Goethe, the preeminent literary artist in Germany, is, in many ways, the last fully integrated literary figure for whom literature, art, science, scholarship, and public life came together over a long career as a writer, minister of state, man of science, theater director, and critic. A powerful influence on world literature, Goethe dominated his period as only a few others, such as DANTE [2], MILTON [8], and VOLTAIRE [69], have done.
He achieved greatness in virtually every literary genre: lyrical poetry, drama, and fiction. In doing so, Goethe helped to define the romantic age in his groundbreaking novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, while in Faust he produced one of world literature’s greatest mythic fables that has, like Dante’s The Divine Comedy and CERVANTES’s [11]Don Quixote, fundamentally shaped our imaginative understanding of the human condition. A legend in his lifetime, Goethe is, in the critic Harold Bloom’s terminology, the archetypal “strong poet” who provides points of reference and a source of imitation and refutation to the generations that fol-lowed him.Born in Frankfurt, Goethe studied law, first at the University of Leipzig and, after an interruption from illness, at Strasbourg, where he received a law degree in 1771.
His friendship with J. G. Herder, the principal exponent of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) literary movement, an early flower-ing of German romanticism and reaction to neoclassical thought and art, was a significant influence on Goethe’s first major work, Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a historical drama. A year later, the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther produced a furor of controversy and gave Goethe an international reputation.It is difficult to imagine another single book that has had the comparable impact and influence as Goethe’s epistolary confessions of the radically subjective Werther, whose deep feelings and disappointments lead to release in suicide. A victim of a hopeless love and a dangerously refined sensitivity, Werther is unable to escape his own torment, and Goethe records the progression of Werther’s world-weary suffering, a new subject for the novel.
As Karl Viëtor has argued:Among European novels Werther is the first in which an inward life, a spiritual process and nothing else, is represented, and hence it is the first psychological novel—though naturally not the first in which the inner life in general is seriously dealt with. The conflict between an immoderately burgeoning passion and the ordered world of society is here described, as it were, “from within.” The scene is the soul of the hero. All events and figures are regarded only in the light of the significance they have for Werther’s emotion. All that happens serves but to nourish the absolution of Werther’s emotions—a fatal propensity which swells to a demonic possession and engulfs all other inward forces and possibilities.The novel, which has a strong basis in Goethe’s own experiences, diagnoses his generation’s romantic self-obsession with no social outlets in which to channel spiritual energies. “I am weary of bewailing the fate of our generation of human beings,” Goethe wrote, “but I will so depict them that they may understand themselves, if that is possible, as I have understood them.” As Goethe warned, “the end of this disease is death!
The goal of such sentimental enthusiasm is suicide!” Despite his warning, the novel exposed a style and attitude of self-absorption that Goethe had detected as latent in his generation. In imitation of Werther’s world-weariness, young men began to dress like Goethe’s protagonist in blue cutaways and yellow vest and breeches, to adopt his attitudes, and, indeed, to take their own lives. Goethe felt the need to add to the second edition of the novel Werther’s own admonition, “Be a man, do not follow me.” The novel is remarkable for Goethe’s skill in presenting Werther’s tortured psychology and reflecting the milieu that produced him.
Werther also set the pattern for the melancholy and striving romantic hero that would be echoed most noticeably in the lives and works of BYRON [83] and SHELLEY [77].In 1775, Goethe accepted an invitation from an admirer, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, to serve at court in Weimar. He became a cabinet minister of agriculture, finance, and mines, and was for 10 years the duke’s chief minister. In 1786, Goethe left Germany for a two-year stay in Italy, where he deepened his appreciation of classical art. His earlier romantic attitudes of individualism and freedom matured and led to a heightened awareness of the importance of discipline and universality. This creative tension is balanced in his mature work, including the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) and its sequel Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (1829), which set the model for the bildungs roman, the novel of growth and development; the drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (1788); and Faust (part one was published in 1808; part two after Goethe’s death in 1832).
Besides his continual creative work, including some of the finest lyrical poetry in German literature, Goethe was the director of the state theater for more than 20 years; conducted scientific research in evolutionary botany, anatomy, and the theory of color; and undertook a serious study of non-Western literature. A polymath of extraordinary ability, Goethe was recognized during his lifetime as a sage. A host of visitors, including Napoleon, came to Weimar to pay their respects and to learn from the master. Admiration for Goethe and his works throughout Europe and America contributed greatly to the spread of German ideas and culture worldwide, with profound effects on scholarship, education, and philosophy, as well as literature, throughout the 19th century.Goethe’s greatest achievement, however, is the poetic drama Faust, the conception and composition of which occupied him from his early 20s to the year before he died, when he finally completed the second part of the work. Faust provides a synthesis of all of his works and skills as a poet.
Adapting the medieval legend of the man of intellect who trades his soul for knowledge and power, Goethe turns man’s boundless yearning into the potentially damning but ultimately redeeming factor that earns his salvation, and he creates in the character of Faust a central romantic hero, like Werther, Shelley’s Prometheus, and Byron’s Manfred. Faust represents the individual’s aspiration for transcendence in defiance of all limits.In Goethe’s version, Faust’s demonic bargain, in which Mephistopheles can claim Faust’s soul at the moment of his contentment, turns on the realization that no single experience will be finally satisfying, that aspiration and striving will alone sustain Faust. Goethe further tests Faust’s assertion of the individual’s dominating will with the counterclaim of love in his relationship with Gretchen.Part one of Faust ends with the protagonist suspended between the seemingly irreconcilable poles of the need of self and the importance of the other.
In part two of the drama, the tone shifts to the more directly allegorical and philosophical as Goethe attempts to find a way out of the dilemma and a synthesis between romantic and classical attitudes, between freedom and restraint, liberty and order. Faust discovers his eventual contentment in the continual aspiration of social improvement, in which the individual will finds a worthy object in the world to which to devote its striving energy. Because the improvements Faust desires are always in the process of becoming.
Mephistopheles finally loses his bargain to possess Faust’s soul. Such a bald summary of Goethe’s masterpiece only sketches the barest outline of a work that Goethe created with genius through the complexity of his thinking and the mastery of his poetic expression.Goethe’s greatness as a writer stems from his ability to question his own assumptions and those of his age, and to recast them imaginatively into forms of inquiry. As William James summarized, “He was alive at every pore of his skin, and received every impression in a sort of undistracted leisure; which makes the movement of his mental machinery one of the most extraordinary exhibitions which this planet can ever have witnessed.”
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