In the English-speaking world today, Goethe is still, in A. N. Wilson’s pithy phrase, “the Great Unread.” This was not always the case. “Close thy Byron,” wrote the reactionary prophet Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s; “Open thy Goethe.” The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe. George Eliot, whose worldview was profoundly shaped by nineteenth-century German thought, called him “the last true polymath ever to walk the earth.” To Wilson, his newest English biographer, Goethe possessed “surely the most interesting brain which ever inhabited a human skull.”
Wilson’s book, the expansively titled Goethe: His Faustian Life - The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World, should be welcomed. Wilson has written over sixty volumes of fiction, biography, and history in a fifty-plus-year career. He is also a former candidate for the priesthood in the Church of England and has a strong interest in science, though his study of Darwin was acrimoniously received (a former editor of Nature called Wilson’s unique spin on evolution “deranged”). This range and manic level of productivity can lead to occasional sloppiness, but it also makes him well-equipped to grasp the contours of Goethe: inspired poet; original man of science; rigorous philosopher; prophetic visionary; stern believer in order, tradition, and realpolitik; and sui generis freethinking mystic.
The Anglosphere’s ignorance of Goethe today likely has two primary causes: anti-German sentiment in the earlier part of the twentieth century and the demands of reading Goethe himself. Some appreciation of nineteenth-century German philosophical context—and the complexities of which its practitioners were so fond—is required to understand him. Meanwhile, his poetry is almost uniquely untranslatable, according to Wilson, and his novels seem bound up with cultural debates that feel obsolete to us now. Yet Goethe, Wilson convincingly argues, is ripe for total rediscovery in our language––not despite the demanding background knowledge needed to fully appreciate his work, but rather because of it.
Wilson frames Goethe’s life through the prism of his greatest work, his “life-masterpiece”: the dramatic poem Faust. It is the story of a sixteenth-century mage and his blood pact with demonic powers, which enables a life lived in the constant pursuit of knowledge, power, and explosive fun. Goethe began it in his twenties when he was still a law student; he finished it shortly before his death at the age of eighty-two. It is a unique phenomenon in world literature––the truest species of magnum opus, made by the author from the living stuff of his life just as he sought to make his life into a work of art. Goethe poured his vast range of interests and activities into Faust, and in so doing, Wilson writes, created “a myth of modern humanity, the intellect who has broken loose from religion, who will pursue truth through self-analysis on the one hand, and on the other, through scientific observation of Nature and the universe.”
The creation of such a myth could only come from a figure who was in his way equally mythic, one of Emerson’s “representative men.” He was born a year before the death of Bach, in 1749, and died five years after Beethoven, in 1832. In Germany, these years saw the modern world as we understand it emerging from the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, modern science, Napoleon, the birth of nationalism, and so on––it became known as “the age of Goethe.” The son of wine merchants in bustling Frankfurt’s upper-middle class, Goethe was born into privilege and never wanted for security or encouragement. He became the brightest star in Germany’s literary firmament at just twenty-four, upon the publication of his Shakespearean play Götz and his hugely influential epistolary novel The Sorrow of Young Werther. Along with Goethe’s lyric poetry (a lifelong “habit,” as he called it), these works lit the fuse for German Romanticism, and (though the veracity of this phenomenon is still debated) Werther inspired a wave of suicides among the romantic young men of Europe.
Goethe had a preternatural ability to craft his life into different, artistically distinct periods (“eras,” we might have to call them today) and he knew it: he called it “molting.” Soon after Werther, he made his first great surprise move: in 1775, he chose to transplant himself out of the literary scene and into the provincial backwater of Weimar. He’d been invited there by the youthful playboy Duke Karl August, who––at the prodding of his formidable mother the Duchess Anna Amalia––wanted to level up his Duchy. Goethe accepted a ministerial post and, over a decade, became a man of the world. Leaving behind the prospective writer’s hermetic via contemplativa, he pursued a via activa: attending Privy Council meetings, supervising road-building, helping reopen mines (which fired his scientist’s passion for geology), managing forests, administering the nearby University of Jena (which duly became the center of the nineteenth-century revolution in German thought and culture), and acting as paymaster for Weimar’s tiny army. By the 1780s, he was running most of the ducal government. In 1782, the ennobling “von” was added to his name and he could finally dine with his beloved Duke and fellow nobles. All the while he carried on a platonic (as far as we know) affair of “Courtly Love” via letter with the aristocratic, married court lady Charlotte von Stein.
Unsurprisingly, Goethe was getting little serious writing done. In the summer of 1786, at the age of thirty-seven, he made a clandestine break for Italy. He stayed there two years, mostly in Rome, writing and discovering the sun, sculpture, sex, and the true wonder of the classical world. On his return he divested himself of his Romantic baggage. Along with his new best friend, the poet, playwright, and historian Friedrich Schiller, Goethe—drawing on the rich store of experiences from Italy—hatched a neoclassical artistic and intellectual movement. Eventually known as Weimar Classicism, it opposed the growing Romantic ferment in the neighboring university town, Jena (a milieu recently written about in splendid detail by Andrea Wulf in her book Magnificent Rebels). Goethe lived the second half of his life at the center of Europe’s literary and philosophical turmoil.
