In the "holy trinity" of European writing-Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper (as Joyce called them)-the position of Goethe is the least secure. His name is universally known, but in the English-speaking world his work is not widely read. People have heard of Faust and Werther, but who has read the books? Goethe's reputation for "wisdom" hardly helps in a climate where "unmasking" is an intellectual trademark. And everyone is aware of the canonical status Goethe's work enjoyed during the Nazi period. This tells us more about cultural manipulation than it does about him, but it is of such asides that reputations are made. By contrast, Goethe is seen today in Germany as a positive manifestation of national culture-like Beethoven or Mozart-about whom Germans can feel unambivalent. The 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth falls on 28th August. Goethe took his own birthday seriously and enjoyed celebrating it. Whether we should celebrate-and on what grounds-is another matter.
The term "important" is a tricky one; it combines an assessment of historical significance with a more elusive component-continuing value. There is no doubt about Goethe's stature. German literary culture grew up with him. He was the first German to obtain a publishing contract which allowed him to draw substantial wealth from his writing (although it took most of his long life to arrive at this). He has entered idiomatic German; a Gretchenfrage (from the tragic character in Faust) is the German $64,000 question; a page-boy haircut is a Gretchenfrisur. Freud and Nietzsche greatly admired him.
But all this leaves unanswered the question of continuing value and, particularly, of his value outside Germany. Is Goethe a local hero or does he have something to offer the rest of the world? Is he to be studied simply because of the light he sheds on the past or does he have something to say in the modern world as well? This is our Gretchenfrage.
Goethe was born in 1749 into a well-to-do household in Frankfurt. Despite its problems (Goethe senior was a melancholic man), it was a stimulating home. There was plenty of instruction, but nothing too rigid, and much of the time Goethe was left to do as he pleased. In adolescence, Goethe spent almost every evening in the theatre (he obtained a free pass from his maternal grandfather who occupied the highest post in the Frankfurt administration). As a result, he got involved with a low company of local youths. They tried to make use of his high connections for fraudulent purposes; these were foiled, but Goethe's peace of mind was disturbed by the parental anger which followed the exposure of his na?ve involvement.
Perhaps as a result of this, in later life, Goethe retained an indulgent attitude to youthful errors. This emerged as a central theme in Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice Years, which had been in preparation for many years when it appeared between 1795 and 1796-Goethe was nearing 50. The novel follows the loves and adventures of young Wilhelm, who leaves his father's business after a failed love affair to travel with a band of wandering actors and actresses. At first Wilhelm opposes poetry to commerce, feeling that the world of business is inferior to art. But this idealism is mixed with na?vet?-he gives money to untrustworthy associates, and falls for women who turn out to be unsuitable. With experience his ideas change: he renounces the theatre and looks favourably on commerce; he sees the appeal of good domestic management; he takes on responsibility for little Felix, his illegitimate son. This is not a standard Bildungsroman. We are not invited to think that Wilhelm is now fully mature and set for life. Rather, the implication is that change will continue; his current attitudes, even if they are an advance on his earlier ones, do not represent a final accounting with life. He has swung too far in reaction; further adjustment is due.
The book is written with such tact that we do not feel that Wilhelm should have refrained from his adventures, stayed in the family firm, and saved his emotions for more suitable partners-even though we can see these as mistakes. It is natural to make errors-even necessary. Truth, or maturity, cannot be achieved in one go-and perhaps cannot ever be achieved, although we may still move progressively, learning from experience. Goethe provides, in the ambit of an individual life, a version of the thesis Hegel (who knew Goethe well) was to inflate into a general claim about world history. Cultures, Hegel suggests, move from one inadequate conception to another, even though there is a real development. There is a shift from paternalism (for example) to rationalism. Rationalism is full of errors, but it is still a step forward. Goethe and Hegel share an unusual generosity towards confusion and misconception. By construing error and pain as the only possible paths to truth and contentment, they give welcome dignity to the ordinary course of life. But Hegel overplays the hand: he posits a definite end to this process, a time when everything will become clear; and he considers this at the level of the history of the world. Goethe's position is qualified in its optimism and personal in its scope-two good reasons why we should prefer it.
Goethe's approach is also poignantly appropriate to many modern readers. What we often need is a constructive position between self-laceration (I should get it right first time) and denial (mistake? what mistake?). Wilhelm Meister shows a model of human nature that is reassuringly centred on mistakes rather than achievements, failures rather than triumphs. Thus it is a welcome release from the relentless success-worship of our own media culture. But there is nothing "alternative" about Goethe. He is always faithful to the fact that most people want a quiet, responsible and comfortable life. He resides in territory which is familiar but rarely described. It is the territory in which appreciation of the difficulties of living goes along with an unradical approach to values. This is where much of real life happens.
