Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution Proceedings vol.9

LECTURE

Goethe: Sage of Weimar or Devil’s Advocate?

Chaired by Peter Rex Valentine

Prof. Peter Skrine

University of Bristol

15 February 2005

If I were giving this talk in Germany - or indeed anywhere in the German-speaking world from the Federal Republic and Austria to Liechtenstein to Namibia - there would probably be a bust or portrait of Goethe somewhere in the room, for he and his presence presides like a guardian spirit even when it is taken in vain, as was the case during the National Socialist years. Obviously everyone has heard of him, but people are sometimes hard put to explain why they know his name. Yes, he is the greatest German writer. That’s easily said, but raises the question: what is or was the competition? In Germany, his pre-eminence in the literary and cultural pantheon is obvious and has been taken for granted ever since his death in 1832. He is, in a word, an integral part of Germany’s Selbstverståndnis, i.e. its understanding and image of itself. But why? This is a question that looms up over much of what I am going to say.

We are not in Germany now. We are in England. Not in Weimar, the small and rather insignificant place for which he, along with his friend, the dramatist and historian Schiller, earned the epithet, the ‘Athens of Germany,’ but in Bath, a place he would surely have enjoyed had he ever come to England, for he was fond of spas and liked taking the waters, especially in his later years, and was often to be seen at fashionable spas such as Karlsbad, which he favoured for over thirty years, or Teplitz, where in 1812 he met Beethoven, and they walked further up the valley so as to be able to talk without being disturbed by all the bowing and greeting of passeers-by. ‘It’s so annoying,’ Goethe said, ‘I simply cannot escape all this bowing and scraping here.’ With a smile Beethoven replied: ‘Don’t worry, your Excellency, perhaps the greetings and bows are meant for me!’. And I mustn’t forget Marienbad, the scene of his last love affair – she was 18, he 74 - and which gave its name to the ‘Marienbad Elegy’, the intense yet stoical valedictory elegy he composed in his carriage on leaving the spa in September 1823.

Talking in Bath about Goethe or about Goethe in Bath suggests an approach, which might view him from a more British angle. The English view of Goethe has had its ups and downs ever since readers and reviewers here first became aware of his existence in the late 1770s. His name caused problems from the start. How is one supposed to pronounce it? Right up to today, this uncertainty inhibits discussion. The Johann Wolfgang part is fine. But in English contexts his surname has often been written and printed Goëthe, which, correctly enough, suggests that the two vowels should be sounded separately. The trouble is that in German, the addition of E to the vowels A, O, and U indicates a change of pronunciation or sound: Umlaut being the word for this in German. In German typography and handwriting two dots above the vowel in question in place of an E do the trick. Thus Goethe’s name can be spelt Göthe and indeed sometimes was, leading to uncertainty ever since, and to our typically English embarrassment when it comes to saying his name aloud. This is nothing new. ‘Goëthe,’ said old Mr Holbrook in Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford back in the early 1850s, twenty years after Goethe’s death. He may have pronounced it wrongly, but he said it admiringly and with veneration. So too does Mathhew Arnold in a poem dated April 1850 and entitled ‘Memorial Verses’. In this poem he laments the passing of Byron’s force, Wordsworth’s healing power, and Goethe’s sage mind:

When Goethe’s death was told, we said:

Sunk, then, is Europe’s sagest head.

Physician of the iron age,

Goethe has done his pilgrimage.

He took the suffering human race,

He read each would, each weakness clear;

And struck his finger on the place

And said: Thou ailest here, and here!

He look’d on Europe’s dying hour

Of fitful dream and feverish power;

His eye plunged down the weltering strife,

The turmoil of expiring life

And said: The end is everywhere,

Art still has truth, take refuge there!

Let us now locate the man with this name in a context we can relate to. Let’s begin with an undisputed fact. He was born in the free city of Frankfurt - then as now one of Europe’s leading commercial and financial centres – on 28 August 1749 - and he died on 22 March 1832 in of Weimar, the name of which is so closely associated with his, and which acquired the epithet ‘The Athens of Germany’ as a result of the artistic, cultural and scientific kudos he gave it during the 56 years he lived there and attracted to it many other famous contemporaries.

