The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (112 page)

In his autobiography Goethe seems to have made an effort to be as truthful in detail as was possible for a man of sixty recalling himself in his twenties. Though a pioneer creation in the modern literature of self-development (
Bildungsgeschichte
,) it has few passages of self-analysis, and, unlike Rousseau, Goethe offers no brief in self-defense. All the vignettes—from his first encounter with Charlotte Buff to his discovery that his trials at oil painting “show more energy than skill,” to the time when “the names of Franklin and Washington began to shine and sparkle in the firmament of politics and war,” to his decision on how his hair should be cut—show remarkable detachment. But each of its four parts is dominated by the story of one of his young loves.

Goethe’s profligacy with words and his alertness to record every item of his time suggest his hope to find in the world of facts a refuge from his inner uncertainty. He often complained that while his poetry had been acclaimed, people did not appreciate his more important works on science and the study of nature. When Weimar was overrun by invading troops he worried most about the safety of his scientific manuscripts. Again unwittingly, in his own obsession with “science” he played out the role of a modern Dr. Faust.

Goethe himself insisted that the refusal of scientists to accept his scientific observations and his cosmic theories was only the obstinate pedantry of the professionals. In sober retrospect his work has proved less a contribution to science than an adaptation of the Faust scenario to the Western Europe of his time. As a boy he listened silently at the table to his pious Lutheran parents’ talk of theology, then retreated to his bedroom, where he had
created an altar to Nature from a music stand adorned with minerals and flowers, and topped by a flame he had lit by a burning glass from the rays of the newly risen sun. He opened his autobiography with his “propitious” horoscope “in the sign of the Virgin” and explained that the auspicious astrological moment might account for his survival though “through the unskilfulness of the midwife, I came into the world as dead.”

As a young man he had been a follower and collaborator of Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), the Swiss founder of the pseudoscience of physiognomies, a Christian version of phrenology, and he had been susceptible to forms of nature-philosophy. His novel
Elective Affinities
(1809), describing how lovers were unwittingly drawn to one another by some external force, took its title from a term of eighteenth-century chemistry that was used to suggest the chemical origins of love. It was therefore condemned as immoral. When a sophisticated friend objected to the book, Goethe responded, “But I didn’t write it for you, I wrote it for little girls!”

Awed by Goethe’s literary fame, dazzled by his reputation as the universal man, in the decades after his death even noted scientists like Ernst Haeckel early praised him as the bold amateur precursor of Darwin. Goethe, who had always enjoyed nature and collected plants, was in charge of the state forestry and agriculture at Weimar. He knew the recently popularized Linnaean system of classification. But he had difficulty remembering the names, which he blamed on the basic error in Linnaeus’s “frozen” view that all species had been created in the Beginning and could neither become extinct nor be added to. As the physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington has shown, “Creative genius in literature, in science his genius longed to create.” Goethe’s Nature, too, was always creating and all existing species were in constant flux. His was no crank hobbyist’s notion but the corollary of his Faustian conviction that he had penetrated to the mind of Nature.

Just as Goethe’s
Faust
expounded the destiny of all mankind in this world and the next, so too Goethe’s science had no petty purpose. In fourteen volumes of scientific writing Goethe offered his skeleton key to nature and his theory of living forms. Goethe divided all the phenomena of nature into two classes. Most are not subject to analysis because in them fundamentals are hidden by irrelevancies. The phenomena that are accessible to human inquiry he called
Urphanomenen
or primal phenomena. While these could never be resolved or taken apart, they allowed insight into the processes of Nature. One example was magnetism, the attraction and repulsion that we comprehend immediately and instinctively. It reveals “in Nature both animate and inanimate, a something which manifests itself as contradiction.” Similarly, in mineralogy and geology, Goethe found it self-evident that the
Urphanomenon
is granite, which is at the base of the earth’s crust and is the core of mountains. “My spirit’s wings,” Goethe concluded, “can go no further.”

Equipped with this vocabulary, Goethe surveyed all nature with an eye for unities, for primal phenomena and primal forms. His poetic interest in the colors of nature quickly led him to the study of light, and into the arena with Sir Isaac Newton’s well-established optics. Back in 1666, in a crucial experiment in Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton had passed white light through a tiny hole in a shutter and then through a triangular glass prism, showed white light to be the product of the combination of colors, and proposed his corpuscular theory of light. By Goethe’s time, Newton’s theories were widely accepted. But not by Goethe. “That all colors mixed together make white,” said Goethe, “is an absurdity.”

And he saw the greatest significance in his own optical theories. “I do not attach importance to my work as a poet,” he told Eckermann, “but I do claim to be alone in my time in apprehending the truth about color.” He insisted with poetic obstinacy, that there obviously could not be many different colored “lights,” but there must be only one light. “Refractivity” was no part of direct experience. By using a prism Newton had violated the necessary simplicity of experiment, and so had introduced
“hundertlei”
complications. Worse than that, Newton had employed mathematics, which had no place in our observations of nature, and showed disrespect for nature’s own beautiful simplicities. “Light is an elemental entity, an inscrutable attribute of creation, an ‘Einziges,’ which has to be taken for granted.” How outrageous to violate the open-air dignity of nature by squeezing a tiny ray of light through a hole and forcing it by a piece of crude glass into a darkened room—when the full abundance of light was available just outside the door! How brutal! How prosaic!

Goethe held fast to the ancient dogmas of Theophrastus and Aristotle, which he had translated in 1801, that somehow colors were a varying mixture of light and darkness. His work
Zur Farbenlehre
(1810) finally came to 450 pages, a vast structure of simile and the poetic imagination.

