Learning With Goethe

If Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remains a mere name to most English readers, it is certainly not for want of trying. Even before Goethe died, in 1832, Thomas Carlyle had begun a campaign to make England recognize his genius: "Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe", he urged. Victorian writers like Matthew Arnold and George Eliot dedicated themselves to the Goethean ideal of Geist, mind or spirit. In the 20th century, W.H. Auden declared that his goal was to be remembered as "a minor Atlantic Goethe"; and Joyce famously joked, in "Finnegans Wake," about the great European poets, Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper.

Yet all these eminent writers, not to mention countless scholars and critics, have been unable to give Goethe the same salience for English readers as Dante and Shakespeare, the other members of Joyce's punning trinity. We could never say "our Goethe," the way the Germans proudly say "our Shakespeare." Goethe's two most famous works, the proto-Romantic novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and the epic drama "Faust," are occasionally mentioned in American literary discussion, but very seldom read. Other masterpieces that are idolized in Germany — "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," "Elective Affinities" — are not even mentioned. Then there are Goethe's lyric poems, which we are most likely to encounter through the Lieder of Schubert; his classical and national dramas; his essays on art and literature; his tabletalk, recorded late in the "Conversations With Eckermann"; his autobiographies and travel journals. And that is not to mention his studies in botany and optics, or his career as a statesman in Weimar, or his friendship with Schiller, or his legendary love affairs.

The problem with Goethe, it begins to seem, is that there is simply too much of him. Dante we know from traditions, Shakespeare from legends, but Goethe lived recently enough to belong to the age of documents: He is more intimately and thoroughly knowable than any writer of comparable stature. It makes sense, then, that John Armstrong, in seeking yet again to make us open our Goethe, should avoid the route of straightforward biography. Instead, Mr. Armstrong — who is not a literary scholar but a philosopher, at the University of Melbourne — has tried an intriguing experiment. As the title of "Love, Life, Goethe" (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 483 pages, $30) suggests, he wants to give us a Goethe we can use — a combination of role model and sage.

"Goethe's view of his life," Mr. Armstrong writes, "focuses on two things: growth and wholeness. His ideal is of the balanced individual who integrates apparently divergent demands: open to sensuous pleasure, yet rigorous and disciplined; learned, yet pragmatic and wise." By reading him and reading about him, Mr. Armstrong suggests, we might learn the secret of that Olympian wholeness.

In practice, this means that "Love, Life, Goethe" offers a lifeand-works biography, but with a relaxed approach to narrative and chronology, and a fondness for didactic digression. (Mr. Armstrong divides the book into short, reader-friendly chapters and sections, but his ideas and themes are not bite-sized.) The poet was born, without a "von," in 1749, to a family of prominent and wealthy Frankfurt lawyers. He studied law himself and took a doctorate at the age of 21, but showed little interest in getting clients. Instead Goethe devoted himself to literature, and in 1774 he published "Werther," a novel in letters describing a sensitive young man's failed love affair, which ends in his breakdown and suicide. The novel quickly became one of the greatest sensations in the history of literature. By tapping into the rising tide of European Romanticism, Goethe not only produced a continental bestseller, but inspired a Werther cult and made himself the most famous writer in Germany.

The key to Goethe's life, and to his significance for Mr. Armstrong, can be found in his reaction to this titanic success. While the world was caught up in Werther's emotionalism, brooding, and selfindulgence, Goethe had already learned to see those seductive neuroses as dangerous and childish. "It took the greatest determination and effort," he later wrote, "to pull myself from the engulfing waves"; but he did pull himself free. To everyone's surprise, Goethe accepted an offer to join the small court of Duke Carl August of Weimar, where he would remain for the rest of his life as a senior minister and royal confidant.

In doing so, he expressed his determination to join the virtues of the artist and the practical man; to prove that intense subjectivity could go along with cool objectivity. For the next 60 years, as he produced masterpieces of fiction, drama, and poetry, Goethe was also attending to the condition of Weimar's roads, reviewing military expenses, and trying to balance the government budget.

For Mr. Armstrong, this determination to bridge "art" and "life," broadly speaking, is what makes Goethe such an exemplary figure. "For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," he writes, "artists have withdrawn their sympathy from the normal conditions of comfortable existence. The artist is at odds with — and critical of — ‘bourgeois life.' But what ‘bourgeois' means is something like this: the material condition of life to which most people aspire ... Goethe's immense hope was that there need not be — should not be — a spiritual loathing or artistic contempt for that life."

This is a deeply important question, and Mr. Armstrong traces it convincingly through Goethe's life decisions and his major works. Yet, ironically, in making Goethe seem so thoroughly a spokesman for bourgeois virtue, he tends to have the effect, not of elevating the bourgeois, but of diminishing Goethe. It seems odd in Mr. Armstrong to think that what Western readers need is more authoritative permission to make money, accumulate property, or even develop their personalities. In our culture, these are practically the only goals the imagination can conceive. It is Goethe's Geist, not his gemütlichkeit, that we need to hear about.

Still more surprising is Mr. Armstrong's apparent acquiescence in the one aspect of Goethe's legacy that has come in for greatest criticism: his political quietism. Mr. Armstrong seems to endorse the Weimar classicism which held that "the aim of art is to ennoble us, to make us whole and balanced; then we can engage maturely and sensibly in political processes." But it is just this refusal of politics, this privileging of the inward over the public, that many post-1945 critics found responsible for the disastrous evolution of German society.

Even Thomas Mann, perhaps Goethe's greatest heir, wrote in March 1932 that "it is hard to say how far the intrinsically ... anti-political character of the German bourgeoisie was stamped upon it by Goethe and how far Goethe in his own person was by that token an expression of the German bourgeois character." In general, "Love, Life, Goethe" would be a more compelling book, and a more appealing invitation to read Goethe, if it embraced Mann's sense of Goethe's ambiguities, the irony and even nihilism that make him more an artist than a pedagogue.

akirsch@nysun.com