Goethe the poet and the age, vol i the poetry of desire (1749 1790)

it should remain a standard account' Theodore Ziolkowski, Times Literary Supplement 'Should become a milestone in the history of Goethe biographies since its scope and detailed knowledge

title : Goethe Vol 1, The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790) : The Poet and

the Ageauthor : Boyle, Nicholas

publisher : Oxford University Pressisbn10 | asin : 0192829815

print isbn13 : 9780192829818ebook isbn13 : 9780585317779language : English

subject Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832, Authors,

German 18th Biography, Authors, German 19th Biography

century publication date : 1992

lcc : PT2049.B53 1992eb

subject : Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832, Authors,

German 18th Biography, Authors, German 19th Biography

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Goethe The Poet and the Age:

Volume I'Monumental and massively learned excellent on the intellectual background'

Michael Hoffman, Independent on Sunday

'Unusually rich detail lucid and often witty prose In its sovereign command of the biographical and

socio-cultural material, its thoughtful and judicious manner, its unifying structure, and its elegance of style it should

remain a standard account'

Theodore Ziolkowski, Times Literary Supplement

'Should become a milestone in the history of Goethe biographies since its scope and detailed knowledge can scarcely be surpassed'

Hans Reiss, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

'There is nothing comparable to this study in any language crammed with reliable and up-to-date information'

Christoph Schweitzer, The New York Times Book Review

'It is not every literary historian who could rise to Boyle's narrative verve broad historical understanding and critical reflection'

T J Reed, Weekend Telegraph

'Brilliant analysis of individual poems'

Stephen Spender, Sunday Telegraph

Nicholas Boyle is Fellow and Tutor at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and University Lecturer in German

Goethe The Poet and the Age:

Volume IThe Poetry of Desire (17491790)

Nicholas Boyle

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Boyle, Nicholas

Goethe: The Poet and the Age

Vol I, The poetry of desire (17491790)

1 Poetry in German Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17491832

1 Title

831.6

ISBN 0198158661

Printed in Great Britain by

For

Michael and Rosaleen

who made it possible

More must be known, or at any rate there must be more to know, about Goethe than about almost any other human being As the age of paper passes, so he comes to seem its supreme product Not only did he do and think more than most menhe, and others, left more written traces of what he did and thought It is true, he also left monuments of a different kind Nearly 3,000 drawings by him survive, as do the villa he built, the palace he rebuilt, and the park he first laid out He amassed very substantial private collections of mineralogical specimens, incised gems, and prints and drawings, and if his own working library was not bibliographically outstanding that was because he had at his disposal the resources, and the buying power, of one of the largest princely libraries in Germany, which he spent a lifetime

enriching He ran a duchy for three years, a theatre for twenty-five, and a university and an art school for longer still A shrewd contemporary thought his greatest achievement to be his devoted personal guidance of his sovereign, eight years his junior, whom he educated into one of the most enlightened of Germany's minor rulers in the early nineteenth

century, and who was a model for his neighbour and relative, the Prince Consort Goethe deserves his place on the Albert Memorial But of course what matters now is the writing

A national celebrity at the age of 24, a European celebrity twelve months later, Goethe was thereafter, until he died in his eighty-third year, sufficiently prominent, remarkable, and at times powerful, for those who met him to want to

record what he said and those who corresponded with him to take care of what he wrote After he moved to Weimar the daily chronicle of his doings, now being put together for the first time in seven large volumes by Robert Steiger, is practically continuous, especially once he began to keep a regular diary in 1796 Accounts of conversations with him, excluding Eckermann's famous collection, run to some 4,000 printed pages, over 12,000 letters from him are extant and about 20,000 letters addressed to him His official papers run to four volumes, and Wilhelm Bode filled another three with contemporary gossip about him, extracted from the correspondence and diaries of third parties There may be parallels to this flood of documentation for an individual life, though few surely can be sustained over so long a

periodVoltaire or Gladstone perhaps? certainly not Napoleon What makes Goethe's case manifestly unique is the

quantity, quality, and nature of the literary and scientific writing which caused this interest in him and which expands indefinitely our potential knowledge of his inner life through its unceasing stream of reflection on the events and

projects of his outward career The most important written memorials to Goethe are the literary works in which he sought to make the particular occasions of his individual existence into general symbols whose significance

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would be appreciated by readers, initially of his own time and place, but increasingly, in his later years, of other times and places as well.