At the same time, he was striking out on his own as an independent scientist, sparring with more established voices. His discovery in the 1780s that a certain bone in the jaw, the intermaxillary, was present not only in humans but across various mammalian species, inspired a proto-notion of evolution––which, according to Wilson, influenced Darwin, albeit through several degrees of separation. In the 1790s, Goethe turned his attention to the phenomenon of color. His extensive, passionate investigations combined all his evolving beliefs about the nature of “Nature” itself and our role in perceiving it. The research spanned decades, culminating in the 1810 publication of Theory of Colors––a work Goethe himself prized more highly than all others, including Faust.
One of the virtues of Wilson’s book is the special interest he takes in Goethe’s work as a scientist and the “holistic” vision of science Goethe pioneered. Put much too simply, this vision of reality centers the wholeness of nature. The scientist, for Goethe, ought never to mistake science’s somewhat arbitrary division of nature into measurable and categorizable units for a true holistic understanding. Goethe believed Newton was particularly guilty of this sin in his color theory, but also in his whole approach to nature. As Wilson writes, “Newtonian and Galilean physics had imposed thinking and theorems on Nature. Goethean science is received from Nature.”
This distinction implies an even greater, more fundamental disagreement about exactly what science, and the human being practicing it, is for. “Rejoice,” Goethe wrote, “for the highest product of Nature is your capacity to rethink her supreme thought.” For Goethe the method, truth, and goal of science were always fundamentally in perception. Wilson believes, too, that in “our capacity for wonder, and a sense of Nature’s holiness,” genuine truth can be intuited and integrated, not imposed. The source of this holiness is the imagination, that truth-bearing poetic faculty, the organ of perception through which, Goethe believed, we can, however dimly, grasp nature as wholly divine.
The Enlightenment science against which Goethe set himself, the science of Newton and Francis Bacon, had figured nature as an “alphabet” (Bacon’s phrase again) to be decoded, chaos awaiting taming, resources to be mined. In another image, Bacon understood nature as female “fecundity” waiting to be “squeezed and moulded” by the “inquisition” (torture and rape in pursuit of “truth”) of dominating man. Of course, it was this vision, and not Goethe’s, which won out. But Goethean science, including its unique contribution to color theory, has slowly gained adherents. The artist and the scientist were not opposites, he believed, but brothers. Science properly understood ought to lead us not into a mindset of dominion and extraction but to the humble embrace of our unique place in a whole: “I learnt to know my brother creatures here,” he writes in a poem. “In quiet woods, in streams and in the air.”
Goethe’s concerns about the direction of modern science fed directly into Faust, particularly its second half, composed in the second half of his own life. But he also poured into the book his thoughts about the other disruptions accompanying the birth of “the modern age”: finance and the banking system, fossil-fuel and mineral extraction, the emergence of the militarized nation state as the prime agent of political change. As Wilson writes in his expansive and somewhat baggily written introduction, now—amid increasingly dire ecological and political conditions—we can see our own world in Faust more clearly than ever before. For Faust, he writes, is “about a world which had taken leave of God but did not know how to live.”
Yet Goethe does not despair; his opus does not end in the fiery inferno of Christopher Marlowe’s play. There is a surprising redemption, as Wilson notes, from which we can learn, if we can turn again toward Goethe’s idea of “Nature as a spiritual power” and toward the “Imagination” in “its power to redeem and explain our predicament.”
Questions about the “meaning” of Goethe’s life and work have fed an inexhaustible well of interpretation. Goethe––the supreme “individual” of the first great age of the individual––believed that any life could be seen mythically. Lives are “mirrors,” Wilson writes, “by which a greater reality may be perceived,” just as science itself could be seen as “a parable or a metaphor.” To Thomas Mann, Goethe was the “representative of the bourgeois age,” but Wilson finds that Goethe “lived and wrote as if the bourgeois Lutheran conventions never existed.” He is less interested in Goethe as a “representative man” than as a prophetic one, forever pointing onward toward the future.
For all Goethe’s grandiosity and prophecy, in Wilson’s flawed, occasionally meandering and repetitive, but loving and ultimately valuable book, Goethe is never less than human––indeed, almost the human. Always earthy yet striving, prey to demonic negation and despair but unbowed, full of low life and courtly love. He is, perhaps more than anybody who ever lived, the outstanding example of what it is possible to do and be with a single human life.
Goethe
His Faustian Life
A. N. Wilson
Bloomsbury Continuum
$31.50 | 416 pp.
