Goethe’s own frustrations were dramatized when Kestner and Lotte married in April 1773 and he lost another object of his flirtation when the attractive Maximiliane von La Roche was married the next January.
Then Goethe turned to writing his Sorrows of Young Werther, completing it in four weeks. “I had written thus much almost unconsciously, like a somnambulist.” He was astonished at the effect of the work on others “precisely the reverse of my own.… I felt, as if after a general confession, once more happy and free, and justified in beginning a new life.” Some have called Werther the first “confession” that was successfully made into literature. Werther’s suicide note to Lotte read:
Albert is your husband—well, what of it? Husband! In the eyes of the world—and in the eyes of the world is it sinful for me to love you, to want to tear you from his embrace into my own? Sin? Very well, I am punishing myself; I have tasted the whole divine delight of that sin, and have taken balm and strength into my heart. From this moment you are mine! Mine, oh Lotte! I am going on ahead! Going unto my Father, your Father. I shall tell Him my sorrows and He will comfort me until that time when you come and I fly to meet you, hold you and remain with you in a perpetual embrace in the sight of the Eternal.
Goethe did change his way of life suddenly and surprisingly. At the height of his celebrity as the author of Werther in November 1775 he was invited to Weimar. When the reigning duke Karl Augustus unaccountably named the twenty-seven-year-old Goethe to his Privy Council, the duke explained to Goethe’s father that Goethe would still be free to leave the duke’s service at any time, but Weimar would remain Goethe’s home till his death in 1832. “Goethe can have but one position—” the duke wrote, “that of my friend. All others are beneath him.” The young Goethe speedily became an energetic administrator of the little dukedom, inspecting mines, overseeing irrigation projects, organizing the small army, setting up a fire brigade, developing and directing the court theater. Like Benjamin Franklin about the same time in Philadelphia, he made the little community his own.
One of Goethe’s first and most delightful innovations was ice-skating. Before Goethe no Weimar gentleman had been seen on the ice. Some applauded Goethe’s “daring grace,” others found his performance on the ice “outrageous.” Skating on the Schwansee became “the rage.” These first “wild weeks” in Weimar made him the duke’s boon companion. Here (to match his Wilhelm Meister) he found his apprenticeship in the arts of living.
The rapid rise of this upstart author of a book of scandalous reputation did not please all the burgers of Weimar. When the duke raised him to the highest post in his service, Goethe found it “strange and dreamlike that I in my thirtieth year enter the highest place which a German citizen can reach. On ne va jamais plus loin que quand on ne sait ou l’on va, said a great climber of this world.” Goethe later confessed in conversations with his friend Johann Peter Eckermann that these first years at Weimar were “perplexed with love affairs.” He was appealing to many of the attractive women who caught his eye, and he enjoyed flirting. Only one became a great love, but she too proved unattainable. This was the baroness Charlotte von Stein, wife of the duke’s master of the horse, remarkable for her gaiety, intelligence, and broad literary culture. When he met her she was thirty-three, and already the mother of seven children. “She is really a genuine, interesting person, and I quite understand what has attached Goethe to her,” Schiller wrote, “Beautiful she can never have been; but her countenance has a soft earnestness, and a quite peculiar openness.… They say the connection is perfectly pure and blameless.” Over the next years Goethe sent her some fifteen hundred letters. She would remain his guide and inspiration, but that she never became his mistress seems to have been one of the bitter trials of his life—which he made a theme for some of his plays and lyrics.
After ten successful years in the microcosm of Weimar, he obtained the duke’s permission for a journey to an unknown destination. With ostentatious secrecy and in quest of anonymity, he left Weimar on September 3, 1786. Italy, his destination, he reached as “Herr Moller,” a German merchant. There he hoped to escape his celebrity as the author of Werther. The relics of ancient culture, the objects of his nostalgia from long immersion in classical literature, would provide another allegory of his unfulfillment. In his Italian Journey, eloquently translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, he recorded rapture at seeing the palatial architecture of Venice mirrored in “the Canal Grande, winding snakelike through the town.” He suppressed his old Gothic enthusiasms, spent only three hours touring Florence, but found refreshment in Rome and Greece. “All the dreams of my youth I now see living before me,” he exclaimed at his four months in Rome, “everywhere I go I find an old familiar face; everything is just what I thought it, and yet everything is new. It is the same with ideas. I have gained no new idea, but the old ones have become so definite, living, and connected one with another that they may pass as new.” Going south, he explored Pompeii, climbed the erupting Vesuvius, and concluded that “if in Rome one must study, here in Naples one can only live.” The Greek temples at Paestum were the climax, “key to the whole.” At Palermo he bought a copy of the Odyssey in Greek, which he enthusiastically translated aloud for Kniep, his traveling companion. And he made a plan for a play (never completed) that would sum up Homer’s tale.
