GOETHE AND EVIL: “FAUST, PART ONE”

9 1 R G O E T H E A N D E V I L ‘ ‘ F A U S T , P A R T O N E ’ ’ M A R T I N G R E E N B E R G In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Feeling broke the long silence imposed on her by Reason and wept and wept. Thomas Gray described the sensitive poet of the time in his ‘‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’’ as ‘‘Now drooping woeful-wan, like one forlorn , / Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.’’ Melancholia swept like a contagion through Europe, and Goethe was not immune. He too knew what it was to be ‘‘like one forlorn.’’ As the Englishman composed his ‘‘Elegy,’’ so Goethe wrote his Sorrows of Young Werther, Sentimentalism’s emblematic text. Its European success made its author, aged twenty-five, famous. Young Werther was a purgation for the unhappy, desperate-feeling young writer. For the generally unhappy youth of the period – middle-class youth – contrariwise, it was an incitement to hotter tears and nearer thoughts of death. Sentimentalism was a form of middle-class selfconsciousness , self-recognition, and self-expression. It was also a fashion. At bottom Goethe was lively natured and liked to enjoy himself. He believed in happiness, his own and others’, and said so often in his poetry. ‘‘Admonition’’ (‘‘Erinerrung’’) is one such poem (not the best!), written not long after Young Werther. 9 2 G R E E N B E R G Y Always wanting to press farther – Happiness, look, lies so near. Only learn to reach out for her You will find she’s there, right there. The older Goethe became, the more acquainted he became with the night. The expression of his darker knowledge is notably calm and reflective. Who never ate tear-stained his bread, Who never spent the nights’ desolate hours Huddled weeping on his bed, He knows you not, you superior powers You usher us all into life, You let the poor fool sink in guilt, Then visit on him pain and grief, For all guilt pays on earth its debt. The poem laments the pains of life, yet quietly. More and more Goethe radiated an untroubled serenity. Serenity, however, isn’t happiness, which has always been a di≈cult, complex notion: ever present as a personal interrogation, argued over by philosophers since there have been philosophers, in common use shallow, in commercial use debased, ignored disdainfully by some. Involved in any idea of happiness is surely love. Goethe was happy in his love-making youth. He acquired in time a worldwide fame that gave him much contentment. But contentment isn’t happiness. In his old age Goethe continued to reach out for happiness, and to find it – by falling in love, profoundly in love, with young women, girls really. His last years knew bliss. The older Goethe came to loathe the upcoming generation of German poets for being the way he himself had been in the unhappy time of his youth: submerged in their own feelings, wandering about in the mists of subjectivity. They were ‘‘sickly,’’ feeble, dispirited creatures. He had a special animus against the ‘‘pathological ’’ Heinrich von Kleist, Germany’s (the nineteenth century ’s) greatest (poetic) dramatist and a vivid novella-ist as well, as I believe. What a relief it was, the elderly poet noted in his diary in 1827, to read the simple fairy tale of Turandot after being subjected to ‘‘the philosophical-fantastical Kleistian blather.’’ Against G O E T H E A N D E V I L 9 3 R the ‘‘morbid’’ contemporary Romanticism, Goethe upheld a classical ideal: ‘‘Classical is what is healthy, strong, fresh, joyous’’: ‘‘In this sense the Nibelungenlied is as classic as the Iliad, for both are vigorous and healthy,’’ he remarked to his Boswell, J. P. Eckermann , in April 1829. The classical poet is objective. To be objective is to ‘‘express the real world,’’ not, obsessively, one’s subjective feelings. At the end of his life you hear no more about the classical. What is less classical than Faust, Part Two? Romantic-classical, objective-subjective, real-ideal, self...