1068
PARTISAN REVIEW
himself with his own papers and second to the labor of German
scholars after the Goethe materials became accessible
in
the eighteen–
eighties. The great Weimar edition, which is still the only one that
aims at completeness, consists of one hundred and thirty-three volumes
-a mammoth performance. Not only this but we have the collected
record of those who met and conversed with him. Goethe was a
European celebrity for more than a generation and most of those
who had any conversation with
him
thought it worth while to set
down what they remembered. The result is like an additional section
to the works and in the New Artemis edition now being published
in
Zurich is being so treated. In
all
history few lives can have been so
fully recorded. No life, perhaps, of comparable range and significance,
unless Voltaire's.
There are gaps in the record, but they go almost unnoticed
in
the
wealth of what is preserved. It so happens that Goethe realized be–
times that the details of his life were worth keeping and any account
of
him
must rely heavily on his autobiographical writings, which
in
one way and another cover all but one extended portion of his career.
AIl in all it is possible to relive Goethe's life with him to an almost
unbelievable extent. In his Frankfurt letters we have so naked and
unguarded a revelation of a young man's mind
in
all its caprice and
uncertainty that after we have familiarized ourselves with them–
preferably in their original spelling and punctuation or rather lack of
the same-we feel that we are living inside him and know what it
was to be like that. In his first ten years in Weimar we can repeat
the experience, more especially with the help of the upwards of fifteen
hundred letters that he wrote to Charlotte von Stein. For his later
years the intimacy may be less, but the information is greater. There
is no period of his adult life that is not accessible to us week by week
and even day by day.
As
Karl Jaspers says
in
his
Unsere :(ukunft und
Goethe
(1948) Goethe stands so vividly before us that it is as if we
had known him personally in every phase of his life.
While readers have not been wanting who deplored the existence
of this mass of biographical data and preferred to read the works by
themselves, as we read Homer, it is more profitable to take the con–
structive view. Rightly used, the biography can serve as a wonderful
extension of our literary experience. In dealing with Goethe's poetry,
and his creative writings as a whole, we find that we not only have the