That individual existence had its eccentricitiesamong them, an English audience may think, that of being German None the less, this book goes to press at a time when it seems worth remembering that the centre of Europe, if its diameter is drawn from Lisbon to Moscow, lies somewhere between Frankfurt and Weimar If Germany is now re-emerging from the marginal position into which it was pressed, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, by the overseas

expansion of the western European powers, and by their implacably anti-Imperial policies, particularly their continued fomentation after 1630 of the Thirty Years' War, a first stage in that re-emergence into European centrality occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century Perhaps because of a different relation between the state power and the

middle classes from that which prevailed further west, there occurred in Germany at that time a religious crisis whose explosive energies, channelled through the then uniquely extensive German system of universities, issued in a series of intellectual and cultural innovations which were to have a most powerful influence on the European, and North

American, mind of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Biblical criticism, historical and classical scholarship,

reinterpretative theology, Idealist (and ultimately materialist) philosophy, sociology, neo-classical art and architecture, aesthetics, and the academic study of modern literature, all were decisively influenced, and in some cases actually originated, by the German cultural revolution which began in the 1790s, and among the last fruits of which in the later nineteenth century, replete with the seeds of the age to come, was the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud Probably not coincidentally, it was also the greatest age of German music A first reason for reading and studying Goethe is that his literary works are the medium in which a superlatively intelligent and unusually well-placed observer discerned and responded to these numerous shifts in the bedrock of intellectual Europe, some of which led to earthquakes in his own time, others only later

A second reason is that Goethe was a poet He was a born versifier and phrase-maker, so that Faust to a German

audience, like Hamlet to an English one, seems a collection of quotations, and no issue of a German quality newspaper

is without a handful of Goethe allusions, acknowledged, or unrecognized He had a natural affinity with the rhythms of the German language and throughout his life produced, unpredictably, but with dreamlike facility, lyric poems of unique form and character, many of which have become internationally known through their later musical settings (which

however sometimes obscure the specifically poetic merits of the original) Faust is certainly the greatest long poem of

recent European literature, and it was Goethe's example, not Marlowe's, which inspired the numerous further treatments

of the theme in the 150 years after its first publication But Goethe was not just a poetfor the whole Romantic

generation, in Germany, England

and even France, he was the poet, and through his influence on that generation he affected all subsequent notions of

what poets are and poetry does In 1797, when the first recognizably Romantic movements began, Goethe was already a figure of authority and achievement, a model of worldly competence and success whose ultimate loyalty was none the less only, and avowedly, to his 'art' Goethe was the first poet who in virtue solely of his poetry, and not of its sublime or sacred subject-matter, or his contingent personal erudition, was also a secular sage Indeed it would scarcely be too

much to say that with the eighth volume of his Literary Works, which was published in 1789 and contained a selection

of his shorter poems, Goethe created the very genre of lyric poetry as it is practised today: the book of shorter pieces linked not in the first instance formally or thematically, or by their devotional purpose or their suitability for musical setting, but by their origin in the discrete occasions of the poet's life, what he sees and reads and feels and thinks about, and all given meaning and importance not by any transcendent order but by their reference, explicit or implicit, to the poet's self and his activity of poetic making Only Petrarch offers a comparable concentration on the self and its

vicissitudes, and from Petrarch Goethe is distinguished by the wholly secular context of his thought and feeling More immediate predecessors there certainly wereKlopstock, Gray, or, particularly, Rousseaubut these furnished only

elements for the compound which Goethe was the first to synthesize and which he bequeathed to the nineteenth century, and beyond

To come to understand Goethe properly is to adjust one's understanding both of modern literature, its course and

derivation, and of Europe, and Germany's place within it, and that equally for an English and for a German reader Goethe's name has been much used, and abused, in a search for identity by German nations which came into existence after his death One of the principal difficulties in reaching a dispassionate view of Germany's painful struggle towards nationhood, and of Goethe's part in it, has been that the main critical instrument available for analysing ideological delusions, namely Marxist social theory, is itself a product of the particular process which stands in need of analysis Since 1945 the alternative to the manifest inadequacies of Marxist Goethe-scholarship has been, in the Federal

Republicand more recently, though for different reasons, in the Democratic Republic tooa programmatically

non-political approach, which has done marvels in editing, annotation, and the accumulation of source-material, but has not always faced the challenging task of interpretation In the English-speaking world Goethe's reputation suffered in his lifetime from endlessly repeated charges of immorality and irreligion, then from accusations of obscurantism,

nineteenth-century progressivism, antinomianism, and literary incompetence, and latterly from benign neglect Barker

Fairley's admirable literary and psychological Study of Goethe is now well over forty years old, and the last substantial

and original English biography, by J G Robertson, nearly sixty The larger and

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somewhat earlier biography by Peter Hume Brown was the first such undertaking since G H Lewes's great monograph

of 1855, a most remarkable work of scholarship for its time, and one of the first Goethe biographies in any language There has been much good writing about Goethe in English since the Second World War, but most of it has been for a

specialized audience, the obvious exceptions being Erich Heller's stimulating essays in The Disinherited Mind and W

H Bruford's Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, to both of which my debt is as great as it is obvious.

