Goethe. The Poet and the Age

...Lifestyle swamis abound, and multitudes proclaim the point of view, and if we haven't read these exact versions before, we've no doubt read something very much like them, right down to turns of phrase...

...Rome was the city that held the essentials of Life...

...Yet Goethe gave her no warning when he cleared out for Italy in 1786...

...Never did they stray into adultery...

...The more superbly appointed one's own interior happens to be, the less likely one is to find suitable accommodation elsewhere...

...Such teaching, Goethe also reminds us, is as much as one can justly hope to find in books, for the story of another man's search for happiness might help one see that he happens to be lost himself—and that is a momentous discovery—but such a story cannot show a reader the course that he must take...

...he sent her the first asparagus from his garden...

...Goethe was to spend the rest of his life there, with a few interGOETHE: THE POET AND THE AGE VOL...

...The Apprenticeship was the masterpiece of Goethes youth and prime, just as Faust was of his old age (although he had written much of Faust as a young man...

...Such regret, or hopefulness, Goethe teaches—for the sake of those who've failed to learn as much elsewhere as in books—is a sign of bad character and a virtual assurance that one is fated to continue in his feckless search...

...T he poet certainly put this passion I to good use...

...the extravagance of soul that sometimes finds itself longing for constraints...

...As for the other works, they are daunting in their own ways...

...skated the day long, inspired by Klopstock's poetry...

...He became the third member of the Privy Council, and earned the privilege of dining at the Princes Table...

...He took horseback ridingand fencing lessons...

...in fact the chief inspiration of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is, for all its backward glances at antiquated forms of sublimity, undeniably modern...

...he gave her English lessons...

...He studied the paintings and sculpture with which the city abounded...

...Wilhelm Meister takes the long way around to the happy fulfillment of his destiny...

...And the lovelorn in their abundance killed themselves after their master's example...

...Goethe devoted much of his youth to falling in love...

...On his thirtieth birthday he was made Geheimrath, the highest position attainable by a German citizen...

...It is the romance of self-discovery, self-development, self-fulfillment...

...Rousseau describes this affliction in The Confessions, sadly and concisely: " . . seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart...

...To Goethe, such solitary ardors seem fever-stricken...

...Goethe came to regard their relation as a marriage rather than a romance...

...First, when he was 14, there was Gretchen, an innkeeper's daughter...

...It was an imaginative passion, in which the poet was more implicated than the man...

...they read Aeschylus and Spinoza together...

...Then at 23 there was Charlotte Buff, a girl of 16 betrothed for two years to Kestner, a young diplomat...

...The first volume of Nicholas Boyle's new critical biography is unlikely to win many new readers for Goethe or, for that matter, Boyle's second volume...

...the cultivation of the soul's tendency to extremity...

...the romance crumbled when they were falsely implicated in forgery along with some of the inn's genuinely criminal patrons...

...The recital of a noble action moves us...

...its high mystery had always drawn him, and, without telling a soul, he headed off under an assumed name...

...Auden wrote of his activity, "And he does all this in the midst of social life, sightseeing, collecting coins, gems, minerals, plaster casts, taking drawing lessons, attending lectures on perspective and making botanical experiments...

...Here is what two sentences only forty words each can do: The Christ whom the Newtonians recrucilied was the pureness and simplicity of white light as it manifests itself to any observer, but above all to this one—the integrity and reliability therefore of the individual's perceptions, of his sense of his own being, and of this intimacy with the world he perceives...

...The themes of the novel include the romantic sufferer who lacks means to render the perceptions with which his soul teems...

...By 1779 he was head of the War Department, and organized-a Fire Department as well...

...Formidably academic in style, presentation, and voluminousness—Boyle is a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge—this biography is full of sentences eighty words long, in which the words themselves are eight words long, and the enterprise amounts to professorial palaver so swank that the ordinary reader wonders forlornly what's in it for him...

...Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the quintessential romance of modernity, or more precisely of a modernity that is still in its youth...

