Lyre and Laurel: Goethe: 1749-1949

by LUCIEN PRICE

1

HE is a belated figure of the Renaissance. For the like of his many-sided genius we must go upstream to Leonardo da Vinci, to Michelangelo, and on back to Aristotle. Our almost complete loss of Shakespeare’s biography is offset by our knowledge of Goethe’s. We know almost too much; at times the underbrush obscures the giant redwood. In 1932 when the centenary of his death was being commemorated, it was said that whatsoever influence he was to have among us had by now been expended. Act there he lowers, alter not one world war but two, after the collapse of Germany, after the mortal stench from Buchenwaltl has been wafted to nostrils in Athenian Weimar in that spot where Bach before him, where Liszt after him, and where Schiller and the Duke Karl August with him, lived and worked. Such world-figures are self-renewing and speak in a fresh tongue to each successive age; they are old deepwater sailors who have weathered the gales of centuries, and one of the stoutest of them is Goethe.

His toughening is a life-work, undertaken by himself. lie is born to the silver spoon, in Frankfort, August 1749; but a silver spoon, as he is not long in finding out, can be a peril the more. At the ripe age of sixteen he is sent to the university of Leipsic to study law. lie studies life and letters but little law. Leipsic in 1765 is a would-be Paris. 1 urn a handsome, spirited, brilliant boy loose in such a city with plenty of money and lie is likely to conclude that, among other subjects, the proper study of mankind is woman. For tutor in this he has a worldling, eleven years older than himself, Behrisch, the first of two human understudies for the figure of Mephistopheles; human merely and figures only, for Mephistopheles Goethe found in his own breast,

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in merrier Brest,

as every candid reader of Faust finds that selfsame son of chaos in himself.

Three years in Leipsic and he goes home with his health well-nigh wrecked by what is politely termed dissipation. There, an invalid with leisure for contrite meditation, he discovers the solace of pietism, assisted by some devout women, “beautiful souls,” as they truly were, and he also ventures into occultism, all of which leaves its traces in the opening scenes of Faust; while on the opposite side of the ledger is entered Johann Heinrich Merck, whose gaunt frame, pointed nose, restless, peering eyes, and mocking tongue live on in Mephistopheles.

By the spring of 1770, Goethe, being twenty, is ready to try another university, Strasbourg. This lime he does bring home his sheepskin though he never practises law beyond a few perfunctory cases to mollify his father. The articles of value he brings home from eighteen months in Strasbourg are his acquaintanceship with Herder and a new conception of poetry; and an enthusiasm for Strasbourg cathedral in which he discovers Gothic, and for the country parsonage of Sesenhcim where he discovers Friederike Brion in a setting like Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield. He now has the materials for the Gretchen tragedy in Faust; impetuous lover, innocent girl, destructive cynic, and Gothic architecture to brood over the drama like the somber genius of the Middle Ages.

But it is not yet ready to well up from his subconsciousness to the level of articulation. First comes Götz von Berlichingen, a drama sired about half and half out of Shakespeare and the Gothic of Strasbourg. Götz swept through Germany, a shudder alternately compounded of horror and delight; the youth of twenty-four had touched off a revolution in letters. Also in publishing? A bookseller ofierce! him a handsome figure for a dozen more plays as nearly like Girts as he could write!

Not a play, however; his next is a novel, and even more startling. It was, as might have been expected, enkindled by woman, and not one but two; Charlotte Buff, betrothed to Georg Christian Kestner, whom she wisely married, and Maximiliane von La Roche, whom Goethe wisely didn’t. They were blended in The Sorrows of Young Werther which went through Europe like an electric shock and on to the ends of the world, even to China in Goethe’s own lifetime. Thirty-four years after its appearance Napoleon, then master of Western Europe, who had read the novel seven times, discussed it wit It Goethe eagerly. Werther had ignited some dangerous lire damp that lurked in the breast of European youth, it is credited with having been innocently a precursor of the French Revolution, and long after ihe publication of the First Part of Faust, Goethe’s fame was still as the author of Werther.

