Chapter 3
Classical art and world literature
The visual arts were as important to Goethe as literature. As a young man he was unsure whether to become a poet or a painter. Until 1788 he probably spent more time sketching, and learning other artistic techniques, than he spent writing, and during his two-year stay in Italy he devoted himself whole-heartedly to the study and practice of the visual arts, though he found time also to complete the still unfinished literary works that he had brought with him.
Goethe’s knowledge of art and literature was wide-ranging, but in both he came to believe that the works produced by the ancient Greeks formed a standard that could never be surpassed. In art he explored especially the classical tradition that descended via the Renaissance to the neoclassicism of the 18th century. In literature, though he read and studied Homer intensively, his taste was much wider. Not only did he read easily in French, Italian, and English as well as Latin and Greek, but as a young man we find him acquiring scraps of Gaelic in order to appreciate Ossian and exploring Serbian ballads, while in his later life he eagerly read translations of the Asian texts that scholars were making available to Europe—novels from China, epics and plays from India, and, above all, the Arabic and Persian poetry that would inspire his great lyrical collection, the West-östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan, a ‘divan’ being a collection of poetry).
Goethe and visual art
The German language distinguishes Augenmenschen (eye-people) and Ohrenmenschen (ear-people). Although Goethe appreciated music, and was a competent pianist, he was emphatically an Augenmensch. He was also from an early age familiar with painters. His father commissioned many paintings from local Frankfurt artists, whom the young Goethe saw at work and got to know. Goethe came to see the world with a painterly eye: he speaks of ‘my tendency to look at the world through the eyes of the painter whose pictures I have seen last’ (Italian Journey, 8 October 1786). Hence in Venice, crossing the lagoon in brilliant sunshine, he felt as though he were looking at a bright and colourful Venetian painting.
Might Goethe himself have become a major artist? It is unlikely. His sketches, of which some 3,000 survive, are talented and sensitive, but he himself admitted their lack of ‘creative power’, and late in life he described them as insubstantial: ‘I had a certain fear of letting the objects make their full impact on me’, he told Eckermann (10 April 1829). In his fictional conversation about art, ‘The Collector and his Circle’ (1799), he characterized a type of artist, the ‘sketcher’, who addresses the spirit rather than the senses: Art should not speak only through the external senses to the mind, it should also satisfy the senses. Then the mind may participate and grant its approval. But the Sketcher addresses the mind directly, thereby seducing and delighting inexperienced people.
It was essential for Goethe that art should be solid, substantial, and satisfying to the eye. In his youth, encouraged by the Frankfurt artists, he preferred the realism of Dutch painting, as opposed to the often playful, extravagant, other-worldly style of the many Baroque churches and palaces throughout southern Germany. The quality he admired was truth to nature, as when Rembrandt, in The Adoration of the Shepherds, shows the Holy Family in a convincingly humble stable, which the shepherds are entering with the help of a lantern.
Of Goethe’s early writings on art, however, the most original and the most untypical is his lyrical essay on Strasbourg Cathedral, published in 1772 as ‘On German Architecture’, and dedicated to the memory of the medieval architect Erwin von Steinbach. At a time when Gothic architecture was still generally thought to be barbarous, Goethe perceived the harmony and proportion underlying the cathedral’s apparent disorder. It had the same kind of unity as a natural organism: ‘As in the works of eternal nature, everything is formed, down to the merest thread, and everything serves a purpose in relation to the whole.’ In seeing great art as shaped by natural laws, Goethe was here anticipating a major theme of his later aesthetic writings. But in celebrating the cathedral as proceeding from ‘a strong, rugged German soul’, and mistakenly assuming that Gothic art originated in Germany, Goethe was voicing a nationalism that flourished in 1770s Germany, in reaction against the excessive prestige of French culture, but that he would ever afterwards oppose. ‘Of German Architecture’ is a dead end in his works, for he never again wrote about medieval architecture, but it was a path-breaking and influential text in the revival of interest in Gothic architecture pioneered by the Romantics and put into practice by such Victorian architects as Augustus Pugin (1812–52).