His family were quite well-to-do; he read law at Strasburg University, and spent some time as a trainee at the Supreme Court of the Holy Roman Empire which was located in the small town of Wetzlar; he practised in Frankfurt, too, for a while, taking up the cases notably of Jews in need of redress. But Goethe did not practise law for long, and that was because he knew at heart that he was cut out for other things. He was quite right. During his vast life span he was constantly active, doing or writing something – there seems to be no record of him relaxing on a sun-lounger… ‘The day is immeasurably long to him who knows how to value and use it’ is one of his many sayings. His life ran from 1749 to 1832 -- just think for a moment what took place between those two dates: the American War of Independence; the French Revolution; the rise and fall of Napoleon; the coming of steam: railways, ships, power; and gas, too, and inoculation: the list goes on! Let’s just pause to remind ourselves of a few of the literary landmarks during his life.

Let’s start here, in Bath, where, as we all know, Jane Austen lived for a time: she was born in 1775, the year Goethe took up residence at in Weimar at the invitation of his friend Carl August , the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who had just attained his majority and could therefore do more or less what he liked. Or we could also glance in the direction of Bristol, where in Park Street and Windsor Terrace, and at Cowslip Green near Wrington, he had an almost exact contemporary in Hannah More, who was born in Fishponds in 1745, four years before him, and died in Clifton in 1833, surviving him by eighteen months. Wordsworth and Coleridge, who first met in Bristol, and who had more in common with him, were his juniors by a quarter of a century: Wordsworth was born in 1770 and Coleridge in 1772, when Goethe was already in his early twenties. If we now try to locate him in a broader cultural context, we should also see him in relation to Mozart, the musician he most admired. He remembered seeing the boy prodigy in Frankfurt, i.e. Goethe was older than Mozart by 6 years, but predeceased him by nearly 40 years: he died in 1791. Goethe, however, not only experienced the entire Napoleonic era, he actually lived long enough to hear about the opening of the Manchester-Liverpool steam railway in 1830, and to receive a signet seal as a token of admiration from fifteen Scottish admirers, a gesture organised in 1831 by the young Thomas Carlyle, who had translated some of his works and corresponded with him, and who was at the time writing Sartor Resartus, a curious book in the German manner, purporting to be by one memorably pseudo-author, Professor Teufelsdreck, and containing an admiring yet also critical analysis of that tantalizingly forbidding concept known as ‘German thought’. But that was three decades after Sir Walter Scott had translated Goethe’s exciting medieval drama Götz von Berlichingen in 1799 — before he started writing his historical novels. In Britain the Jacobite rising of 1745 was recent history when Goethe was born; by the time he died the Reform Bill had been passed, and the foundations of Victorian Britain laid. And in between, Napoleon had waged his wars, and been defeated – indeed there are moments when Napoleon impinges closely on Goethe himself. For instance in 1812, on his rush back to France after the débâcle in Russia made famous in literature by Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Napoleon had driven through Weimar at dead of night, yet had taken the trouble to send a greeting to Goethe as he sped through. He had been in less of a hurry when they met the year before in 1811: on that occasion Goethe had an hour-long interview with Napoleon over breakfast on 2 October in the nearby town of Erfurt, during which Napoleon told him that he had read his famous story, The Sorrows of Young Werther, seven times. Then, as Goethe left the room, Napoleon was heard to remark to the generals gathered around him: ‘voilà un homme!’ It was a telling comment on the poet and thinker by the man of action.

And, yes, it is as a man, a human being, that Goethe rivets our attention. The book Napoleon claimed he had read seven times was the one which swept Goethe into the front rank of contemporary writers when it took Europe by storm with astonishing speed after its publication in 1774. Seldom if ever has a book been greeted with such an immediate response thoughout what I suppose we might call the western world. Seldom has an author so accurately and vividly put his finger on the pulse of a whole generation. Its success with readers back in those days might, of course, make us think it was hopelessly dated now. Yet that isn’t so — and the reason is not far to seek. It is a novel in the letter form which had been pioneered by Richardson in Pamela and Clarissa, but unlike them it is short: Goethe compresses their long-drawn-out form to a fraction of their size. The eternal triangle on which it focuses is turned into an intimate experience for each and every reader: it seems to have been been one with which readers everywhere could identify. Its immediacy and economy made it quick and easy to read — and Napoleon was a busy man — its direct language made it easy to translate, and its direct expression of human emotion and action was guaranteed to make readers identify with its central character, a young man called Werther, whose letters to a friend tell the jubilant yet tragic story of his relationship with Charlotte, the fiancée of steady solid Albert. Here and there, however, there were voices quick to denounce Werther as immoral and harmful to the young. At the end of the story young Werther shoots himself, and suicide was only considered acceptable for the heroes or heroines of tragedy, preferably in verse, like Romeo and Juliet or Cleopatra! But Goethe’s Werther is just an ordinary young contemporary German fellow, a trainee lawyer, like Goethe himself, and the letters he writes are in the language of every day, albeit with a clarity and focus which connoisseurs recognized as the work of a genius, and which imitators could only appreciate with envy. Its world-wide sales soared as translations were made, while from the pulpit it was denounced as a moral outrage: indeed for many people Goethe’s first international success was the work of the devil because it provoked discussion of emotions and actions which, though irrational and even taboo, rang true. Some have even said that this short novel by Goethe was the death-knell of the Age of Reason. And, not surprisingly, it even reached Bath: here Werter. A Tragedy, the first play by a minor dramatist called Frederick Reynolds, was performed in 1785 (Dublin: P. Cooney, 1786) and, a few years later, it was also here in Bath that a certain Sarah Farrell had the temerity to publish Charlotte, or, a Sequel to the Sorrows of Werter in a collection called Charlotte and other Poems (Bath, Campbell & Gaisborough, 1792).

