THE CHAOS OF CLASSICISM: GOETHE’S CLASSICISM AS A FEATURE OF
ROMANTICISM
by
BRYAN DAVID EMANUEL
THESIS
Submitted to the Graduate School
of Wayne State University,
Detroit, Michigan
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
2008
MAJOR: INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
Approved by:
Advisor
Date
1460263
2009
1460263
© COPYRIGHT BY
BRYAN EMANUEL
2008
All Rights Reserved
PREFACE
When I began the Master of Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Wayne State
University I grappled with ideas particularly about the Modern artist. Two strands of
interest remained resilient to the end and important to the formulation of my subject as it
is presented in my thesis.
The first quality to nag me, begging somehow to become the problem of my
thesis, had to do with the messiness of the Modern artist. Artists always appeared to
me as neurotic, tragic figures, inevitably possessing a formidable dysfunction that
exercised itself in their development and caused corresponding eccentricity in their
adulthood. They appeared to me as self-sabotaging, always drawn to a flame, painfully
depressive, and alienated from the world by a lack of the same life-skills that enabled
everyone around them to succeed. Despite this, from the relative havoc, a creative
gene gave them the ability to reconstruct the elements of their havoc into something
with distinct form and meaning, into something beautiful and touching. The filth and dirt
was not the individual’s end, but the artist may exert sun and water to draw a flower
from it. The paradox of the final picture has always been alarming to me: how from the
committed messiness – chaos even – of the artist’s disposition, a constructive work may
emerge that resonates deeply the world over. The difference in the effects works as the
North to the South Pole: two forces that are opposed to one another and nevertheless
productively joined together. The wonder of this paradox begged to be addressed in my
thesis.
ii
The other interest that endured throughout my studies was in the autobiography,
the artist’s autobiography in particular. Whether in the fine arts or writing, I have found
the artist’s text about their self working in an interesting exchange with their artwork.
The artwork, as a composition, is poised to make the impression it was meant to make.
Autobiographical material stands anterior to the artwork, it stands outside of it. If the
autobiography is poised to make an impression, it must be said that the impression is
distinct from the artist’s works. If the artist is a painter or sculptor, the autobiography is
in another medium altogether, widening the gap that exists between the text and the
artwork. In any case, this gap has provided a psychological window for me to judge the
motivations of the artist. From the autobiographical staging point of an artist in their
historical context, one may even begin to submit answers to the above paradox.
I began researching my thesis on Primitivism in Modern art. This carried similar
paradoxes as those that initially attracted me to the Modern artist. Modern societies
increased in complexity: mechanization and industrialization made changes, social life
shifted to urban centers, and global information overloaded traditional reality. The artist
ironically gave attention to tribal or “exotic” cultures, which the modern trends of socalled civilization had not corrupted. The reaction does not limit itself to tribal cultures.
When one sees the polarity being created – attention to simplicity in spite of
complication (simplicity as pre-complication) – one may see many more aspects of
Modern Art proceeding from the same instinct. Naïve Art uses childlike forms to find
innocence that is uncorrupted by adulthood.
Outsider Art is crude art that is
uncorrupted by official training. Acceleration meets regression. Kandinsky’s painting
iii
reduced art to the simplicity of geometric forms and Minimalism focused solely on the
basic, essential features of expression.
While I found the discussion on Primitivism too broad to funnel my thoughts, the
paradox of Primitivism occurred to me as regarded an individual, a long time literary
interest, the German Romantic author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
From an
existentialist background in philosophy, I found sympathies with the passionate work,
Sorrows of Young Werther. I read Nietzsche first, and then Goethe. That the author of
Werther was the predecessor of Nietzsche rang true.
The classicism championed
notoriously by the later Goethe appeared to me to have an anachronistic quality.
Moreover, I was convinced that something suspicious was happening during the
Romantic era.
Throughout my coursework I learned that the word “genius,” a
commonplace word today, found its origin and aggrandizement in the Romantic era. In
Germany, the word was attached to no other than Goethe himself. Why did the concept
“genius” find development at this particular time? Something was happening. Things
were moving in order to make place for the genius. My suspicion was supported by
Isaiah Berlin when he called Romanticism “the greatest single shift of consciousness in
the West” (1).
I arrived to the key question of my thesis. It is a paradox equal to the paradoxes
that allured me from the beginning. What caused Goethe to shift from Modernism to
Classicism? Goethe began his literary career in a literary movement, the Sturm und
Drang (Storm and Stress), which promoted Modern values. This culminated famously
in the seminal Sorrows of Young Werther.
What caused his drastic shift to the
Classicism that he stubbornly defended in Weimar?
iv
My thesis works on two levels. It is both asking the broad questions that I began
with and the particular question that I ended with.
This is why my thesis is
interdisciplinary. It is not only an exploration of Goethe’s life, but it has an eye on the
problems that have nagged me from the beginning. It is aesthetic theory proceeding
alongside autobiographical history. It is an exploration of Goethe’s life, of which his
works are one feature. I will give attention to his literary works, but the main work that I
will focus on is his autobiography, Poetry and Truth.
This thesis will rely on your
sympathies for psychology, literature, history and aesthetic theory.
Goethe was born in late August, 1749. He gained companionship with the Sturm
und Drang as early as 1771. His first publication of national fame was the play “Götz
von Berlichingen,” in 1773 at age 23. Sorrows of Young Werther, which accorded him
fame over all of Europe, was written in 1774, at age 24. He began writing portions of
Faust in this year. One year later, in 1775, Goethe would move to Weimar to become
part of the court. In 1786, Goethe left Weimar for Rome where he spent two years that
brought forth his Italian Journeys. In 1788, he returns to Weimar and meets Schiller, to
begin the period known as Weimar Classicism. A fragment of Faust was first published
in 1790, and the first part of Faust was not published until 1808. Goethe died in 1832.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE……………………………………………………………….......................... ii
CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 1 – Introduction……………………………………………………… 1
CHAPTER 2 – The Problem of Romanticism………………………………… 8
CHAPTER 3 – Earthquake, Genius and the Artistic Calling………………… 16
CHAPTER 4 – Sentimentalism………………………………………………… 27
CHAPTER 5 – Disclosures of an Autobiography. Scorn for the Public…… 35
CHAPTER 6 – The Culmination of a Reluctant Romantic…………………. 48
CHAPTER 7 – Conclusion in Classicism……………………………………… 59
AFTERWORD………………………………………………………………...………….. 66
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………. 68
ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….. 72
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT..................................................................... 74
vi
1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
How does a German author who famously advances the emotive individualism
that is essential to Modern art and culture arrive at such a polar opposite as Goethe
represents in his Weimar Classicism? Goethe, the Sturm und Drang author of the
Romantic Era, that is. The confluence of aesthetic headlines was only one feature of
the age’s upheavals through which an artist like Goethe was trying to make his way.
The era of wars, revolutions, theological and governmental disorder is the first period in
history that launches the question of aesthetic allegiances. The Romantic Era is the
first period in history where psychologically, by the very flux of the historical context, the
individual artist is forced to grapple over his or her identity in art. For his part, Goethe
agreed:
How chaotic the condition of my poor brain was in this conflict between two very
significant epochs of our native literature. A great many new things intruded
before I had learned to deal with the old ones, and a great many old things
continued to exercise their hold over me even though I thought I was justified in
renouncing them completely. (Poetry and Truth 214)
Goethe experienced strain under the jostling aesthetic modes.
“The literary
epoch into which I was born developed from the preceding one through dissension,”
Goethe said (Poetry and Truth 197). Goethe and his Sturm und Drang companions
dissented from the prevalent mores of French Neoclassicism. The Romantic is the first
period about which dissension may be said to instigate such a change.
Modern artists and scholars tend to find justification in the moment. What is in
the past may be scorned because it is behind them. Time draws us away from other
2
cultural and artistic periods – the Classic era, for instance – and what they were
becomes confirmed as the annals of history nail down their story. Each step that we
take into the future increases the polarity between ourselves and our ancestors. We
begin to define ourselves as opposed to them and our ancestors become defined as
opposed to us. For artists especially, the dignity of the moment gives them pride in
existing despite the dead statements of dead aesthetes. Retrospection causes modern
artists to believe in the necessity of their current position, in the enlightenment of their
revolution, and it makes them incredulous at the true artist that doesn’t cohere to the
‘progressive’ stance.
This incredulity has been present in many ages, among many artists who stand
defiantly in the current of those who existed before them.
It is the incredulity that
Goethe the Weimar Classicist suffered, especially after the writing of his dynamic work
of Sturm und Drang fame, Sorrows of Young Werther. Horst Daemmrich supposes the
question that Goethe’s Sturm und Drang companions may well have asked of their
friend who went to serve on the court in Weimar:
Could they have imagined that their former companion was to become a strongwilled statesman or a hard-working commissioner of public works who practically
single-handedly revived the mining industry in the state, and that, for all practical
purposes he would suppress his creative urge for a decade while he served the
state and its citizens? Could they have guessed that his life during these years
would perfectly exemplify the themes of self-realization and renunciation of
personal desires which figure dominantly in his later works? (143)
The questions, as they may have been posed by his fellow Sturm und Drang dissenters,
arise naturally of the Goethe that left for Weimar.
The Romantic era sets the stage for the transition from classical artistic values to
modern values. The rift between two such norms is where Goethe stood – a central
3
historical figure himself – both changed by and changing the Romantic definition. In an
era that in Germany has been called Goethezeit, 'the age of Goethe', it is no secret how
prominently he figures. Nonetheless: such a mover in a time of movement, at one point,
opted for the Classic. Many have taken it as a regress. The historical shift of Europe
and Germany in the Romantic era, like the shifting of tectonic plates, caused
earthquakes that distressed the peculiar temperament of an artist. It made possible the
extremity of a swing like the one that Goethe made to Classicism. It was his own
revolution in an era that was setting the stage for Modernism.
"We do not mean quite the same thing when we speak of a writer as
romantic…the opportunities for systematic misunderstanding, and for futile controversy,
are almost ideal" (Eliot 31). While the potential for polarization and controversy are
ideal, as T. S. Eliot commented, the nature of the age seems to allow that we roll up all
of its divergences and call them Romantic.
Goethe’s biographical and emotional
progression from one state to the other, the incendiary Modern to the Apollonian
Classic, reveals that the same temperament was at the bottom of the two apparently
opposite stances. The flux of the Romantic context enabled that temperament to spin
into two versions. Throughout Goethe’s scientific ventures in Weimar, he displayed his
vexation with the developing specializations, with the ability of taxonomy to fracture the
field of knowledge. The insistent divisiveness of classifications, like those in taxonomy,
are also distracting in aesthetics. The conflicting aesthetic norms that are pinned on
Goethe, though, find conformity by the thread of his artistic temperament.
The
temperament, spun about in the Romantic era, becomes typical to Modern art. Despite
4
what titles may be haphazardly tagged to him, it is what causes him to fit in the frame of
an age on the cusp of those changes.
In addition to many commentaries and ancillary works, I have read four
biographies of Goethe.1 While usefully informative on Goethe’s life, none of them have
deliberately addressed the question I am asking. This may be because Werther, the
ultimate statement of his Sturm und Drang mood, is separated from his departure to
Italy, considered the starting point of his classicism, by twelve years. It may be because
the intervening time is muddled with administrative duties, studies in science, and
unfinished creative works. It may be because scholars already know the tenets of
Romanticism and Classicism and consider an individual’s conversion from one to
another too personal to be significant, too subject to accident and variance to be
considered direct. The individual in question is Goethe, Germany’s Shakespeare. The
conversions that he endures reflect the conversions taking place in an era. The answer
to the question – how Goethe can be both an instigator of incendiary German
Modernism and the Weimar Classicist – lies in the peculiar temperament of an artist
negotiating his way through a peculiar age.
To begin answering this question, I will address the problematic nature of
Romanticism in chapter two. Romanticism introduced values that impugned traditional
mores. This began to fracture the unity of a cultural understanding that was composed
by notions of God, society, and art. Germany, due significantly to the Thirty Year's War,
was in shambles politically. This set the ground for the rise of the Sturm und Drang and
1
Boyle, Nicholas: Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Lewes, George Henry: The Life of Goethe. Reed.
T.J: Goethe and The Classical Centre.
5
genius, two literary expressions of the drastic revaluation of Romanticism. The literary
expression of this revaluation is where effects may be measured on the artist, Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe.
The instabilities that register throughout Europe, and Germany in particular,
reflected in the artist's intimate sphere. In chapter three, I will utilize his autobiography
to show how the artist has a makeup that is sensitive to those tremors. Goethe is
among the first of artists whose development was conditioned by Romantic problems,
because the problems were new to Europe and Germany. The public understanding
fractured during this time, creating lapses in valuation that were filled by a new and lofty
concept, the genius.
attributed with genius.
Artists generally, and Goethe in particular, were the first to be
If the German Reformation dethroned the pope from his
ascendancy, German Romanticism made the artistic genius the mediator to the divine.
In chapter four I will highlight the role of the sentimental movement in German
Romanticism. It rushed in alongside genius to replace traditional ground that was being
lost. Goethe and the Sturm und Drang wrestled with the sentimental movement. Like
the genius, sentimentalism was a concept that originated with the artist, but filtered
down to everyone.
Goethe resisted but became associated nonetheless with
sentimentalism. Goethe expressed ambivalence and tension between the sober man
and the passionate man in Sorrows of Young Werther. He avowed the purging effects
of this expression, but the public, and even his closest friends, took purgation as
promotion.
Many committed suicide.
Something was unleashed.
Goethe was
damaged by the lapse between his intent and the effect. Throughout his development
6
he gained a mistrust of public judgment; in the last the public proved unreliable to
Goethe.
Considering the damage done by Werther and the resentment that emerged from
Goethe afterward, his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, plays an interesting role. I will
focus on this in the fifth chapter.