Goethe was uninspired by his legal studies at university, but he was able to pursue other interests with considerable freedom. He had a generous allowance and letters of introduction to the most useful people-who often treated him with generosity. The sociability of 18th-century German bourgeois life is astonishing (and, to the commuting modern whose friends live a tube ride away and must be booked weeks in advance, enviable). He practised drawing, got interested in medical science and flirted with love. His doctorate (a slight affair by today's standards) was granted on the basis of disputation rather than a dissertation, much to the disappointment of his father, who wanted to have the manuscript published.
His first legal post was at the lethargic Imperial Court of Appeal, located in Wetzlar, which had been established originally to resolve disputes between princes. Goethe's stay there provided the material for his first literary success (and it was a massive one) The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe had been greatly attracted to the daughter of one of the Appeal Judges, but she was already happily engaged and (sensibly) he gave up his attachment to her. He also heard the story of a young suicide, a jurist named Jerusalem, with whom he had been acquainted. The novel fuses the two stories. In a series of letters, Werther charts his growing attachment to-and obsession with-a young woman called Lotte, who is engaged to "the best of men." Although she is fond of Werther, his love is not returned; his behaviour becomes strained and hysterical; he dwells on the idea of suicide and the futility of existence; and ends by blowing his brains out, in a climax at once theatrical and tragic. The letters (from Werther to an unnamed friend) are finely realised and wholly plausible.
Reception of the book included a rush of suicides and provoked the simplistic assumption that Goethe had told the story of his own experience-the fictional suicide being seen as a cathartic substitute for his own. In later life, Goethe was plagued by the attention the book received. He was known everywhere as the author of Werther and produced a burlesque poem in which Werther's suicide bid fails comically, he marries Lotte and they joke in happy later life about his youthful follies.
The irony is that far from recommending such extreme action-the Romantic interpretation that it is noble to be like Werther-Goethe actually gives a warning: look, terrible things happen when you get lost in a purely egoistic vision of happiness. He is compassionate, not complicit. Indeed, it is one of Goethe's virtues that he can work simultaneously with an intimate feel for extremes of despair and confusion without holding these up as, somehow, good. He never loses sight of the common sense proposition that after all, we are better off getting on with life. He displays a deep commitment to overcoming rather than wallowing in problems. Although Goethe came to be seen as a champion of the Sturm und Drang movement, it was a role in which he was uncomfortable. With the Romantics he shared an interest in despair, passion and wildness; unlike them, he did not see these as end points clinching the argument with life.
For many of his contemporaries, the most enviable moment of Goethe's life was his invitation to the court at Weimar-extended by the 18-year-old Prince Karl August, Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, who had been impressed by the recent publication of Werther. Goethe was 28. The young duke had only recently taken on the business of ruling and was on the look-out for sympathetic young courtiers to balance the older advisers he had inherited. Goethe's visit soon turned into an appointment to his cabinet, with Goethe gradually taking on wide-ranging administrative responsibility. But the position was also a social one. Goethe was responsible for many of the diversions of the court: writing witty sketches, directing the court theatre. He frequently joined in the young duke's carousing. And he was paid a substantial salary. Who could ask for more?
Weimar's charms, however, must not be exaggerated. It was an impoverished little state. It had almost no industry, and a population of about 100,000. The roads were bad, the court was over-spending and in need of extra funds to repair some grave fire-damage of two years before. Goethe's well-intentioned plan to restore the state finances by reopening the silver mine at nearby Ilmenau incurred great expense over many years, but yielded no return.
After ten years in Weimar-by his late 30s-Goethe was in a distressed state of mind. His poetic output had more or less dried up; he had a number of larger literary projects in hand-including Faust-but seemed unable to make progress with them. He was absorbed in a tight-knit, gossipy court circle in which he often had to act as a mediator between warring factions, and even had to smooth over the relationship between the duke and his neglected duchess. His own emotional life was centred upon Frau von Stein-a chaste and aristocratic bluestocking. She kept a possessive eye upon him, but their relationship remained intellectual and sentimental, in the older sense of the term. (A sweet website, maintained in her name, makes the case against the poet-"I gave you everything, you abandoned me.")