It is now 1775; there is shooting in Concord, Massachusetts; in Bonn, Germany, is a little boy live years old named Beethoven; and Faust has been germinating in Goethe for the past six years, lie knows it, and takes good care to tell no one. (“Bilde, Künstler, rede nicht.”) As a lad he had read at least one of the chapbooks hawked about for sale which told the fabulous tale of the scholar who sold himself to the devil, and he could scarcely have helped seeing one of the puppet shows (quasi Punch and Judy) which dramatized the Faust legend for the populace. Suppose Shakespeare had worked at intervals for sixty years on a great tragedy dealing with problems central to the life of modern man, the while he kept himself refueled by producing his other works, by a life of action as Minister of Stale in a Principality, by travel, by scientific investigation, by theatre management, by writing novels, by voracious reading; then suppose we had a record of all this, day by day, decade by decade, including a record of the gradual growth of that greatest work: would the final achievement seem less remarkable, or more miraculous than do Shakespeare’s works as we have them in almost utter anonymity? (“ We ask and ask — Thou smilest and art still.”) There is of course the risk that the product will be obscured by the process, and yet “The process itself is the actuality,” and, as the centuries roll on, a function of Faust will be to teach artists of successive generations what the crealiou of a work on so grand a scale must cost a man, ‘how begot, how nourished’;

2

Faust in its original prose version boiled up and out of the twenty-five-year-old poet at his father’s house in Frankfort in 1774-1775. Not until one hundred and twelve years later (1887) did a copy of that original come to light. The prose is molten lava; even translated into verse as all but one scene of it later was, the spontaneity is still impetuous: twenty-two scenes, written almost helterskelter in whatsoever way they poured out, and with them the ache of his self-reproaches for his behavior at the Sescnheim parsonage, a purging of the perilous stuff that weighed upon his heart; an appallingly lucid contemplation of the grisly mighthave-beens of a situation in which he had repeatedly found himself and was to find himself at intervals from his adolescence until he was past seventy: in the immediate foreground, a drama of seduction, betrayal, murder of the girl’s mother by poison, of her brother by rapier’s thrust, infanticide committed by the crazed girl herself, then prison, condemnation to the headman’s block, and death; but towering in the background, world-issues of a worldsoul, thirst, for knowledge and disgust with its inadequacy, yearning to achieve an unattainable godhead, thirst to experience life to its uttermost, and the problem of gradual self-redemption through beneficent effort. The scaffolding for the mighty edifice is now up.

It is simpler than it looks. Two companions fare forth on adventures which they discuss as they go: Dante and Vergil, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Faust and Mephistopheles, Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim. Dante, who stands for the human race, guided by Vergil, who embodies human philosophy; Don Quixote, the slightly cracked idealist, squired by Sancho, a creature of prosaic sense; Faust, humanity that errs so long as it lives and strives, escorted by Mephistopheles, the spirit of negation, to whom all things created are worthy only to be destroyed; in each pair, two aspects of humanity presented in the guise of contrasted personalities, though we are well aware that both natures dwell in every human breast; and thus each of these divine comedies is a dialogue of the soul with itself, in which the listener hears the language of his ow n heart. What had happened to Goethe at twenty-five, though he was not fully aware of it until years later, was something which, with luck, happens to a great artist perhaps once: he had hit upon a device so simple that into it he could pour the multifarious experiences of a lifetime, — a lent, of Pari-Banu in the Arabian Nights, which while small enough to be carried in the palm of a hand, can be unfolded to dimensions that will shelter an army.

Faust now becomes a life-work, not continuously, and for long intervals not even consciously so. It is Schiller who, between 1795 and 1801, persuades Goethe to complete the First Part, and the Second Part, after an interval of twenty-four years, is resumed in 1825 and finished in 1831, six months before his death, thanks to the inducement, of his secretary, Peter Fckermann. The paradox must be entered also. Faust would not be what it is had it been Faust only. Like Nature, Goethe’s mind produced a multitude of seeds for one that it ever brought to fruition. Such prodigality of insemination can be seen in the thick strewing of seed pods under a maple tree in May. Like Michelangelo’s, his mind tossed up scheme after scheme too grandiose for one mortal to achieve in a single life-span, although in retrospect such men are seen to have lived several lifetimes in one.

