GOETHE: THE MAN AND THE MYTH
1071
his emotions to a state of Wertherism almost equal to that of fifty
years before. In the face of such evidence the Olympian interpretation
be<;omes untenable. It is only by recognizing a persistent vulnerability
or even inadequacy in the author that we can make sense of all
this
and learn from it, as he did. Treat him as
.a
god, and it makes non–
sense of
his
life and record.
If,
having disposed of the myth, we concentrate on the man and
ask what manner of man he was, the logical answer might be that
each must find out very slowly for himself. But this is discouraging,
and a less evasive answer can be attempted. First, he was a man with
an unusually rich play of emotional Pie, which never came to quies–
cence with the' lapse of years but, as already indicated, remained ac–
tive in
him
even in old age. We have abundant evidence of this from
the reports of contemporaries, but the proof is in the lyrical poetry
that he wrote.. In Goethe the lyrical impulse never died but remained
with him, or revisited him, to the end of his days, not as the game
or exercise that lyrical poetry can become in the hands of a tech–
nician, but as the urgent pressure of feeling hard or impossible to
control. In a moving little poem written when he was about twenty
he seems to recognize at the beginning that for him the emotional
journey will not be short, because he says:
Dies wird die letzte Triin' nicht sein,
Die glilhend herzauf quillet.
To single out a few milestones on the long road, Goethe at twen–
ty-six wrote the poem
"Herbstgefuhl,"
consummate in its vein of
opulent melancholy; in
his
middle thirties he wrote
"Nur wer die
Sehnsucht kennt,"
a poem never exceeded by himself or anyone in
lyrical intensity; at forty-seven he wrote the great lyric that stands
retrospectively at the head of
Faust "Ihr naht euch wieder, schwan–
kende Gestalten";
ten years later, in his middle or late fifties, came
the poignant lines of Epimeleia in
his
Pandora
fragment:
ccAch, warum, ihr Gotter, ist unendlich
Alles, alles, endlich unser GLUck nuT";
at sixty-five in a great revival of lyricism he wrote the poem
"Selige
Sehnsucht,"
surpassing himself, if that were possible; at seventy-four
the "Marienbad Elegy" with its despair and its struggle with des-