Classicism
Goethe’s visit to Italy in 1786–8 marked a turning-point in his life in many ways—not least in his appreciation of art. Living amid Roman remains and Renaissance masterpieces, Goethe was converted to classicism: all artistic greatness came ultimately from ancient Greece.
The enthusiasm for the Greeks that seized late 18th-century Germany has been called ‘the tyranny of Greece over Germany’, but might rather be described as the liberating influence of a foreign culture. It goes back to the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68). Coming from a modest background in Prussia, and largely self-taught, Winckelmann converted to Catholicism in order to pursue his studies in Rome, where he enjoyed the patronage of several prominent cardinals and art lovers. His main work was a History of Ancient Art (1764). Goethe, as a student in Leipzig, took classes in drawing from a friend of Winckelmann’s, Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717–99), who advocated classicism in art. He hoped to meet, or at least see, Winckelmann when the latter revisited Germany in 1768, but to widespread shock Winckelmann was murdered by a thief during his journey.
Goethe paid a tribute to Winckelmann by writing a biographical essay as a preface to an edition of Winckelmann’s letters. He described Winckelmann as by temperament a Greek and a pagan, hence having an intuitive affinity with the ancients and their art, and as a truthful and upright character. He sympathetically acknowledged Winckelmann’s homosexuality, remarking that whereas moderns invest their emotions in the relationship between a man and a woman, the Greeks invested theirs in passionate male friendships, and that Winckelmann was a true Greek not least in finding friendship and beauty combined in his relationships with handsome young men. This essay, which must impress us by revealing Goethe’s generous tolerance in sexual matters, scandalized contemporaries above all by its evident sympathy for paganism and by thus confirming Goethe’s rejection of Christianity.
As this tribute shows, classicism meant for Goethe far more than an artistic style. The Greeks represented for him a way of life that was freer, more spontaneous, closer to the senses, less intellectualized than the modern world. The Greeks cultivated the body equally with the mind; they invented the gymnasium as well as the academy. Hence their art excelled in portraying humanity in its greatest and noblest forms. This of course implied a hopelessly idealized view of the Greeks, ignoring slavery, the oppression of women, genocidal warfare, and the tendency of democracy to become mob rule, but it became an educational orthodoxy in 19th-century Germany.
In Italy, Goethe was surrounded by classical art going back to Greek models. The key moment in his conversion to classicism was his encounter with the classical architecture of Andrea Palladio (1508–80). In Vicenza, where he arrived on 19 September 1786, he was astounded first by Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico, then by the Villa Rotonda. The latter, on a hilltop just outside Vicenza, unusually has a classical porch on each of its four sides, from which the occupant can survey all the surrounding countryside, and gains added grandeur from being surmounted by a dome. ‘The more one studies Palladio,’ wrote Goethe later, ‘the more one is staggered by this man’s genius, mastery, richness, versatility and grace.’ The Palladian style would shape many neoclassical building projects, especially in 18th-century England and America, including Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
However, Palladio, who relied heavily on the Roman treatise on architecture by Vitruvius, was at several removes from actual Greek buildings. Goethe never visited Greece, but he encountered authentic Greek temples at Paestum in southern Italy. The three massive Doric temples, dating from the 6th century bce, are nowadays handily close to a railway station, but in Goethe’s day one had to make an arduous journey through swamps populated by water-buffalo, and on getting there he felt ‘stupefaction’ at finding himself ‘in a world which was completely strange to me’, ‘offensive and even terrifying’ (Italian Journey, 23 March 1787). The huge, chunky temples were so different from the slender columns that Goethe associated with classical architecture that it was over an hour before he could feel reconciled to them.