In Poetry and Truth, Goethe charts his own
development in an age that produced Werther.
Despite the stern criticism that he
occasionally expressed against the public and the youth of his age, the "confessional"
quality of his autobiography produced revealing incidents from his childhood that allied
him with the public. Quite subtly, by the artfulness of a poet who applies himself to an
autobiography, Goethe makes a contact with a tumultuous past that approached
forgiveness.
Goethe associated himself with the age that produced Werther by a significant
revelation made in his autobiography pertaining to his first love. More than the societal,
more than the literary, here in the most intimate sphere, as Goethe describes in Poetry
and Truth, he became subject to chaos. The devastation that he shows here is only a
prelude to that which is displayed in Werther. It exposed him to an underbelly that
melded into his perspective of everything. A sense of chaos became implanted after
the loss of Goethe’s first love. By virtue of this, a spell was cast over Goethe's life in the
romantic sphere. This is the subject of the sixth chapter. The relationships to follow,
five of them into the Werther period, were doomed by the ill portent of his first love.
Sorrows of Young Werther expressed finally the crescendo of chaos that was leveling
itself in the most intimate of spheres. This was expressed by a suicide.
7
When the author killed Werther, he killed Romanticism. This was signified in
Goethe’s life by his move to Weimar shortly after the writing of Werther.
As his
development attests to his parallel with the Romantic, he also killed himself as a poet.
The Goethe of administrative duties, Goethe the scientist, became the Goethe of
Weimar. If Goethe thought he was exorcising the artist by these diversions in Weimar,
he was in fact only exercising the artist. By the end of his initial stint in Weimar, by the
time he left for Italy, Goethe the artist would be realized again. This time, the artist
would arise, of course, Classic. In chapter seven, we find our conclusion in Classicism.
8
CHAPTER 2
THE PROBLEM OF ROMANTICISM
In the West, traditionalism is defined by theism, order, provincial realms and
community. These qualities lend themselves to the Classic. Modernism, in contrast, is
defined by secularism, individualism, globalism, and the perpetual wrestling match
between irrationalism and science.
Modern trends began their slow tilt after the
Enlightenment and find themselves blossoming still.
"Classicism” is a term that should be taken with a grain of salt when it is used in a
Modern context. When a Modern claims the norms and values of an antique model, an
implicit displacement happens. If a Modern attempts to import the antique quality into
the moment, the antique quality is being displaced. A “classical work” is not, precisely
thereby, Classic. It is classical in approach and style; it is an imitation of the classic.
This imitation is better termed “neo-classic.” It is a revival, something new. The nature
of imitation tells us that we are outside what is being imitated.
In eighteenth and
nineteenth century Germany, the Classical movement is an attempt to imitate values
that once existed, but no longer remained in their former vitality. The use is meant as a
reintroduction of that former vitality. The possibility of making new versions of what
existed in the past is itself a modern quality.
Despite this understanding, alleging a classic position in a modern context
creates resentment among critics and artists, both now and in the Romantic era. A
contemporary instance is offered in Kenneth Weisinger’s book, The Classical Façade,
which betrays its bias in the title. The author proves incredulous that Goethe can assert
himself a Classicist in a Romantic era. He takes exception to Heine’s assertion, made
9
after Goethe’s death, that "one could study Greek art in his works as if in the works of
an ancient" (1). Weisinger says, rather, that depicting a Classic Goethe was useful
because “in the mid-twentieth century, the image of Goethe as the eminently sane older
man, creating rational order out of ambiguous experience, has served as a necessary
and cherished model in an age of political and social turbulence” (10). He says that the
artistic schizophrenia that Goethe reveals, despite his classical banner, interests
contemporary scholars the most (3).
Heine’s positioning in 1834, to Weisinger’s in 1988, shows us that Goethe’s
ground is still field for aesthetic warring. T.S. Eliot articulated the potential that the
Romantic era holds for futile, contentious debate. This bespeaks the arrival of a new
set of values. Set against the traditional values, a dualism arose in Germany. Shortly
after Goethe died, Heine tried to stake claim on his capital by proclaiming him antiRomantic. Indeed, the bold verdict of the later Goethe rang out over the German land:
"I call the classic healthy, the romantic sickly" (qtd. in Eckermann 305). This came
despite his Sturm und Drang youth: his squibs against the glassy pose of French
decorum, and his preference for the homegrown German, as represented by his
German historical play, “Götz von Berlichingen,” written at age 23. Classicism, as it was
noted by Heine and promoted by the later Goethe, is less a pronouncement for its own
sake than it is consistent with the tumult and revolution of his context. The note of
revolt, of separation from the age, is distinctly romantic, whether or not it is called
“classic.”
Such consolations as he will make only a year after he denounces the
romantic as sickly admit the ambivalence that he and his time are subject to: “Schiller,”
he said, “proved to me that I, against my will, was romantic, and that my Iphigenia,
10
through the predominance of sentiment, was by no means so classical and so much in
the antique spirit as some people supposed” (qtd. in Eckermann 366).
The state of controversy that emerges over Goethe and the new values that
surrounded him signify a cultural distemper that has come to be called Romanticism. Of
the
new
problems
presenting
themselves,
Dennis
Mahoney
says,
“German
Romanticism itself was less a solution than it was a manifestation of the seismic shocks
striking a civilization on the fracture line between tradition and modernity” (Introduction
7). The first palpable conflict between traditional values and modern values arose in the
Romantic era. The progressive notions that arrived onto the scene were so stark and
clamorous that in his book, Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin calls Romanticism "the
greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West” (1).
Then there is a sudden, apparently unaccountable, invasion. Suddenly there is a
violent eruption of emotion, enthusiasm. People become interested in Gothic
buildings, in introspection. People suddenly become neurotic and melancholy;
they begin to admire the unaccountable flight of spontaneous genius. There is a
retreat from this symmetrical, elegant, glassy state of affairs. At the same time
other changes occur too. A great revolution breaks out; there is discontent; the
King has his head cut off; the Terror begins. (Berlin 7)
The time Mahoney called a “daring combination and amalgamation of past and present”
(“From ‘Romantick to Romantic’” 31) is subject to an amalgamation of voices. The
Sturm und Drang, Romanticism, and Classicism all reach their apex in this same period,
1770-1830, the same decades of Goethe’s life.
Antiquity and modernity produced unconventional perspectives within the
confines of what is regarded as ‘Romantic’ literature, that is as a modern
literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century and as literature influencing
the future, a literature distinct from that promoted by the traditional eighteenthcentury schools of aesthetics for which antiquity alone was the sole yardstick in
artistic achievement. (Mahoney. p. 31)
11
A rift developed in the Romantic era, a gauntlet was thrown.
A fault line coursed
between the new aesthetic and that which proceeded from antiquity.
The aesthetic signs of cultural dualism are added by religious signs.
Nicholls
asserts that the Sturm und Drang was particularly concerned “with the question of how
much ground religious ways of thinking should cede to the process of secularization”
(16). Where traditional arenas were becoming field for battle, religion was not exempt.
This embattlement was assisted by the emergence of theology as a critical discipline. It
began to break down the traditional religious understanding. This breakdown affected
the identity of a German Protestant. It was an age of theological turmoil unparalleled in
Germany, comments Nicholas Boyle; nothing of the like had been seen since the
Reformation:
“Throughout the period from 1750-1810 (at least) Germany was
secularizing itself into philosophy” (191). That process is described throughout this
chapter and into the next, both in Germany and in Goethe’s life.
The Sturm und Drang, unique to Germany, was the first literary movement of its
kind. It challenged the French universal standard which, in addition to its aesthetic
sway, Berlin contends, was at the root of the French Revolution:
Certainly the principles in the name of which the French Revolution was fought
were principles of universal reason, of order, of justice, not at all connected with
the sense of uniqueness, the profound emotional introspection, the sense of the
differences of things, dissimilarities rather than similarities, with which the
romantic movement is usually associated. (7)
The Sturm und Drang vied for the particularity of a historical situation, for the
peculiarities in language and character that made a message unique to its audience.
Unlike the French Revolution, it did not contest theistic notions. Lutheranism was a
distinct part of the German heritage. Aesthetic rules gathered from the French pool of
12
universal order were rejected by the Sturm und Drang movement. French Literature
“was venerable and refined, and these two things are not what appeals to youth in its
search for freedom and the enjoyment of life,” said Goethe (Poetry and Truth 359).
“They concentrated far too rigidly on the external form in which everything had to
appear. So we made the opposite resolve to reject the French language totally and to
devote ourselves to our mother tongue” (Poetry and Truth 357). German literature at
this time defined art as homegrown. It developed a national and historical strain that
was outside the conventional pastoral, mythological, chivalric, classical or religious
themes (Boyle 115). In this context, in 1773, Goethe produced the novel that would
gain him a reputation in Germany, “Götz von Berlichingen,” a historical drama about a
16th century German Imperial knight.
The time period written about coincided with
Luther’s revolt against the church. The protagonist has a brief encounter with Brother
Martin.
The Sturm und Drang contested the universal laws that presided since the
Enlightenment.
They turned to the particular.
If the French accused them of
provinciality, they aggrandized it, made it literary, historical and German.
It is for
sociological reasons, Berlin suggests, that an art such as this is provoked to emerge:
“The truth is they were a remarkably unworldly body of men. They were poor, they were
timid, they were awkward in society. They were easily snubbed, they had to serve as
tutors to great men, they were constantly full of insult and oppression” (131). Germany
failed to achieve a centralized statehood, like France, England, and even Holland. It
was governed by three hundred princes and twelve hundred sub-princes. It suffered a
violent dislocation in the Thirty Years War, crushing any cultural development, and as
13
Berlin tells us (34), foreign troops, including French, killed such a number of people as
had not been since the tyranny of Genghis Khan. This devastated the German spirit.
German culture became provincialized, mirrored in its tiny, local courts. Scholasticism
drifted to Lutheran pedantry, or into a revolt against this scholarship in the direction of
the inner life (Berlin 35). Its art tended “to be domestic, religious, passionate, inward,
and above all different from the glittering court art” (Berlin 35). “The whole thing is a
product of wounded national sensibility, of the dreadful national humiliation, that is the
root of the romantic movement on the part of the Germans” (Berlin 38). Germany was a
fragmented society; its art was an attempt to pull it up by its boot strings.
Before the title ‘Sturm und Drang’ was adapted from a play by Klinger, the same
period was called Geniezeit, 'age of geniuses' (Boyle 152). It is a label that hangs in
sharp contrast to the humiliation referenced above. Diderot described such a person
when he said:
Beware of those whose pockets are full of esprit – of wit – and who scatter this
wit at every opportunity, everywhere. They have no demon within them, they are
not gloomy, or somber, or melancholy, or silent. They are never either awkward
or foolish. The lark, the chaffinch, the linnet, the canary, they chirp and twitter all
the livelong day, at sunset they fold their head under their wing, and lo! they are
asleep. (qtd. in Berlin 51)
The tormented man described by Diderot is akin to Goethe's Werther, the man
warned against like the courtly Albert, whom Werther himself chastises in kind several
times throughout the novella. Who is the person that Diderot credits? He goes on to
give this type of person a name – a name that would have much currency at this time:
“It is then that the genius takes his lamp and lights it. And this dark, solitary, savage
bird, this untameable creature, with its gloomy melancholy plumage, opens its throat
14
and begins its song, makes the groves resound and breaks the silence and darkness of
the night" (qtd. in Berlin 51).
While Diderot displays the vocabulary dawning on the lips of men, genius, the
insight of an individual in France becomes, at roughly the same time, the name of a
literary movement in Germany. Restlessness in Germany, in the Sturm und Drang,
manifested itself by overturning French aesthetic authority. Much of Germany's attempt
to build culture issued from artists, from a literary movement. Goethe acknowledged the
distinction of the artist at that time. “The word ‘genius’,” he says, “was reserved for the
poet alone” (Poetry and Truth 585). He tells us it was at this time that the word first
made it into the German dictionary, attesting to both the newness and the proliferation
of the term. Whereas the term was introduced to describe poets, "suddenly, a different
world seemed to open up, and genius was demanded of the physician, the general, the
statesman, and soon of every person who was ambitious to excel in the theoretical or
practical sphere...The word 'genius' became a universal slogan, and on account of
hearing it so often, one assumed that the quality that designated it was also
widespread" (Poetry and Truth 585). We will see ‘genius’ applied to Goethe in the next
chapter.
Goethe’s Classicism entered the Romantic era with contention. Weisinger helps
us to see that the contentiousness still has a market today. Contention, though, is in the
fabric of the Romantic era. Contentiousness in the Romantic era is characteristic, as
“the opportunities for systematic understanding and for futile controversy” that Eliot
diagnoses (31). The Romantic era is subject to an amalgamation of voices; the ability
to conjure up “Classicism” is distinctly Romantic. One of these voices, the literary Sturm
15
und Drang, arose from a devastated German ground, hailed over nonetheless by the
regal French star. Germany was so politically disorganized that a literary movement
was viably the only way that it may have asserted itself into the European arena.
Germany’s ambition persisted despite its dispersion and humility; the bristling genius
ascended alongside the Sturm und Drang. In the next chapter, particular signs of the
general state of flux will begin to register in Goethe’s life.
16
CHAPTER 3
EARTHQUAKE, GENIUS AND THE ARTISTIC CALLING
The
appearance
of
the
genius
parallels
a
consciousness that may be traced in the life of Goethe.
phenomenon
in
Western
The genius dawned at a
conspicuous time in Germany history, a time when Germany was humbled in enough
ways to make its lofty connotations a bit ironic.
The concept arose in a country
governed by several hundred princes and sub-princes, with no clear leader or governing
principle.
Germany.
Theology surged to the foreground as a critical discipline at this time in
It made dubious the traditional consideration of God.
