BOOKS
Resisting most temptations
Rupert Christiansen
GOETHE: THE POET AND THE AGE, VOLUME I, THE POETRY OF DESIRE by Nicholas Boyle OUP, £25, pp. 807 The British, I think, long ago decided that Goethe was a bit of a bore, but have been too embarrassed by his reputation elsewhere to admit it. The strenuous mid- Victorian effort (eulogies by Carlyle and Arnold, Lewes's biography, Oxenford's translation of the conversations with Eckermann) to recommend his earnestness and gravitas fell flat before the intoxica- tions of Wagner and Nietzsche; the post- war debate over the 'good German' and the good Germany needed something more immediate and less exceptional than the Sage of Weimar to fuel its argument. For our cultural temper, his ironies are too Olympian, his serenity too smug: a whiff of killer ruthlessness seems to lurk behind it all. Our own sages are less monumental. We have Wordsworth to tell us about the soul maturing through a Romantic concep- tion of Nature, Coleridge to represent polymathic genius, and both of them would be more likely to receive our dinner invita- tions than the stiff-backed author of Torquato Tasso. Goethe is just not very clubbable.
Yet as Nicholas Boyle points out in the introduction to his magnificent biography, there he stands, a pivot of the European idea, with Weimar the Mittelpunkt between Lisbon and Moscow, his birth in 1749 and death in 1832 spanning epic changes to western civilisation. Shouldn't we be taking him in? Might he be worth at least a glass of sherry?
Boyle's case for Goethe is not a head- line-grabbing one. He hasn't uncovered a stash of novel sources, and aspires only to have 'synthesised the syntheses'. He is not straining after a radical re-assessment or pitching in for a hatchet job. The Goethe he presents is not a rat or a phoney. Instead, Boyle has been content to produce a massive and deeply meditated portrait of man and writer, life and works, beautifully — but beautifully — written and com- posed. It provides a richness of context and understanding of Goethe's intellectual development which makes almost all other contemporary runners in the literary field look positively breathless. This authority is not for a moment pompous or (as Matthew Arnold catalogued) harsh, uncouth, diffi- cult, professional or exclusive; it is entirely readable. If his second volume matches the achievement of his first, Boyle will have given us one of the great biographies of the century.
Whether his efforts will bring Goethe the wider affection and attention he currently fails to command is more doubtful. His is not a Goethe romanticised, but a Goethe illuminated by the cool white light which he exalted in his Theory of Colour. How little he seems to suffer, how much he was given: few great artists could claim, for instance, such a sane and happy childhood, with a cultured and measured father of solid means, an exuberantly theatre-loving, story-telling mother, and a companionable sister. Goethe's Bildung was rooted in that soil, with its finely balanced elements of discipline and affection. Out of it grew a clever but not prodigious adolescent who rubbed up against his father in an ordinary way and bridled at the conventional expect- ations.
Boyle deals tactfully but suggestively with the matter of Goethe's faintly arrested sex- uality. He does not quite commit himself to the view that he remained a virgin until the visit to Rome in 1786, but certainly allows the possibility of it. Goethe managed this chastity without ever keeping himself away from women, and the trail of tear-stained girls (like the poor little rich Lili Shonemann to whom he was briefly engaged) he abandoned along the way were victims less of puritanism or lack of self-assurance than of a form of commit- ment-phobia in which marriage was seen as the enemy of promise and fulfilled desire the death of poetry. The alternatives appealed to him little more: the fashion- able Sentimentalism which he adopted in Werther was experienced at arm's length; the equally fashionable libertinism passed him by. He was not apparently one to spend sixpence on half an hour in the stews, and the Higher Friendship (if indeed that is all it was) he enjoyed in Weimar with the conveniently married Charlotte von Stein seems to have satisfied his libido for a surprisingly long time. Only when he reaches Italy, scribbling a memo to himself to read Fanny Hill, does his erotic nature finally come truly alive.