Another overwhelming experience was Goethe’s increasing acquaintance with Raphael, whom he, like many contemporaries, regarded as the supreme Renaissance painter. ‘If one encounters a work by Raphael,’ he writes after seeing a St Agatha ascribed to him in Bologna (in fact by the Baroque painter Guercino), ‘one is at once healed and happy’ (Italian Journey, 19 October 1786). Raphael exemplified the best relation modern art could have to the Greeks. He did not imitate the Greeks (and could not, since ancient Greek paintings have perished), but he created with the easy mastery that distinguished the Greeks. ‘Here’, Goethe wrote in 1818, ‘we have a talent that sends us fresh water from the primal source. He never imitates the Greeks, but he feels, thinks, acts, just like a Greek.’ Goethe concludes: ‘Everyone should be a Greek in his own way—but he should be one!’
While in Italy, Goethe was himself diligently drawing and painting, and enjoying the company of living artists. The German artists whom he got to know in Rome and Naples included the internationally famous Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807), a Swiss painter who had long lived in London and been a founder member of the Royal Academy; the landscape painter Philipp Hackert (1737–1807), whose biography Goethe wrote; and the portraitist Wilhelm Tischbein (1751–1829). Tischbein is famous for his painting Goethe in the Campagna, in which Goethe, wearing a white travelling cloak and a broad-brimmed hat, reclines on a rock, with classical ruins in the background (though if you look closely, the artist seems to have given Goethe two left feet). Goethe’s interest in art was never that of an antiquarian or a connoisseur; it was always linked to practice and production.
The aesthetics of classicism
Back in Germany, Goethe eventually formed an alliance with Schiller to raise the standard of art and literature, which they thought were in deep decline. They did this through a series of literary journals—Schiller’s Die Horen (1795–7), Goethe’s Die Propyläen (1798–1800), and later Goethe’s Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity, 1816–32). It was an uphill struggle: the journals found few subscribers and not enough contributors; Schiller, Goethe, and Goethe’s close friend the Swiss art historian Heinrich Meyer (1760–1832), provided much of the copy themselves. Goethe once gloomily compared their campaign to the unsuccessful attempt by the Emperor Julian the Apostate to roll back the triumph of Christianity.
However, Goethe and Schiller, writing against their times, produced not only a body of drama and poetry that has made Weimar classicism into one of the high spots of German literature, but also wide-ranging and profound theories of art. Art theory, or aesthetics, has been a constant preoccupation of German philosophy ever since Alexander Baumgarten originated the term ‘aesthetics’ in 1750. From Kant and Hegel down to Adorno and Gadamer, most German philosophers have written about art theory. Goethe was perhaps too modest about his philosophical abilities; from his scattered writings, and from his rich correspondence with Schiller, one can make out an aesthetic theory, which can be summarized as follows.
Art imitates nature, but does not copy it. That art reflected nature was an 18th-century commonplace. Goethe’s early conviction that art must be true to nature is part of this doctrine, and he retains it, but within a much more ambitious theory. The artist has a duty to depict nature accurately. Hence he must study the anatomy of the human body, as the great Renaissance artists did. But this does not mean that the artist merely copies nature. That would be what Goethe and Schiller disapprovingly call ‘naturalism’. It is clear that art often pleases us by departing from nature: thus in opera people sing their conversations, which does not happen in real life, but nobody minds.
Art does not copy nature, because art and nature are radically different. Inferior artists aim at the reality of nature, genuine artists aim at the truth of art. One has to realize that artistic truth (‘das Kunstwahre’) differs entirely from natural truth. For, besides imitating nature, the artist selects and composes: ‘the true connoisseur sees not only the truthful imitation, but also the excellent selection, the ingenuity of the composition, the ideal character of the little world of art’. When the artist chooses a natural object to depict, it no longer belongs to nature, for the artist creates it ‘since he extracts from it what is significant, characteristic, interesting, or rather confers their higher value on them’. Art does not just imitate the objects we see around us, but shows nature at its best: hence the artist imposes on the human figure ‘the more beautiful proportions, the nobler forms, the higher character’.