Then, in a remarkable act of self-liberation, Goethe simply ran away. During the summer of 1786-a grey and rainy one-Goethe travelled with the court to Carlsbad and one night, at 3am, without telling anyone, he took the mail coach south and headed for Italy. The description of his journey over the Alps to Verona, then to Venice and on to Rome (his final destination) is among the most attractive of his writings. Goethe travelled without a servant, and incognito. It is an ur-story of taking off, not on a frivolous adventure, but on a journey of self-exploration. He finds the Goethe of sunny skies, fruit ("I long to eat a fig") and above all, freedom. No one had any claims on him. It was the most dramatic instance of what he called "sloughing off a skin"-his way of describing a personal transformation. But what was the new skin? What did Italy do for Goethe?
To put it crudely, Italy meant two things: art and sex. Or, to be more sophisticated, Italy brought a particular, classical conception of life: one in which sex and art encouraged and formed each other. This vision was set out in Roman Elegies-27 shortish poems. When published in the 1790s, they harmed his reputation. They were offensive to "good people," as Goethe put it-avoiding any sarcasm around the word "good." For the same reason, they are among his most accessible poetic works. They tell the story (we all know it) of someone wandering around a great city he has long wanted to visit. Despite studying the guidebook and getting up early to see the sights, he feels left out-and dreams of a love affair with someone who will typify the city. Goethe dreams of a girl who will unlock the domestic life of Rome. And he meets his Faustina. Through his physical relationship with her-which is movingly recounted-his relationship with the city deepens. It gives him a vision of classical culture: far from being a remote arena of learning and scholarly dispute, classicism comes to mean ordinariness taken seriously.
One of the key traditions of German poetry (centring on Klopstock) in the generation before Goethe was sublime in aspiration and religious in motivation-urging the mind to ascend from the present to the immortal, from the petty to the grand. It is a conception of art as an escape from the world. Goethe had struggled against this tradition-clearly it never suited him. But in Rome he finds for the first time a settled alternative. His attraction to what is immediately present to the senses, his devotion to domestic order, and his erotic energy, can be validated as a reincarnation of the classical poet. Art is a means of appreciating, not escaping, the present.
When he returned to Weimar, Goethe renegotiated his arrangements with the duke. He took a mistress, Christiane Vulpius. To outsiders, she seemed a strange choice: uncultivated, almost uneducated. She never mixed in Weimar society. The couple had six children-only the uninspired August survived. Christiane represents a continuation of Rome in Weimar: a simple, sexual, homely woman. But the return was, in other ways, unsatisfactory. Goethe's writing became quieter, less emphatic; he no longer sought to rouse the emotions. He needed a new audience-but all he had was his bemused Weimar circle.
In 1794 Goethe began a friendship with Friedrich Schiller (one of the most underrated "real value" stocks on the intellectual market) which was to last until the latter's early death in 1805. More accurately, Schiller-in a wonderful act of intellectual generosity-commenced the relationship. The two men had been acquainted for some years, although with mutual mistrust. Hoping to benefit from the high position occupied by such a cultivated man, Schiller had moved to Weimar, but Goethe did not respond favourably, and eventually secured Schiller an un-remunerative post at the University of Jena-in order to get rid of him. Goethe disliked Schiller's early, violent and disturbing play, The Robbers. Schiller, who suffered considerable material hardship, found writing a terrible strain and faced political prosecution; he was openly envious of Goethe's ease-his social standing, his material comfort, his (apparently) effortless and spontaneous production.
A brief discussion about botany, on the doorstep of Schiller's house in Jena, highlighted the different casts of their minds. Schiller turned this to account by showing an appreciation of Goethe's mode of thinking, contrasting it with his own, and placing both in a larger historical perspective. Schiller draws a distinction between people whose minds start from the particular and concrete and never lose sight of the answerability of generalisation to particular fact. Goethe, for example, always wanted to find what he called "the primal plant"-not just an idea, but an actual object which would constitute the basic general nature of all plants. The question is not whether Goethe was right in this undertaking, but what it shows about the character of his mind-his dislike of abstraction, his attachment to his own experience and desire always to see things with his own eyes. These are surprisingly unTeutonic qualities for a German cultural hero-Goethe seeming rather closer in type to such a quintessential British figure as David Hume. (The Vicar of Wakefield in which Oliver Goldsmith portrays a kindly Church of England cleric was Goethe's favourite novel.)
Schiller contrasts this with his own mental temper, which seeks incontrovertible and highly generalised starting points, non-experiential in character. But he encouraged Goethe to see himself as a type and thus as someone with a particular cultural mission-namely, to be true to type and to illustrate his nature to the full. It was a friendship which shaped the ambitions of the two men-and a brilliant study in the containment of envy (on Schiller's part).
