1066
PARTISAN REVIEW
in Weimar
(1939) is something for every student of Goethe to
ponder. Here Goethe is subjected to the severest close-up he has
ever been given; the all-but-impossibility of living in his vicinity,
whether as his son or his secretary or his neighbor, is argued im–
plicitly on almost every page; the unideal aspects of his person, say
in the bath-tub or at the dining-table, are unsparingly accentuated;
and yet by letting Goethe soliloquize for the best part of a long chapter
-the seventh-the author restores him to his full stature and, for some
readers at least, writes a constructive piece of Goethe criticism. The
myth is shattered, but the man remains.
Turning back in this spirit to the more traditional critics, we may
ask what grounds they had for suggesting that Goethe was "nurtured
under the most favorable circumstances imaginable" or that there
was nothing in his environment to impede "his perfect unfolding."
The Germany of 1749, the year of Goethe's birth, was more of a
hinterland to Europe than a cultural part of it. It had produced
great music, but the world was slow to respond and Germany re–
mained an obscure country. Those who took the grand tour left it
severely alone and headed south. Frankfurt, where Goethe was born
and bred, had its archaic charms and its festive moments, but it was
quite without the intellectual ferment of a great city and was scarcely
a good breeding-ground for poets. Goethe wrote to his mother from
'Weimar in 1781, when he was over thirty and had been away from
Frankfurt for six years or so, that if he had stayed there the disparity
between its confined and sluggish life and the speed and scope of his
mind would have either driven him mad or kept him in a perpetual
childhood.
As
for the Goethe household, who would choose to grow
up in it? His father who at the start was the only adult in the house,
his mother being eighteen when our Goethe was born and closer in
years to him than to her husband, was a gloomy and disappointed man
who lived in self-imposed isolation after failing to be elected a city
councillor. In a house so dominated the atmosphere must have been
oppressive and we know from private letters that Goethe found it so.
In
Dichtung und Wahrheit,
where all such matters are passed over
comparatively lightly, Goethe confesses that his father's temperament
lay on him like a burden.
To go through Goethe's long life in this fashion looking for
trouble would
be
laborious and there is no need to do it. Enough has