If art does not imitate the world around us, what does it imitate? Here Goethe is—as he readily admitted—indebted to the aesthetic thought of Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–93), whom he got to know in Rome. Moritz had struggled up from dreadful poverty (described in his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser, 1785–90) to become a respected and versatile educator, psychologist, and philosopher. In 1789 Goethe published a sympathetic review of Moritz’s treatise On the Imitation of the Beautiful, consisting largely of a summary. Moritz’s theory of art is basically Neoplatonic: it maintains that all beauty is a reflection of the highest beauty. The highest beauty is embodied in the world as a whole, which is coherent and self-contained. Every beautiful object is a miniature version of the highest beauty, and hence likewise complete in itself. The artist, who has the gift of perceiving beauty, wants not just to perceive it but also to attain it, and the way to attain it is by imitating it. Hence imitation is central to Moritz’s theory; but imitation, not of external nature, but of the highest beauty. The artist who intuits the beautiful can form a beautiful object by means of his innate shaping power. Hence Goethe quotes from Moritz the sentence: ‘The born artist is not satisfied with contemplating nature, he must imitate her, strive after her.’ And what the artist thus produces is a little world in itself, a self-contained object with its own internal coherence.
The work of art shows itself to be coherent and self-contained by its symmetry. It forms a pattern which is not derived from nature but imposed by the artist. And the presence of symmetry explains why even a representation of painful and shocking things can cause aesthetic pleasure. Goethe’s example is the Laocoon, a sculptural group mentioned by ancient writers and actually dug up in Rome in 1506. It depicts the episode in Virgil’s Aeneid in which the Trojan priest Laocoon, who has tried to warn his fellow-citizens against the Trojan Horse, is attacked, along with his two sons, by two gigantic snakes emerging from the sea. The Laocoon group was the subject of a famous treatise (1766) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) and of much further discussion, but while Lessing used it to illustrate what could be depicted in visual art as opposed to writing, Goethe is interested in the aesthetic representation of pain. One of the sons is being encircled by a snake, while the other snake is biting the father in the thigh. The sculptor, according to Goethe, has chosen the moment in the struggle which permits the greatest variety of contrasts and gradations and invites the greatest range of different emotions in the spectator. Thus, despite its painful subject, the Laocoon group is a self-contained, symmetrical, richly patterned and satisfying work of art.
Being a world in itself, the work of art can occasionally go beyond nature. Goethe sometimes expresses this by saying that the artist is also a poet. Thus in the essay ‘Ruisdael as Poet’ he maintains that the Dutch artist Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9–82) was not only faithful to nature, but used his poetic imagination to make his landscapes simultaneously real and ideal: ‘the artist, feeling purely and thinking clearly, showing himself to be a poet, achieves a perfect symbolism’. In 1827 he discussed with Eckermann a painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Return from the Fields, in which close inspection reveals that the light is falling in two different directions. Goethe justifies this contradiction as being ‘higher than nature’. Of course the artist must depict nature faithfully: for example, he must not change the anatomy of an animal. ‘But in the higher regions of artistic activity, when a picture becomes an independent image, he has freer play, and here he may have recourse to fictions, as Rubens has done with the double lighting in his landscape’ (to Eckermann, 18 April 1827). The great artist can show his creative individuality in his work.
At its greatest, art is nature. Although the two are distinct, in classical art they coincide. Great art has the inevitability that natural objects have: it has to be the way it is. ‘These masterpieces of man were brought forth in obedience to the same laws as the masterpieces of nature. Before them, all that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses: there is Necessity, there is God’ (Italian Journey, 5 September 1787). After seeing Raphael’s Transfiguration in a Roman convent, Goethe is convinced that ‘like nature, Raphael is always right, and most profoundly so when we understand him least’ (Italian Journey, December 1787).
These theoretical reflections are always prompted by specific works of art, and can be checked against the experience of art. In the introduction to the first issue of his journal, Die Propyläen, Goethe, having set out his views, adds that all the maxims about art he has expressed must be put to a practical test. It is almost impossible to reach agreement on theoretical principles, but one can very quickly find out what works or doesn’t work. Not surprisingly, Goethe excels in art appreciation. Scattered through his writings and conversations are many sensitive, lovingly detailed descriptions of such paintings as Leonardo’s Last Supper, Andrea Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar, and works by Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Caspar David Friedrich, and Eugène Delacroix. Nor is it surprising that Goethe enthusiastically collected art, including plaster casts of famous sculptures and copies of paintings. His collection contains over 26,500 items, comprising drawings, paintings, coins, gems, medals, sculptures, porcelain, and much else. A selection is nowadays displayed to the public in Goethe’s house on the Frauenplan in Weimar (see Figure 6).
