In 1878 the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold wrote: ‘Goethe is the greatest poet of modern times, not because he is one of the half-dozen human beings who in the history of our race have shown the most signal gift for poetry, but because having a very considerable gift for poetry, he was at the same time, in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.’
If we disregard some dated language (‘race’, ‘man’), Arnold has stated the key reasons why Goethe demands our attention. First, Goethe was a great writer. By ‘poetry’ Arnold means not only lyric poetry, in which Goethe certainly excelled, but literary writing in general. Goethe produced masterpieces in almost every genre: poems on the largest and smallest scale, plays and novels in varied kinds, autobiography, aphorisms, essays, literary and art criticism. Second, Goethe addressed the greatest issues of his—and our—time, and he did so on the basis of unusually wide experience. In private life, he experienced love, marriage, parenthood, friendship, bereavement; in public life, he helped to govern a country (admittedly a very small one) and saw at first hand the horrors of war—a battle, a chaotic retreat, and later the insolence of occupying troops. He never considered becoming a professional writer; for a long time his ambitions were set on visual art, and throughout his life he probably devoted as much time to the study of the natural world as he did to writing.
Goethe claims our attention primarily as a supreme writer, with an exceptional amount of interesting material to write about. I stress this because the image persists of Goethe as a distant and, nowadays, unexciting Victorian sage, and also as a serene Olympian figure above ordinary human passions. Nothing could be more false: Goethe assumed a calm pose precisely in order to control his turbulent emotional experience; and his approach to life was wholly individual. Both in action and thought, he defied convention. He scandalized contemporaries by living for many years in a loving relationship with a woman he was not married to; and on every issue, as Arnold rightly says, Goethe asks implicitly: ‘But is it so? Is it so for me?’. However, though Goethe’s essays and aphorisms are rewarding, his main works are literature, and they offer the complexity, the clash of different perspectives, the contradictions, and the avoidance of easy answers, that are characteristic of great literature.
Goethe’s works inevitably bear the stamp of the world he lived in. In his youth, we find him chafing against the petty restrictions of the old régime in Germany; in his extreme old age, we find him considering the gains and losses of modernization, and imagining projects of social reform and technical progress. He was deeply marked by living through the French Revolution and the twenty-plus years of war that followed it. Intellectually, he was shaped by the Enlightenment, and by its commitment to understanding the world by means of empirical and historical study, though he rejected the egalitarianism and irreligion of the Enlightenment’s radical wing.
In Germany, Goethe has long been an iconic figure. Criticism of him sometimes arouses fury. This has not always been the case. In his lifetime, his opposition to trends such as Romanticism and German nationalism, and the frequent difficulty of his later works, made him seem marginal. His supposedly immoral domestic life, his detachment from Christianity, his political conservatism, and his employment at a princely court, provoked many attacks. ‘Since I began to feel, I have hated Goethe’, wrote the left-wing radical Ludwig Börne in 1830; ‘since I began to think, I have known why.’ It was the official intellectuals of the German Empire, founded in 1871, who elevated Goethe into a cult figure and artificially smoothed his image.
The present book is not a hagiography, nor an attempt at debunking. It is a personal book, in which, without forcing my presence on the reader, I have tried to express my own views about why Goethe matters and why his main works remain endlessly rewarding. I do not offer him as a universal genius or an infallible sage: his achievement in science seems questionable, and his political views have only limited value for the present day. Nevertheless, he was more than just an author: his literary works are intimately connected with his autobiographical and scientific writings, his letters and his many recorded conversations; to explore his immense oeuvre (40 stout volumes, including commentary, in the latest edition) is like exploring a world. This book is intended to help readers into that world.
In quoting Goethe’s poems, I have mostly given unambitious literal prose translations, but there are a few instances where no translation can suggest the dignified movement, or the extreme concision, of the original, and in these cases I have reproduced Goethe’s German along with a prose translation.
I am very grateful to Matthew Bell, Kevin Hilliard, and Katharine Nicholas for reading the whole of this book in draft, and to Barry Nisbet and Jim Reed for reading parts of it. Their comments have been invaluable. The opinions expressed here are my own, as are any surviving mistakes.