‘Great Poet, Poor Scientist’

I

Of the world’s great poets, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is perhaps the least familiar in the English-speaking world. Although most educated people know that Goethe wrote the verse drama “Faust,” new translations of that masterpiece receive nothing like the attention drawn by new English versions of “The Divine Comedy,” the Homeric epics or even Rilke’s lyric poetry. Neither Goethe’s major novels--”The Sorrows of Young Werther,” “Wilhelm Meister,” “Elective Affinities”--nor his plays, with the exception of “Faust,” are included in the lists of the Western literary canon drawn up by professors of literature who do not reject the idea of a literary canon altogether. And who knows that Disney’s “Sorceror’s Apprentice” (played in “Fantasia” by Mickey Mouse) is based on one of Goethe’s narrative poems? Goethe is one of those figures whom one is expected to know of but need not know.

This state of affairs marks a historic reversal. It may be that no continental European poet influenced 19th century British and American literature as much as did Goethe, who was born in 1749 and died in 1832. Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott idolized Goethe, and he praised them in turn, modeling Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helen, after the short-lived Byron (Goethe’s affinity with these two British writers may reflect the fact that romanticism, as it appeared in Scotland, had more connections with 18th century culture than did the English romanticism of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley). Carlyle and Arnold were only two of the great Victorians inspired by the “sage of Weimar,” while the work of Longfellow, the most influential American poet of the 19th century, a student of Germanic languages, reverberates with Goethean echoes. Twentieth century Modernists, by contrast, had little use for Goethe. The stoic classical humanism of his later years seemed irrelevant both to political radicals and to political reactionaries like Eliot and Pound; his polished poems and his stylized fiction seemed inauthentic to avant-garde writers who valued evocative fragments and sensational realism. The exception, a major exception indeed, was W. H. Auden, who was immersed in German culture and resided at different times in his life in Germany and Austria (the gay poet helped Thomas Mann’s daughter Ericka escape from Nazi Germany by marrying her). Auden translated Goethe’s prose narrative, “Italian Journey,” modeled the lead character in one of the opera libretti he wrote with Chester Kallmann on Goethe and even said that he wanted to be remembered as “a minor Atlantic Goethe.” The fascination with exotic meters that Auden passed on to American formal poets like James Merrill is a legacy from Goethe.

The neglect of Goethe, today, however, is the result of more than the lingering influence of the Modernist aesthetic. The stylization of his plays and novels seems quaint and insincere to generations accustomed to the realism of Ibsen, Chekhov, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoevski. Failing to understand that he was writing something more like allegorical romances may lead one to dismiss Goethe as an inept novelist. The Bildungsroman, the Central European genre to which Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister” and Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” belong, seems tedious and talkative to Anglophone readers; the coming-of-age novels and memoirs written in English tend to devote more attention to a character’s sad childhood and first sexual experiences than to his or her intellectual and emotional maturation (Bildung). A culture that lionizes Frank McCourt will have trouble making sense of Goethe.

Similarly, the reader whose notion of poetry is based on imagistic free verse may find Goethe’s lyrics and ballads trite, his mastery of dozens of genres and meters unoriginal. One might think that Goethe’s lifelong enthusiasm for Weltliteratur (world literature) would make him seem relevant in the age of multiculturalism. But Goethe’s imitations of the Roman elegists, the Persian poet Hafiz and Chinese poetry show that, like Renaissance syncretists and Enlightenment philosophes, he was more interested in sophisticated, self-conscious non-western high civilizations than in the supposedly authentic “cultures” of the primitive nations celebrated by 19th century Aryanists and 20th century Afrocentrists.

To make matters worse, poets, dramatists and philosophers have always had a much lower status in the relatively anti-intellectual English-speaking countries than they have possessed in the Mitteleuropa of Goethe and Vaclav Havel. In the Anglo-American world, to find an equivalent to Goethe--who was not only the founder of his nation’s modern literature, but also an official in the duchy of Saxe-Weimar, a theater director and a scientific dilettante--one would have to turn to William Butler Yeats, who among other things was a senator. Yeats’ attempt to promote Irish poetic drama was as frustrating as Goethe’s effort to launch a classical German drama (although Goethe was fortunate in finding an ally in Schiller). One might further draw a parallel between Yeats’ obsession with the occult and Goethe’s cranky, life-long effort to refute Newtonian science.

But cross-cultural parallels are few. What readers in the Anglophone world need is not just a translation of Goethe’s German but a translation of Goethe’s Germany. Nicholas Boyle, the head of the department of German at Cambridge, has provided just that. In “Goethe: The Poet and the Age,” Boyle has given the English-speaking world the definitive account of the life and times of Germany’s greatest author.