3

WEIMAR was then a town of 7000. It is not a large town now, although remembering what it was as recently as ten years ago, — its eighteenth-century aspect of stucco walls tinted the Weimar yellow, the placid Ilm winding through its huge Park of majestic trees, the snowy swans, the Gartenhaus, hermitage of llie poet, the rustic statuary, and mementos on every hand of Goethe, of Schiller, of the Duke Carl August, and Franz Liszt — then remembering what was done within smelling-distance of this idyllic scene in the fifth decade of this twentieth century, would one ever want to see the place again? Better remember it as it was.

To Weimar Goethe was invited as guest by the young Duke Karl August, He was eighteen years old and Goethe was twenty-six. Each had divined the deeper capacities of the other, though that would have been hard to guess from their escapades in the next few months. They rode like centaurs and drove like Jehus; they stood in the marketplace together by the hour cracking huge sledge whips for a wager, — unheard-of conduct for young aristocrats! Court etiquette be hanged, they dined at the same table, slept in the same room, and were du-und-du. Fresh-air fiends and cold-water demons, they went in for swims in December, and bivouacked under the stars: “Last night I slept on the terrace wrapped in my blue cloak, awoke 3 times, at 12, 2, and 4, and each time there was a new splendor in the heavens.” All this, please remember, when rooms were kept suffocating and baths were as sketchy as they were infrequent. Add mountain climbing when folk thought it was flying in the face of Providence to climb a mountain. Naturally the pair were viewed with alarm; which was galloping the other to hell? But the poet knew what he was about; he knew that the boy prince would be wildish anyhow, and joined the sport until he should be able to sober and steady him. It was a game for high stakes and he won; throughout half a century the pair labored for the good of the Duchy and for Germany. Poet and prince, it was one of the classic friendships of history.

In no time at all of course there was another woman; without a love affair Goethe was only half alive. She was Frau von Stein, wife of the Duke’s Master of Horse, seven years older than the poet, mother of seven children, frail, beginning to fade, and a bit given to melancholy. Her nature had depth, her mind was good. She was probably the most kindred spirit Goethe ever found among women. Whether it was entirely what Henry James calls “a virtuous attachment” the reader can answer to suit himself after having read Eckermann’s narrative of October 7, 1827; but the deprecatory cough of pre-Freudian biographers when they come to Goethes successive attachments to women is now a trifle muted by the Kinsey Report. The 12,000 males who answered Professor Kinsey’s questions did so orally and anonymously and their answers were recorded in code: Goethe wrote his out m works of art a score of times and signed his own name. Case dismissed.

For the next ten years his immense and manysided talent is drained off into State administration. The poet in him is dying by inches, he knows it, and at 3:00 o’clock in the morning of September 3, 1780, he starts for Italy without telling anyone he is going until after he is gone. The Duke takes it handsomely; Frau von Stein takes umbrage. In Italy he stays two years, travels widely, studies indefaligably, and returns a changed man. He had gone to Italy a German; he comes home a Greek; “Let everybody be a Grecian in his own way, but let him be a Grecian.” That Italian journey is his Great Divide. Never again was his Pegasus to be a pack horse. He brings, with the aid of Winckelmann, ihe Renaissance belatedly to Germany, it had previously taken the form of Protestant Reformation; it now becomes humanistic, Nietzsche has said: “Goethe belongs to a higher sphere than ‘national literatures’ . . . not merely a great and good man, but a culture.”

To this day, who would see Greece must see Italy. Penetrating observer that he was, even in the Italy of 1786 Goethe could see, and knew that he was seeing, the modern world from the vantage point of the ancient one, and he saw that Hellas is higher ground and a nobler conception of life. Such an experience is like reincarnating backwards; after it the man may return to his own epoch, but trailing clouds of glory does he come, from Greece that is his home.

