Goethe: The Poet and the Age (Volume II): Revolution and Renunciation 1790-1803
Nicholas Boyle
Oxford University Press £30, pp949
Nicholas Boyle's Goethe: The Poet and the Age towers among a Victorian prodigality of massive biographies: Lord Bullock's double portraits of Hitler and Stalin, Richard Holmes's Coleridge, David Cairns's Berlioz, Michael Holroyd's Shaw, Richardson's Picasso. Some 2,000 pages and two volumes into the journey, and we have reached only 1803.
As in no other individual existence - what do we know of Plato, of Leonardo or of Shakespeare? - the sheer range of Goethe's sovereignty fully justifies, indeed compels Boyle's amplitude. A complete edition of the works and correspondence, of the drawings and state papers, might exceed 100 volumes. These would include lyric and epic verse, drama, prose fiction, literary criticism, translations (from 28 languages), diaries, many of pre-eminent stature and influence. They would include texts, some book-length, on optics, mineralogy, comparative botany, reflections on architecture, the incomparable conversations with Eckermann.
Often Goethe dictated in a week what would constitute very nearly the collected writings of lesser spirits. He did so while travelling, while helping to govern a duchy, while directing its theatre and opera, investigating its agricultural and mineral resources, accompanying its ruler to war, begetting a family and entering on erotic relationships almost each of which generated poetry of a classic force.
Rightly, Napoleon hailed in Goethe the boundless measure of man; to innumerable contemporaries, the author of Werther and of Faust, Newton's opponent in the theory of the spectrum, the begetter of a pre-Darwinian morphology of species, seemed of a stature more than human. In complex ways, not immune to irony and recurrent depression, Goethe was prepared to share this estimate.
Nicholas Boyle's second instalment covers a period of tumultuous public and private experience. In a perspective at once traditional and authoritative, Boyle retells the history of the French Revolution and of the rise of Bonaparte. In parallel, he summarises admirably the idealist revolution and counter-revolution in German philosophic thought.
One could extract from Goethe II a handy introduction to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jacobi and surrounding luminaries. Goethe and his works were intimately related to these tidal motions. He was present at the battle of Valmy and may, on the spot, have recognised in that event a change in the very order of the European world. French armies were to force him and his family into vexing peregrinations.
Boyle's treatment of Goethe's readings and uses of Kant would make for a tidy monograph in itself. As would Boyle's analysis of Goethe's studies and experiments in optics, in the meaning and structure of light. The conclusions drawn were erroneous, but it has been argued that the treatise on colours, the Farbenlehre, is a stylistic, intellectual masterpiece at the heart of Goethe's achievements. An achievement relating Goethe to Spinoza on the one hand, and to various schools of light-mysticism, of 'illuminism' in a literal vein, both Western and Oriental (Persian doctrines and literature fascinated Goethe).
But Boyle is also a literary expositor and critic of vivacious perspicacity. His treatment of Wilhelm Meister, Goethe's didactic roman-fleuve, of the domestic epic, Hermann und Dorothea, of that enigmatic yet somehow pivotal drama, The Natural Daughter, of individual lyrics and of the gestation of Faust, already 25 years in the making and legendary prior to its publication, could be combined into a most useful guide to realms largely unknown to English literacy. In appendix, one would find Boyle's analyses of Schiller's aesthetics, dramas, historical narratives.
The Goethe-Schiller nexus, beginning in July 1794, the collaborative rivalry and loving tension between the two men in Jena and Weimar, is like no other known to literature or art. No single thread can do justice to the intricacies of Goethe's inner evolution during these seminal years. But Boyle does trace the change in Goethe from an earlier Romantic radicalism, from a Promethean rebelliousness, to that Olympian conservatism which was to become his hallmark. A deep sense of domesticity, of familial pleasures, of emotional balance took over in 1793 and 1794 from the Sturm und Drang of an earlier sensibility.
Having witnessed the face of the mob, having followed closely the development of the Terror in France, more and more alert to the fragile social fabric which empowered the flowering of knowledge and the arts, Goethe made his celebrated (yet still problematic) choice: where need be, injustice must be preferred to disorder. This conservatism of a man now 'bulky and in his forties' was subtly undermined by the paganism, by the scientific audacities of Goethe's passions. It never achieved the lapidary repose manifest in Burke.
At numerous points, moreover, as Boyle admirably shows, a wealth of private, even esoteric significance underlies the high polish, the classical forms of Goethe's works. These covert depths were to find expression, itself often mysterious, in the hybrid immensities of Faust II.
Nicholas Boyle stands beside Carlyle, Emerson and Auden in the select galaxy of those who have striven to make Goethe part of the English-language inheritance. Yet a disturbing paradox underlies this entire enterprise. These volumes could not have been written in postwar Germany. Not after the philosopher Karl Jaspers's influential dissent from Goethe-idolatry in 1948.
Boyle seems indifferent to the courtly officiousness in Goethe's treatment of Fichte's radicalism and academic employment; there is nothing, so far, to clarify Goethe and Schiller's derision of the ailing Holderlin (the greater poet); the voluminous exposition of Wilhelm Meister leaves unanswered the question of why that opus is today virtually unreadable and unread. But the issue is a larger one: how was it that a commitment to Goethe, at every level of schooling and cultural activities, proved irrelevant in the face of political barbarism? What terrible truth lies behind the fact that Goethe's Weimar abuts on the camp at Buchenwald?
It may be that Dr Boyle will confront these questions in the closing part of his great labour. They should not be evaded. In Germany, they are not.