6. Goethe’s house on the Frauenplan in Weimar.
Classicism or Romanticism?
By now the reader may be surprised to find Goethe so firmly associated with Classicism. Literary histories written in English sometimes assign him to the Romantic movement; Werther often ranks among the founding texts of Romanticism; and the story of the eternally unsatisfied Faust seems an archetypally Romantic narrative.
However, there is no contradiction here. Period terms such as Romanticism are simply a convenient way for historians to arrange writers in groups. They do not express any actual Zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the age’; they are at best a necessary over-simplification of the complex facts of history; and they do not always correspond to how writers thought of themselves. None of the British ‘Romantic’ poets from Wordsworth to Byron called himself a Romantic, whereas the term was used by the writers, centring on the Schlegel brothers, who were active in Jena (near Goethe’s Weimar) from about 1800 onwards. German literary historians use the term ‘Sturm und Drang’ for an earlier phase (often seen as anticipating Romanticism) when young writers, including Goethe, challenged literary and social convention, exalted passion above reason, wrote realist dramas in supposedly Shakespearean form, admired folk poetry, and advocated a popular German art as against a courtly art based on French neoclassical models. Werther, which exalts passion (but also warns against its excesses), belongs to this period.
The ‘Sturm und Drang’ Goethe was also an enthusiast for Shakespeare. In 1771 he gave a lecture on Shakespeare’s name-day, 14 October, praising him as the poet of nature, in contrast to the artificial drama of France. His early play Götz von Berlichingen, inspired by Shakespeare’s history plays, gives a broad picture of early 16th-century Germany, stretching over several decades and with innumerable changes of scene; horsemen ride across the stage, a castle is besieged, a soldier drowns in a swamp. The play was influential: not only did it initiate a German fashion for dramas and tales about medieval knights, but it was translated into English (very inaccurately) by Walter Scott and showed how a panorama of a past era might be presented in fiction, as Scott would do in Ivanhoe and many other historical novels.
For the young Goethe, poetry was the voice of the people. Encouraged by his friend, the clergyman and critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), whom he met in Strasbourg and for whom in 1776 he would procure a position in Weimar, Goethe collected folk-songs among the German-speaking farmers of Alsace, and himself wrote poems in popular styles such as ‘Heidenröslein’ (later set to music by Schubert and others). Sharing the general enthusiasm for James Macpherson’s ‘Ossian’, Goethe obtained the English text, studied the specimens of Gaelic which Macpherson had appended to it, and made his own translation of them. When he encountered a Serbian ballad with a German translation, he made his own version, using the Serbian text to get a sense of the rhythm; the result, ‘Lament of the Noble Wives of Azan Aga’, was included by Herder in his collection of folk-songs from around the world.
When the German Romantics came on the scene, Goethe was reserved. He and Schiller regarded the Schlegel brothers primarily as critics, occasionally profound but often uninteresting and sometimes spiteful. In the late 1790s Goethe was intent on a study of Homer, and on working out the structural features which distinguished epic from drama. The Romantics, by contrast, were exploring medieval art and literature, with an increasing interest in the Catholic religiosity that underpinned them. Goethe was broad-minded enough to acknowledge the good qualities of many Romantic writers and painters, and from 1810 was a close friend of the art historian Sulpiz Boisserée who helped to revive interest in Gothic architecture. Nevertheless, he could not stand the ‘neo-Catholic sentimentalism’ that so many Romantics promoted, and the tales of terror by Romantic writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) struck him as pathological and repellent. It remains surprising that while he was writing Elective Affinities in 1808–9 Goethe had as a house guest the Romantic playwright Zacharias Werner, an erratic character who soon afterwards converted to Catholicism and ended up as a fashionable preacher in Vienna; the supernatural suggestions in the novel have been ascribed to Werner’s influence. Goethe’s last word on the subject is reported by Eckermann (2 April 1829):
I call the classical that which is healthy, and the romantic that which is sick. And the Nibelungenlied [the German medieval epic] is as classical as Homer, for both are healthy and sound. Most modern work is romantic, not because it is new, but because it is feeble, sickly and sick, and the ancient is classical, not because it is old, but because it is strong, fresh, happy and healthy. If we distinguish the classical and the romantic by such qualities, we shall soon be clear in our minds.