The Sorrows of Young Werther reached an international readership like no other German work before. In 1792 it even became the first work of prose fiction ever to be published on the Indian sub-continent. This suggests that it had credibility far beyond Germany. Perhaps this lies at the base of Goethe’s later claim that poetry or, rather, the essence of the poetic vision, is universal, a notion fundamental to his conviction that man is essentially the same wherever and whoever he is, despite the diversity of the world’s cultures and societies. It is not for nothing that post-war Germany’s counterpart to the British Council was called the Goethe Institute. The diversity and potential conflicts of interests, which appear to divide one human being or grouping from another, are actually deep within in each one of us. That they are diverse and perhaps even incompatible is an easily uttered proposition, which this one-time trainee lawyer turned devil’s advocate was putting to the test.

Goethe never travelled much beyond Germany, Switzerland and Bohemia — apart from that one momentous escape to Italy from Weimar in 1786 to recharge his cultural and emotional batteries. Much as he was admired in Britain and highly though he regarded Greece, he never visited either, and left it to a young British contemporary to experience both: one who, famously, dedicated one of his works to ‘the illustrious Goethe’ — this was none other that Byron, whose tragic drama Werner (1822), is set in Silesia and Bohemia, and is prefaced by these words. The impact of Goethe on English poets was far slighter or perhaps less obvious than might be suggested by the attention his works attracted from admirers and translators. Most major Victorian poets expressed admiration for him, especially Longfellow and Tennyson, who counted Goethe among the great poets who are also sages, though on one occasion he did also call him a ‘glorious devil’. Even Carlyle, who did so much to popularize Goethe and who corresponded with him between 1824 and Goethe’s death eight years later, could sometimes find the going tough. He embarked courageously on the mammoth task of translating Goethe’s major novel, Wilhelm Meister, but as he laboured away, he said ‘no mortal will ever buy a copy of it.’ But he went on to say: ‘So what! Goethe is the greatest genius that has lived for a century, and the greatest man that has lived for three. I could sometimes fall down and worship him; at other times I could kick him out of the room!’

Wilhelm Meister is one of the most famous novels in the German language, yet despite Carlyle’s best endeavours, it has never really caught on in this country in the way that, say, War and Peace has. It is the epitome of a genre that Germany has long favoured – the Bildungsroman – a type of story that traces the development or evolution of a young man as he confronts the challenges of life and does his best to cope with its eventualities and make sense of its apparent inconsistencies. In other words it presents an argument against the proposition that the course of a human life is arbitrary, and that the individual is dependent on good fortune and bad luck rather than on flair and purposefulness or his lack of either. Young Wilhelm is pushed out by his author into the complexities of life, both serious and trivial: it seems a labyrinth and quite arbitrary, or will it add up to something coherent? Will Wilhelm manage to navigate life, or will he go under? By the end this green apprentice in the craft of life manages to make his way, and even to earn himself the rank of ‘master’ – but that of course isn’t really the end, it is merely the end of the beginning - his apprenticeship. In the novel’s less famous and rather less readable sequel, Wilhelm, now a journeyman in the craft we all share, i.e. the art of living, finds himself setting out to earn something by putting his training to the test. This sequel, called the Wanderjahre, is strange, and often enigmatic; at the end of it Wilhelm, the journeyman, is fully and truly qualified, and has earned the title of ‘master’; he is a master of the craft of living, as his name implies. Wilhelm Meister was an essentially nineteenth-century book, as Caryle realised when he translated it during the 1820s and made it something of a Victorian classic. At once realistic and enigmatic, and worked on intermittently by Goethe from 1777 to 1828, it exerted many a direct and indirect influence, appealing as it did on one level to the self-made men of the industrial era, and on another to their more artistic contemporaries especially among the pre-Raphaelites. But it was Carlyle himself who was most affected: for him, and he was the only great Victorian to have actually conducted a correspondence with the sage of Weimar, Goethe was someone who had achieved harmony of mind and soul, someone who, by grappling with the problems of life, had attained the highest wisdom. He was a sage indeed!