The present book has been written in the belief that two different needs can be met by a biographical study of Goethe and his works which starts from first principles and assumes as little prior knowledge of its subject as possible On the one hand the reader with some knowledge of English and French literary history, but unacquainted with the German language or its literature, or anything but the outlines of the nation's political development, should find here enough information to set Goethe's life in the context of his age, and his poetry in the context of his life On the other hand, those already familiar with Goethe's works will, I hope, learn something from seeing them presented against their

biographical, social-historical, and philosophical background, and discussed, as far as possible, in a rigorously

chronological sequence These have not on the whole been features of the synopses of Goethe's achievement published since 1945, even of the three-volume study, both authoritative and sensitive, of Emil Staiger To say that, however, is not to be ungrateful, for the present work has been made possible only by the magnificent scholarship of the last half-

century Several annotated editions and selections, Femmel's Corpus der Goethezeichnungen, Flach and Dahl's edition

of Goethes amtliche Schriften, the Leopoldina edition of the scientific works, E and R Grumach's new collection of

Begegnungen und Gespräche, Steiger's 'documentary chronicle', and various other projects, variously advanced, are the

foundation of this studyalong, it must be said, with the indispensable legacies of earlier generations, the Weimar edition

of the works and letters, and the many volumes in which Wilhelm Bode recorded his unequalled knowledge of the literary and social world of later eighteenth-century Weimar What I can offer is only a synthesis of syntheses, whose value will long be outlasted by that of the compilations on which it is based; yet if such a synthesis is not attempted from time to time, and for a particular time, to what end are the compilations made? The secondary writing about

Goethe long ago grew to a point at which no one man could hope to encompass it; the primary sources are now not far behind: it is a moment to pause for thought, and to attempt to situate this extraordinary human phenomenon in that widest possible context in which by its own nature it demands to be inserted For the specialist there may emerge from the exercise a new view of a commanding literary presence: as a free man responding to the social, spiritual and

intellectual demands of modernity, as they formulated themselves around him For the non-specialist there is the

promise of a new

acquaintance: limited and even peculiar, no doubt, as we all are, but grand and deep and rich as none of us is, and few of our forebears have been It is my hope too that the following pages may find some readers in Germany, for they are written in the belief that the Federal Republic has represented not only what is best, and oldest, in the nation's political traditions, but also what is closest to the mind of Goethe, and it is time for the rest of Europe to start to say thank you.

To make Goethe accessible, whether to the general reader, to the student, or to the scholar, was my principal concern in the organization and writing of this book Only passages in verse, or significantly poetic prose, have been cited in

German, and always with a translation Translations, which are my own, are as literal as possible, and in some cases the word order is deliberately closer to the original than normal English usage would allow, in order to hint at important effects that would otherwise be lost The book has to some extent been conceived as a companion to the Hamburger Ausgabe, as the selection from Goethe's works and correspondence most likely to be readily available to the student, and wherever possible texts have been cited from this edition; where this is not possible recourse is had to the new

edition of Der junge Goethe, by Hanna Fischer-Lamberg, for Chapters 13, and thereafter to the Weimar edition The

text is cited precisely as found in the edition of reference, since there seemed no way of imposing consistency on the different editorial practices, and no purpose in it either Place names are given in anglicized forms, when these are available and not obsolete, personal names, except for a few well-known monarchs, are left in their original form

'Erbprinz' is inaccurately but conveniently rendered as 'Crown Prince' To aid pronunciation, feminine forms ina have generally been preferred to those ine (e.g Amalia) The page has been kept (almost) free of footnotes and references, but sources for quotations and for important facts or assertions are grouped at the end of the volume and identified by page number and a few key words

The reader will see from the contents list that within each chapter sections mainly devoted to Goethe's life alternate, on the whole, with sections mainly devoted to his works Not that the two subjects can be separatedon the contrary, it is a main theme of the whole book that they cannot But to make orientation easier, and to make the biographical narrative more continuous, it seemed better to confine the literary discussion of major works to discrete sections The

biographical sections still contain some discussion of minor and shorter works, such as lyrical poems, and also of

Goethe's scientific concerns and of his drawingenough, I hope, to confirm the general principle of the inseparability of mind and matter Works composed over a long period are treated as far as possible stage by stage in the course of their development With Goethe's æuvre the biographical approach has great analytical power, and to abstract from the

gradual process of composition is the surest way of reintroducing those ideological preconceptions and conventional judgements which I am trying to eliminate The headings to the pages, and the index of

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Goethe's works, should help the reader to find the main passages relevant to any particular work.