Criticism and
competing claims broke down an interpretation that once enjoyed unity. The intangible
promises of religion were dissatisfying to a humbled society with increasing demands.
The promises diffused under multiplying interpretations. Society replaced the traditional
god with another creator, a genius. The creative ability of the rising genius was so
confounding that it gained them a mystified, even deified, status.
Herder, German philosopher and Goethe’s early mentor, understood the cultural
usefulness of the genius. He took Shakespeare for instance. Shakespeare, to Herder,
was a cultural icon that elevated the character and psyche of England. He exemplified
genius by virtue of his exception as an individual. Herder exhorted this example. The
aggrandizement of the “genius” in Germany was laden with the expectations of the
genius’s cultural-shaping power. In a time when the hero was a notorious theme in
Romantic literature, amidst an abject national character, the genius became the real-life
hero in Germany. The erection of the genius may be considered a national case of
loser-wins.
17
Germany was subject to unprecedented theological turmoil at this time, nothing
the like of which had been seen since the Reformation (Boyle 191). The Reformation
witnessed a tumultuous shift of ground that in the end confirmed the German religious
heritage. It was a rebellion with an affirming effect. At the time of Goethe, Germany
was secularizing itself into philosophy (Boyle 191). The arrival of theology, or “the
skeptical movement of biblical criticism,” as Boyle calls it (24), had much to do with this.
Theology was a discipline founded on the criticism of an arena that was previously not
criticized.
It began the breakdown of an understanding that was unified under the
Protestant church. The divisive effects of theology in German Protestant understanding
is shown intimately in Goethe’s life. The surge of theology, a decisive step in the
phasing of religion into philosophy, served to slight the distinction offered to Germany by
its Protestantism.
It also opened the way for the valuation of a formerly coherent
religious understanding to become confused, as we will see in Goethe’s example. The
introduction of the genius in western culture is pivotal because it represents both the
aggrandizement of the individual and the secularization that would become standard to
modern Europe.
In his autobiography, Goethe describes the breakdown of theology in his own life.
His confidence in traditional theism and theologians wavered at the place where his
assurance often wavers, at the point where opinion became divided. “I was six when I
began to doubt the goodness of God,” Goethe said (Poetry and Truth 47). “The boy’s
tranquility of mind was deeply shaken for the first time by an extraordinary event”
(Poetry and Truth 34). That event was the great earthquake of Lisbon, on the first of
November 1755. It spread “enormous terror over a world accustomed to peace and
18
quiet” (Poetry and Truth 34). It was a world in which 40,000 people were suddenly
killed, flames raged, and with them “a mob of criminals, now coming out into the open,
or perhaps set free by the disaster” (Poetry and Truth 35).
The world in which criminals were set free was Goethe’s own, his inner world,
one “accustomed to peace and quiet” (Poetry and Truth 34). As Freud interprets the
recurrent dreams of adulthood as being sourced in the traumatic events of childhood,
the effects of the earthquake symbolize a struggle that will recur for Goethe over the
course of his life. This is a struggle that is implicit to Romanticism and Modernism.
“Indeed, the demon of terror has perhaps at no other time spread its chill over the world
as quickly and as powerfully” (Poetry and Truth 35).
Goethe’s vocabulary later in his life.
The daemon integrated into
It is a meaning that he formed to help him
understand the unpredictability of the artistic nature and the spontaneous potency of
artistic production.
The Lisbon earthquake revealed the raw potency of nature to a young Goethe
whose world was previously ordered. “Hereupon, God-fearing persons were moved to
wise observations, philosophers offered consoling arguments, and clergy preached fiery
sermons” (Poetry and Truth 35). But for Goethe:
Having to hear all of this repeatedly, I was more than a little disconcerted by it in
my boyish mind. God, the Creator and Preserver of heaven and earth, who had
been presented to me as very wise and merciful in the explanation of the first
article of the Creed, had shown Himself by no means fatherly when He
abandoned both the just and the unjust to the same destruction. My young mind
tried in vain to resist these impressions, and it was not made any easier for me
by the philosophers and scholars when they themselves could not agree on the
way to view such a phenomena. (Poetry and Truth 35)
19
Goethe considered the opinions of those around him as part of the incident itself; they
were like apples that fell from a precarious tree. The inconsistency of opinion affected
him no more favorably than the incident itself.
The body of principally unified knowledge that becomes splintered by
interpretation never ceased being a conflict for Goethe. This finds direct expression in
his scientific explorations in Weimar. Goethe’s science sought to reveal that nature
proceeded from the same source, not dissected, as the taxonomic trend would suggest.
Nature is not understood by containing and classifying one of its aspects. His advances
in morphology would be acknowledged in Darwin’s first writings.
Goethe explained his impressionability after the Lisbon earthquake as being the
result of a boyish mind. To the credit of Goethe’s artistic nature, this impressionability
endures as a lifelong property. Goethe would lead us astray if he caused us to believe
it was peculiar to his youth. In all things he is like the Richter scale of an innocence
being intruded upon. This is to our benefit. A stilting impressionability will also reveal
itself after Sorrows of Young Werther quakes the ground in Germany and Europe.
Another example in the same time frame shows the tension that multiplying and
competing opinion caused Goethe. We see the effect of competing and divided human
opinion when, after the beginning of the Seven Years War, debates began among the
public and in Goethe’s family. Goethe suffered an almost disproportionate dejection
when he was forced to listen to his hero, Frederick II, King of Prussia, “being most
dreadfully defamed” (Poetry and Truth 47). This time Goethe did not reject the object of
interpretation, he rejected the interpreters themselves: “I now began, for the sake of
20
Frederick II, to doubt the justness of public opinion” (Poetry and Truth 48).
In
retrospect, as the author of his autobiography, the later Goethe goes on to say: “In
examining the matter more closely, I detect here the germ of my disregard, nay, even
scorn, for the public, a feeling that stayed with me through much of my life and was
offset only at a late date by insight and culture” (Poetry and Truth 48).
Goethe’s development progressed alongside the specter of war. The French
occupied Frankfurt in the third year after the Seven Years’ War began. The activity of
war kept Goethe and his sister indoors. A puppet theater was built for the children to
keep them entertained. He and his sister produced shows for some of the children in
the area. The creative germ developed while insulated from a war that nonetheless
created tremors for young Goethe. This may well be where he was first exposed to the
Faust storyline. In Germany, during Goethe’s youth, puppet plays are where the Faust
legend found much of its exposure.2
Goethe’s dire reaction to the instability of public opinion was the response of an
aggrieved personal absolute.
The prickliness surrounding Goethe’s standard is
displayed early on in his aesthetic development.
He recounts a scenario from his
childhood Sunday school meetings, in which each week the boys were to present
verses composed by themselves. A doubt began to register:
I soon noticed that my competitors, in spite of the weakness of their productions,
felt just like me, and had an equally high opinion of themselves…I sadly
wondered one day whether I myself might not be like them, whether perhaps
their poems were really better than mine, and whether I might not justly seem as
2
Boyle tells us that in the century preceding, “the play [Faust] was almost exclusively the province of the
chap-book and the puppet-theatre (a form of entertainment much more widely distributed in Germany
than in England)” (219).
21
absurd to those boys as they seemed to me. For a long time this seriously
worried me, for I found it quite impossible to discover an external criterion for
truth. Indeed, my productions even came to a standstill. (Poetry and Truth 38)
Some twelve years later, at age eighteen, Goethe has a literary struggle that is
eerily similar. Anyone with an interest in literature at the time, Goethe explains, was
inundated by an excess of literary criticism against poor, imitative poetry. Works that
delighted him were markedly disparaged. “I was even forced to help turn over the
drying hay myself, and scoffingly call something dead that had recently afforded me
such lively pleasure” (Poetry and Truth 195). Everyone protested against his hobbies
and inclinations without offering him a satisfactory substitute. He attended lectures
without coming to terms with what he really wanted to know. “I demanded a standard of
judgment,” Goethe said, “and was forced to conclude that nobody actually had one, for
people did not even agree when examples were brought forward” (Poetry and Truth
195). He avowed his frustration with the lack of agreement in the field of opinion,
disillusioned by the competing interpretations of God after the Lisbon earthquake, as by
the unknowable standards of his young, seven year-old contemporaries.
After the earthquake, the young Goethe’s exposure to the multiple interpretations
of God gave him a new liberty. He decided to form his own religion. “The thought
occurred to [the boy] that he should try to come closer to the great God of nature”
(Poetry and Truth 44). With this idea, he performed an oft-cited ritual. He set about
making an altar to God, whom could be found best in His natural works. At dawn
Goethe enacted his plan and consequently burned the makeshift altar, his father’s
music stand.
The discord of multiple interpretations taught Goethe liberty; he
reinterpreted God into a God of nature.
Goethe’s recourse to nature followed a
22
tumultuous incident that was complicated further by the public’s reaction to it. It is not
the first time we will witness this reaction.
Complication and tumult in society caused Goethe to redirect his attention to
nature; complications in the aesthetic field registered more direct effects for Goethe.
Later in his autobiography, after the Lisbon earthquake, Goethe describes how at
eighteen years old he searched futilely for a standard of judgment in literature. “This
uncertainty of taste and judgment disturbed me more every day, until at last I grew
desperate” (Poetry and Truth 196). It was then that he resorted to a sacrifice of another
kind: “After some time and many struggles, I was seized with such great scorn for all
my finished and unfinished works that one day I burned them all” (Poetry and Truth
196). This was one of two occasions – the second happening two years later at age 20
– that lost us all record of his early work. Here, his literary frustrations did not lead to
redirection, they led to destruction.
The “uncertainty of taste and judgment” that Goethe describes in literature was
new to Germany and to Europe. The bewilderment was a result of the openness of a
field whose resident mores were being abandoned. This was not unlike the traditional
mores that were dissecting under the scalpel of a burgeoning theological discipline.
“The literary epoch into which I was born,” Goethe stated, “developed from the
preceding one through dissension” (Poetry and Truth 197). The transition between
literary epochs was not seamless.
It jarred and left two attitudes in competition.
Goethe’s boundless sympathies caught him between the two attitudes to stunt and
frustrate his productivity.
23
Information surged and complicated in the Romantic era. This presented unique
difficulties for an artist that tried to assimilate it. As E. M. Butler states:
It has been suggested with much truth, and in the first instance by Goethe
himself, that the world into which he was born was at fault…a world disintegrating
beneath an ever-increasing burden of knowledge and culture, some of it living,
much of it dead, and such a vast quantity of it, that no single human being could
assimilate it and organize it into a whole. (86)
The ‘world at fault’ was the impending modern world. The modern world is signified by
an opening and variegated consciousness, a global consciousness.
Goethe
acknowledged this when he called ‘world literature’ the new reality (Eckermann 165, 6).3
It was no longer merely German literature that was accessible to the German – or even
French and English literature. Texts from all over the world were becoming accessible.
In a time when man is burdened by knowledge, the flood of which threatens traditional
theistic knowledge, a ‘genius’ raises up. He replaces the valuation that is lost when
God dies and he matches the influx of information that is being thrust upon him. The
artist, a creating surrogate to God himself, is apt to accept this title.
Who can take this role in Germany, a European country already suffering from
disadvantage? When Goethe published his first successful play at age twenty-three,
Herder was glad to make him the genius, the Shakespeare of Germany. “A close
examination of what was lacking in German poetry reveals that it was substance, and,
to be precise, substance of national import” (Poetry and Truth 201). Shakespeare’s use
of historical themes was a strong part of literary Germany’s admiration for him.
Goethe’s first significant work, “Götz von Berlichingen”, was a national historical play. It
3
“National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of World-literature is at hand, and
everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”
24
played upon the popularity of Shakespeare’s historical themes and the German need for
national material. Perhaps more importantly, it gave Germany reason to call Goethe
‘the second Shakespeare’.
“He has set up,” Herder wrote, “a monument to
Shakespeare from the substance of Germany’s own knightly epoch” (Reed, Goethe 27).
The more we pan back, the more the earthquake of Goethe’s youth gains
complexity.
In the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake he deals with multiple and
contending explanations as to its cause. His confidence in the word of others has
paramount importance for him, especially in his childhood. After the earthquake, the
absolute began to break down, in both the object and the subject, in both the cultural
notions of God and the public who posited them. The earthquake elicited competing
interpretations; the impressionable boy received this as an after-shock and began
himself to dislodge from the corpus of thought. The “burden of knowledge,” as Butler
called it, impressed the boy early on. The artist, the autobiographer, did not forget the
literary use of an earthquake. Goethe used the actual event to frame the changes that
he sensed taking place in his own youth. He recognized personal changes as they
were reflected by those happening in the broad, national context.
While Goethe relays so many facts to us in his autobiography, he was
nevertheless an author, an artist. The country’s response to the Lisbon earthquake
mirrors the quiet movements that take place in his young chest. Goethe, the author of
the ambiguously titled autobiography (Dichtung und Warheit, alternately, Fiction and
Truth), said that all his works were but “fragments of one great confession, which this
little book is an odd attempt to complete” (Poetry and Truth 214). The earthquake was
25
disorienting nationally, but finally, it was personally disorienting. Goethe would become
dislodged in the lack of uniformity. He would become an individual.
The assurances of God and community change into individualism that is
reinforced by the emphasis of “genius.”
The assurance of the external and the
accessibility of cultural absolutes are lost. After the earthquake, interiority is what’s left
to offer assurance: “We were advised to…gain knowledge of the emotions we partly felt,
partly suspected, in our bosoms. We formerly had been rebuked for these, but from
now on they could only be viewed as something important and worthy” (Poetry and
Truth 264). Emotions and the inner life were exhorted directly by literary teachers, and
reinforced culturally with the status of genius.