Goethe writes fine prose – there can be no doubt of that. His interests were also extremely wide, which makes him and his achievements even more interesting to an even wider range of people: his serious interests included meteorology — he worked on cloud formations; botany – the palm he planted as a young man in the botanical garden of the University of Padua is still growing there; he came up with a theory of colours; he took up anatomy – and discovered the last unidentified bone in the human skeleton, the intermaxilliary bone; he was an expert on numismatics and on gemstones, and it is even said that he introduced to science the notion of evolution!

But it is as a poet that he is best known in the German-speaking countries. Alas, this essential aspect of his creativity is one that those who cannot understand his language are bound to miss. It has been said that his poetry has an inner music in it – certainly it has inspired many composers to set it to music: for instance Schubert, Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and his own friends, Carl Friedrich Zelter and the young Felix Mendelssohn. It is often said that his treatment of musicians was ungrateful. You have probably heard the sad story of how Schubert – author of many of the most inspired settings of Goethe poems – never even got an acknowledgment when he sent samples of his settings to the sage of Weimar. We don’t know why this was. Today we would probably conclude that they got lost in the post! Goethe’s treatment of his many correspondents was usually meticulous and he had the rare gift of being able to dictate three letters simultaneously to three secretaries. It was a gift he developed when the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach invited to him come and help run his petty state, a function he performed for the rest of his life and which included seeing to the local mining industry, keeping an eye on education, attending the upkeep of roads, managing the theatre, and negotiating the loans that kept the dukedom afloat during the Napoleonic Wars. No wonder he devised ways and means of getting all his jobs done. As for poor Schubert: could it be that Goethe felt that here the musician had usurped the poet’s role? Was it that these masterpieces were Schubert songs, rather than settings of Goethe poems? Did he ever hear or sing them? We do not know. What we do know is that no other German poet has been so often set to music – surely in itself a tribute to the latent musicality of his poetry, its subtle placing of vowels and consonants, its wonderful sense of rhythm, sound and mood. Perhaps the very fact that his poems sound so good when read aloud or to oneself is a challenge to the composer setting them to music. Take, for instance, his early poem, ‘Heidenröslein’, written in 1771 in the apparently artless manner of a folksong:

Sah ein Knab ein Röslein steh’n

Röslein auf der Heiden,

War so jung und morgenschön,

Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehen,

Sah’s mit vielen Freuden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Or ‘Erlkönig’, his haunting ballad of 1782:

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?

Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind,

Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,

Er fasst ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

In both cases the sound of the language is inherently related to its meaning – and in translation that sound is easily and almost inevitably lost. In follows therefore that if you really want to read Goethe — at least Goethe the poet — you simply have to wrestle with his language until you can understand him and appreciate him in the original. Take another example, ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’, a short poem that Goethe wrote, as dusk was falling, on the wall of a mountain hut looking out over the Thuringian forest. It is as familiar and as attuned to the German sensibility as Wordsworth's ‘Daffodils’ is to ours. Goethe’s poem is a masterpiece, which consists of only 24 words, and it reads:

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch

Using extreme simplicity of utterance in order to express the most piercing aperçu of existence, Goethe invites his readers to enter that language which was the medium of his art. For how can it be translated? David Luke’s ‘plain prose’version in his Goethe volume in the Penguin Poets series brings home the difficulties:

‘Over all the hill-tops it is still, in all the tree-tops you can hardly feel a breath stirring. The little birds are silent in the forest. Wait! Soon you too will soon be at rest.’ It comes to 37 words in place of Goethe’s 24. And where is the strength of the original; its directness, its sense of mystery; the sense we have on reading or hearing it that he is saying something ‘beyond’ the meaning of the words he is using. Where are the assonances, the associations, the anticipations that captivate the ear and the mind when we listen to the original?

He wrote his poem on 6 September 1780. Half a century later, in August 1831, almost at the end of his life, he saw it again when he revisited the place and the hut with a local inspector of mines. The inspector recorded the moment: ‘Goethe read through the few lines, and tears flowed down his cheeks. Slowly he drew his snow-white handkerchief from his dark-brown coat, dried his tears, and said in a gentle melancholy tone, ‘Yes, wait, soon thou shalt rest!’ He was silent for about half a minute, looked out of the window once more into the dark pine-wood, and then turned to me with the words: ‘‘Now let us go home’’.’