...Napoleon claimed to have read it seven times...

...Parisshall be my school...

...A contemporary critic observed that the three main events of the time were the French Revolution, Fichte's Critique of All Revelation, and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship...

...and played the violoncello...

...the dangers of solitude...

...There is a rare hopefulness to the story of Wilhelm Meister, a joyous worldliness that confirms the young seeker in his confidence that what he aches to have is out there, somewhere, to be found...

...The professor's obsessions elbow aside Goethe's own thoughts and passions...

...Although James Joyce placed him among the heroic trio of Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper, he is nevertheless little read in English-speaking countries, as W. H. Auden pointed out...

...By the eighteenth century, a young man who sets off on a noble quest cannot hope to find anything so ablaze with the numinous as Christ's serving-dish or a holy city in need of deliverance...

...we feel then as if we were not altogether in a foreign land...

...The success of Werther would have left a lesser man with a permanent swagger...

...It is the story of a young man of common origins who hopes to live an uncommon life, a noble one, but who must make such a life for himself without any sure idea of what his own nature is or of what nobility might consist in...

...He wrote poems to her...

...As Wilhelm remarks, though only to himself, at one sad point in his seeking: 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 . . . and what can move us but some silent hope that the inborn inclination of our soul shall not always be without an object...

...He made the acquaintance of several German artists there, and worked hard to develop his skills as a painter...

...Next, at 17, was Annchen Schtinkopf, again an innkeeper's daughter...

...This passage is by way of pursuing Boyle's ubiquitous critical preoccupation: Goethe's veerings between subjective and objective perception...

...37.50 Algis Valiunas THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 39 ruptions...

...It is even harder now than it was in Goethe's own shabby time to find a man with the strength to be true...

...Each man's fate is his own to understand and to decide, and finding ones way through life is a serious business for serious men, more demanding than even the devout legions of the cult of self-development are inclined to suspect...

...and an innkeeper's daughter...

...The smart money would bet the ranch that Goethe had something else in mind with the Urfaust...

...Rich in anecdote and substantial of thought, Lewes's Life is a masterly biography, and a strong antidote to the excessive academicism of Nicholas Boyle...

...In Italian Journey he wrote, "Everything will in the end be condensed and summed up in Wilhelm Meister...

...It saddens one to make that judgment, for Boyle is clearly a man of significant learning and intelligence, and the book is not quite worthy of him...

...Where Werther is the tragedy of official Sentimentalism, the Urfaust is the tragedy of the Algis Valiunas is a writer living in...

...Passionate chastity remained their watchword...

...There is a tendency among those modern writers who examine our best wishes, and who are still willing to recognize them as the best, to insist that such wishes will find no earthly object, that the things the searching soul hopes to find can be found only in the soul itself, that sublimity is to be enjoyed strictly in solitude: this is the strain of magnificent loneliness that runs from Cervantes through Rousseau and on to Joyce...

...A woman of the beau monde...

...Third, at 21, was Friederike Brion, a clergyman's daughter of sixteen, whom he loved and left...

...The joy of his eventual arrival makes the trouble of getting there seem not an undue price to pay, but one cannot help wishing nevertheless that someone had found him earlier, aimed him in the right direction, and given him a kick in the pants to speed him on his way...

...It was the first book read by Frankenstein's monster, and remained his favorite, poor thing...

...Boyle examines many poems, and several plays and novels, ultimately to pronounce them subjective or objective or something in between...

...If it is the marvelous he seeks, he must settle for whatever trace of it he might discern in his own nature, or in the natures of those he meets: his hope is to find what he is made of, and to find love, work, and friendship that are worthy of the best in him...

...He finished plays that had languished in his desk for years, 1phigenia and Egmont...

...While having the time of his life, Goethe transformed his new experience and understanding into art...

...One's true regret, of course, is that no messianic bellhop or other agent of fate has arrived to direct oneself to salvation, where one can bask in the warmth of amorfati and recollect without sorrow the past's tortuous ways...

