In second place was Johann Wolfgang Goethe, with two second places, one third, and one fifth in the national polls, which placed him ahead of Cervantes and Dante, in third and fourth place, and Kafka, Proust, Thomas Mann, Moliére, Joyce, and Dickens, who filled out the top ten.

Why did British, French, Spanish, and Italian readers automatically think of Goethe when asked about the great European writers? Certainly in part because of the remarkable variety and scope of his writings. Some years ago, when asked why so many German writers in the nineteenth century had turned to philosophy rather than other forms of writing, an English critic hazarded the view that it was because Goethe had used up everything else. He was Germany’s greatest lyric poet and the author of some of its finest epic, narrative, and dramatic poetry as well. He was a dramatist of great power, whose plays included the historical dramas Götz von Berlichingen of the Iron Hand, set in the age of the Reformation, and Egmont, about the Dutch wars of liberation; the court drama Torquato Tasso, which dealt with the conflict between poetic genius and social convention; The Natural Daughter, a critical view of the French Revolution which, read today, seems like a chilling forewarning of twentieth-century totalitarianism; and his lifework and masterpiece, Faust.

His novels were equally remarkable. The Sorrows of Young Werther was the first modern novel about the problems of the outsider in society; Wilhelm Meister the model for all future German Bildungsromane, or novels of development and self-improvement; and The Elective Affinities, in Thomas Mann’s view, “the most daring and trenchant novel about adultery that the moral culture of the Occident ever produced.” To this body of work must be added a wonderful travel book, Italian Journey, and an autobiography, Poetry and Truth, which for style and penetration is rivaled in German only by Bismarck’s Memories and Thoughts, and which includes an impressive piece of historical reconstruction and reminiscence called The Campaign in France. Considering all this, and the fact that Goethe also wrote treatises on mineralogy, optics, and botany, the English comment cited above seems less jocular than upon first hearing.

An additional reason for Goethe’s international renown may be that he is the least German of all the great German writers. In an address delivered in 1932 in Weimar, on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death, Thomas Mann suggested that after the tremendous success of Götz and Werther, Goethe never again wrote anything (with the possible exception of the epic Hermann und Dorothea) that was a popular success in Germany, and that his dramas never touched the national heartstrings in the way that Schiller’s did. Indeed, popular success was not something that Goethe strove for, and he opposed the cultivation of the essentially German consciously, deliberately, and pedagogically. Mann said,

His own mighty nature embraces the German and the Mediterranean, the European and the national. And this combination is, in essence, the same as that other combination of genius and intellectualism; of mystery and clarity; of the deep chord and the polished word; of the lyrical and the psychological. He is the greatest of them all because he so happily unites the daemonic and the urbane in a way that is probably unique; and it is precisely this combination that has made him the darling of mankind.

It is doubtful whether this sweeping statement could be made to apply in the United States. True, Emerson wrote in Representative Men that whereas Shakespeare was the greatest poet, Goethe was the greatest writer, the most remarkable in reporting “the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works.”But he qualified this by adding,

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men.

Throughout the nineteenth century Goethe’s reputation suffered from charges of immorality and irreligion; in our own century it has tended to erode because of bad translations, the remoteness of Goethe’s world from our own, and the heavy demands that his major works make upon readers. It is not surprising that the American theater has failed to come to terms with him and that even the Faust drama is generally known only in Gounod’s operatic setting of the Gretchen story. Similarly, only the earliest lyric poetry and ballads like “The Elf King" and The Little Heath Rose" have become at all familiar in this country, and then only because they appear so frequently in song recitals. In 1983, when the distinguished Goethe scholar Katharina Mommsen published in English translation an excellent collection of excerpts from all of the poet’s major works, she titled it Who Is Goethe?The answering silence becomes yearly more pronounced. In university education, if we put aside departments of German studies and comparative literature, exposure to Goethe takes place only in freshman courses on Western culture, where students are likely to spend a week on either Werther or the first part of Faust. As the pressure for multicultural courses increases, that stronghold is likely to fall, and Goethe will disappear from general education, unless someone has the wit to make something of Goethe’s own multicultural interests and introduce students to his imitations of Persian poetry.

