Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet (review)

John Armstrong has had the idea for a book that I suspect many of us would like to write. His model is no doubt the series of charming books by Alain de Botton on the theme of happiness or, conversely, on the ways we humans conspire to banish it from our lives. The first of these was How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), described (by The New York Times Book Review) as "A self-help manual for the intelligent person." To the question What does a whole life consist of?, de Botton found answers in Proust's opus, which is not simply a memoir of a more lyrical age, but rather "a search for the causes behind the dissipation and loss of time." He combed Proust's life and work, including letters and conversations, for lessons these might offer on such subjects as How to Love Life Today, How to Take Your Time, How to Suffer Successfully, How to Be a Good Friend, and so on.

Armstrong thought that Goethe offered similar possibilities. The aim of Love, Life, Goethe is "intimate: to consider how getting to know Goethe might enrich life" (19). Though Armstrong is a philosopher of art (at the University of Melbourne), not a Germanist or a Goethe scholar, from the evidence of this book he has read widely in Goethe, if not in Goethe scholarship. As if in answer to the question de Botton posed, he responds: "Goethe shows us that, properly considered, domestic economy is a major human good, continuous with our most noble and serious aspirations" (16).

Goethe had interesting things to say on aspects of domestic economy—on sleep, work, drink, sport, leisure, friendship—and numerous contemporaries recorded their impressions of its importance for him. Unfortunately, where de Botton's book is rich with his own reflections and short, incisive quotes from Marcel, Love, Life, Goethe is burdened with lengthy plot summaries, potted interpretations, and the kinds of oracles familiar from undergraduate term papers: "The core of Goethe's maturity was self-discipline" (343); "Gretchen is boring, to put it plainly" (403); "Faust is Goethe's largest attempt to explain how he sees life" (418). While Armstrong can quickly sketch the large historical picture (e.g., the political and military situation of Europe between 1806 and 1813), he misses the local, pungent detail: how much wine did Goethe actually consume in a week? What were the foods on the mid-day table in Weimar? What were the accommodations in Carlsbad like?

Such omissions are crucial since Armstrong makes his case on the person of Goethe himself. Basically, he sees Goethe as a model of healthfulness and, moreover, as having pursued the goal of healthfulness throughout his life. Some of us might regard a life in public service as saner than a neurotic attachment to one's mother and two decades in bed in a soundproof room, but would still hesitate to affirm that "[w]hat Goethe achieved in his life—even more than in his literary and intellectual work—is the closest we have yet seen to a solution to the problem of modern life" (331). Implicitly, Armstrong seems to be saying (the contrast is to be discerned between the lines rather than in the presentation itself) that Goethe is more exemplary than those morbid Romantic writers and their nineteenth-century acolytes who reveled in failure and self-flagellation. Unfortunately, instead of building his book around, say, his insight concerning Wilhelm Meister ("the story of a man gradually discovering—through many mistakes and exaggerations—an increasingly solid and serious vision of what is important to him," 346), Armstrong takes the reader on a superficial journey through Goethe's entire life, from the "wretched labour" (6) preceding his birth to Eckermann's impression of the "divine magnificence" of his limbs in death. At every stage he discerns Goethe's own intentions. At the end, he even puts words in Goethe's...