Classicism, for Goethe, was no mere theory. It had to issue in literary creation. As a dramatist, he turned his back on the Shakespearean form of Götz and adopted classical form for his plays Iphigenie in Tauris (completed in Italy, 1786–7) and Torquato Tasso (1790—both to be discussed in future chapters). But this did not mean returning to Greek drama. With their five-act structure, stylized blank-verse dialogue, small cast, and intense concentration achieved by strictly observing the unities of time and place, these plays follow the rules of drama prescribed by neoclassical critics almost as closely as the dramas of Jean Racine a century earlier. And, as with Racine, they use classical concentration to achieve dramatic tension and rich psychological subtlety.
Similarly, Goethe’s studies of Homer made him want to write a Homeric epic. But his attempt at an epic poem on the death of Achilles, the Achilleis (1799), faltered after one—admittedly impressive—canto. He had far greater success with Hermann und Dorothea (1797), where German small-town life is depicted in Homeric verse which provides both epic dignity and humorous irony. Goethe realized that one could not simply recreate classical literature: in adopting classical forms, one had ironically to acknowledge one’s own modernity and hence one’s distance from the ancient world.
World literature
Goethe’s curiosity about literature always extended well beyond Germany. Late in life he uttered the famous dictum: ‘National literature no longer means much, the age of world literature is at hand’ (to Eckermann, 31 January 1827). He continued to believe that ancient Greek literature represented an absolute standard. But he was anxious to appreciate what was excellent in every accessible literature. For this purpose, Goethe even around the age of 80 still kept up with contemporary literature in French, Italian, and English, reading literary reviews from various countries to inform himself. He valued highly the work of cultural intermediaries such as Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who translated Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship into English, along with many German Romantic texts, and wrote a biography of Schiller. The two had a cordial correspondence; Goethe even wrote Carlyle a reference when the latter applied unsuccessfully for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews.
Goethe’s literary tastes were wide-ranging but not omnivorous. When in Italy he enjoyed annoying the Italians by disparaging their national poet, Dante: ‘I had never been able to understand how people could take the trouble to read these poems. I thought the Inferno absolutely horrible, the Purgatorio ambiguous, and the Paradiso boring’ (Italian Journey, July 1787). His early enthusiasm for Shakespeare was qualified by his belief—common at that time—that Shakespeare’s plays were better read than performed. As director of the Weimar Court Theatre, therefore, Goethe paid less attention to Shakespeare than to the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), whose highly visual theatrical style reconciled Goethe even to the intensely Catholic character of his plays. Among contemporary writers, Goethe shared the Europe-wide enthusiasm for Byron, but the great discovery of his later years was Alessandro Manzoni, particularly Manzoni’s historical novel The Betrothed (1827), which, he said, ‘surpasses everything we know in this genre’ (to Eckermann, 18 July 1827)—hence, by implication, was better than the hugely popular historical novels by Scott. With younger German writers, Goethe’s judgement was less sure. He has often been blamed for disparaging works by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1844) and Heinrich von Kleist (1778–1811) whom posterity has placed among the leading writers of their age; but the poems Hölderlin showed him were minor work, while his refusal to stage Kleist’s Penthesilea is more than understandable, since this great but shocking tragedy, in which unhappy love culminates in cannibalism, could only be appreciated against the background of the 20th-century theatre of cruelty.