In botany and biology Goethe once again let his creative faculties run riot, in pursuit of “morphology.”
Urphanemenon
here meant the “ideal” form, which was variously realized in all particular organisms. He proposed, for example, that all plants were elaborations of an “ideal” leaf, and that all parts of a given plant—petals, sepals, stamens—were also modifications of the ideal leaf. When he learned that in man the incisor part of the upper jaw (the intermaxillary, or premaxillary, bone) at first appears separate from the rest of the bone, just as in other animals, he saw a vestigial partition of the human facial bone, confirming the original form of all animals. Goethe could not contain himself. “I have found—not gold or silver—” he wrote Herder when he compared the human and animal skulls, “but something which gives me unspeakable delight.” When Goethe proposed one of his new “findings” in science, Schiller simply responded, “That is not a fact; it is an idea.”

But Goethe was not daunted, and went on to create his grandiose “law” of the “correlation of parts,” a kind of rule of compensation for all living bodies. Thus the snake could have a long body only by giving up its limbs, and a frog had long legs only by shortening its body. And man’s skull was simply several enlarged vertebrae.

Goethe provided charming and sometimes witty verses to accompany his biological observations. And some of his aesthetic preferences, such as his prejudice against violent forces in nature, happened to coincide with later discoveries of Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, and other nineteenth-century pioneers of science. But he was not on the path to a modern theory of evolution because he had no feeling for the vast extents of time, nor for the role of great geologic uplifting movements.

His heroic Faustian self went in search of Skeleton Keys to Nature, which he finally created from his fertile poetic imagination. “Goethe could not readily bear contradiction with respect to his Theory of Colours,” Eckermann reported of their conversations. “His feeling for the Theory of Colours was like that of a mother who loves an excellent child all the more the less it is esteemed by others.” Goethe’s love of Nature was the love of one creator for another. “We are in her and she is in us.…” Whatever his doubts of the Creator God, he had no doubts of Creator Nature!

When, a century after Goethe’s death, James Joyce in
Finnegans Wake
listed the three reigning spirits of European literature, he named Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper. To readers of English, Dante and Shakespeare would be recognizable enough. But Goethe, a popular eponym for streets in Chicago and other immigrant-settled American cities, would remain still more a mystery, seldom read, another symbol of the unfulfillment of Faustian ambitions.

I
N
an age of revolutions, which had recently seen the American “Declaration of Independence” and the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” Wordsworth’s inconspicuous Preface to the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads
in 1801 announced a revolution in poetry. Declaring independence from the stilted conventions of “poetic” language, the private language of men of letters, he proclaimed the equality of all readers with poets. He announced the poet’s mission “to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them … in a selection of language really used by men.”

To the layman this might seem a harmless, and even an obvious, way of thinking about poetry. But at the time it had a radical sound. The poet, like other artists, had been told to “hold the mirror up to nature.” The word “poet” itself came from the Greek word for “maker.” Aristotle’s
Poetics
, the authority, said that since all the arts aimed at imitation, they differed from one another only in their ways of imitating. The poet was a craftsman, the Latin poet Horace explained, shaping and fitting the parts toward an intended finished product.

By the eighteenth century, the neoclassic tradition in England had hallowed an artificial high-flown language and a canon of literary “forms” for the poet-craftsman. The neat couplets of Dryden and Pope offered “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.” Then impatient poets, reaching for a more emotional view of poetry, found a new spirit in poems of melancholy like Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in popular ballads, and in Gothic romance. The Wordsworthian revolution in poetry, brilliantly described by critic M. H. Abrams, was from the “mirror” to the “lamp.” And Rebecca West dryly expressed the rebels’ feelings, “A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.” A new “expressive” view of poetry was in the making. While older critics, focusing on form, had contrasted poetry to prose, now poetry
was contrasted to “science,” the dispassionate recounting of facts. A new dignity was given to the outcries of primitive people and the songs of peasants, which the new poets tried to forge in the legendary “Ossian” (1760). In place of the Homeric epic of great deeds, the new poetic norm was the lyric, the first-person utterance of thoughts and feelings in verse. And it was no accident that the epochal collection of new poems was
Lyrical Ballads
.

The first edition of this 1798 sampler of new poetry was anonymous. It was introduced only by a brief apologetic “Advertisement” for the “experiments” aiming to see “how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” The reviewers were not enthusiastic, but the work sold out in two years. The second edition no longer apologized but instead argued that “
all
good poetry”—like the works in this volume—must be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” taking its origin from “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Everyman his own Poet! The poet must be judged only against himself. Or, as Oliver Goldsmith had declared, “I am myself the hero.” The poet was simply “a man speaking to men.”

While the Preface had appeared under the name of Wordsworth alone, Coleridge (1772–1834) said it was “half a child of my own brain.” The
Lyrical Ballads
contained poems by both Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the later edition added new poems. The two poets were an odd couple, as different in temperament and cast of mind as could be found among literary men of the same generation. They were such intimate collaborators that we cannot know how, or how much, each contributed to the other. In this alchemy there was also an unlikely catalyst, Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, who was part of their literary life, but whose role is also a mystery.

William Wordsworth, born in 1770 in the Lake District of northern England, was one of five children in a prosaic family. His father was a business agent of a local landowner who was a member of Parliament. His mother, daughter of a linen draper, died when he was eight and his father died when he was thirteen, leaving him under the frigid guardianship of uncles. Luckily they boarded him and his three brothers with a sympathetic housewife in a cottage in the countryside who left them free to ramble.