The representational Goethe

Bouguereau, The Shepherdess (1889)

I have been neglectful about posting in recent months, as most of my waking thoughts are given over to the novel I am writing. For those who do not know Goethe Girl, it may be of interest to learn that, before Goethe came into her life, she published two novels. That occurred ages ago, after which, for reasons not to be gone into here, she went to graduate school and wrote her dissertation on Goethe. The dissertation concerned the pre-Weimar Goethe, before Goethe betook himself to Weimar and never looked back. My focus was on the poetic genre known as the idyll -- alternately, pastoral -- which appears throughout Goethe's oeuvre, from the Rococo lyrics of the Leipzig student years to the Philomen and Baucis episode in the last scenes of Faust. Like other traditional genres, the idyll is set in a communal world and displays reverence for the order of that world as well as for the regular movements of the heavens, the changing seasons, the regularity of festivals and harvests. Any ripples that disturb the regularity of the pastoral world -- a lost ribbon, a lost sheep -- are part of a larger wave of time in which everyone and everything are merged in a continuous human cycle.

Hermann Ramberg, Hermann and Dorothea

Such a conception of life was being undermined already by Goethe's time, a breakdown that also undermined traditional poetic genres. Who writes an epic in the style of Milton anymore? Goethe had a great fondness for traditional genres, however, and thus he often drew on the idyll, but in doing so the idyll is always portrayed as endangered. One example is Hermann und Dorothea. in which the French Revolution casts its shadow over the loving interlude of wooing a wife And, of course, Philomen and Baucis must be destroyed in order to make way for progress, the most modern of modern conceptions.

While this theme of the destruction of the idyll runs through Goethe's oeuvre, the move to Weimar brought about a departure in his poetic production. Goethe gradually left behind the "Genius" mentality that characterizes the production of the pre-Weimar works. Indeed, I have often thought about what Goethe might have been like had he not secluded himself for another fifty-plus years in the backwater of Weimar. Evidently, Goethe thought he had a lot to learn there, but what he produced was eigenartig: exclusive to himself. Goethe was of course familiar with the works of contemporaries, but one only has to consider his novels after The Sorrows of Young Werther to understand that he was not working the vein that has played such an important role in the conceptualization of the modern novel. I am thinking in particular of the British tradition.

I was again looking through Hermann Hesse's essay "Dank an Goethe" (1932), in which Hesse also refers to the split, if one can call it that, between the pre-Weimar poetry and what came thereafter. Hesse writes that he came to know Goethe as a boy, when it was easy to succumb to the power of the early lyrics and to Werther. That Goethe was "der Sänger, der ewig junge und naive," who brought "samt dem Duft von Wald, Wiese und Kornfeld, und in seiner Sprache, von der Frau Rat her, die ganze Tiefe und die ganze Spielerei der Volksweisheit, die Klänge von Natur und Handwerk, und dazu einen hohen Grad von Musik" (the scent of the forest, of meadow and cornfield, and, in a language inherited from his mother, the entire playfulness of folk wisdom, the sounds of nature and of craftsmanship and, in addition, a high degree of musicality).

Goethe and Carl August on Swiss journey, 1779

Yet in time Hesse also began to encounter a different Goethe: the great writer, the humanist, the ideologue and educator, the critic and the literary man, the friend of Schiller, the collector of art, the journal founder, the author of countless essays, the correspondent. This is not the fresh, youthful poet we know from his Sesenheim lyrics. Indeed, his appearance (attested in contemporary portraits, but even more so in contemporary accounts) is bourgeois, somewhat stuffy, official, miles distant from the wildness of Werther. Hesse doesn't say so, but this was Goethe "becoming Goethe," a transformation that took place only after he went to Weimar. This Goethe was what has been called "suprapersonal" ("überpersönlich). He became a representational person, somewhat like in Habermas's use of that term.  Though this be madness, according to Hesse, yet there was method in it: "die Ermöglichung und Begründung eines vom Geist regierten Lebens, für ihn selbst nicht nur, sondern für seine Nation und Zeit" (the facilitation and justification of a life dominated by Spirit, not simply for himself, but for his nation and his era).

Image credit: Goethezeitportal; Die Weltwoche (AKG Images, Keystone)