Acknowledgement of the inner life
became an explicit quality of Goethe’s writing process:
And so began that tendency which throughout my life I have never overcome,
namely to transform whatever gladdened or tormented me, or otherwise
occupied my mind, into an image, a poem, and to come to terms with myself by
doing this, so that I could both refine my conceptions of external things and calm
myself inwardly in regard to them. It is likely that no one needed this talent more
than I, since my nature kept propelling me from one extreme to the other.
(Poetry and Truth 214)
A compass will spin if it loses its polar relation. If a dynamic artist loses his
external relation and if his desire for an absolute standard is not realized, then his
nature propels him from one extreme to the other. In order to ease his vacillations,
Goethe chose art. Creatively he re-engineered aspects from the external world that
troubled him: “I observed [the outer world] as well as I could, but found little in it that
was salutary, and had to add improvements from my own imagination just to make it
barely tolerable” (Poetry and Truth 230). Inwardness ordered Goethe’s conceptions of
the external. This is opposed to the presiding French aesthetic, which as Goethe said
26
“was venerable and refined,” and “concentrated far too rigidly on the external form in
which everything had to appear.” (Poetry and Truth 359, 7). As “the boy’s tranquility of
mind was deeply shaken for the first time by an extraordinary event” (Poetry and Truth
34), as the external world moved into flux, so did the impressionable sensibility of
Goethe propel him from one extreme to the other. His creativity corresponded, founding
a direct link between external disorder and his creative impulse.
What of the new mode of navigation? Will art and writing create the adequate
gravity? In criticism, Goethe said, “no one had any notion about a supreme artistic
principle” (Poetry and Truth 199). The lack of Goethe’s assurance, the lack of external
measure in his literary development caused him twice to burn all the compositions of his
youth. As a childhood trauma may become a recurrent element of dream material, so
would the great earthquake symbolize losses that Goethe would try to replace or
overcome for the duration of his life.
Goethe was born on a fault line, the earth quaked, opinion scattered, Goethe
surveyed the opinions and created his own religion – he became a genius. He burned
sacrifices upon an altar, and twice burned the compositions of his childhood.
The
rupture, the instability, the self-aggrandizement, they are all part of a narrative that
reflects Germany and the historical arc of the time.
27
CHAPTER 4
SENTIMENTALISM
Goethe tells us how artists, once chided for displaying their emotional life,
became admonished to use their emotional life. He tells us that the genius was a title
meant for the artist but filtered down nonetheless to everyone. In the same way, the
encouragement for artists to realize themselves emotionally was spreading out to
everyone. Under the guidance of F.M. Leuchsenring, the tutor of the crown prince, the
encouragement was spreading in a cult-like manner. Leuchsenring, the leader of a
patronized literary circle, proclaimed himself the apostle of sentiment who taught the
world how to weep (Boyle 126). Their meeting, a ‘sentimental congress’ as it was
called, did just that. They wept together as they read poems, letters, travel accounts,
descriptions of meetings and partings – anything that displayed the lavish movement of
their hearts. Goethe had mild association with the group. Herder’s wife was a member
and Goethe’s friend. He read sections from his “Götz von Berlichingen” to the group.
He went to a sentimental congress after the fallout with Kestner and Lotte – the parallels
to Albert and Lotte in Sorrows of Young Werther – forced him to leave Wetzlar.
A literary journal began with rather different sentiments at this time. This was the
Sturm und Drang element – and much of its mark early was made in opposition to the
sweeping literary sentimentalism.
It was in this journal, the Frankfurter Gelehrte
Anzeigen, that Goethe wrote an essay against J.G. Sulzer, an author who was
instrumental to the inflation of the genius concept in Germany. The term “nature” was
so well used in the Romantic era that it gained hundreds of various meanings. The
genius concept was popularly conceived of inside the era’s manifold roles of nature;
28
genius was the crown and culmination of nature. Goethe disagreed, calling genius
rather the defiance and displacement of nature. The order of nature, especially under
the abiding hubris of science, was a force that may be apprehended. That order, being
apprehended, made things more and more the object of ordering. This is an ordering
that, spreading out, justified the differentiation and controls between classes. Rather
than the crowning achievement of nature, the genius for Goethe was the only entity able
to strike out from the stifling imposition of order. This is useful to Goethe’s Sturm und
Drang mood. It is also like the spontaneous daemonic quality, represented by Goethe
until the end of his life. “The Daemonic is that which cannot be explained by Reason or
Understanding;” he said, “it lies not in my nature, but I am subject to it” (qtd. in
Eckermann 392).
Goethe suggested the earthquake – the loss of theism and the cultural transition
that was taking place – in the farce Lumberville Fair (1773). The play displays his
awareness of the cultural transition and his criticism of the sentimentalist movement in
part with his Sturm und Drang contemporaries. In Goethe’s story, the protagonist is a
militant rationalist whose mission is to put an end to the belief in Christ. He finds that a
substitute religion of Sentimentality cropped up to replace the vanquished religion:
“What good is it for us to have pushed religion from its tyrant’s throne if the fellows put
their new idol up on top of the ruins? Religion, Sentimentality, are all the same filth…”
(Boyle 143). Goethe notifies us that traditional religious valuation was being replaced
with sentimentalism.
Conspicuously alongside Goethe’s own charge against Sentimentalism is one of
several statements of admiration made about Goethe, the second Shakespeare, by one
29
of his admirers, Grumach: “…Why not make him our Lord Jesus and let me be the least
of his disciples? He spoke so much with me and so superbly; words of eternal life that
as long as I have breath shall be articles of my creed” (qtd. in Boyle 188).
Sentimentality couples itself with the connotations of the genius as a replacement for
deteriorating
religion
and
religious
valuation.
Even
while
Goethe
showed
sentimentalism pushing religion from its throne – he was being placed on it.
Goethe and sentimentalism were ushered together into a vacated throne.
Despite their criticism, sentimentalist notions could not help but be confronted and
absorbed by Goethe and his Sturm und Drang contemporaries. Sentimentalism allied
itself with genius in justification of the growing cultural mandate for the inner life. The
inner life was also the capital of the Sturm und Drang. It was the key to the opposition
of the external-based aristocratic order. They imported genius-type into their writing to
exemplify the forceful soul of a hero.4
According to Goethe, Germany made
Shakespeare their hero; he gained popularity there that was unparalleled even in his
own country (Poetry and Truth 365). The elevation of Goethe to a lofty role came as
unconsciously as it did consciously.
His “willingness to take part in a national
movement exposed Goethe to enormous pressure to accept the role formulated by
national expectation – to become the German genius, the German Shakespeare, the
German Messiah even” (Boyle 188). Goethe, sentimentalism and genius shared the
4
“The identification of receptivity and productivity as simply aspects of the soul’s one basic force, the
interpretation of that force in the relatively empirical terms of thoughts and feelings (rather than the logical
terms favored by Leibniz), and the definition of genius as an abnormally forceful soul: these are the
theoretical foundations of the psychology espoused be German Sentimentalism and passed on by it to
the Storm and Stress movement.” (Boyle 156,7)
30
same ground. They would reign together from the vacated throne, finally delivering on
their unaccounted partnership in Sorrows of Young Werther.
Sorrows of Young Werther shows the naturalness of the connection between the
Sturm und Drang and sentimentalism. The epistolary form of Werther is not a far cry
from the letter-reading and exchange that took place at the sentimental congresses.
Goethe advised Sophie von La Roche, a friend in the sentimentalist group, in the writing
of an epistolary novel. He drafted Werther at the same time. It is written much like a
presentation at one of these meetings would be. When a member in the group reads a
personal letter aloud, the author is not present and the audience is left to imagine the
writer and the circumstances behind the letter. That is, there is only one face. Likewise
in Werther, the writer’s is the only correspondence that we are privy to. One never sees
the word of Wilhelm. We do not hear only one exchange, but an entire narrative is built
in this way, over the course of which we come to find Wilhelm an entirely featureless
partner. What is made objective in a correspondence between two people becomes
absorbed in the cares of Werther himself. Wilhelm becomes less an interlocutor and
more a passive sounding-board. The training offered by the duration of this format
causes an audience vaguely to feel itself in the place of Wilhelm, their passivity making
them subject to the sweeps of Werther’s heart. The objectivity that one may gain by
viewing the letters between two other people is vitiated.
intimacy.
Objectivity is traded for
Sorrows of Young Werther magnifies the sentimentalist dynamic.
The
thoroughly sympathetic reading that one might encounter at a sentimental congress is
fully replicated by Goethe’s epistolary format. Sorrows of Young Werther was designed,
both by the acknowledged and unacknowledged effect of the sentimentalist movement,
31
to summon a sympathetic readership. This was quite enough to cause audiences to
pass over the thought that Werther may have been a criticism of sentimental notions, as
Goethe later described it to be.
An instance of the sentimentalist meeting may well have been mirrored in the last
scene between Werther and Lotte, in which Ossian is passionately read aloud. The
couple comes to grips with the tension between them, they kiss, he leaves, and it is the
last that Werther will be seen by Lotte.5
Werther’s persistent reference to Homer
throughout Sorrows of Young Werther, especially in his healthier times, is worth noting.
It is Ossian that Werther reads at the end. Whereas Homer is noted for the externality
of his depiction, Ossian – the text purported to be from Celtic antiquity, written in 1760
rather by James Macpherson – was awash with emotive landscapes.6 The externality of
Homer is traded by the end for the abstract sensual depiction of Ossian. This quality
played upon the frenzied emotion between Werther and Lotte in the final scene.
Homer, Ossian, the Bible, Rousseau, Goldsmith, Klopstock – even as Emilia
Galotti lay opened beside the dead Werther, there is good suggestion that “the Sorrows
of Young Werther actually treats the problem of life as literature” (29). Lesley Sharpe
follows with a statement that is as accusatory as it is diagnostic: “Literature increasingly
5
Boyle notes the latent sexuality in sentimentalist societies when he quotes the journal of one of its
members: “‘If another and later species comes to reconstruct the human being from the evidence of our
sentimental writings they will conclude it to have been a heart with testicles.’ The implied analysis,” Boyle
goes on to say, “– that Sentimentalism interprets as ‘feeling’ what is no more than impotent desire – is far
more than a coarse joke. The cult of feeling was not just an intellectual movement: it had a clear
implication for personal and even physical behavior, which went beyond a greater readiness to weep or
read together, or to dress and speak informally, and which were bound to conflict with the prevailing
notions of decorum – and so to generate frustration and misery.” (139)
6
Ossian appeared as a discovered ancient Celtic text though it was written by Macpherson in 1760. It
was wildly popular, that popularity largely under the illusion of its antiquity. The possibility of Ossian in
the Romantic Era, its appearance and popularity, bespeaks the possibility of Classicism at the same time.
Ossian and Classicism fall under a different banner, but that the ground was fertile for their arrival was
nonetheless Romantic.
32
dominates as the compensation for an unlived life” (29).
The attitude surrounding
literature is worthy of criticism when it encroaches upon the function of life. The reading
of Ossian resembled similar instances at sentimental readings – instances not unlike his
own reading of “Götz von Berlichingen”. The dominant literary references in Werther,
their proximity to the emotional movements, likewise reflect a ‘sentimental congress’.
Here too, a literary text is the centerpiece of the member’s emotional movements.7 The
text is the excuse for meeting and the center of the group’s activity. An excuse is
needed in a society that not only represses passion, but with the deterioration of the
church, allows no outlet otherwise.8 Rather, in church-like meetings, the text is held up
as the focal point, and the author (the artist or the genius) becomes the new priest, a
mediator between the subject and their passion.
Goethe had an ambivalent relationship with the sentimental movement.
His
initial acceptance is an embrace to be expected of his enthusiasm. He wrote Sorrows
of Young Werther with a strong current of sentimentalism, the likes of which created a
mighty explosion “because the young people themselves were already on unsure
ground” (Poetry and Truth 433). The sentimental quality came in spite of Goethe’s
resistance leading up to the writing and publication of Werther, as in Lumberville Fair or
the essay against Sulzer. The odd thing is that even Goethe’s friends, whom you would
7
In a section of The Triumph of Sensibility written by Goethe in 1778, one of the swooning, romantic
characters carries with him a ‘traveling nature’ because he cannot always bear the small perturbations of
real nature. He carries a dummy of his true love along with his model nature. He carries the imitations so
that he may contemplate his love whenever and wherever. The woman that the romantic beguiled, whom
his dummy replicated, was married. Seeking to expose the romantic, the husband seizes the dolls and
cuts it open to find that it is stuffed with sentimental books. Revealing this to his wife, she discovers the
motive of his romanticism and is cured of her infatuation.
8
“We tend to forget,” Vaget reminds us, “that until about the middle of the nineteenth century, books of a
religious and devotional nature were by far more common than other sorts produced in the German
speaking lands. But after the middle of the eighteenth century, a growing number of the educated
members of the middle class became emancipated from the devotional type of literature and turned to
books of a secular kind – novels in particular.” (20)
33
presume knew best his objections, took Werther very seriously, as a personal mantra
whose tragic, sentimentalized sweeps they must emulate. This came despite the clarity
of the following testament about Werther given by Goethe in his autobiography:
Through this composition more than any other, I had saved myself from a stormy
element on which I had been tossed back and forth most violently, and by my
own and others’ doing, by chance and by chosen mode of life, by resolve and
rashness, by obstinacy and pliancy. I felt as glad and free again as after a
general confession, and entitled to a new life. The old home remedy had served
me supremely well this time. (432)
“But whereas I felt relieved and serene for having transformed reality into poetry,” he
went on to say – and this is key – “my friends were misled into thinking that poetry must
be transformed into reality, and that they must reenact the novel, and possibly shoot
themselves” (432). Not only did his friend Lenz go mad and his friend Mertz commit
suicide, but there was also a purported rash of suicides of which Werther was supposed
to be the seismic center. Sale of the book was banned in Leipzig and Copenhagen. In
his autobiography, Goethe was quite clear about how his intentions behind Werther
didn’t match with the effect that it would have, to the degree that one could fairly allege
that the reason for so much of Poetry and Truth was so that the autobiographer could
account for his Werther.