NICHOLAS BOYLE may have been moved by some of these considerations when he embarked upon this new life of Goethe, which he describes as “start[ing] from first principles and assum[ing] as little prior knowledge of its subject as possible.” He feels that two different needs may be met by the book: the reader who knows something about English or French literary history but is ignorant of the German language and literature and has only a sketchy knowledge of German history will find enough information in it “to set Goethe’s life in the context of his age and his poetry in the context of his life"; and the reader already familiar with Goethe’s works will benefit from having them presented in strictly chronological order against their biographical, socio-historical, and philosophical background. “For the specialist,”Boyle writes,

there may emerge ... a new view of a commanding literary presence: as a free man responding to the social, spiritual and intellectual demands of modernity, as they formulated themselves around him. For the non-specialist there is the promise of a new acquaintance: limited and even peculiar, no doubt, as we all are, but grand and deep and rich as none of us is and few of our forebears have been.

This first volume gives one good reason to believe that these objectives will be achieved. The book is perhaps too long (and certainly too heavy to read comfortably either in an easy chair or in bed), and because of Boyle’s decision to alternate sections dealing with Goethe’s life with others that deal mainly with his works, it tends to be annoyingly repetitious, since of course the life and the works cannot be separated, as Boyle acknowledges. But these faults are minor, and those who bear with them will be rewarded by a more convincing account than can be found in any previous biographical study in English of Goethe’s discovery of his self and his mission in life. That discovery came through a long process of emancipating himself from the religious and philosophical orthodoxies of his time, from the limitations that his early successes threatened to impose upon his genius, from the social conventions and class prejudices of the society in which he moved, from his own sexual confusions, and from the problem of determining who his audience should be.

In analyzing the internal strains of an age that moved from the reassuring certainties of the Leibnizian world order to the convulsive changes introduced by the French Revolution, and in relating Goethe’s creative evolution to them, Boyle shows admirable skill, reinforced by the clarity and depth of his analysis of Goethe’s work, which reaches a high point in Boyle’s masterly readings of Egmont and Torquato Tasso. Notable also is his perceptive portrayal of the contrasting milieus in which Goethe moved—the bourgeois world of Frankfurt, in which he was born and from which he fled in 1775, and the hierarchical court society of Weimar, to which he gave ten years of his productive life before escaping to Italy. Not the least attractive feature of this book, finally, is its gallery of portraits of those representative figures of an age of great originals who played a significant role in Goethe’s life and development: Johann Gottfried Herder, who, in a meeting in 1770 that was momentous for German literature, cleared Goethe’s head of the clutter of old models and opened his vision for new sources of poetic inspiration; J. H. Merck, “a singular man,” Goethe said in his memoirs, “who had the greatest influence on my life,”an acerbic personality who edited The Frankfurt Literary Advertiser, who early recognized and encouraged Goethe’s literary gifts, and who gave the decisive impetus not only to the publication of Gétz von Berlichingen but also to Goethe’s adoption of a literary career; Johann Caspar Lavater, the Zürich pastor and physiognomist, whom Goethe for a time admired but whose insistent piety unwittingly contributed to the extinguishing of the last vestiges of his religious faith; and Karl Philipp Moritz, the author of the psychological novel Anton Reiser, whose definition of art as the nearest thing to a religious activity allowed by a completely secularized world view helped Goethe, after he had returned from Italy, to discover a new role for himself as “artist" at the court at Weimar and thus, in Boyle’s words, “to reconcile in himself the courtly and the middle-class elements in German culture by becoming a self-sufficient creator of literary beauty who was maintained by his patron but did not subserve any of his patron’s purposes.”

