GOETHE: THE MAN AND THE MYTH
1069
finished works, as with any other author, but that we also have the
works in the making and can watch them grow. This can be done
in spots with others, but with Goethe we can do it right and left and
to an extent that one would not have thought possible. Even those who
specialize in the study of Goethe only slowly realize what an unusual
opportunity they have. Take for instance
Torquato Tasso,
one of
Goethe's greatest works and unsurpassed as a study of the poetic
temperament at odds with life. On the one hand it is quite self–
explanatory; it can be read without commentary and the reader is
free to stop at that if he chooses. But thanks to our knowledge of
Goethe's life in his thirties, when his mind was torn between dreams
and duties and this poem was germinating, we can enter so fully into
its origins that we are enabled to float ourselves, as it were, into its
creative current and recapture it in process of formation. There are
moments, long waited for, when it is as if one shared in the writing.
This double approach to Goethe's poetry-from the inside and
from the outside-can be made in varying degrees with all
his
greater
works, both long and short. His lyrical poems lend themselves to it
in infinite variety. Little masterpieces like
«Harzreise im Winter"
and
«An den Mond"
can be restored to the living environment they came
from and recreated every time we read them. The famous lines:
Fullest wieder Busch und Thal
Still mit N ebelglanz
Losest endlich auch einmal
Meine Seele ganz
become almost as rich in association for us as they were for him. The
enhancement of our understanding of poetry is such that after Goethe
we read all poetry differently.
But this intimate sharing of Goethe's mind is quite incompatible
with the mythical view of him or with any unrealistic view whatever.
Far from finding him an ideal or Olympian poet, we find
him
strangely compounded of weak and strong-a poet who, for instance,
was unable to say when he would begin or, having begun, when he
would finish, with the result that his pages are littered with fragments
and failures like an untended forest in which one tree prospers where
three decay. There is a sense in which as a poet he lacked will-power
and was at the mercy of his mood or his milieu, so that we might