When he said “the old home remedy had served me
supremely well this time,” he made a connection with an earlier statement in his
autobiography. The “old home remedy” referred to the “tendency in my life I have never
overcome,” the tendency begun after the Lisbon earthquake, “namely to transform
whatever gladdened or tormented me, or otherwise occupied my mind, into an image, a
poem, and to come to terms with myself by doing this” (Poetry and Truth 214). This
connection swept over hundreds of pages and many years. His friend’s misjudgment of
Werther and Goethe was an initial and intimate miscalculation that spread out into the
34
larger, general public. It was a misperception that affected Goethe greatly, that caused
him to bristle at the autobiographical associations that Werther’s public constantly
imposed on him. He made changes in the 1786 reissue, along with his advice to the
reader in its preface to “Be a man.” It hurt him and changed his life. The lapse between
the intent and the effect of Werther is the locus of the second great earthquake of his
life.
The wrestling match between the Sturm und Drang, genius, Goethe and
sentimentalism was one of tension and ambivalence. It saturated German culture to the
degree that individual agents couldn’t exercise complete control over it. It entered the
German psyche forcefully because traditional mores were detaching forcefully.
For
Goethe, this culminated in Sorrows of Young Werther. He would be as little prepared
for its consequences and for the public’s reception as he was able to control the imprint
of the sentimental movement. The lapse in judgment displayed by the public’s reaction
to Werther – by his own friend’s reaction – shook Goethe. It was an earthquake that
very nearly shook him off of his writer’s chair.
35
CHAPTER 5
DISCLOSURES OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. SCORN FOR THE PUBLIC.
“Altogether, the most important part of an individual’s life is that of development,
and mine is concluded in the detailed volumes of Dichtung und Wahrheit. Afterward
begins the conflict with the world and that is interesting only in the results.” (qtd. in
Eckermann 37)
An autobiography, while it may at times be informative, is not always guaranteed
to be objective. It is written, invariably, with selective memory. Goethe’s autobiography
is guilty at times of re-ordering the chronology of events in order to make them more
rationally linear. In his autobiography, Goethe explained that the suicide of fellow law
student Jerusalem crystallized the parallel occurrences of his own life into the
composition of Sorrows of Young Werther. The suicide actually occurred over a year
before the writing of Werther.
Goethe’s autobiographical version offers a pointed
beginning and end. It is a better story.
An autobiography is subject to the bias of the authors’ resentments or
associations and may end as a form of propaganda as much as a piece of information.
The subjective element is essential to the work.
When Salvador Dali wrote his
autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, he admitted outright the potentially
seamless interweaving in his retelling of “true memories” and “false memories.” He
unabashedly admitted to his reader that at unknown points, his retelling would be
colored by the preferences of his imagination.
The autobiography admits objective
compromises because of the author’s subjectivity.
An autobiography may be an
obstacle to the historian, but for the psychologist it is a window of opportunity. The
objective compromises – because of what they veil or obfuscate – allows the
36
psychologist to examine why the autobiographer has swerved on an otherwise straight
road.
Goethe, like Dali, played with the subjectivity of the autobiography when he titled
his own, Dichtung und Warheit, or Fiction and Truth. He acknowledged the subjectivity,
his mixing of fiction and truth, when he made the notorious statement of intrigue: “All my
published works are but fragments of one great confession, which this little book is an
odd attempt to complete” (Poetry and Truth 214). Given the objective compromises of
an autobiography, Goethe affirms that there is something to be found in his mixture of
fiction and truth that is more appropriate for the psychologist. What the autobiographer
chooses and does not choose is relevant to the psychologist.
If an autobiography
elaborates on something disproportionately, or gloss over it entirely, it becomes worthy
of attention. Goethe tells us in his conversations with Eckermann that the important
aspects of his development are concluded in Poetry and Truth. One may take this to
mean that Goethe felt he successfully completed the confession that he said he would
make in his autobiography.
Early in Poetry and Truth Goethe emphasizes an instance disproportionately
enough to draw the attention of a psychologist. The instance, already highlighted in
chapter three, will be expanded and reevaluated this time according to the analytical
benefits of an autobiography. Goethe mentioned the quarrels that began when he was
young, after the start of the Seven Years War. The contentions in society were present
in Goethe’s own family. Each Sunday he went to his grandparent’s house for dinner:
These had been the most enjoyable hours in the week for me. But now not a bite
tasted good, because I had to listen to my hero being dreadfully defamed. Here
there was a different wind blowing and a different tone ringing than at home. My
affection and respect for my grandparents diminished. I could not mention a
37
word of this in my parent’s house; my own feelings and my mother’s admonitions
kept me from doing so. As a result I was thrown back upon myself, and just as
when I was six, after the Lisbon earthquake, I had begun to doubt the goodness
of God, so now I began, for the sake of Frederick II, to doubt the justness of
public opinion. My spirit was by nature inclined to reverence, and only a great
shock could shake my belief in anything worthy of reverence.” (Poetry and Truth
47)
The Lisbon earthquake and the disparagement of Frederick II join together in this
statement to display Goethe’s agitation at the division of opinion.
agitation.
It was no static
He began to lose respect and admiration for his own grandparents, he
doubted the goodness of God and he doubted the justness of public opinion. In Poetry
and Truth, Goethe indicates the formation of attitude toward the public that will
culminate in Sorrows of Young Werther.
After retelling this incident, the autobiographer says: “In examining the matter
more closely, I detect here the germ of my disregard, nay, even scorn, for the public, a
feeling that stayed with me through much of my life and was offset only at a late date by
insight and culture” (Poetry and Truth 48). The innocuousness of an incident that a
historian may pass over dryly becomes noticeable to the psychologist when Goethe
doubles back. When he references his “scorn for the public” here, one may be sure that
he draws a line from one earthquake to the next, from the Lisbon earthquake and the
Seven Years War to Sorrows of Young Werther. In each earthquake Goethe becomes
profoundly stilted – more than by the event itself – by the discordant effect that it had on
the public. Despite the presence of his hero, Frederick II, the young Goethe found
himself opposed. The opposite corners of debate were not only in the public, they were
even in his family.
38
Didn’t God have more claims to honor than Frederick II? Many things were
united under God and religion. The unity and conformity hereunder was a fundamental
principle, as personal as it was timeless. The wise and merciful God that was explained
to Goethe nonetheless exposed the just and unjust to the same destruction.
The
explanations of God were incongruent with the reality of the earthquake. The discord
was as ubiquitous as that represented by the competing theological explanations after
the Lisbon earthquake. The public was divided against itself to Goethe; their folly was
in their division. This was enough to plant the germ of disregard and scorn that he felt
for the public.
Goethe wrote Sorrows of Young Werther with strong sentimental threads given
his protests against sentimentalism, in the Sturm und Drang journal Frankfurter
Gelehrte Anzeigen for instance. When he wrote it he “felt as glad and as free as after a
general confession, and entitled to a new life” (Poetry and Truth 433). He felt that he
had divested himself of a tendency that he was dangerously close to, that he had clearly
displayed the follies of a sentimental character. He felt that he was swimming against
the sentimental current.
Yet the public received it drastically.
The composition
dramatically exposed every sentimental current that flowed beneath the surface of
society.
The sentimental strain was confirmed publicly, with great acclaim.
Public
celebration of Werther’s sentimental qualities opposed the strides that Goethe sought to
make against sentimentalism internally.
The germ of scorn for the public that was
planted in his youth would not have been fully realized were it not for the mis-reception
of Sorrows of Young Werther.
39
The “insight and culture” at a late date that offset his public scorn is the very
maturation that allows the autobiographer to look back on the tumultuous and
controversial time of Werther and make peace. It is the same maturation, at the age of
74, with which he instructs Eckermann’s solipsism in Conversations of Goethe when
Eckermann said: “I seek a nature which may harmonize with my own; I wish to give
myself up to this and to have nothing to do with the others.” Goethe responded: “What
would be the use of culture if we did not try to control our natural tendencies? It is a
great folly to hope that other men will harmonize with us” (59). Goethe may well give
this advice to his former self, the self that accused the public of being full of
“exaggerated demands, unsatisfied passions, and imaginary sorrows,” and unable “to
receive an intellectual work intellectually” (Poetry and Truth 433).
Despite his criticism of the public in his autobiography, Goethe gave us a
revealing incident from his teenage years. The incident is conspicuous because in it he
allies himself with the public that he spends so much time criticizing in his
autobiography.
It reveals how the acceleration of a tragic reaction is possible for
Goethe. This is much the same tragedy that Goethe criticized the public of being so
susceptible to after Werther.
This instance concerned “the first durable impression that a person of the
feminine sex had ever made on me” (Poetry and Truth 132). Goethe was 16 years old,
living with his family in Frankfurt. Her name was Gretchen, a relative of a tavernkeeper’s family, the cousin of friends from a lower class that Goethe fraternized with at
the time.
It has gotten little attention from scholars though it is as interesting
allegorically as it is significant psychologically.
40
Having discovered his talents, Goethe’s new friends made him central to their
pranks by putting his writing skills to use. He composed a phony letter that was to be
exchanged from a boy, the object of their pranks, to his desired love.
Goethe
compliantly composed the letter and his friends gave it to the boy who was overjoyed at
the letter’s quality. Goethe was then commissioned by his friends to write a letter that
was supposed to be from the beloved to the unsuspecting boy. He performed the task
on the spot, in the company of his friends and Gretchen. Conscious of her presence, he
wrote imagining how he would like to receive such a letter from her. When he finished
he read the letter aloud. His friends raved and Gretchen’s body language betrayed the
effects of unspoken knowledge. His friends demanded a revision as the letter proved
inaccurate in the respect that it was written from Gretchen’s station and vantage. They
left and Goethe stewed over a revision he finally insisted he couldn’t make. Gretchen,
ever moderate and sensible, here intervened, asserting that Goethe should neither edit
the letter nor participate in this mischief, as it was bound to have ill effects for a person
of his class and independence. He objected at the notion of his independence. There
was no independence when the class disparity prevented Goethe from having an open
relationship with Gretchen and her cousins. He mused how desirable it would be to
receive such a letter as the one that he wrote for Gretchen’s cousins. Gretchen read
the letter aloud, pondered, and signed her name to the bottom. Goethe thrilled, jumped
up and moved to her when she said, “Do not kiss me! That is vulgar. But love me, if
possible” (Poetry and Truth 134).
This is the basis of Goethe’s activity over the months to follow. What deserves
notice is Goethe’s reaction to the abrupt ending of this situation. Goethe’s time with
41
these friends continued more or less unknown. His family and especially his father
would not have approved. Something happened that would bring the attention of not
only his father but the town’s authorities as well. Goethe’s friends, Gretchen’s cousins,
solicited a recommendation for an official position for one of their friends from Goethe’s
grandfather. Goethe consented to their request and applied to his grandfather who
permitted his request. Some months later, evidence arose alleging that the subject of
his grandfather’s recommendation had been involved in ‘dangerous and evil’ affairs.
This implicated Goethe and his friends, by association.
Goethe was accused and
interrogated, and “now I very vividly imagined the good cousins and, above all,
Gretchen, being arrested, interrogated, punished, and disgraced” (Poetry and Truth
163). When the young Goethe felt certain that his friends would not be treated with the
same fairness that he was, as was demanded by his station and innocence, “if they
were treated with the slightest harshness and injustice,” he said to his interrogator, “I
would kill myself and no one would stop me” (Poetry and Truth 164). Assured of his
innocence his persecutor left him, yet while Goethe remained uninformed about his
friend’s situation, “I told myself tale upon tale, saw nothing but misfortune upon
misfortune, and made a special point of imagining Gretchen and myself as quite
miserable…nothing could entice me out of my feverish solitude” (Poetry and Truth 165).
He continued:
The only satisfaction I felt now was in ruminating on my misery and letting it
multiply a thousandfold in my imagination. All my inventive gifts and knowledge
of poetry and rhetoric concentrated themselves on this morbid spot and by their
very vigor threatened to inflict an incurable disease on my body and soul…I
would write vehement letters to our family friend, warning him not to withhold the
outcome of the situation from me. At the next, I would tear them up again
because I was afraid to learn the true extent of my misfortune and be forced to
42
relinquish the consolation of those fantasies with which I had alternately
tormented and cheered myself. (Poetry and Truth 166)
Goethe criticizes the Werther public of the same reactions that he boldly admits
of himself in this account.
Theirs was a tragic reaction made possible by “morbid
youthful folly,” “unsatisfied passions,” and “imaginary sorrows” (Poetry and Truth 428,
433). The account matches boldly with Werther’s downward spiral in a book that –
again, boldly – paralleled Goethe’s own involvement with an engaged woman and her
fiancé.
These fits were manifested in a violent physical illness.
“Only now did my
distress really begin,” said Goethe, “and I had ample time to torment myself by
imagining the oddest romance, made up of sad events and leading inevitably to a tragic
catastrophe” (Poetry and Truth 166). Goethe ambiguously suggests what connections
are possible in the lovelorn desperation of his first romantic encounter and that which he
displays eight years later in Sorrows of Young Werther. As Werther is considered the
only true tragedy that Goethe ever wrote, the implied connection becomes more
concrete. This is the same book – 300 autobiographical pages after the Gretchen
incident – that Goethe says made a great explosion “because the young people were
themselves already on unsure ground. The perturbation was great,” he says, “because
every individual burst out with his exaggerated demands, unsatisfied passions, and
imaginary sorrows” (Poetry and Truth 433). The span and coincidence of the parallel
between Gretchen and Werther, offered in his own autobiography, is not something the
psychologist would allow us to overlook.