...He demanded that his mother put out three suits of clothing for him every morning, so that he'd have a proper choice of gear...

...The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which made him a European celebrity, retails the pain of a young man who, having failed to establish some abiding spiritual connection to the world, lurches wildly into love with a woman, Charlotte, who is engaged to a stolid, decent man...

...the sight of everything harmonious moves us...

...we fancy we are nearer the home, towards which our best and inmost wishes impatiently strive...

...Unfortunately, the book has been out of print since 1965...

...Chinese porcelain-makers turned out commissions for china embossed with scenes from the novel...

...told me that Goethe was the most handsome, most lively, most natural, mostfiery, most stormy, most gentle, most seductive and for the heart of a woman the most dangerous man she had seen in her life...

...Boyle writes, "He dressed extravagantly, conversed annihilatingly, took a leading part in the traditional uproar before lectures, frequented dubious taverns, and paid court to an (unidentified) society woman of easy virtue...

...the strictures of ordinary life that inhibit the free flow of extravagant feeling...

...Goethe could no longer live a symbolic life, with himself as the reinterpreted Christ-figure at its center, but he had discovered, in a moment of insight, how to transfer that pattern to the world of scientific activity, with the role of the suffering Son given to the observing consciousness that comes innocent into the world, and to the pure light that enlightens it...

...Of the child Goethe, who displayed an early affinity for the un-Christian, Lewes writes that he was "a vigorous logician who thinks for himself—so independent, that at six years of age he doubts the beneficence of the Creator;at seven, doubts the competence and justice of the world's judgment...

...Goethe's youth was not irredeemably serious, however...

...Goethe pursued her in spite of this insuperable obstacle...

...One thousand eight hundred letters and notes remain from the romantic friendship...

...He even took one of her sons into his house and tutored him for three years...

...Yet no one now reads Goethe, who offers those who desire such strength as much of it as one can find in any other man's imagined life...

...Rome my university," he had declared while a student at Strasbourg...

...how the Enlightenment's leveling of intellects drives the man who is, or would be, superior, to cultivate his private passions...

...Lewes writes of this impassioned chase, "Love in the profound, absorbing sense it was not...

...they kept each other amused with amateur theatricals, in which they played the lovers...

...Auden found Goethe's poetic repertoire of styles and tones so fine that the poetry could not adequately be translated...

...BOOK REVIEWS oet, dramatist, novelist, autobiogr- rapher, painter, physicist, botanist, geologist, zoologist, statesman: the man who was all these things was arguably the greatest man of modern times, and that man was Goethe...

...I: THE POETRY OF DESIRE (1749-1790) Nicholas Boyle/Oxford University Press/807 pp...

...Chicaga collapse of the Storm and Stress historicist and realist opposition...

...A year after Werther's publication, Goethe was eager for a change from Frankfurt, and accepted the invitation of the Duke of Weimar to spend a few weeks with him...

...F ortunately, there is a biography of Goethe that better suits the nonacademic reader: The Life of Goethe (1855) by George Henry Lewes, who was George Eliot's lover and London's leading journalist of the time...

...Also, as the Roman Elegies suggest, he enjoyed his sexual initiation during Carnival with the lovely Faustina Antonini, a 24-year-old widow...

...Undogmatic and eager to familiarize himself with the various types of men, Goethe at the University of Leipzig befriended a devout and earnest Christian who belonged to a peculiar cult, and who was shunned for his allegiance: "Goethe was eminently qualified to become the friend of one who held opposite convictions to his own, for his tolerance was large and genuine, and he respected every real conviction...

...the determined misdirection of the course he takes has something both horrible and pitiably ludicrous about it, like the wandering path of a man who is lost in the wilderness but somehow has a suspicion that there is a fine hotel in the vicinity...

...glory of feeling good about themselves...

...Goethe openly acknowledged his debt to the chivalric romances of earlier times...

...So a society doctor had admonished Frau Charlotte von Stein, who nevertheless yielded her heart, if nothing more, to the madly importunate Goethe...