Goethe’s reading extended to the literatures of Asia, which were becoming available through translations, especially by the great philologist Sir William Jones, whom Goethe called ‘the incomparable Jones’, and who translated from Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit. Goethe shared the general enthusiasm especially for the Sanskrit play Sakontala (by Kālidāsa, c.400 ce), which had been translated into English by Jones and thence into German by Georg Forster. He wrote a quatrain in praise of this play’s immense charm. Late in life we find Goethe telling Eckermann that he has been reading and enjoying a Chinese novel (31 January 1827); this appears to have been a 17th-century romance entitled, in the English version Goethe used, Chinese Courtship in Verse, but he seems to have read at least two other Chinese novels in English or French translations. These translations were important, not only because they made unknown masterpieces available in Europe, but because they combated Eurocentrism by revealing the richness of the ancient cultures of the Middle and Far East.
With his hands-on approach, Goethe could not read foreign literatures without a creative response, which often took the form of translations. He translated directly from French, Italian, and English (including the first five stanzas of Byron’s Don Juan), and from French versions of modern Greek heroic ballads and South American songs. He made his own versions of Middle Eastern texts—extracts from the Koran, the pre-Islamic poems known as the Mu’allaqat, the Song of Solomon from the Old Testament—by drawing on Latin, German, and increasingly English translations. Translation became creative adaptation when in 1828 Goethe published, as ‘Chinese–German Seasons and Times of Day’, fourteen short poems inspired by Chinese models.
Although most of Goethe’s translations are short, he deserves credit as a cultural mediator for two major achievements. He translated in 1803 the autobiography of the Italian Renaissance goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71) and soon afterwards the satirical novel in dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew) by Denis Diderot (1713–84). The manuscript of the latter, unpublished during Diderot’s lifetime, found its way by a roundabout route to Schiller, who persuaded Goethe to translate it in 1804–5. Both texts focus on talented misfits: Cellini is constantly falling out with his employer, the Pope, who values his abilities but finds him an impossible person; the Nephew refuses to compromise with conventional society and relentlessly attacks its beliefs. Did these translations enable Goethe, a mainstay of courtly society who defied its conventions by his relationship with Christiane Vulpius, to express his other, anti-social self?
The West-Eastern Divan
The delighted exploration of a foreign culture, and the liberating exploration of an alternative self, are undertaken in the great collection of Orientalizing poetry that Goethe published in 1819. In 1814 he read the translation made by the Austrian diplomat Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall of the Divan by the 14th-century poet Hafiz. This prompted Goethe to seek further translations from Persian and Arabic literature and find out all he could about it, then to write his own poems.
From Hammer-Purgstall’s introduction, Goethe learnt that Muhammad Shemseddin, known as Hafiz because he had learnt the Koran by heart, lived all his life in the Persian city of Shiraz; that he belonged to an order of Sufi mystics; that he charged his co-religionists with hypocrisy because they disapproved of his hedonistic poems about wine and love; that he enjoyed the protection of successive princes; and that when Timur (Tamerlane, 1336–1405) conquered Persia, he sent for the then elderly Hafiz, praised him, and treated him kindly. Parallels between Hafiz and Goethe were numerous: Goethe had lived for almost forty years, with just one break, in Weimar, supported by a prince; he was attacked by the religious; and, like Hafiz, he lived in an age of upheaval which had been going on since 1789. So in one sense the Divan represents Goethe’s flight from modern Europe, increasingly dominated by warfare and nationalism, into the older civilization of the Orient. Hence the opening poem is called ‘Hegire’, after Muhammad’s flight (hejira) from Mecca to Medina in the founding year of the Muslim calendar. But in other ways the world of Hafiz recreates Goethe’s. Timur features in several poems, and others refer pointedly to ‘tyrants’ and ‘conquerors’, keeping us in mind of Napoleon, who in 1808 had summoned Goethe to meet him as Timur did Hafiz.