I’ve haven’t forgotten the Devil, and wouldn’t dare to! When Goethe was still a small boy in Frankfurt, he found the subject that was to challenge and engross him for the rest of his long life: Faust. Faust is the scholar who goes beyond the established syllabus of human knowledge and ventures out into the unknown. His first attempt at handling it was in 1774 – the same year as Werther. He then he reworked it for partial publication in 1790 and published the full text in 1808. This is what is now known and performed as Faust: Part I. Many years later he followed it up with Part II, which he completed and placed in a sealed envelope 5 days before his death in 1832. Both parts focus on the questing scholar eager to go beyond the frontiers that limit his knowledge, and who is helped to do so by the figure who always has the best tunes - the Devil. Faust sets out in quest of enlightenment and self-fulfilment while Mephistophiles takes on the role of Devil’s Advocate and leads him on through all the barriers in his way, arguing against him, and in so doing spurring him on through the relatively familiar scenes of Part I into the enigmatic, complex, often uncanny world of Part II - a work which many scholars have attempted to elucidate, but which remains as impressively enigmatic as ever, especially to those of us who cannot always make the connections which Goethe, one of the wisest, most enquiring and most original of writers, suggests or challenges us to make at every turn.

In the very first scene of Faust, Part I Faust, the quintessential eternal scholar, is discovered in his dark Gothic study. Engaged in the occult, he conjures up the Erdgeist, the spirit of earth, whom he thinks he resembles; but the spirit retorts: ‘Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, nicht mir!’ (512). Faust, the intellectual human being, is taken aback. After all, man, made in God’s image, should be able to understand the universe. He is interrupted by his elderly assistant, Wagner, who enters the study holding a lamp. He, too, has been trying to increase his knowledge, but, he says, he finds it heavy-going. ‘Mit Eifer hab’ ich mich der Studien beflissen. Zwar weiss ich viel, doch möcht’ ich alles wissen (599-600) (‘I know I know a lot, but I’d like to know everything’). We smile at such naïvety. But it is characteristic of the Sage of Weimar’s approach that, later, we realize that the naïve words of this silly fellow need not be altered by one syllable to convey the ambitious aspirations of some of the people at the cutting edge of research in the world today. But they are also related to the very theme the Earth Spirit initiated with his words: ‘You resemble the spirit you can understand, not me!’.

Some time later Faust succeeds in conjuring up if not the Earth Spirit, then at least, Mephistophiles (his name more or less means ‘no friend of the light’ in Greek). So here is the Devil at last! And, like all enquiring human beings, Faust is eager to ask him a question. He asks him who he is: ‘Part of that power that wills evil, yet creates good,’ Mephistophiles enigmatically replies (1335-6). Being full of impish fun Goethe’s ‘Devil’ soon hits on the idea of swapping roles with Dr Faust, the learned scholar and human being, so that he can interview a would-be student – an educated human in the making - whose ambition it is to know everything—though he quickly adds that he’d like to have some fun while at university, too. Mephisto as admissions tutor discusses the pros and cons of every subject on the syllabus. The hapless sixth-former cannot make up his mind to study any of one them in particular, so he decides to ‘leave his options open’ and takes his leave saying he’ll give it some thought; as he does so, he asks for his interviewer’s autograph. The Devil naughtily writes in his autograph album the Latin words ‘Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum,’ [l.2047] words their recipient gratefully reads aloud but cannot really understand – for such is the nature of partial knowledge. They are almost the very words the serpent spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:5: Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil), From these brief samples from the opening pages or minutes of a vast and wonderful work you may, I hope, see that Goethe is no pedantic, humourless, heavy-going German. There is ample confirmation of that in many other works of his, and in his diaries, conversations and letters, too. Emerson put it memorably in a lecture called ‘Goethe or the Writer’ which he gave in England in 1847, as part of a series entitled ‘Representative Men’:

‘Society has, at all times, the same want, namely, of one sane man with adequate powers of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right relations. […] There was never such a multiplicity of facts. Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity.’

Or go to Weimar and see his house there: you may be as moved as Tennyson was when he crossed its threshold and saw Goethe’s old boots standing in the porch and read the word ‘salve’ written on the doorstep; or go for a stroll in the parks and gardens Goethe helped to lay out in Weimar and which George Eliot describes in her wonderful account of her ‘Three Months in Weimar,’ first published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1855. To my mind, this is the finest piece about Goethe ever written in the English language.