The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (110 page)

T
HE
self that Boswell chronicled was notable for its wit and oddity, but had nothing of the heroic. The sovereign metaphor for modern man’s heroic aspiration and frustration remained the medieval legend of the megalomaniac Dr. Faustus. Goethe, who gave this spirit its enduring form, was himself an allegory of modern frustration, of limitless hopes and limited achievement. He was unsatisfied in love, experimental in all the arts, skeptical of all philosophies, yet hoped finally to grasp the world through science. In a Europe dividing into national languages, specializing Science into sciences, he stood for the universal man. Also in the modern mode he was the celebrity sage, known across Europe less for what he did than for what he was or was reputed to be.

At the age of twenty-five Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) became notorious in 1774 for his short novel,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
. In the form of letters it tells how the eager Werther falls hopelessly in love with Charlotte, already betrothed to Albert. In Albert’s absence Werther can enjoy her company only for a few weeks. On Albert’s return Werther withdraws, Albert and Charlotte are married, and Werther in despair ends
his own life with a pistol. “I am not the only unfortunate,” wrote the young Werther. “All men are disappointed in their hopes and cheated out of their expectations.”

This spirit that luxuriated in its own misery and was already beginning to stalk Europe found a voice in Goethe’s little book. It became “Wertherism,” the self-indulgent melancholy of youth. Concocted of the German ingredients of
Weltschmerz
(pain or dissatisfaction with the world) and
Ichschmerz
(pain or dissatisfaction with the self), it had wide appeal. Two years earlier Goethe had already promoted the closely related
Sturm and Drang
(Storm and Stress) movement, which had taken its title from a drama of the American Revolution by a German playwright who had been a childhood friend of Goethe. Inspired by the love of nature and by Rousseau’s writings, the “Wertherites” rebelled against literary conventions. Their mentor Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) drew them to Homer, to Gothic architecture and German folksongs. Shakespeare was their idol and they called for a German counterpart. Goethe had attracted attention by his try at Shakespearean grandeur in his play
Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand
(Götz of the Iron Hand) (1773) about a sixteenth-century German Robin Hood.

Enthusiasm for heroic folk figures like Götz was one thing, suicide quite another. And Goethe’s
Werther
seemed to prescribe suicide as a way of joining the international community of Weltschmerz. At the request of the theological faculty in Leipzig, where the book had been published, it was promptly banned by the City Council, and its translation even in Denmark was prohibited. Across Europe despondent young men, not quite suicidal, showed they were with-it by wearing Werther’s blue frock coat, buff waistcoat, and yellow breeches. Tea sets showed scenes from the novel, ladies perfumed themselves with Eau de Werther, wore Werther jewelry, Werther gloves, and carried Werther fans. Poems, plays, and operas about Werther appeared in London and Vienna. The vogue survived long enough to evoke Thackeray’s own mock “Sorrows of Werther,” which ended:

The tie of
Werther
to the cult of suicide was not entirely imaginary. In January 1778 Christine von Lassberg, deserted by her lover and with a copy of
Werther
in her pocket, drowned herself in the river Ilm behind Goethe’s house in Weimar. Journalists and novelists somehow tied all current suicides to
Werther
.

The story of the novel was rooted in the facts of Goethe’s personal
miseries. In the spring of 1772 when he visited Wetzlar, forty miles north of Frankfurt, he had been captivated by the bright and beautiful nineteen-year-old Charlotte (Lotte) Buff, then engaged to her fellow townsman Christian Kestner. Goethe took a liking to Kestner and in what Goethe later described as “a genuine German idyll” the three enjoyed that summer together. When Goethe declared his love to Lotte, she rebuffed him and he left Wetzlar precipitately. His farewell note to her ended, “I am alone now, and may shed my tears. I leave you both to your happiness, and will not be gone from your hearts.”

That October 1772 Goethe heard an unfounded rumor that one of his Wetzlar friends had committed suicide. He wrote his friend Kestner, “I honor the deed.… I hope I shall never trouble my friends with news of such a kind.” Before the end of the month another young friend, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, really committed suicide. As Goethe recalled, he was a gentle youth who “wore the clothes that were usual, in imitation of the English, in northern Germany: a blue frock-coat, a buff leather waistcoat and breeches.” With a brooding disposition, he liked to draw deserted landscapes, and had a passion for another man’s wife. Snubbed by Wetzlar society, he had actually written a defense of suicide. His beloved asked her husband to forbid him their house. At that point, Jerusalem borrowed Christian Kestner’s pistol for a pretended trip. Just after midnight, seated in his room he shot himself. The account that Goethe received of the burial from Kestner ended, “No priest attended him”—the very words with which Goethe ended his
Werther
.

Goethe’s own frustrations were dramatized when Kestner and Lotte married in April 1773 and he lost another object of his flirtation when the attractive Maximiliane von La Roche was married the next January.

Then Goethe turned to writing his
Sorrows of Young Werther
, completing it in four weeks. “I had written thus much almost unconsciously, like a somnambulist.” He was astonished at the effect of the work on others “precisely the reverse of my own.… I felt, as if after a general confession, once more happy and free, and justified in beginning a new life.” Some have called
Werther
the first “confession” that was successfully made into literature. Werther’s suicide note to Lotte read:

Goethe did change his way of life suddenly and surprisingly. At the height of his celebrity as the author of
Werther
in November 1775 he was invited to Weimar. When the reigning duke Karl Augustus unaccountably named the twenty-seven-year-old Goethe to his Privy Council, the duke explained to Goethe’s father that Goethe would still be free to leave the duke’s service at any time, but Weimar would remain Goethe’s home till his death in 1832. “Goethe can have but one position—” the duke wrote, “that of my friend. All others are beneath him.” The young Goethe speedily became an energetic administrator of the little dukedom, inspecting mines, overseeing irrigation projects, organizing the small army, setting up a fire brigade, developing and directing the court theater. Like Benjamin Franklin about the same time in Philadelphia, he made the little community his own.

