The Genius as Toady

Ever since the 18th century, without ever suffering a decline in his reputation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) has been considered the greatest German writer, a universal genius, the embodiment of German culture. The German state’s cultural embassies around the world are all named after him; almost every big city has a Goethe Institute. He was undoubtedly a great poet: Auden, a great poet himself, spoke of “Goethe’s amazing command of every style of poetry, from the coarse to the witty to the lyrical to the sublime” and believed that “no translation can give a proper idea of it.” Yet Goethe’s immense reputation always had a lot to do with his reverence for authority. No oppressive regime or blinkered public had to feel uncomfortable with his work. He is the supreme example of the artist who sells out.

He had the gifts of a great poet and the character of a toady. The author of “Egmont,” the play about the hero who is willing to die for his nation’s freedom, which inspired Beethoven’s stirring overture, was a high official of the ducal court of Weimar and a close personal friend of Duke Karl August. Rank, authority and the attitudes of the ruling class always held greater sway over him than the dictates of his talent. Thomas Mann said the same thing in a more complimentary vein when he remarked that Goethe’s work was “informed both by his genius and a sense of propriety.”

It was the kind of propriety that involved hypocrisy and deceit. According to Daniel Wilson, professor of German at UC Berkeley, who has spent more than a year exploring the 18th century state archives in Weimar, Goethe, as minister of war, drafted convicted prisoners against their will into the Hanoverian army fighting on the British side in the American War of Independence. Wilson says, “It is bizarre that a figure such as Goethe who held enlightened views on human rights in his writings should have supplied troops for an army that was fighting to crush Americans’ right to self-determination.” German scholars can’t have looked very hard in the last 170 years if they left anything to uncover in the year 2000, but in fact Wilson has unearthed many important facts about this hallowed figure of the Enlightenment. Among his other unsavory duties, Goethe was in charge of silencing teachers at the University of Jena who espoused the ideas of the French Revolution and ran Karl August’s secret police, keeping tabs on radical students, infiltrating their meetings with his spies and even turning poor Schiller, who thought of him as a friend, into his unwitting informant.

His vilest crime was performed in public. Goethe used his reputation to denigrate Heinrich von Kleist, the young genius whose eight stories say more in fewer words than any other work in Western literature. (The absolutely faithful American translation by Martin Greenberg is a work of art in itself; it is out of print can be found in better-stocked libraries.) The object of Goethe’s jealous spite, ignored and humiliated, unable to earn a living, Kleist committed suicide at the age of 34.

In “Faust,” Goethe wrote moving lines of protest against the execution of Gretchen, a poor girl who is seduced and abandoned by Faust and drowns their child to hide her shame. But since these lines could be construed as a criticism of the death sentence, he suppressed them when he produced the play at his theater in Weimar. Mann notes that “when in the presence of opposition or negation, Goethe always thought of himself as the grand seigneur and representative of the government. ‘If I had the misfortune to be in opposition,’ he once said.”

Indeed, he was often more heartlessly ministerial than he needed to be: In his capacity as privy councillor, he signed the death warrant of another Gretchen, a servant girl accused of killing her baby, even though the duke himself favored clemency.

None of this would matter to the reader if Goethe’s hypocrisy and deceitfulness did not also infect his writing. “Faust” is full of striking scenes and marvelous lines, but it tells a wickedly false story. Goethe’s Faust makes a pact with Mephistopheles, takes everything the devil can give him and then ends up in heaven. Officially considered the greatest work of German literature, Goethe’s “Faust” enshrines the notion that you can deal with the devil, commit vile acts and still remain essentially a noble person who will come out on top in the end. This notion had more to do with the educated classes’ support for Hitler than all the works of Nietzsche. Goethe constantly misled people to avoid upsetting them, to make them feel safe, comfortable and good, but the history of Germany demonstrates that when writers betray their calling as truth-sayers, they do no favors to their readers.

Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” makes a pact with the Devil and in the end is carried off to hell. And that has made a difference for the subsequent development of English and later American literature and perhaps even of politics. Marlowe’s point has become a truism in our culture.

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Goethe is good for a quote on practically any subject, but he could never have written Swinburne’s lines:

The woundless and invisible thought that goes

Free throughout time as north or south wind blows,

Far throughout space as east or west sea flows

And all dark things before it are made bright.

This sense of truth as a force invincible as the elements is what sets apart those geniuses who are brave enough to disregard what everybody else thinks and discover something new. It is thanks to them that we came down from the trees. Goethe was not one of those who jumped first. According to Mann, who had an uncanny ability to say the deadliest things in the most gracious way, Goethe did not believe that he “could speak out regardless and give free vein to his creative gift.”

Perhaps this is nowhere so apparent as in his much-admired erotic poems “Roman Elegies” and “The Diary,” which shocked the bien-pensants of his time and are considered his least conventional works. Yet when Karl August and an old friend of Goethe’s who had become a bishop both advised him to suppress some of the elegies, Goethe obeyed, as he himself said, “blindly.” As for “The Diary,” he decided against publishing it without waiting for the duke to censor him. His lack of courage starts with his sex life. Stendhal, poor and fat and an absolute nobody as far as the world knew, was the lover of several brilliant, young and beautiful women; Laurence Sterne, plagued all his life by ill health and poverty, paid “small, quiet attentions” to numerous ladies; but Goethe, the famous poet and statesman, an international celebrity, could feel at ease in bed only with his social and intellectual inferiors who needed his support. At the age of 39 he took as his mistress a poor girl who accosted him to ask a favor for her brother and who had to address him in company as “Herr Privy Councillor.” What kind of man would need such a subservient partner, such inequality in sex and domestic life? What sort of man would allow his mistress to humble herself in this fashion before other people? Prig is the only printable word that comes to mind.