43
The situation resolved itself for the young Goethe, or so he said, when he got
word of Gretchen’s report during the interrogations. “I cannot deny that I saw him often
and gladly,” she said, “but I always regarded him as a child, and my affection for him
was altogether sisterly” (Poetry and Truth 170).
When he heard this, Goethe
considered himself cured on the spot. In his mind he turned over the flattery of her
conceit, imagining herself a wise housemaid and he a child, until she appeared in a
completely different light. He willed himself into blackening the image of a girl that he
honored willfully from the moment that he saw her. Though Goethe puffed himself up
and imagined himself freed from Gretchen, this was a decisive break of trust. Coming
once from the judgment of society, from his friends whose mischievous folly took
advantage of his good faith, betrayal came finally from the girl that elicited his most
intimate confidence.
The tragic scenario of the young Goethe is one of a series of allegories that
Goethe takes up again in Sorrows of Young Werther.
Werther iterates one such
allegory in a conversation that he has with the courtly, rational Albert, about suicide.
Werther argues that a case of suicide may not be easily brushed off on the moral
grounds that Albert represented. He recounts for Albert the history of a girl recently
found in the river who was obliged to repress her liveliness and passion into gossip and
narrow domestic limits until her subdued passions found life and hope under the
attention of a man:
Finally, when she opens her arms to embrace all her wishes – her lover
abandons her. Stunned, and almost out of her mind, she finds herself above an
abyss; all around her is darkness; no way out, no consolation, no hope! The one
person whom she had found the center of her existence has left her. She does
not see the wide world spread before her…She throws herself into the depths to
44
drown all her anguish in the embrace of death… is not this case like that of a
disease? Nature is unable to find a way out from the maze of confused and
contradictory forces, and the patient must die. (44)
This forecasts Werther’s tragic end. Werther references the “abyss” later when
he meets the swelling river, after the final disconnection with Lotte became the most
pressing: “I faced the abyss and breathed: ‘Down, down!’ and was lost in an ecstatic
wish to hurl down all my agonies, all my sufferings! To storm along with the waves”
(94)! Like the girl who threw herself in the river, Werther does not see the ‘wide world
spread before him’ or what in that world might substitute for and mitigate his loss.
After the Gretchen affair the young Goethe was consoled by his concerned
mother and his sister. His father tried to entice him back into society, into partaking in
the ceremony of the Holy Roman Empire that passed through Frankfurt, which Goethe
had followed ardently up to that point. “In vain!” Goethe said, “…nothing could entice
me out of my feverish solitude” (Poetry and Truth 165). Here is the final match, three
characters that resonate with Goethe over an eight year span, who despair and cannot
see ‘the wide world spread before them’ (Goethe Werther 44).
Goethe’s character, Albert, in Sorrows of Young Werther, comments on the
passionate girl who drowned herself in the river in a statement elicited by Werther idly
holding a gun to his head: “When a man is carried away by his passions and loses all
power of reflection; he can then be considered a drunkard or a madman” (42). Albert
abstractly regards the young Goethe, whom Goethe’s mother and sister pleaded with.
How does Werther reply? “I myself have been drunk more than once…I have learned in
my own way that all unusual people who have accomplished something great or
seemingly impossible have always been proclaimed to be drunk or mad” (42). Werther
45
answers the accusation of sickness from the traditional, conventional moralist – by
asserting the genius. The sixteen-year old Goethe may easily have been the ‘unusual
person’ that taught Werther his belief. Through Goethe’s creative engineering, in at
least three different symbols – himself as a youth, Werther’s girl in the river, and
Werther himself – three things are placed on the same plane: the disease, the genius,
and himself. What may be said of him at many points may be said here determinedly:
“Goethe responds to an epochal crisis of meaning by adapting the theory of genius to
himself and his project” (Sharpe 25). Goethe intimately experienced crisis and sickness
at 16; it became expressed finally, fatally in Werther.
Highlighting Goethe’s drastic youthful tendencies before Sorrows of Young
Werther is not to insist on the autobiographical interpretation of Werther that persistently
aggravated Goethe.9 It is merely saying as much as he said himself in his
autobiography: “I was in that state myself and know best what pain I suffered, what
exertions it cost me to escape that pain, I shall not conceal that I deliberately meditated
on the various kinds of death that can be chosen” (429).
He confesses here an
association with the Romantic cult of suicide. It is a confession that comes in sharp
contrast to his famous statement, which scholars have taken as a denouncement: “I call
the classic healthy, the romantic sickly” (qtd. in Eckermann 305). Despite the boldness
of his latter judgment, Goethe the autobiographer, who is both summing up the account
of his artistic development and inferring final confessions, implicates himself with the
romantic youth and the public that he criticized.
9
This does not insist on an
In addition to the constant questioning that Goethe faced on its account, the autobiographical
association of Werther with Goethe was lusted after to the extent that it became common for the book’s
most devout followers - including foreigners - to make a pilgrimage to Wetzlar in search of the real Lotte
and Kestner or to visit the grave of Jerusalem.
46
autobiographical association of Werther with Goethe. Instead, the alleged Classicist
writes an autobiography that associates him with the sickness of Romantic youth. This
raises the cost of interpretation, placing it against the complexity of a Romantic context.
Interpretation is not merely based upon how a character relates to its author. It is based
upon how a character relates to an author that is relating to his age. By asserting
Goethe’s tragic impulse before Sorrows of Young Werther, I am asserting his
association with his age throughout his development. “Altogether, the most important
part of an individual’s life is that of development, and mine is concluded in the detailed
volumes of Dichtung und Wahrheit.” The autobiography is Goethe’s first opportunity,
framed in an entire work, to account for his past and his cooperation with his age.
Goethe’s confession about his association with the sickness of his age does not
admit regret for abandoning his romantic mode. E. M. Butler asserts in The Tyranny of
Greece over Germany that the later Goethe showed remorse for not living the life that
he admired in Lord Byron,10 that he regretted not submitting to the dynamic force of the
daemon, that he regretted thereafter not facing and reflecting the modern dualism of his
time as it is confronted in Werther.
Goethe’s identification with Werther in his
autobiography is distinct and decided. He doesn’t contact his past to mourn his losses
and regret his choices. Dualism arrived to the Romantic Era in the form of sickness and
genius, a daemon, as Goethe called it.
The acknowledgement of dualism as it is
represented in Werther was not the remorse of a foregone destiny; it was identification
with a phase of personal evolution.
10
“If, during the course of our life, we see others accomplish what we ourselves earlier felt it was our
calling to do, but had to abandon along with much else, then we get the beautiful feeling that mankind in
combination is the only true human being, and that the individual can only be glad and happy when he
has the courage to feel himself part of the whole” (Poetry and Truth 287).
47
“Fate bade thee go,” in a poem called ‘To Werther’ written for the fiftieth
anniversary of the book’s publication “– to linger here was mine” (Poems 202). The
confession of Goethe’s autobiography entails the acceptance of his former life and the
consequential, relative part of his psyche, “the fragrance that the violet sheds on the
heel that has crushed it.” This is resonant with the remnant that our past life leaves on
our psyche; it’s also ironically congruent with what Mark Twain calls forgiveness.11
What Goethe gives in his autobiography by way of confession was as important
culturally as it was personally.
In an age that he called sick, an age also called
Goethezeit, such an acknowledgement begged health.
11
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
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CHAPTER 6
THE CULMINATION OF A RELUCTANT ROMANTIC
The movement from the Gretchen affair to the Sorrows of Young Werther gives
us a timeline in Goethe’s relationships that helps us to see how the creation of the latter
is possible. The timeline that begins with Gretchen and ends with Werther marks a
pattern in his relationships that crescendos in the Werther period. The progression in
these relationships admits a sense of turmoil that will fling him into the Classic role that
he is notoriously associated with.
After the Gretchen incident, Goethe said: “I never tired of reflecting on the
transiency of affections, the changeability of human nature” (Poetry and Truth 217).
This sets the tone from Gretchen to Werther.
The sense of transience and
changeability in humans, being launched by Gretchen, will gain ever-increasing weight
until Werther. After Gretchen, Goethe notes, he lost the ability to be unselfconscious:
“Even the most indifferent glances of other people were a burden to me…The morbid
conceit began to torment me that I was attracting other people’s attention and that their
gaze was fixed on my behavior, determining, investigating and censuring it” (Poetry and
Truth 172). He drew his friends into the woods, “spacious enough to lend concealment
to a poor wounded heart” (Poetry and Truth 172). He built an altar to the god of nature
in reaction to the Lisbon earthquake; he sought nature again upon the rupture with
Gretchen.
Gretchen was the first test of intimacy for Goethe. She was the first person
outside of his family that he would become vulnerable to. This is a severe test when
erotic love, by its nature, summons vulnerabilities that never could have been
49
approached by his family.
Upon the rupture of the Gretchen affair, Goethe lost
confidence in the unity of a social world that was marvelously and securely constructed
by his mother and his sister. This world was undermined by a conditional and strictly
laced relationship with his father. Constitutionally, Goethe was a hard egg that didn’t
realize the permeability of the underlying yoke. Goethe’s social unselfconsciousness
came from the security of his relationship with his mother and sister. His sense of
intimacy enjoyed the freedom of giving and receiving without the threat of harm. His
companionability enjoyed a sense of unity that transcended social boundaries. After the
break with Gretchen, the intimate nature became differentiated. Goethe’s new selfconsciousness betrays a fracture in the unity of his intimate construct, his identity even.
Thereby, “the morbid conceit began to torment me that I was attracting other people’s
attention and that their gaze was fixed on my behavior, determining, investigating and
censuring it” (Poetry and Truth 172). The realization that there were other people was
instigated by the disconnection of intimate lines in an erotic sphere hitherto unexposed
to Goethe. Before, each person was only an extension of his mother and sister. This
safety was broken and a vast difference opened up between people. It was reflected by
a new self-consciousness, one that caused him to feel looked-upon and vulnerable.
Such vulnerabilities were the oozing of an under-layer previously unrecognized, set up
by the lapse in the relationships between the main male and female figures in his life: an
extreme over-identification with his mother and sister and a task-driven, brittle tie with
his father.
Goethe “never tired of reflecting on the changeability of human nature” because
the flux was problematic and new (Poetry and Truth 217). “What gives a sensitive youth
50
the greatest concern,” he says, “is the recurrence of errors. How late we come to the
realization that while we are developing our virtues we are simultaneously developing
our faults” (Poetry and Truth 426). A fissure appears in the Gretchen affair that causes
Goethe reflection. The confirmation of the fissure by the recurrence of thwarted love
causes him serious concern. The recurrence of thwarted love will culminate in the
Sorrows of Young Werther.
The rude awakening was so stark that the fissure appeared not only in himself,
but all around him:
There was a dark, significant, intense world which had interested me even
earlier. In connection with the Gretchen affair and its aftermath I had gotten a
precocious look into the extraordinary labyrinth that underlies town society…
Religion, mores, laws, status, circumstances, custom – all these hold sway only
on the surface of municipal life. The streets lined with those fine houses are kept
clean, and everyone on them behaves quite decorously; but behind those walls
affairs may be in great disorder, and many a smooth exterior is merely a thin
layer of plaster over a rotting pile. (Poetry and Truth 216)
Goethe’s intimate nature is divided. He realizes that there are other people in a
way that never occurred to him. By the Gretchen affair, people acquired the ability to
harm him, and so his conceptions about the nature of people changes, too. He projects
his soured perspective not only onto others, but he begins to sense the underbelly in
everything, in society, in the very nature of things. Goethe shows remarkable similarity
in this respect to the paranoiac quality of Romanticism, which Isaiah Berlin tells us
resulted from the French Revolution:
The French Revolution…did not go the way it was intended (that was clear to all),
and therefore what it attracted was not at all reason, peace, harmony, universal
freedom, equality, liberty, fraternity – not the things which it was set in train to
satisfy – but on the contrary violence, appalling, unpredictable change in human
affairs, the irrationality of mobs, the enormous power of individual heroes…It
stimulated the notion of a mysterious nine-tenths of an iceberg, about which we
did not know enough. (109)
51
So too was Goethe an optimistic, buoyant youth, recklessly personable even in
the security of his intimacies. His good will was boundless, so that, in his youth, he
deigned even to forgive God for not “assisting me more in the exercise of my infinite
good will.”12
Goethe was set-up in the same way that Isaiah Berlin posits
revolutionaries were led into the French Revolution: “We the enlightened, we the
virtuous, we the wise, we the good and the kind seek to do this or that, but somehow all
our efforts end in nothing, and therefore there must be some fearful hostile force lying in
wait for us which trips us up when we are on the brink, as we think, of great success”
(107). In both cases a kind of sophomoric and optimistic intent was thwarted by an
unexpected, unfavorable effect. The paranoiac quality of Romanticism was the result.
For Goethe, things did not go the way he wanted, the Gretchen situation ruptured, the
confidence of his disposition was shaken, the egg cracked, and he became conscious
of the underbelly of existence, society’s as much as his own.
In the comparison
between the French Revolution and Goethe, the societal process and the internal
process mirror one another. The chaos that may be found in the larger sphere, in the
same period of history, is completely internalized and contained in the life of an artist,
Goethe.
Goethe alluded to the traumatic role that Gretchen played in his life. The allusion
comes, coincidentally, as he speaks of the public malaise that led to the explosion of
Werther. Men become world-weary, Goethe says, when they become disgusted with
12
“Actually, from childhood on I had believed myself to be on quite good terms with my God, indeed after
various experiences I even imagined that He might be in my debt, and I was bold enough to think that it
was for me to forgive him some things…He should have assisted me more in the exercise of my infinite
good will” (Poetry and Truth 254).