II

In the first installment of this three-volume project, “The Poetry of Desire” (1991), Boyle detailed Goethe’s life from his birth in 1749 until his 40th year; the latest installment, the second volume, “Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803,” focuses on the mid-point of Goethe’s life, from the age of 41 to the age of 44. Boyle is pains-takingly complete; the first volume has 666 pages, and the second, 794. They must be read in sequence. Boyle, a precise and fluent writer, is never obscure, but he assumes a high degree of general erudition on the part of his readers. Readers seeking a succinct overview of Goethe’s life and career should begin with T.J. Reed’s “Goethe” in Oxford University Press’s Past Masters series.

Boyle begins his account of Goethe’s life by portraying the precocious child of Frankfurt’s upper middle class as he became a celebrity in his 20s with his best-selling novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and launched an early form of German Romanticism, “Sturm und Drang,” with his poems, plays and essays. Goethe then turned his back on the middle-class world of his origins to become an administrator in the court of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, a satellite of Prussia. Trapped by early celebrity and success, Goethe escaped the stifling atmosphere of Weimar for a sabbatical in Italy, where he experienced both a sexual awakening and a transformative encounter with the art of the Italian Renaissance.

By contrast, the years that Boyle covers in the second volume are short on incident. Having scandalized the Weimar court by living with his mistress Christiana Vulpius and fathering a son, Goethe has become a middle-aged paterfamilias. A diarist observed: “Nothing is simpler than his present domestic circumstances. In the evenings he sits in his armchair in a well-heated room with a white carter’s cap on his head--while his little boy rocks on his knees . . . [O]n the other side Dame Vulpia [sits] with her knitting.”’ Frau von Stein, the Platonic mistress of Goethe’s early years at the Weimar court, wrote to her husband of one encounter with the mature poet: “[T]owards 6 o’clock Goethe walked in. I had not seen him for a few months. He was appallingly fat with short arms, both pushed straight down into his trouser-pockets. Schiller was looking his best, like a celestial spirit beside him. . . . He has really become of the earth, earthy, poor Goethe, who used to love us so much.” The novelist Jean Paul (J.P.F. Richter) recorded his impression of Weimar’s resident genius in 1795: “His house is striking, it is the only one in Weimar in the Italian manner, with such staircases, a Pantheon full of pictures and statues, that a chill of fear weighs on the breast-eventually the god approaches, cold, monosyllabic, no accent. Let Knebel, for example, say the French are marching into Rome: ‘Hm’ says the god. . . . He regards his poetical career as over.”

“Goethe felt he was growing old,” Boyle writes. “With life expectation at birth for men in northern Europe around 38 years this was not pure hypochondria.” Goethe struggled to finish uncompleted projects like “Faust” and “Wilhelm Meister,” with something of the fatalism of an old man putting his affairs in order. When he published his works to date, they attracted little attention: “The relative failure of the Goschen edition, of which the most telling evidence is the absence of any attempt to pirate it, left Goethe in an isolation which would have demoralized a man of lesser tenacity: ‘one cannot imagine anyone more isolated than I was at that time and long remained,’ he later wrote.” Goethe’s collaboration with Schiller on literary magazines and in promoting the Weimar theater prevented this period of Goethe’s life from being completely bleak and sterile.

In Goethe one can discern signs of what nowadays would be called a midlife crisis. He grew obsessed with Naturphilosophie, an ap- title subhead proach to science based more on intuition than on experiment. He attempted to replace Newtonian optics with his own pseudoscientific “color theory.” His friends and acquaintances put up with it with good humor. As Edward O. Wilson observed recently, Goethe “would have grieved had he foreseen history’s verdict: great poet, poor scientist.”

III

If Boyle’s second volume were devoted exclusively to Goethe’s troubled middle age, it could be recommended only for connoiseurs of Goetheana. But Boyle has chosen to write about “Goethe and His Age.” He gives the times as much attention as the life and portrays Goethe’s life against the backdrop of two revolutions: the French Revolution and the German Revolution. “On account of bad weather, the German revolution took place in music,” the poet Heine quipped. Boyle would amend that: The German revolution took place in philosophy, with Kant inaugurating the Idealist tradition that Hegel and others would develop.

The literary works of Goethe’s middle age respond to both revolutions. In 1792, after witnessing the battle of Valmy between French revolutionary forces and the Prussians whom he was accompanying, Goethe told the German officers: “From this place and from this day a new epoch in world history begins and you can say you were there to see it.” Or maybe not; as Boyle points out, Goethe is the source of this anecdote, writing 30 years later and using a terminology that Hegel only later invented. In any event, Goethe’s experience of the wars of the French Revolution inspired his verse epic “Hermann and Dorothea,” which uses Homeric hexameters to describe the flight of small town refugees before the French armies. The French Revolution also inspired one of Goethe’s lesser-known plays, “The Natural Daughter,” which Boyle analyzes with the thoroughness and insight that he brings to more famous works like Goethe’s life-long “Faust” project and his massive Bildungsroman, “Wilhelm Meister.”