Returning to Rome for ten months, he tried his hand as painter and sculptor, learned perspective, sketched from models, and, somewhat to his astonishment, discovered that he lacked great talent as an artist. At the same time he industriously pursued his writing, rewrote Egmont, revised two early comic operas, wrote lyrics and some scenes for Faust—all to fulfill a commitment to prepare for his publisher the last four volumes of his collected works. In June 1788 he returned to Weimar, where his critics (even including Schiller) had been grumbling at the large ducal stipend he still received for doing nothing. In Italy he had been captivated by a young Milanese, whom he pursued until he discovered that she, too, was already engaged, and then abandoned her in dark regret. But he had not been able to conceal the episode in his weekly letters to Charlotte von Stein, and when he returned their relationship had changed.
Goethe’s discovery that he was no painter confirmed his determination to spend his next years in writing, to “produce a Greece from within.” His encounter with the ancients had sharpened his distinction between the classical and the modern ways of thinking. “The ancients,” he concluded, “represented existence, we usually represent the effect; they portrayed the terrible, we terribly; they the agreeable, we agreeably, and so forth. Hence our exaggeration, mannerism, false graces, and all excesses. For when we strive after effect, we never think we can be effective enough.” And he even apologized for the heroic self. “All eras in a state of decline are subjective; on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective.” But in his time the depths of “subjectivity” had only begun to be revealed.
A by-product of the Italian journey was his sensual Roman Elegies, a product also of his new love affair with Christine Vulpius.
Saget, Steine, mir an, o sprecht, ihr hohen Palaste!
Strassen, redet ein Wort! Genius, regst du dich nicht?
Ja, es ist alles beseelt in deinen heiligen Mauern,
Ewige Roma; nur mir schweiget noch alles so still.
O wer flüstert mir zu, an welchem Fenster erblick ich
Einst das holde Geschöpf, das mich versengend erquickt?…
Tell me, you stones, oh speak, you lofty palaces!
Streets, say a word! Spirit of the place, will you not stir?
Yes, everything is alive within your holy walls, eternal Rome;
only for me it is all still so silent.
Oh who shall whisper it to me, at what window one day shall I see
the sweet creature who will burn me and refresh me?…
Oh Rome, though you are a whole world, yet without love
the world would not
be the world, nor would Rome be Rome.
(Translated by David Luke)
He had met her in a Weimar park when she politely approached him to find a post for her brother, a struggling writer. This bright, attractive girl of a lower social class, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well drunken father, appealed to Goethe and he scandalized the neighbors by taking her into his house. She had several children by him, and remained his domestic comfort for twenty-eight years. He did not marry her until 1806, when the French had occupied Weimar.
While celebrated in Germany as the poet and across Europe as the last universal man, Goethe claims a place among great creators of Western literature for one work, his Faust. He probably first conceived it when he was a twenty-one-year-old law student in Strassburg in 1770, he wrote and revised it off and on until his death in 1832, and the last part was published posthumously. A product of his whole writing career, it became his own kind of anthology of all forms of prose and verse, from doggerel to the subtlest meter, in varied forms of drama, dance, and lyric.
Goethe’s Faust theme, like that of Joyce’s Ulysses, had been tested long before his time. The original Dr. Faustus was an unsavory necromancer of German folklore, who traveled widely, who died about 1540, and left a legacy of alchemy, magic, and astrology. He made a pact with the Devil, for which he was expelled from several cities. Despised as a sodomite, a gourmand, and a drunkard, he died from mysterious causes. Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), Luther’s collaborator, reported that Faust was strangled by the Devil in a rural inn in Württemberg on the day his evil pact came due. The legend, spread by Lutherans in the Reformation, expressed both reaction against the Roman Church and awe at Renaissance magic and science. As a parable of the perils of forbidden knowledge the Faust legend seemed to prove the need to keep learning within respectable bounds. But precisely because Faust explored the frontiers of forbidden knowledge his notoriety grew alongside Protestant orthodoxy. A collection of Faust stories, the Spies Faustbuch, published in German in Frankfurt in 1587, was reprinted eighteen times in the next ten years, was widely translated and frequently revised. Goethe probably knew the book.
It told the simple story of an arrogant scholar seeking unlimited power and knowledge who puts aside the proper science of theology for the forbidden science of magic. To secure this power for a number of years he sells his soul to the Devil. Faust then delights the theater audience by raising the dead, flying over the earth, and winning the beautiful Helen of Troy for his mistress. Finally, when his time is up, he is taken off to Hell.
The English translation of the Spies Faustbuch, entitled The historie of the damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus was itself magically transformed by Christopher Marlowe into his immortal play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604). Marlowe’s Faustus is no mere necromancer but a man of infinite ambition lusting to be “great Emperor of the world.” The familiar plot is embellished with some of Marlowe’s best poetry, including the classic salutation to Helen:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see, where it flies!