Schiller was particularly struck by one aspect of Goethe's personality: his many-sidedness. It is a feature of the modern world that we are required to specialise in order to compete or to master the complexity of the world. Collectively, this is a good thing, but individually it is a problem. One aspect of our personality is developed at the expense of others and we become lop-sided. Many-sidedness implies that different aspects of our personality are not only well-developed, but also enjoy a harmonious co-existence. Goethe's love of order-which makes him potentially severe-is tempered by loyalty to past errors; his seriousness is reconciled with worldliness.
The Goethe ideal persists in our own over-specialised world: interdisciplinary studies; the urgency with which modern arts graduates read popular science; the juxtaposition of articles in Prospect. But why does it matter? Goethe says it matters because we misconstrue the significance of any discipline if we pursue it in isolation. "Why does quantum mechanics matter?" is not a question within physics. It can only be addressed by someone who is informed about the topic and also has a perspective on the rest of life. The same holds true for any subject. The more powerful the particular understandings of any discipline are, the more we ought to cultivate a Goethean attitude.
After Schiller's death, Goethe's life remained fairly stable. He devoted himself to scientific research on light and colour-which involved many oddities and unfortunate antipathies (he detested Newton). But the research still has its use (although not as Goethe intended). The Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) remains the most comprehensive study of how people react to colours. Goethe was a wonderful observer of the phenomena of light and colour, but not a great scientist.
It was in his later years that Goethe wrote his autobiographical studies-primarily of his youth, but also of his experiences during the war of 1792-93. The Napoleonic wars disturbed Weimar; Goethe's house was attacked, but stoutly defended by Christiane (Goethe married her three days later). He met the victorious Napoleon-who wanted Goethe to produce dramas worthy of his deeds. Goethe did not take up the offer; nevertheless the great work of his maturity, Faust, has a central character marked by enormous ambition and granted great temporal power.
The Faust story is well known. The ambitious scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, power and pleasure in this life. It is a morality tale showing-in the most dramatic terms-that we should not prefer the short- to the long-term, that it benefits us nothing if we gain the whole world but lose our own soul. In Goethe's hands, the tale changes. We know from the "Prologue," which takes place in heaven, that Faust will not be damned; it is the powers of the devil (Mephistopheles) which are on cosmic trial. The devil is allowed, by God, to grant powers to Faust; God is confident that Faust will-in the end-use those powers creatively. There is no doubt that Mephistopheles can encourage Faust to do terrible things: he seduces Gretchen, a sweet and trusting young woman, who becomes pregnant, is abandoned, kills her child and is herself condemned to death.
It would be folly to pretend to know what such a complex work is really about, but it would be a pity not to try one's hand at interpretation. The play can be seen as Goethe's attempt to show why, despite the ghastly Gretchen sequence, Faust can remain a figure of hope. Goethe is addressing the traditional problem of evil: if we believe that existence is basically benign, how can the fact of evil be accommodated? His terrible behaviour to Gretchen remains Faust's burden, but does not prevent him from using his powers in productive ways. Goethe is saying: of course terrible things happen, and they are not always for the best. But nor do suffering and disaster show that everything is for the worst. Humans are complex and resilient, and we can still get on with other worthwhile things. This is the sanest form of optimism.
Goethe finished Faust only months before his own death, which came in 1832, at the age of 83. His luck persisted into his last years: his mind remained clear, his reputation held up, he made money; he found devoted followers to do his bidding and collate every remaining scrap of his writing and record his conversation. His doctor reports the terror of his last day (22nd March 1832), as Goethe struggled with the violent pain in his chest and his terror of death. He died at noon, in the armchair by his bed. Unable to speak, his fingers traced letters on the rug over his knees, still careful in his punctuation.
As the best writers do, Goethe demonstrates a particular aspect of human nature: one in which curiosity about inner life and the external world, subtlety and common sense, poetic fancy and a drive to impose order, coexist. You do not have to be a Goethean-you do not have to agree with his world-view-in order to want to inhabit (if only for a while) such an attractive environment and to find Goethe's company sympathetic. Goethe may not be a writer to gulp down, but rather someone we want to call upon again and again, whose conversation can be relied upon to be good-humoured, intelligent, wide-ranging, well-informed, intimate, elegant and instructive.
In one of his least known works, The Siege of Mainz, Goethe recounts his experiences with the Prussian forces who retook the city after it had been occupied by the French. In his account of the ravaging of the city, he pauses to recollect that he ensured that the forecourt of the house where he was lodged was kept clean. He could not stop the cannons firing at Mainz cathedral-all the more reason to bring grace and dignity to those things which lie within our grasp. It was a metaphor for his life.