Meanwhile, his mind had long been in a state of blazing energy. The flirtation with alchemy and cabbalism, the emancipation from pietism and ultimately from all forms of Christianity, the impact of the classicism of Winckelmann — all this Boyle explains with patient lucidity. He is particularly helpful on the subject of Herder, whose profound influence on Goethe was felt from the time they met in Strasbourg in 1770. Goethe was barely 21, Herder a more mature and cosmopolitan 26. He showed Goethe his direction, feeding him ideas about the constitution of a 'national cul- ture' and the way a creative individual might relate to it, as well as posing import- ant questions about the origins and funct- ions of language. As a result, Goethe scuttled off to collect folklore in imitation of Bishop Percy and his Reliques and use- fully misread Shakespeare; more lastingly, he found through Herder a body of thought which could replace theology as his fulcrum.
But Goethe was not a composite genius, the sum of his race, milieu, moment, and the books he read. There is much to be said for Boyle's polemical view that 'the Age of Goethe' is 'simply the series of liter- ary and intellectual temptations which, as it happens, Goethe resisted'. His capacity to absorb was countered by a capacity to oppose, and it is this, Boyle believes, which makes him 'the authentic, the classic poet of modernity'. That begs the question of what establishes `modernity'; but Goethe is surely unique in his attitude to the hero fig- ures he creates. Glitz von Berlichingen, Werther, Wilhelm Meister, Faust and Tasso are not literary types or Byronic self- projections as much as figures of self- criticism, their example neither absorbed nor rejected so much as transcended. It is as if Goethe is using literature to get over himself, to teach himself a lesson.
This impulse is evident in his life as much as in his art. He was a man who had written out a life-plan and proceeded to execute it in careful stages. Everything and everybody falls into an allotted place within his own Christ-like conception of his des- tiny. He leaves Frankfurt a literary celebri- ty and settles in the backwater of Weimar, where he turns his mind to administration and natural science; ten years later, he leaves Weimar for Italy, because it is time to turn his body to sensuality; he returns to Weimar, his soul strengthened, his perspec- tives extended, his roots reaffirmed. Experience is just so much fodder; he seems to live only for the greater purpose of his life. It is too much for us to take, this messianic inability to make a false move, and it leaves us incredulous and un- engaged.
And it is why the last section of Boyle's book is the most enthralling: because, in his late thirties, life suddenly curdles on Goethe, and he miscalculates as the pace quickens. He takes as his first mistress Christiana Vulpius, a woman 'spirited, energetic, practical and straightforward' but socially unacceptable at the court of Weimar, who becomes pregnant by him. Goethe decides to 'regularise' their rela- tions and takes her into his house, thus braving a final rift with Charlotte von Stein in what Boyle counts 'among the most ter- rible love letters ever written' (to which his only reply was 'to write on it, in anger, pain, and incredulity the exclamation "O!!!" '). In consequence, his status in Weimar is diminished. The French Revolution breaks out: he turns away to work on his treatise on the metamorphosis of plants and has an apocalyptic vision which refutes Newton's theory of colour (and turned, Boyle thinks, into paranoid obsession). His son, the unsatisfactory August, is born. He returns to Italy, is bored and disenchanted with it, scratching out the bitter and volatile Venetian Epigrams. The Mephistophelean no-saying note is like a boil on his noble brow.
The symbolical life which he had led for 20 years as a secular Son of Man, after casting off the orthodox requirement to live his life in imitation of the Son of God, was by then at an end. The power of natural desire, on which he had relied to give purpose to his life and a seductive fascination to his poetry, had been tamed. The law and the prophets had been fulfilled and the end of it all was social and intellectual isolation and a crying infant next door.
We may still not like Goethe much after this, but at least he has become human. How he reintegrated himself from this alienation — this first back-sliding — will be the subject of Boyle's second volume, for which it is already hard to wait.
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