The dramatic climax is the anguish of Faust when his twenty-four years of power come to an end and he is dragged off to Hell. Marlowe stays in the tradition of the medieval morality play. But he adds the Reformation note that Faustus is damned not only for inordinate ambition but for his fatalism and his refusal to accept the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Marlowe’s play was popular in the German puppet theater, where both Lessing and Goethe saw it as children. They both used the old scenario to challenge the Enlightenment faith in reason, to affirm instead the sovereign self, the power of Weltschmerz and the striving of the individual genius.
As Goethe developed the Faust legend he transformed the leading character. Doctor Faust, no longer a mere legendary necromancer, has become a universal hero, a self in quest of fulfillment, as recounted in two parts. Part One, the most widely read, which was published in 1808, offers scenes long familiar on the stage; Part Two, twice as long and published only after Goethe’s death in 1832, is complex, obscure, and symbolic. His hero turns out to be not only a man of lust (he is that too), but a restless striver, reaching for his full humanity, and finally justified by God Himself.
The play begins with a Prologue in Heaven, where God agrees to let Mephistopheles (the Devil) try to win his bet that he can capture the soul of Doctor Faust. While God is confident that Mephistopheles cannot succeed, the play shows the Devil’s efforts and Faust’s response. An opening soliloquy by Faust declares his disillusionment with all knowledge—“philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, too, and, worst of all, theology.” Mephistopheles then engages Faust in a pact to give himself up to be the Devil’s servant if at any moment of delight, he says, “Stay, thou art so fair! (Verweihle doch, du bist so schön.)” Hoping to trap Faust into this moment of climactic satisfaction, Mephistopheles tempts him finally with the delectable Gretchen. Faust, though with misgiving, seduces her, she ends in a dungeon and a miserable death—a victory for Mephistopheles—while Faust himself is overcome with remorse.
The second part offers five wildly melodramatic and allegorical acts. These include a scene of Helen of Troy recalled from Hades to be pursued by Faust. Their son Euphorion, who stands for poetry and the union of classical and romantic traditions (and incidentally, too, Lord Byron!) disappears in flames. This works a kind of catharsis, and a born-again Faust goes seeking ways to serve his fellowman. When, with the help of Mephistopheles, he has reclaimed some land from the sea, he feels the ultimate satisfaction, exclaims “Stay, thou art so fair!” and falls dead. When Mephistopheles tries to seize Faust’s soul for Hell, it is rescued and borne away by angels. With this happy ending, the drama becomes, in Dante’s sense, a Comedy.
Like Hamlet, Goethe’s Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture “Faustian,” and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.
Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends in Rome accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. “I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.” In his conversations (May 6, 1827) with Eckermann he explained why he laughed at “the people who … come and ask what idea I sought to embody in my Faust.”
As if I myself knew that and could express it! “From heaven through the world to hell,” one might say in a pinch; but that is no idea but the course of the action.… It was altogether not my manner as a poet to strive for the embodiment of something abstract.… My opinion is rather this: The more incommensurable and incomprehensible for the understanding a poetic creation may be, the better.
From the beginning God, too, explains that man will always be in the Devil’s path:
Solang er auf der Erde lebt,
So lange sei dir’s nicht verboten;
Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.
As long as he may be alive,
So long you shall not be prevented
Man errs as long as he will strive.
(Translated by Walter Kaufman)
Man is to be judged, then, not only by his acts, but by his hopes, always better than his deeds:
Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunklen Drange,
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.
The good man however dark his striving,
Is ever mindful of the better way.
(Translated by Thomas Mann)
Man’s problem, and his hope, come from the divine in him, which Mephistopheles explains:
Der kleine Gott der Welt
bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag
Und so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag.
Ein wenig besser würd er leben,
Hätt’st du ihm nicht den Schein des Himmelslichts gegeben;
Er nennt’s Vernunft and braucht’s allein,
Nur tierischer als jedes Tier zu sein.
The small god of the world will never change his ways
And is as whimsical—as on the first of days,
His life might be a bit more fun,
Had you not given him that spark of heaven’s sun;
He calls it reason and employs it, resolute
To be more brutish than is any brute.
(Translated by Walter Kaufman)
In his opening soliloquy Faust asks himself:
Binn ich ein Gott? Mir wird so licht!
Ich schau in diesen reinen Zügen
Die wirkende Natur vor meiner Seele liegen.
Am I a god? Light grows this page—
In these pure lines my eye can see
Creative nature spread in front of me.
(Translated by Walter Kaufman)
And Faust’s ambition has no bounds.
Zu neuen Sphären reiner Tätigkeit.
Dies hohe Leben, diese Götterwonne!…
Ja, kehre nur der holden Erdensonne
Entschlossen deinen Rücken zu!
Vermesse dich, die Pforten aufzureissen,
Vor denen jeder gern vorüberschleicht!
Hier ist es Zeit, durch Taten zu beweisen,
Dass Manneswürde nicht der Götterhohe weicht.…
Uncharted orbits call me, new dominions
Of sheer creation, active without end.
This higher life, joys that no mortal won!…
Upon the mild light of the earthly sun
Turn bold, your back! And with undaunted daring
Tear open the eternal portals
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 85