It is always a pleasure to write about Goethe, and naturally it is a pleasure to express one's gratitude to those who have enabled one to do so I should like to thank Stephen Brook, who first suggested, more than ten years ago, that I should write this book, and Virginia Llewellyn-Smith and Catherine Clarke, of Oxford University Press, who encouraged me to continue with the project A scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung made it possible for me, under the benevolent direction of Professor A Schöne, to write a first draft of Chapters 1 to 3, and the generosity of that

remarkable institution deserves the warmest recognition in these chill times My work was rendered much easier by the helpfulness of the staff in the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Gättingen and in the Cambridge University Library, and by the protracted loan of many volumes from the Beit Library of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in Cambridge I am grateful to my colleagues, and especially to Dr J Cameron Wilson of Jesus College, Cambridge, who readily took over my normal duties while I was on study leave, and to Wolfgang and

Rosemarie Bleichroth, who were the kindest of hosts and who drew my attention to many of the silhouettes which adorn the book They, and Paul Connerton, proved indefatigably tolerant of Goethocentric conversation and so have left their mark on much of my exposition A timely gift of books from Anneliese Winkler, to whom I owe any facility in the German language I may have, greatly eased the later stages of my work Dr M R Minden kindly passed on to me a number of books from the library of Trevor Jones, who I like to think would have enjoyed the use I have made of them

I wish particularly to thank those who have given their time and attention to read and comment, often at greater length than I had any right to expect, on parts of the manuscript as it has developed: Professor J P Stern, Professor and Mrs J

C O'Neill, Professor T J Reed, Dr E C Stopp, and my dear colleague the late Professor U Limentani, who gave me invaluable assistance with Chapter 7 They have saved me from many errors, obscurities, and fatuities which the reader will not see: those which remain on view are all my own work

I am grateful to the editors of German Life and Letters for permitting the republication of some material in Chapter 3

which first appeared in their journal A general word of thanks is also appropriate here to those who have furnished me with illustrative material and given permission for its use, and who are more specifically acknowledged in the List of Illustrations That there are any illustrations at all is a result of the generosity of the MorsheadSalter Fund of Magdalene College, Cambridge, of the Tiarks Fund and the Jebb Fund of the University of Cambridge, and especially, and once again, of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, who have all made substantial grants towards the cost of reproductions

My thanks go not only to the institutions themselves, but also to their individual representatives who have helped and encouraged me

A project of this kind has necessarily passed beneath the fingers of many typists who deserve grateful

acknowledgement: Rosemary Baines, Marion Lettau, Nicholas and Deborah Hopkin, and above all my wife, Rosemary,

a busy solicitor who none the less not only typed Chapters 4 to 8 but was also their most rigorous critic To her support throughout, but especially in the difficult hours and days of what has been a more demanding undertaking than I hope is now apparent, I owe both the completion of this first volume and the prospect that the second volume will follow it with reasonable expedition My parents-in-law spared neither their time nor their energy in sustaining us both and in

managing a household which, despite including two children under three, at times seemed to revolve around a man dead one and a half centuries ago This book is their work also, and I dedicate it to them

N.B

JANUARY 1990

Preface to the Paperback Edition

This reissue has made it possible to introduce a number of minor corrections I am particularly indebted to Professor T

J Reed for his helpful vigilance

When I wrote the Preface to the original edition I did not know that thanks to a Research Readership awarded by the British Academy I would be able to compose the Index to this volume much more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case I am glad to be able to take this first opportunity to express in public my gratitude to the Academy for their support for this project

N.B

NOVEMBER 1991

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2

Origins of a Poet

41

7

To Italy at Last (17861788)

413

'Quite as much toil as enjoyment': October 1786February 1787 431

A Glimpse of Fulfilment: Iphigenia and 'Forest Cavern' 447

8

The Watershed (17881790)

531