GOETHE: THE MAN AND THE MYTH
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been said to indicate that from the start his life was no more favored
than that of many others we could name in the literary field, and
that we cannot treat him as the product of ideal conditions without
grossly falsifying the picture. Even
his
advantages were not as smooth
as they seemed. Not the least of these was that he was always in
prosperous circumstances. Prosperity, if not wealth, had produced a
frustrated father, and something of the uprootedness or lack of
direction from which he suffered seems to have been handed on to
the son. Goethe, it is true, graduated in law but did so without much
effort and without much effect, playing at law rather than. practicing
it, and for the most part leading a life of extravagant dilettantism,
dangerous for any young man and especially so for one of Goethe's
excitability. The extraordinary beauty of
Werther
and the early
Faust
-the two most impressive pieces of poetic creation that grew out of
a welter of aimless writing in these early years-should not blind us to
their explosive and almost pathological nature. Neither of these works
came out of an ideal environment. Goethe's sudden change of abode
from Frankfurt to the Weimar court ·at the age of twenty-six which
proved
in
the long run to be the saving of him, was at the time as
disconcerting a plunge as any. And even here where his life slowly
began to gather weight and size till at his death he dominated Euro–
pean letters, what are we to say of the attendant circumstances?
Weimar, his home for more than fifty years, was an unimpressive little
duchy, which at the time of his arrival was just being taken over by
a boy of tWl:lflty-one-not a propitious omen-and which recom–
mended itself chiefly because the dowager-duchess, Anna Amalia, had
a taste for letters and had begun to collect authors. Her son in ad–
ding Goethe to the collection and pitchforking him into
his
Privy
Council within the year was merely behaving like the youthful ruler
that he was.
If
it looks like a supreme stroke of enlightened states–
manship now, that is only because we insist on reading the future into
the past.
No matter what our thoughts about myths in general, there are
two great and compelling reasons-both of them specifically related
to his case- for distrusting the myth of Goethe and preferring Goethe
the man. First, his life and works are extraordinarily well documented.
If
we cannot claim to possess everything that he wrote we can be sure
of having the great bulk of it, thanks initially to the care he took