One of Goethe’s first and most delightful innovations was ice-skating. Before Goethe no Weimar gentleman had been seen on the ice. Some applauded Goethe’s “daring grace,” others found his performance on the ice “outrageous.” Skating on the Schwansee became “the rage.” These first “wild weeks” in Weimar made him the duke’s boon companion. Here (to match his Wilhelm Meister) he found his apprenticeship in the arts of living.

The rapid rise of this upstart author of a book of scandalous reputation did not please all the burgers of Weimar. When the duke raised him to the highest post in his service, Goethe found it “strange and dreamlike that I in my thirtieth year enter the highest place which a German citizen can reach.
On ne va jamais plus loin que quand on ne sait ou l’on va
, said a great climber of this world.” Goethe later confessed in conversations with his friend Johann Peter Eckermann that these first years at Weimar were “perplexed with love affairs.” He was appealing to many of the attractive women who caught his eye, and he enjoyed flirting. Only one became a great love, but she too proved unattainable. This was the baroness Charlotte von Stein, wife of the duke’s master of the horse, remarkable for her gaiety, intelligence, and broad literary culture. When he met her she was thirty-three, and already the mother of seven children. “She is really a genuine, interesting person, and I quite understand what has attached Goethe to her,” Schiller wrote, “Beautiful she can never have been; but her countenance has a soft earnestness, and a quite peculiar openness.… They say the connection is perfectly pure and blameless.” Over the next years Goethe sent her some fifteen hundred letters. She would remain his guide and inspiration, but that she never became his mistress seems to have been one of the bitter trials of his life—which he made a theme for some of his plays and lyrics.

After ten successful years in the microcosm of Weimar, he obtained the duke’s permission for a journey to an unknown destination. With ostentatious secrecy and in quest of anonymity, he left Weimar on September 3,
1786. Italy, his destination, he reached as “Herr Moller,” a German merchant. There he hoped to escape his celebrity as the author of
Werther
. The relics of ancient culture, the objects of his nostalgia from long immersion in classical literature, would provide another allegory of his unfulfillment. In his
Italian Journey
, eloquently translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, he recorded rapture at seeing the palatial architecture of Venice mirrored in “the Canal Grande, winding snakelike through the town.” He suppressed his old Gothic enthusiasms, spent only three hours touring Florence, but found refreshment in Rome and Greece. “All the dreams of my youth I now see living before me,” he exclaimed at his four months in Rome, “everywhere I go I find an old familiar face; everything is just what I thought it, and yet everything is new. It is the same with ideas. I have gained no new idea, but the old ones have become so definite, living, and connected one with another that they may pass as new.” Going south, he explored Pompeii, climbed the erupting Vesuvius, and concluded that “if in Rome one must
study
, here in Naples one can only
live
.” The Greek temples at Paestum were the climax, “key to the whole.” At Palermo he bought a copy of the
Odyssey
in Greek, which he enthusiastically translated aloud for Kniep, his traveling companion. And he made a plan for a play (never completed) that would sum up Homer’s tale.

Returning to Rome for ten months, he tried his hand as painter and sculptor, learned perspective, sketched from models, and, somewhat to his astonishment, discovered that he lacked great talent as an artist. At the same time he industriously pursued his writing, rewrote
Egmont
, revised two early comic operas, wrote lyrics and some scenes for
Faust
—all to fulfill a commitment to prepare for his publisher the last four volumes of his collected works. In June 1788 he returned to Weimar, where his critics (even including Schiller) had been grumbling at the large ducal stipend he still received for doing nothing. In Italy he had been captivated by a young Milanese, whom he pursued until he discovered that she, too, was already engaged, and then abandoned her in dark regret. But he had not been able to conceal the episode in his weekly letters to Charlotte von Stein, and when he returned their relationship had changed.

Goethe’s discovery that he was no painter confirmed his determination to spend his next years in writing, to “produce a Greece from within.” His encounter with the ancients had sharpened his distinction between the classical and the modern ways of thinking. “The ancients,” he concluded, “represented
existence
, we usually represent the
effect;
they portrayed the terrible, we terribly; they the agreeable, we agreeably, and so forth. Hence our exaggeration, mannerism, false graces, and all excesses. For when we strive after effect, we never think we can be effective enough.” And he even apologized for the heroic self. “All eras in a state of decline are subjective;
on the other hand, all progressive eras have an objective tendency. Our present time is retrograde, for it is subjective.” But in his time the depths of “subjectivity” had only begun to be revealed.

A by-product of the Italian journey was his sensual
Roman Elegies
, a product also of his new love affair with Christine Vulpius.

He had met her in a Weimar park when she politely approached him to find a post for her brother, a struggling writer. This bright, attractive girl of a lower social class, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well drunken father, appealed to Goethe and he scandalized the neighbors by taking her into his house. She had several children by him, and remained his domestic comfort for twenty-eight years. He did not marry her until 1806, when the French had occupied Weimar.