In most biographies, the excitement is over at forty. By then the heavy fighting is done, the career decided, and the rest a record of inner life reflected in outer works. Not so with Goethe. The excitement, is inner from the start, and goes right on accelerating in crescendo. Now come his friendship with Schiller, his break with Frau von Stein, his alliance with Christiane Yulpius in the face of Weimar and the world; his sustained intellectual production, not alone in literature, — novels, plays, poems, essays, autobiography, editing, translating, — but two notable scientific discoveries, one in botany, another in anatomy, and, too, his hapless Theory of Colors. Next, the tides of Napoleonic war pour through Weimar, now this way, now that, once at least to the peril of Goet he’s life in his own house at the hands of the marauders. He is saved by the promptitude of Christiane, whom he marries forthwith as it were under the very rain of cannon balls. (One of them is still stuck in t he walls of The White Swan next to his residence.) And finally his old age, by the pen of Eckennann, is the most moving act of the drama.

The German language is worth learning if only to read Faust in the original. It is a Pan-European took, and perhaps the last. A tragedy of the break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between theology and humanism, beginning in Gothic glooms il finds its way into the golden sunshine ol Hellas. And when he does utilize Christian imagery at the close of the work il is because “the conclusion, where the redeemed soul is carried up, was difficult to manage; and that, amid such supersensual matters about which we scarcely have even an intimation, I might easily have lost myself in the vague — if I had not, by means of sharply drawn figures, and images from the Christian Church, given my poetical design a desirable form and substance.” It is thus that Plato resorts to myth when he wishes to scale down some of his most difficult, abstract thinking to a form in which it could be grasped by the average educated Athenian ol his day; for myth is the language of abstraction before a people has risen to the comprehension of general ideas.

In Faust, too, Goethe had the advantage that he was working in a traditional saga. Like the Greek tragic dramatists, he was retelling a story which everyone knew, or thought they knew, beforehand. The Gretchen tragedy, so-called, is extraneous and would read as well il published separately as the story ofHeinrich, Gretchen, and Iago. Nietzsche denies it the rank of tragedy at all: “A.little letupstress is seduced and plunged into despair: a great scholar of all four Faculties is the evil-doer. That cannot have happened in the ordinary course, surely? Without the aid of the devil incarnate, the great scholar never would have achieved the deed. — Is this really destined to be the greatest German ‘tragic idea’?”

No. The tragic ideas are stated in the first hall of Part One, before Faust has ever heard of Gretchen. These are what boiled out of him in Frankfort as a youth of twenty-four to be reworked and elaborated first in 1788 to 1790, and finally from 1794 to 1801, when Part One was finished. In their final form they plunge us into the profound quandaries which confront modern man.

What are these? Let the reader dig them out for himself. But never suppose they will yield their lull import,—beautifully though their bodies shine through their poetic vestments, — in one reading or in twenty.

incorporated with one’s very tissues, until they are a part of his unconscious reflective processes.

The first half of Part One slates thematic material with a riotous prodigality and with a poetic elevation hardly to be matched outside of those three great choric odes which come early in the first play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Gresteia. In both the Agamemnon and Faust, the action is slowed down or stopped, but in both the poet is treating enigmas of human destiny in verse so pregnant that one hardly cares whether the action is moving or stalled; and again in both, these statements of themes are landmarks of human thought, towering Peaks which, once recognized, continue in view for the rest of one’s life-journey. This greater potency of Faust’s opening scenes is the first run of sap in the springtime of the poet’s young manhood; it is the red-hot metal of genius cooling gradually through a quarter of a century into disciplined form. Here are the sudden and direct insights, bursts of lyric spontaneity, audacities of thought, grandeurs of imagination, and always the fructifying of wide knowledge. Hardly again does one feel, like the deck of an ocean-going vessel under his boot soles, such a majestic grouiulswell of the verses, heave and roll, imparting their rhythmic pulsations to his own living organism, until he comes to the final scene of the Second Part: then

Faust is the trunk of that mighty tree which is Goethe’s life-work. It grew slowly like an oak, and his fame grew likewise, — fame, a plant which today emphatically does not grow on mortal soil but is machine-made, or is a summer squash, decaying faster than it ripens. From first youth tested up to extreme old age, the Faust poem, conceived in Goethe’s adolescence, worked at over six decades, progressing like his own life through successive reincarnations, from prose to verse, from Gothic to Hellenism, and reincarnating anew in the Romantic music of the early nineteenth century, is ready now to reincarnate in North America and fructify the creative spirit of our people; for tins example of a great work deliberately matured throughout a lifetime “without haste, without rest,”comes two hundred years after the poet’s birth to a land where, reversing his epigram, “Here or nowhere is America,” the fact may be that “Here, in America, or nowhere is Europe.”