Perhaps more influential in shaping Goethe’s career than any of these were the women in his life: Friederike Brion, Charlotte Kestner, Lili Schönemann, Charlotte von Stein, Faustina Antonini, and Christiana Vulpius. Since his earliest writings, Boyle observes, Goethe’s art had required as impetus “an exceptionally powerful and unremitting desire for an adequate object, never completely identified, always more or less absent,”and as his religious faith waned, the object of desire necessarily became this-worldly. When Goethe met Friederike Brion, the pastor’s daughter in Sesenheim, his love for her was immediate and overwhelming and was expressed in an outburst of poetry that astounded and enchanted readers for generations. But it was a love that could find only literary fulfillment. Having been led to suppose that she was affianced to Goethe, Friederike was abandoned unceremoniously, to become, Boyle writes, “not merely a victim but, in her fate, a symbol of unresting desire" — and, of course, the subject of new literary exercises, a fact that horrified Rahel Varnhagen, who venerated Goethe but, after reading one of the Friederike poems composed after the break, wrote, “I sat with ice congealing on my heart. . . . And for the first time Goethe seemed hostile to me!” The affair with Friederike became a kind of model for those that followed, with Charlotte Kestner, who found herself immortalized as the heroine of Werther, a fate that she would certainly not have chosen for herself; Lili Schönemann, the daughter of a wealthy Frankfurt family, who was engaged to be married to Goethe until he broke off the relationship, in 1775; and Charlotte von Stein, his poetic inspiration during his first Weimar period. Herder called Goethe “the cold misogynist,”a remark that Boyle finds cruel and “not quite correct,” but full of insight, for certainly Goethe could “love as few men could, but only at a distance, only in unfulfilment,” since he feared that complete intimacy might lead to marriage, the hobbling of inspiration by material cares, and the end of poetry.

In going to Weimar, Goethe was intrigued by the possibility of giving guidance to the young duke Carl August and proving what a free individual could accomplish in the world of bureaucratic politics. There is no doubt that he was successful. In June of 1782 Herder wrote sourly,

So he is now Permanent Privy Councillor, President of the Chamber, President of the War Office, Inspector of Works down to roadbuilding, Director of Mines, also Directeur des plaisirs, Court Poet, composer of pretty festivities, court operas, ballets, cabaret masques, inscriptions, works of art etc., Director of the Drawing Academy in which during the winter he delivered lectures on osteology; everywhere himself the principal actor, dancer, in short, the factotum of all Weimar.

He had become, after the duke, the most powerful man in Weimar. But his writing was at a standstill, and his enthusiasm for science was in part a reaction to the fact that he could neither complete unfinished work nor launch new literary projects. As for the relationship with Frau von Stein, a pseudomarriage without consummation, it was becoming intolerable. In September of 1786, without announcing his intentions, Goethe slipped away to Italy, where, with the forbearance and support of Carl August, he lived for the next two years.

In some ways the Italian journey was a disappointment. Goethe had embarked upon it in the hope that it would produce an outwelling of poetic creativity. It did so only to a limited degree: he was able to finish old projects, such as Iphigenia on Tauris, and Egmont, and Torquato Tasso, but his plan to write a new drama called Ulysses Among the Phaeacians came to nothing and was soon abandoned. On the other hand, it was in Italy that he discovered art and learned that it was more than an exercise in ego satisfaction, more than a poetry of desire. Boyle writes, “He had come looking for culmination, enjoyment, and a revelatory immediacy of experience, and he had found ... the need for study, informed understanding, and hard work.”And Italy taught him also the pleasures of sexual gratification, through his relationship with a twenty-four-year-old widow named Faustina Antonini—the first sexual encounter of Goethe’s, Boyle tells us, for which there is documentary evidence. The anguish that the poet felt upon being forced to return to Weimar in June of 1788, which he later compared to Ovid’s feelings on being expelled from Rome by Augustus, may have been caused as much by the loss of Faustina as by any love of the city.

However that may be, it was not long before Goethe had taken into his house Christiana Vulpius, the orphaned daughter of a clerk in the highway department, who worked in a factory for the making of artificial flowers. Despite the chagrin of Charlotte von Stein, who said spitefully that he had given himself completely to a “girl who used to be a common whore,” he lived happily with Christiana for the rest of her life, celebrating their love in the cycle Roman Elegies (poems that Boyle describes as being of “astonishing energy and novelty,” demonstrating “the capacity for simultaneous renewal and rebirth”), and finally marrying her, in 1806.

Goethe’s abandonment of the poetry of desire was completed by a brief return to Italy in 1790. This time it took only a few days for the old illusions to be dispelled and for him to acknowledge that this was no Arcadia but a place of decaying statuary, flea-infested caravanserais, and streets pullulating with pickpockets. He wrote:

(Fair is the land! but alas, I cannot find the like of Faustina again.

This is no longer the Italy I left in anguish.)

Implicit in these words, as in the final act of the drama Torquato Tasso, was a turning away from his previous work and a suggestion that it would be replaced by a more limited, impersonal, and objective poetry, whose success, Boyle concludes, would require Goethe’s return to the real world of “Germany, Weimar, Christiana, and all the strange tense and partial fulfilments they brought.” □