The “Roman Elegies” are about his dalliance with a poor Italian widow who

. . . has kindled a fire in his heart, and shares it, rejoicing

Too in his liberal purse. . . .

He says he might have frolicked with women who didn’t need his purse but claims to have become sated with them:

I have grown sick of adornments and finery: are not, when all’s done,

Skirts of brocade and of wool equally easy to lift?

Here speaks a rich man who found humble women’s woolen skirts far easier to lift than the brocaded gowns of his social equals. I have no moral objection to this; Francois Villon wrote wonderful poems about pimping (the only virtue a poet’s work must have is truthfulness). What I object to in Goethe is the mendacity, the psychological nonsense of the pretense that seducing a woman of his own class by his charm alone would have been no more difficult than dazzling a needy widow with his money. No one knew better than Goethe, a virgin until the age of 37, what a big lie that was.

The most vividly conveyed passion in his erotic poems is the fear of getting the clap; the poet’s greatest love is his love of safety:

Always protect the neat little garden I cherish

Fend off diseases from me when I’m invited by Love,

And when I trust myself to him, that rogue, may my pleasure be ever

Carefree, and never with fear, never with danger be mixed!

He never wrote anything more heartfelt than this. Caution has its points--it could not be more timely in the age of AIDS--but inGoethe’s case, prudence gives way to hysteria, to mindless dread that displaces love and trust.

Who does not hesitate now to break faith with a tedious mistress?

Love may not hold us, but sheer caution will make us think twice.

Or:

Who in his own wife’s lap now lays a confident head?

Neither in wedlock now nor out of it can we be certain;

Mutually noxious we are, husband and wife.

Many scholars have praised Goethe for wrapping his eroticism in the “classicist’s cloak” (as Hans Rudolf Vaget put it), but the constant references to the ancient gods and goddesses are like fig leaves on statues. The “Roman Elegies” remind us what a debt English literature owes to Shakespeare, who established naturalness as the poet’s birthright. Reading Goethe’s complacent “love” poems will make you appreciate what great love poets Donne and Marvell were and will send you back to “When by thy scorne, O murdresse, I am dead” and “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, ‘til we loved?”

And you can’t read “The Diary” without remembering how much more poetry, truth and eroticism are to be found in the encounter with the chambermaid in “A Sentimental Journey.” Goethe’s poem mixes sex and virtue in a most unlikely manner: Stopping overnight at an inn, the gentleman traveler makes a pass at a virgin chambermaid, who is so taken by his handsome looks that she herself proposes to come to his bed once she has finished working. This is the sort of tall tale told by men with little experience of courting women. Nothing like it ever happened to Casanova, a man of enormous sex-appeal in his youth who was genuinely interested in women, knew how to behave with them, had the best chatting-up line on record and was a champion seducer of chambermaids. In his memoirs he describes how he had to cajole and lie and scheme and part with lace, money and precious stones to persuade the maids to forget that he would be off the next day. A casual pass is all that Goethe claims to have required to win the heart of a virgin. His boasting is mixed with modesty as the irresistible hero confesses that he cannot rise to the occasion until he thinks of his dear wife--and then, rather than embracing the lovely girl lying beside him in bed, he gets up and writes his wife a letter.

This poem explains Goethe’s immense impact on generations of repressed and conventional people: Unmentionable subjects are mentioned, so reading him is a kind of liberation--but a painless one. While reminding readers of their impure parts and feelings, the poet also administers a dose of virtue to quell any stirrings of guilt. Still, within the Big Lie there are many lively truths. Here is one on erection anxiety:

There in my arms, happy at last. But though

I kissed her now, her mouth, her brow, her eyes,

I was in wondrous quandary even so:

My master player, hitherto so hot,

Shrinks, novice-like, its ardor quite forgot.

And:

Resigned to this most novel accident

He muses ruefully: So now you know

Why bridegrooms cross themselves, and what is meant

By magic knots. . . .

Both the “Roman Elegies” and “The Diary” were published in England some years ago by Libris in David Luke’s translations, which I quote from here. This attractive bilingual edition conveys both Goethe’s poetic powers and his artful mixture of truth and dissimulation. His prodigious talents gave a good name to the kind of compromise that corrupts writers and induces mental laziness in readers.

When I reviewed David Luke’s translations for a London paper, his publisher, Nicholas Jacobs, objected to my description of Goethe as a toady. “On the question of Goethe’s politics,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “your reviewer has elsewhere expressed admiration of Stendhal. Would he call Stendhal a toady of Napoleon?” In fairness to Jacobs, he knew nothing of Goethe’s role as head of the thought police in Weimar, but even without that, it is impossible to compare Goethe with Stendhal, who sprang from the French Revolution and whose attitude to the opinions of good society is suggested by Julien Sorel, the hero of “The Red and the Black,” who in his careerist phase “made it a rule never to utter any opinion which didn’t strike him as idiotic.” As for Napoleon, Stendhal wrote a clear-eyed critical biography of Napoleon and drew on his experiences of the Napoleonic court in his devastating portrait of court life in “The Charterhouse of Parma,” and he praised Napoleon after Waterloo, when few others had a good word to say for him, as the ruler under whom it had been possible to rise in the world on talent and courage alone.

In another letter, Luke objected to my comments on the basis that “Goethe was a strong personality who was determined to survive, to develop a strategy for living.” Luke saw Goethe’s toadyism as simply tact. “Tact,” he wrote, “is one of the forms of hypocrisy and mendacity that life and survival demand of us. Would Mr. Vizinczey have preferred Goethe to die young like Kleist or mad like Holderlin?” Well, yes.