As for the German revolution, Boyle shows that Goethe was at the center of German intellectual life. Here, for example, is, according to Boyle, an average day for Goethe in 1801: “When Hegel, introduced by Schelling, first called on Goethe in the Jena Old Palace at 11 o’clock on the morning of 21 October, Goethe had just spent the first hours of his day on ‘The Natural Daughter,’ a plan to which he was returning after an interval of nearly two years. . . . Perhaps he could again have the new play finished for Duchess Luise’s birthday. He also wanted to consult Schelling about his translation of Theophrastus’ ‘On Colours,’ and to take advantage of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s presence to discuss with him the inclusion in Weimar’s experimental season of Schlegel’s new work ‘Ion,’ a verse play loosely based on Euripides.” A good morning’s work.

If you were to think of Goethe, Hegel and their company as dilettantes, you would miss the urgency and seriousness of their common project, which was nothing less than the creation of a new post-Christian (or quasi-Christian) high culture. As Boyle writes: “Despite their personal differences, Goethe, Schiller, the Schlegels, Schelling--and Schelling’s scarcely noticed friends Hegel and Holderlin--and even the banished Fichte, were bound together by a belief in the culturally transformative power of Idealism: ‘We professed our loyalty to the strivings of the new philosophy--and to an aesthetic to be derived from it,’ Goethe later wrote in his ‘Annals.’ As the secular theology of the official class, Idealism was, however, opposed by the literature, art, and philosophy of a smug and politically unrealistic bourgeoisie unprepared either to compromise with its political masters”--the German princes--”or to confront them . . ., and Schelling made the goal of their avowedly elitist art not the achievement of a courtly style but the manifestation of ideal beauty, something of which only the academically and philosophically educated official could have an understanding.”

Boyle is free from the prejudice that leads many parochial American and British thinkers to treat Germany’s Sonderweg or alternate path in the 19th century as a failure of development rather than a different but genuine form of modernity. He argues that the bloody transition in France from a monarchy to a republic was accompanied, in Germany, by an equally profound but bloodless transition from premodern monarchy to a modernizing bureaucratic monarchy, a revolution that empowered one middle class (the Bildungsburgertum or professional and official elite) rather than another (the Besitzburgertum or bourgeoisie).

“In Prussia the Revolution consisted not in the subordination of the central political power to an assembly representative of the will of the governed, or at any rate of the bourgeoisie at large, but in a shift within the central power itself. In one and the same movement the bureaucracy detached itself finally from the professionally and commercially active middle classes with which it had coexisted throughout the eighteenth century, and transferred to itself a large part of the monarchical authority. The resultant political irresponsibility of the central power led to the strange dualism characteristic of nineteenth century Prussian society: a middle class, of increasing economic importance but politically inactive, confronted a monarchy that was increasingly irrelevant to economic realities but retained in theory all the political functions of early modern absolutism.” In an essay on Goethe, Ortega y Gasset complained that he turned his back on modernity by abandoning the commercial bourgeois German West for a comfortable sinecure in a backwater of a duchy in the German East. Boyle argues to the contrary that Weimar, a scaled-down version of Prussia, was the future of Germany: The largely-Catholic Germany of burghers, republican towns and federal decentralization, the old Holy Roman Empire, was on the way out, although it would experience something of a resurrection in Konrad Adenauer’s very Rhenish and Catholic Bonn Republic. Weimar, not Frankfurt, was the precursor of the Germany that Bismarck would found, an enlightened bureaucratic state run by humanistically-educated mandarins that Hitler would destroy. Nor was the German East in Goethe’s era a “Sahara of the Bozart.” With few exceptions, the great thinkers and administrators of Prussia were brilliant, ambitious men from the West German middle class seeking their fortunes at a royal or ducal court.

The story that Boyle tells is partly our own: For 200 years, one or another Teutonic philosophy originating in Goethe’s milieu--in many cases, among Goethe’s acquaintances and friends--provided educated people in the world beyond Germany’s borders with a secular substitute for religion. In 1900, most of the leading academic philosophers in Britain, the U.S., France and Italy spoke the language they learned from Hegel. Although German idealism’s influence did not survive World War I, the establishment of the Soviet Union gave new credibility to a crude spin-off of Hegel’s thought by a young Hegelian, Karl Marx.

The world spirit, the absolute, the dialectic--what appeared to several generations to be the building blocks of thought--may look today like unusable rubbish. Future generations may regard the influence of German-style “philosophy” as a disastrous detour into mysticism, yet ironically, as the Hegels and Schlegels and Marxes fade, Goethe will be remembered in spite of himself. If he had succeeded in making his art a vehicle for the philosophy of his day, then his poetry might have remained inexplicable outside of its context. But Goethe’s masterpieces are far less dependent on his theories than they may seem. A great historian like Boyle can put a great artist like Goethe in his place and time, but nobody can keep him there.