Although Goethe found in Hafiz a kindred spirit, he does not identify with him. Nor does he ‘appropriate’ the Orient, professing knowledge of it and hence virtual power over it, as Western writers on Asia have in recent decades been charged with doing. Rather, he explores the Middle East, feeling his way into it and suggesting analogies with his own world. Thus the poetic voice of the Divan conducts an imaginary interview with Hafiz, asking the meaning of his name, and remarking that he too, however sceptical, is deeply impregnated with his own holy scripture. Some of Hafiz’s traits are ascribed to the persona of Hatem, the elderly, white-haired man who feels rejuvenated by his love for Zuleika. Hafiz’s tense relationship with the Islamic authorities provides another affinity: Goethe doubts his supposed mysticism and portrays him as a hedonist, enjoying himself with wine, women, and his handsome young cupbearer. In conversation Goethe referred to Hafiz as ‘a second Voltaire’.
The religious authorities are often present. Goethe versifies an actual fatwa, reported by Hammer-Purgstall, which diplomatically concluded that Hafiz’s poems, though mostly commendable, contained ‘some trifles beyond the boundaries of the law’. The Hafiz of the poems is happy in the earthly world without being devout, and hopes that the poet’s eloquence will gain him access to Paradise. Meanwhile, Goethe subtly undermines the authority of Islam (with Christianity in mind) by introducing the legends and fairy-tales of which Muhammad, according to Goethe’s explanatory notes, disapproved. We hear of Chiser, the green-clad nature-spirit who makes the earth fertile, and of the four women and four animals who have been admitted to Paradise. Goethe also celebrates the nature-worship of the ancient Persians, who venerated the sun, and inserts many significant allusions to the sun and fire, thus subtly undermining later theological systems. The famous poem about death and rebirth, ‘Selige Sehnsucht’ (Blessed Yearning), differs from both Christianity and Islam in hinting at a transmigration of the soul through fire to a higher form of being.
The physical world of the poems is sensuous and luxurious. Against the background of the desert, traversed by merchants’ caravans from ‘Hindustan’ to the Red Sea, and from Bukhara to Arabia, we imagine cities with bazaars, baths, and taverns, and luxurious palaces where an avenue lined by cypresses leads to a fountain. The hoopoe (which according to the Koran bore a message from the Queen of Sheba to Solomon) may cross one’s path, the bulbul (Persian nightingale) sings in the garden, where roses and lilies grow. Jewels, spices, and perfumes—ambergris, musk, attar of roses—complete the atmosphere of luxury. Altogether the Divan is a veiled protest against the Christian tradition of disparaging the physical, earthly world in favour of an unknown spiritual realm.
Being ‘west-eastern’, the Divan contains many anachronistic, playful allusions to Western culture. In one poem, quoted here to illustrate the simplicity and concision Goethe attains, classicism is invoked, set against its opposite, and the two reconciled in a higher synthesis:
Lied und Gebilde
Mag der Grieche seinen Thon
Zu Gestalten drücken
An der eignen Hände Sohn
Steigern sein Entzücken;
Aber uns ist wonnereich
In den Euphrat greifen,
Und im flüssgen Element
Hin und wider schweifen.
Löscht ich so der Seele Brand
Lied es wird erschallen;
Schöpft des Dichters reine Hand
Wasser wird sich ballen.
Song and Form
Let the Greek mould his clay into shapes and take ever-increasing delight in the son of his own hands. || But to us it is bliss to dip our fingers into the Euphrates and to drift to and fro in the liquid element. || When I have thus quenched my soul’s fire, my song shall sound forth; when the poet’s pure hand draws water, the water will become a ball.
Greek art is typified by the limited, self-contained, visible, and tangible statue. Oriental art (like Romanticism) is close to nature, fluid, and boundless. But once the poet has transmuted his turbulent emotions (we remember the ‘heart on fire’ of ‘To the Moon’), the poem, however fluid its materials, will take shape as though by itself, in response to the poet’s invitation. Goethe’s German contains a discreet pun on schöpfen (‘to draw water’) and Schöpfer (‘creator’). Poetic creation, transcending the conflict between Classicism and Romanticism, is identified with the archetypal human action of drawing water. As in Goethe’s aesthetic theory, art, at its supreme point, becomes identical with nature.