1072
PARTISAN REVIEW
pair; at seventy-eight the lovely lines,
"Diimmerung senkte sich von
oben";
and at seventy-nine the little group of Dornburg poems, in–
cluding
"Um Mitternacht-ich schlie!, im Busen wachte."
We know
too, though we cannot specify with certainty, that some of the wonder–
ful lyricism at the close of
Faust
was written later still when he was
over eighty.
This little sequence does nothing to suggest the range of Goethe's
verses, but simply shows the persistence in
him
of the initial impulse
-the lyrical cry-which normally is the first thing to go as a poet
ages. This in itself, quite apart from the intrinsic merit of the lines,
makes him unique or nearly so. Is there any poet, or composer either,
who retained this passionateness at this pitch for this length of time?
We do not know what quartets Beethoven might have written if he
had lived as long as Goethe, because he died at fifty-seven, exactly a
generation younger. Wordsworth, another contemporary, wrote noth–
ing in late life to match his early inspiration.
The relation of this phase of Goethe to the rest of him has not
always been well understood. His interpreters have relied heavily,
perhaps too heavily, on the well-known passage in his autobiography
where he tells us that by converting an inner disturbance into poetry
he calmed himself and adjusted his outlook, which may be true and
important in its degree but is not on that account to be taken as a
key to his life.
If
Goethe had been able to surmount all his difficulties
creatively-and selfishly, as Kierkegaard claimed- by simply turning
them into poetry, his life would have been very different from what
it was, and very much easier. But the creative impulse is not as docile
as that even in one so rich in it as he. It is enough to note that
the two constructive turning-points or crises in his life, his break with
Frankfurt and departure for Weimar in 1775 and his sojourn in Italy
in 1786-88, had little or nothing to do with his creativeness. In
Weimar it was the change of environment that helped him, not, so far
as we can judge, his release as a poet, since, if anything,
his
creative
life was retarded by the change. While in the two years before leaving
Frankfurt he wrote both
Werther
and the Gretchen tragedy, he waited
four years in Weimar before writing
Iphigenie.
As
for the second
crisis, his creative activity in Italy was almost entirely restricted to the
secondary task of revismg and completing older works; there is no
evidence that he leaned on the poetic gift to round this crucial corner.