4

THE enduring magnitude of Faust may now be measured by its impact on the dominant art-form of our modern world, music. It falls within the floruit of that art; Goethe was born one year before Bach died, and outlived Beethoven five years. Among the numerous — almost innumerable—attempts at music to Faust, Liszt’s symphony remains majestically grandiose and can be very moving; Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust is dramatically elective though more on tin’ side of macabre diablerie; Gounod’s is theatre and French theatre at that; Boito’s Mejistofele has something the sweep of Goethe’s total dramatic conception, however diluted the libretto and Italianate the music; Wagner’s Faust Overture is better than he himself ever gave it the credit of being; from the groping doubt of its first measure to the religious peace of its last, the music moves in that haunted world of the Faust poetry; yet the only composer who has really added anything to Goethe’s verses, who has written music for them apart from which one never again thinks of those words, is that gentle poet, Franz Schubert. But the music for Faust has never been written and now never will be. The man who should have composed it, and contemplated doing so, died untimely on March 26, 1827. His name was Beethoven, and one reason why he never wrote it may be that the music of Faust had already been written by Goethe himself in his verse.

Christendom has four great Faster poems. They are Dante’s Divine Comedy, which opens at dawn on Good Friday, April 8, 1300; Bach’s Matthew Passion Music; Goethe’s Faust, which begins on Faster Eve; and Wagner’s Parsifal. The first is Catholic, the second Protestant, the third is humanist, and the fourth Buddhistic by way of Christianity. And what an august family tree is the genealogy of poetic ideas: Vergil derives from Homer, Dante derives from Vergil, Goethe’s last scene in Faust owes its holy mountain to some of the same sources as Dante’s Mount of Purgatory; and Wagner’s Parsifal begins where Faust ends, at Montserrat. (Von Humboldt had described it to Goethe.) It is startling how much of Wagner, as dramatist, stems from Goethe, and perhaps the nearest into music Faust has ever been carried is in the Good Friday scene of Parsifal, that flowering mead and sacred spring below the holy mountain of the Grail. As Gurnemanz says to Parsifal, when they begin their first ascent to the Temple, — “Here space and time are one.”

There remains the Indian Summer of a mighty poet. That goldenly glowing canvas let the humble peddler’s son, Peter Eekermaun, paint for us in his Conversations wilh Goethe. I hey begin in 1823 and end a few days before Goethe’s death in March, 1832. Nietzsche, who was not in the habit of passing around compliments on silver platters, calls Eckermann’s “the best German book there is.” It bequeaths, like sunset to the skies, the splendor of the poet’s prime, for his prime lasted to the very end.

Yes, there were dreadful days from 1933 to 1945, and after, when the staggered comprehension of those who had known and loved Germany reeled from the idea that the same people could have spawned the Nazis and the Gestapo that had sired Bach, Beethoven, and Goethe. But we know better now, and in truth we knew better then. Poets and composers, artists and savants, the men of thought and imagination create indestructible worlds, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against them, no, not even the hells created by their own people. What! Has no one noticed that the Evil Genius of Germany perished on Walpurgisnacht? Witches’ Sabbath, no less, — April 30, 1945. And the morrow is May Day. For in the long count of the centuries, literature becomes history. Historical records tell us about what happened, but great works of art or poetry are themselves the things that happened: “Here for the first time in its millennia of struggle, the spirit of man reached such-and-such a height,” reached Faust . . . Then what if the bloody instructions taught at Hiroshima and Nagasaki returned to plague the inventor; by what would our memory survive in the minds of men? By mechanical ingenuity, by science, by political innovation, by private profit, by the diffusion of creature comforts? (“Nay, nor the world, nor any tiring thing, will so cohere.”) We shall survive to remoter time, if survive we do, by the release of fresh crealive faculties in the spirit of man.