52
the pleasure that is supposed to be accorded by the recurrence of external things.13
This world-weariness softened the ground for the explosion that Werther made. He
makes a turn that moves close to home:
But there is no more effective cause of this weariness than the recurrence of
love. It is correctly said that the first love is the only one, for the supreme sense
of love gets lost in the second and because of the second. The concept of
eternity and affinity that really exalts and sustains love is destroyed, so that it
seems as transitory as everything else that recurs. (Poetry and Truth 425)
Hope, gullibility, immaturity, and innocence are all qualities that are brought into a
first love. Despite their potential to set up a great fall, they are qualities with a certain
rawness, booming originality, and vulnerability. Recovery after the loss of a first love is
not a straightforward matter. The concept of love begins to develop in youth before
erotic love is ever experienced. The first love is a test of the early understanding.
When the first love is lost, one may be as disappointed in the loss of understanding.
Goethe may be as disappointed as when an earthquake proved the explanations of an
all-loving and merciful God to be false.
Even worse, the recurrence of love – of
romantic relationships that pretend love – further devalue the loftiness first conceived of
love. The spark of originality becomes mocked by facsimiles. The initial and naïve
hope in the fulfillment of love becomes indecisive, becomes subject to the insect of
transience. What was at first stone becomes as fickle and moveable as water.
13
Goethe’s diagnosis of the negative sense of repetition in the Romantic era prophesies its fulfillment in
the Modern era. Goethe from Poetry and Truth: “It is told of an Englishman that he hung himself so as
not to be enforced to dress and undress every day. I knew an honest gardener, the overseer of a large
park, who once cried out in annoyance: ‘Must I then watch these rainclouds constantly move from west to
east?’ It is said of one of our most excellent men that he was vexed with seeing the spring grow verdant
again and wished it might look red for a change. These are truly symptoms of life-weariness, which not
infrequently results in suicide” (425). -To over 100 years later, Albert Camus: “Rising, street car, four
hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed
most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins with the weariness tinged with
amazement” (10-11). What Goethe calls the resulting sense of suicide, Camus, in the Modern era, calls
the most important question of philosophy.
53
Goethe is not posing general principles on recurrence, but he has touched home.
He makes the statement about the recurrence of love to suggest how men become
world-weary and how such dissatisfaction prepared the ground for the explosion of
Werther. While he spoke at first of the public, his interpretation, half-knowingly, finds
application to himself. The “transiency of affections” became an obsession for Goethe
because his concept of affection was dashed when he lost Gretchen (Poetry and Truth
217). It confirms the distinction of a progression that begins with Gretchen and ends
with the Sorrows of Young Werther. It is a process in which multiple relationships play
themselves out and embed the sense of transience for Goethe.
The two relationships following Gretchen were marked by the transience that
Goethe says began to fascinate him. Both women were subject to his capriciousness.
Of the first, “Katchen,” he writes: “that evil impulse came over me that leads a man to
amuse himself by tormenting his sweetheart and keeping her submissive with his
arbitrary, tyrannical whims” (Poetry and Truth 215). When this behavior caused him to
lose her – “only now did I really feel that I loved her and could not give her up…I had
really lost her,” he said. “I took such frenzied revenge on myself for my mistake, trying
to punish my moral nature by foolishly attacking my physical nature” (Poetry and Truth
215). Goethe felt his capriciousness worthy of punishment, as it was similar
unpredictable elements that befell him in the Gretchen affair. Both situations ended with
Goethe’s unexpected, spontaneous flight, and when he received the farewell letter from
Fredericke Brion, his second romance – “here for the first time I was guilty…this gloomy
period was very painful, nay, intolerable” (Poetry and Truth 385.)
54
The following two situations involved the women around which Sorrows of Young
Werther was written. When Goethe met Lotte Buff at a ball he did not know that she
was engaged to Johann Kestner.
In his autobiography, Goethe accounts for this
relationship – referring to himself in third person – in terms that find consonance with
Werther’s escalation:
He thus went on unthinkingly but was before long so entangled and captivated,
and the attitude of the couple was at the same time so trustful and friendly, that
he no longer understood his own feelings. She liked having him as an escort,
and he was unable to bear being away from her, for she acted as an intermediary
between him and the everyday world, and so they soon became inseparable
companions. (Poetry and Truth 401)
It reached such a pitch, with the impending betrothal approaching, that Goethe
would be forced to leave Wetzlar, where Lotte and Kestner lived. He left unannounced.
Upon his exile to Frankfurt, another sentimental relationship concluded there when the
promised Maximiliane was married to an Italian banker. While Lotte Buff’s eyes were
blue, Werther’s Lotte had Maximiliane’s black eyes.
Goethe remained in correspondence with Lotte and Kestner after he left Westlar,
remaining on friendly terms with them both. Upon his insistence Goethe bought their
wedding bands, and when they were married Lotte sent him the bouquet. He pinned it
to his hat and wore it in the streets. Lotte was quickly pregnant. Goethe pleaded with
them to give the baby his name, Wolfgang.
They would.
The intimacy of their
relationship was evident despite the objections against Werther that they would have.
In Frankfurt, before Maximiliane’s marriage and still a year before Goethe would
begin writing Sorrows of Young Werther, he received news of Jerusalem’s suicide in
Westlar, reported in a letter written by Kestner himself. It was alleged that Jerusalem, a
promising law student like Goethe, was in love with a married woman.
“Goethe’s
55
reaction was violent and he instinctively attributed the suicide to the forces operative in
his own life: disappointed love, inner solitude, and the frustration of personal and
spiritual yearnings by an established religion in which he could not believe” (Boyle 135).
When Goethe began writing Sorrows of Young Werther, he took many of the details and
phrases about Jerusalem’s death directly from Kestner’s letter.
Goethe informed Lotte that he was writing a book that embodied their relations at
Wetzlar. He evidently looked forward to the praise of her and Kestner. He sent them
each a copy and asked them to read it on their own and to write him a response. Their
response was predictable. They were annoyed at the parallels and the suggestion
behind them. They did not want to see it published. Goethe’s naiveté was rather
astounding; when he discovered Lotte and Kestner’s reactions, his apologies were
immediate and profuse. But the copies that they received handwritten were already off
to print. The first lapse between the intent and the effect of Sorrows of Young Werther
began for Goethe:
I had hardly thought I would be so intolerably tormented by sympathetic wellwishers. Instead of saying anything complimentary to me about my little book as
it stood, every single one of them wanted to know, for once and all, how much of
the affair was actually true. Then I would grow very annoyed and usually return a
very rude reply. For I had meditated a long time about this little work in order to
give poetic unity to its various elements, and to answer their question I would
have been obliged to pick it to pieces again and to destroy its form, with the
result that the true constituent parts would have been, if not annihilated, at any
rate scattered and disbursed. (Poetry and Truth 435)
The public sought to “scatter and disburse” elements in his work that were
otherwise whole. As scattered as the opinions concerning the nature of God after the
Lisbon earthquake, as scattered as opinion during the Seven Years War – if in this
variability Goethe detected “the germ of my disregard, nay, even scorn, for the public, a
56
feeling that stayed with me through much of my life” (Poetry and Truth 48), then his
scorn is definitively blossomed by the public’s misunderstanding of Werther.
The
miscalculation of Goethe’s intent was represented immediately in the effect that it had
on his friends. “Being oppressed in this way,” the autobiographer says, “he grew only
too aware that a vast gulf separates authors and their public, although, fortunately for
them, neither has any concept of it” (436).
The suicide in Werther signified the exhilaration of despair that came after five
romances marked by transience. After Werther, Goethe tested the more conventional
means to happiness. He began a relationship with Anna Schonneman, ‘Lili’, as he
called her, which resembled an engagement by all appearances.
Despite the
storminess that causes one to affix their self to a buoy, the situation followed form and a
restless Goethe took flight. He left on a trip to Switzerland without warning, severely
disappointing the expectation of engagement that he built. His sudden flight ended the
relationship. “I was never so near my own proper happiness as in the period of that
love for Lili,” Goethe said reflectively to Eckermann. “The obstacles that kept us apart
were not really insuperable – and yet I lost her” (5 March, 1830). After Gretchen,
Goethe was imbued with a chaotic intimate sense. He conveyed the turbulence that
was taught him to the following two compliant romantic hosts, incurred guilt because
after all it was chaotic, and then entered situations that rang with the impossibility of the
woman’s marriage. It was therefore because the obstacles were not insuperable that
Goethe lost Lili. He wrote to Herder in the days before he flew from Lili: “I recently
thought I was approaching the port of domestic bliss and a firm footing in the true joy
and sorrow of the earth but am now wretchedly cast out again onto the deep…On the
57
wire known as inborn fate (fatum congenitum) I am dancing my life away…Its will be
done” (Briefe 182,3)!
Goethe and three others left for Switzerland dressed in the English style that
Werther was wearing when he ended his life: blue frock coat, buff waistcoat, and
trousers.
Under the symbol of Werther-wear, the recklessness of Goethe’s destiny
resumed its grip as he enacted a flight that would ultimately lose him Lili. He persisted
nevertheless in fondling the trigger of Werther’s gun: “Goethe continued to visit
Offenbach, to look out for Lili at the theatre, at a big ball, even though there was nothing
to say, even though she positively avoided him. He seemed to be trying to drive himself
into illness” (Boyle 209).
By the time his flight to Switzerland was over, Goethe’s buoy – the engagement
to Lili – was also subject to the storminess that tossed him. The sturdiness of what the
autobiographer considered true love could not assuage the transitory nature of humans,
of himself. The signs of disharmony among people first shook him when he was a child,
again upon his first female encounter, and finally when he flew from his fiancé dressed
in Werther-wear.
The underbelly would not keep covered.
“Goethe’s ‘general
confession’,” as Goethe called Werther in his autobiography, “was very far from
resolving all the issues raised in the novel” (Boyle 197).
The transience of human affection that riddled Goethe after Gretchen embedded
itself so deeply that it, in all its inglorious variability, would play itself over and again in
Goethe’s own affections. The recurrence of his errors troubled the youth deeply. It
troubled him because it echoed the chaos and disunity that the Gretchen affair imposed
on him. The decisive culmination of that turmoil is expressed in Sorrows of Young
58
Werther, which emerged as his own child that the public and his friends interpreted as a
monster. Goethe was horrified that the despair that trickled down from Gretchen –
which he sought to divest himself of in Werther – may be identified so persistently with
himself.
If first a symbiosis of intimacy was lost, second a symbiosis of understanding was
lost. The tendency by which Goethe “could both refine my conception of external things
and calm myself inwardly in regard to them” (Poetry and Truth 214), his writing itself,
became subject to the Romantic storm that tossed everything. His intimate sense was
lost and society became a smooth, thin layer of plaster over a rotting pile. Writing
became his bastion, where he may salvage his intimate nature by expression, but even
his writing could no longer be trusted in the hands of the public. His strongholds were
forsaken. “I have been lying curled in on myself and silent and questing around and
about my soul whether there was the power in me to bear all that brazen Fate has
dictated in the future for me and mine; whether I could find a rock to build a castle on
that I could flee to with my belongings in the direst need” (Briefe 171).
This rock would be Weimar, a city that, by the end, became a symbol for the
Classic.
59
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION IN CLASSICISM
Could [the Sturm und Drang] have imagined that their former companion was to
become a strong-willed statesman or a hard-working commissioner of public
works who practically single-handedly revived the mining industry in the state,
and that, for all practical purposes he would suppress his creative urge for a
decade while he served the state and its citizens? Could they have guessed that
his life during these years would perfectly exemplify the themes of self-realization
and renunciation of personal desires which figure dominantly in his later works?
(143)
The questions that Daemmrich poses at the beginning of this thesis may now be
answered with ease. We may answer these questions about Goethe, whose condition
before he left to Weimar is testified by his friend Knebel: “Goethe lives in a state of
continual inner warring and turmoil, for all objects have a most violent effect on him”
(qtd. in Boyle 209). We may answer the questions about Goethe, whom Stolberg
testifies to after he arrived in Weimar: “If God does not work some miracle upon him he
will become one of the most wretched of all. How often I have seen him melting and
then raging in the same quarter of an hour” (qtd. in Boyle 209). And Charlotte von
Stein: “There is an enormous amount on my mind that I must tell this inhuman creature.
It is just impossible; with his behavior he will not survive in this world” (qtd. in Boyle
258). This is the troubled poet, who undertook uncharacteristic roles on the court of
Weimar, and who is at the source of Daemmrich’s question.
Boyle is affirmed when he says of Werther that “Goethe’s ‘general confession’
was very far from resolving all the issues raised in the novel” (197).
The above
quotations testify to the persistence of those issues even after Werther. Despite this
persistence, Goethe’s entrance into Weimar offers definitive proof of the alterations
60
caused him by the writing of Werther. Goethe wrote Werther to avoid suicide. He wrote
it because he wanted to live, and live long. To do this, he didn’t draw up a protagonist
who walked off into the horizon to live a sunny, durable life. To do this he drew up his
alter-ego, the sick self, and he killed him. “Fate bade thee go – to linger here was
mine,” he said in his poem, To Werther (Poems 202). Goethe was trying to solve pain
and chaos. He was trying to live longer. Far before the donning of “Weimar Classicism”
– Goethe already killed Romanticism when he killed Werther.
When Goethe moved to Weimar, he continued the mission that the composition
of Werther had already begun. He moved to Weimar to engage durable life. The
“strong-willed statesman” and the “hard-working commissioner of public works” are the
components of durable life. Goethe’s scientific studies are one of the most stunning
components of his attempt to solve chaos while in Weimar. “No one could understand
the serious passion with which I pursued this business; no one perceived how it came
from the depths of my innermost being” (qtd. in Richards 441). Goethe made this
statement in response to the criticism that he received over his essay, Metamorphosis
of Plants. This is the passion of an author who killed Werther, the passion of one who
embattles chaos, now with science.
While small but stately Weimar possessed the components of longevity,
Goethe’s statement made after the break with Gretchen still lingers: “I had lost the bliss
of being able to walk around unselfconsciously…Therefore I drew my friends into the
woods…spacious enough to lend concealment to a poor wounded heart” (Poetry and
Truth 172). After Werther – the extended, dramatic culmination of Goethe’s break with
Gretchen – Weimar became concealment for a poor wounded heart. “That figure,”
61
Gretchen, “which had made the concept of beauty manifest to me had disappeared into
the distance. It often visited me in the shadow of my oaks, but I could not hold it fast,
and I felt a mighty urge to seek something like it out in the world” (Poetry and Truth
173).
Here, unfiltered enough, is the confession from Goethe that the rupture with
Gretchen influenced him to sublimate his erotic passion into nature. After Werther,
Weimar offered Goethe longevity, concealment for a wounded heart, and it was a
sanctuary for his passionate attention to nature. Two years after his arrival in Weimar,
he wrote:
I have heard it maintained that the only way that a person can escape and save
himself from a painful, self-torturing, gloomy state of mind is by contemplation of
Nature and a heartfelt sympathy with the outward world. Even a most general
acquaintance with Nature, no matter in what way, in fact any active
communication with it, either in gardening or farming, hunting or mining, draws us
out of ourselves; the employment of our mental energies upon real, actual
phenomena affords by degrees the greatest satisfaction, clearness of mind and
instruction; in the same way as the artist who keeps true to Nature, while
cultivating his mind, is certain to succeed the best. (Campaign in France,
Biermann 124)
In Weimar, Goethe sat for a month at night in his garden house to study the
phases of the moon; he challenged Newton with a treatise formed by over 700
observations on the permutations of light and color; he studied sound for five years; his
position as the overseer of the mining industry drew him into the study of geology,
forestry and agriculture drew him into botany. The observational method that Goethe
developed in the field of botany would found the discipline of morphology. It led him to
write the first thesis ever in comparative anatomy. The thesis ushered in the discovery
of the intermaxillary bone in humans – a bone that was traditionally considered present
only in animals – validating theories of morphology that garnered recognition in Darwin’s
first essays.
62
The chaos of human affection, which followed Goethe still to Weimar, found
response in geology, where Goethe gained a calming sense of the static, unchanging
mood of nature.
In science, Goethe needn’t be the genius, the second creator in
defiance of nature. Writing needn’t be the fickle life raft in an unremitting Romantic
storm. It needn’t be like his writing, the instrument relied upon to “refine my conception
of external things and calm myself inwardly in regard to them” (Poetry and Truth 214).
As a scientist, his conception of external things may be lead by the external itself.
Goethe need only be an observer; the intrinsic processes of extrinsic nature are given
the chance to orient him. This is comforting.
Goethe’s morphology was a key part of his scientific approach.
It worked
deliberately to rectify timeless natural principles that were sundered by the
classifications of Modern science.
For Goethe, classifications limited what may be
known about nature. They served to cut aspects of nature off from the whole. Goethe’s
work in morphology worked importantly to dissolve the differentiation of scientific
knowledge: “I was convinced that a general type threaded its way through all organic
creatures, constantly enhanced by metamorphosis, all its features quite noticeable in
certain intermediary stages, and challenging recognition even when modestly retreating
into obscurity at the highest stage – mankind” (Annals, Magnus 82). All plants, in his
theory, were morphological variations of one plant, an archetypal plant. (One may see
here how easy it becomes to substitute the word “morphological” with “evolutional.”) If
plants are not all so dissimilar while they are linked by an archetypal quality, humans
are not so distinct from the animal. The intermaxillary bone that is present in animals
must be present in humans also. Goethe discovered the intermaxillary bone in infants,
63
not yet sutured to the skull, showing an attention to the process of development in the
skull that was easily missed by the snapshots that scientific classifications offered.
What is knowable about nature, to Goethe, may be discovered according to a thread
that runs through all of nature’s aspects.
We may easily see how this connects to the Classic strain that he comes to be
identified with in Weimar. Instances of nature were not isolated features, unto their
own. They participated in a higher unity. This was the thread that Goethe followed, a
small, subtle voice that may only be perceived with patience and discipline. It was the
same thread, Goethe presumed, that the Greeks followed. “I have the impression that
they proceed according to the laws under which nature herself proceeds, and whose
traces I have been following” (qtd. in Steiner 105).
Science enabled Goethe to
understand the thread of nature that the Greeks perceived and become manifest in their
art.
The conformity of understanding, which comforted him as a child, became
discoverable in nature as an adult. This unity was discoverable by the observational
acuity, the intuition and receptivity of an artist. The skills that served to enhance his
scientific studies in Weimar became placed again into the artistic sphere when Goethe
reached Italy. The artistic sphere, this time, was redefined by the Greeks. Through
them he’d learned to pursue the law under which nature herself proceeded. His art reemerged this time, Classic.
When Goethe observed a broken sheep skull while walking in the dunes, under
the rule of metamorphosis, he was led to posit that the skull “constituted a forward
continuation of the spine, enclosing the fully developed brain as does the spine the
spinal cord, and accordingly composed of modified vertebrae” (qtd. in Magnus 90).
64
Likewise, Weimar became the spine that would enclose the eventuality of the
Classicism that was confirmed in Italy. It was there Goethe accomplished the trip that
he and his father intended from childhood. It was there he learned a method that would
rediscover his art.
He went to Italy with attention to plastic arts, architecture, and
botany, but it was there he became a poet, again.
“I am now living with a calmness and tranquility to which I have for a long time
been a stranger,” Goethe wrote to his friends from Rome shortly after his arrival.
“Whoever looks around here with earnestness and has eyes to see, must become solid,
he cannot help apprehending an idea of solidity with a vividness which is nowhere else
possible” (Biermann 155). The concrete that Goethe poured in Weimar, the traces of a
Greek artistic principle that was discoverable in nature, was artistic attention that Italy
stimulated into solidity. This “solidity” is in direct contrast to the transience that riddled
him so. “As soon as one sees with one’s own eyes the whole which one had hitherto
only known in fragments and chaotically, a new life begins” (Italian Journey 503). When
he returned from Italy, he would speak to the duke and dramatically reduce his
administrative duties. He met Schiller and the period known as Weimar Classicism
would begin. “We went back centuries, where serious abilities had emerged brilliantly
from a chaotic situation” (Poetry and Truth 556). While still innately attached to chaos,
Goethe found an art form that was not its confessor, but its suppressor.
Goethe’s work throughout his life thereafter was heterogeneous, not unlike his
lifework, Faust. This was written fitfully, left and then revisited again over the course of
his life, the concluding section found in his writing desk only after he died. Such a work,
drawn from many allusions, silently represented many courses in his life and the
65
struggle that he they had over him.
Goethe mentioned Faust only once in his
autobiography, about which Goethe said: “the most important part of an individual’s life
is that of development, and mine is concluded in the detailed volumes of Dichtung und
Wahrheit. Afterward begins the conflict with the world and that is interesting only in the
results” (qtd. in Eckermann 37).
Perhaps this conflict is composed of Christian,
medieval and Roman elements, the elements of eastern and Hellenic poetry, philosophy
and literature. These diverse elements comprise Faust. The elements nonetheless
emerged as a unity and the work was considered a masterpiece.
“Fate bade thee go, to linger here was mine. / Going the first, the smaller loss
was thine” (Poems 202). The poem, “To Werther,” written by Goethe while he was still
writing his autobiography, testified to the duration of his sorrows. The fact of chaos was
not overcome by Classicism, but with the Classic under his summons, Goethe lived.
Classicism was his reaction to chaos.
Classicism would have been impossible for
Goethe if he did not endure chaos. Living was his final expression of harmony. The
final section of the complex work Faust that was found inside his writing desk after he
died was a picture of this. Upon the extension given him by the writing of Werther, life
remained a field on which Goethe’s energetic nature may exercise itself. Nature was
permitted to take its course and an artist experienced the arc of life, from beginning to
end. Love-sickness and the unruly, demonic fever of his youth would not steal that from
him. “I have lived, loved and suffered much –” he said to Eckermann in final prognosis
of his Werther – “that was it” (34).
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AFTERWORD
The strand of interpretation that I’ve taken up in this thesis is important because it
has the potential to explain many manifestations of Modernism and of Modern art in
particular. It interprets Modern art as a reaction to chaos. Chaos proceeds from a
breakdown in the unity of understanding. This begins with “an ever-increasing burden
of knowledge and culture,” as E.M. Butler states it (86). New information, at some
period in world history, roughly the Romantic period, began accelerating exponentially.
It began dividing and multiplying under new forms of analytical criticism. The rate at
which information began to accelerate challenged the ability of humans to corral that
information.
Particularly, theological criticism, competition, and dissension began to break
apart the traditional source of cultural unity that resided under the conceptions of God
and theism. A felt loss arose. On an individual and national scale, the ability to deeply
value something became lost. The sense of identity, community, and culture that was
garnered from shared beliefs became shaken. There was a void in the personal and
national psyche.
Germans and Europeans carried golden eggs with them; by the
Romantic era they no longer had a basket to put them in. A new carrier need then
arise, a substitution. The hand off was made, in the case of Goethe, with the newly
founding conception of genius, sentimentalism and art itself.
Classicism, or neo-Classicism more properly, is one such a manifestation of the
reaction to chaos. It is a reaction that becomes typical to Modernism. It is the type of
reaction that found its beginnings in the Romantic era. This is appropriate where Isaiah
Berlin refers to Romanticism as the stage for "the greatest single shift in the
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consciousness of the West” (1). Classicism becomes choice because Modern chaos
triggers nostalgia for a time that was better.
Unlike the multiform confusion of the
Modern era, the Classic offers unity. For Classicism, Greece represents the Golden
Age of civilization and artistry, when men were naturally productive because their power
was direct and undivided. In this model, Classicism in the Romantic era is one of the
first forms of Primitivism, which is a properly Modern artistic expression. Whether it
refers to the tribal, or the Greek, Primitivism seeks its own Golden Age, a period in
history that is uncorrupted by Modern chaos. The Primitive-impulse – seeking simplicity
in reaction to complication, and seeking simplicity as pre-complication – may be located
in many manifestations of Modern art.
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Biermann, Berthold. Goethe’s World as Seen in Letters and Memoirs. New
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Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. London. Pilimco. 2000.
Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
1991.
Butler, E.M. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany. Great Britain. Cambridge
University Press. 1935.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York. Vintage International. 1991.
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ABSTRACT
THE CHAOS OF CLASSICISM: GOETHE’S CLASSICISM AS A FEATURE OF
ROMANTICISM
by
BRYAN DAVID EMANUEL
December 2008
Advisor:
Professor Ronald Aronson
Major:
Interdisciplinary Studies
Degree:
Master of Interdisciplinary Studies
“Chaos of Classicism” analyzes the changes that the German author Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe undergoes in the Romantic era. The Romantic era represents
fundamental changes in Western thought and culture. It is an era of wars, revolutions,
and political dispersion in Germany, Goethe’s milieu. It is a time of origins. The rise of
critical theology served to loosen the traditional, theistic hold of Protestant Christianity in
Germany. Concepts such as “genius” emerge from this period, in reference chiefly to
the artist.
Sentimentalism originated as a societal movement in Germany.
It was
organized by meetings called ‘sentimental congresses’. Sentimental meetings revolved
around texts that reveled in recently repressed emotions. The Sturm und Drang was
the first literary revolution in Europe characterized as counter-enlightenment, promoting
particularity and passion in expression.
It was here that Goethe began his literary
career, as expressed in his first work of national fame “Götz von Berlichingen.” His
Sturm und Drang status culminated one year later in the work of European fame,
Sorrows of Young Werther. It is from Goethe’s place in this unprecedented, progressive
movement in Europe that the key question of the thesis emerges: How does an artist
73
who sprang from this ground, fertilizing it with the dynamic Sorrows of Young Werther,
eventually become a virtually imperious Weimar Classicist?
In answering this question, the aforementioned symptoms of the time are the
features of the answer. In Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth, used principally in
this thesis, the features of this answer are made uncommonly particular and personal.
The tumultuous elements of Romanticism registered distinctly in the life of a sensitive
individual that was developing into his artistry, Goethe. He’d begun to mistrust a public
who reflected the chaos that was injected into the cultural fabric. The developing sense
of chaos in Goethe’s life, traced in his relationships, reaches a crescendo.
It was
expressed finally in Sorrows of Young Werther, in the form of a suicide. When Goethe
killed Werther, he killed Romanticism. Even for him, it was a frightful recognition of all
the transient, chaotic elements that conditioned him until then. When he moved to
Weimar one year later, it signaled the sentence that he already delivered to
Romanticism. When he left to Italy eleven years later, it was final. He followed Nature
to Italy, enchanted by the order under which she operated. He left christened by that
order, as a poet. This time the poet was Classic.
Romanticism is an era that initiates Modernism, the romantic artist likewise the
modern. Traditionalism is defined by provincial realms, order, community, and theism;
Modernism, by globalism, irrationality, individualism and secularism in the West.
Romanticism provides the historical crossroads between the two. It is the moment of
tension, the birth pain. Goethe’s classicism – an anachronism that expresses itself
against chaos and for the sake of order – is a reaction that will become typical to
Modern artists against the accelerating complexity of their surroundings.
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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT
Bryan Emanuel received his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Spring Arbor
University.
There he focused on the early existentialists, Soren Kierkegaard and
Friedrich Nietzsche. Through the lyrical quality possessed by these philosophers, he
discovered his connection to the art of writing and to the lot of artists.
He writes
creatively, in addition to his scholarly attention to artists and art movements. Bryan
received his Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from Wayne State University, in
Detroit.