Barker Fairley
GOETHE: THE MAN AND THE MYTH*
"If
we survey Goethe's personality as a whole," wrote
Georg Witkowski some fifty years ago, "it would appear that Nature
for once had tried to show what humanity was capable of at the
highest stage of development and had deliberately produced this man
under the most favorable conditions imaginable." And while he goes
on to qualify the statement somewhat he lets it stand and we are
entitled to quote it as a typical illustration of the idealized view of
Goethe which has established itself so strongly among his German
interpreters and, for that matter, among interpreters and readers
everywhere-a view which presents him as a man different from other
men, the darling of the gods, or even a god or a demi-god himself. "It
seems," wrote Hermann Grimm in 1880, "as if Providence had placed
him in the simplest circumstances in order that nothing should impede
his
perfect unfolding." Quotations to the same effect could be multi–
plied among the Goethe biographers of the nineteenth century and
they will also be found still lingering in the twentieth.
. Exactly when this view of Goethe- the Goethe myth or legend,
we might call it-began to be formed might be hard to say. But we
can see the beginnings of
it
in his lifetime. Not perhaps in his early life,
though he had his passionate admirers then, but certainly in his late.
Two books which appeared in quick succession shortly after his death,
both commemorating his personality at first hand, reflect this ten–
dency clearly and may be said to have established it in print. One
is Bettina Brentano's ecstatic, almost idolatrous,
Goethes Briefwechsel
mit einem Kinde
(1835), a volume of largely, but not wholly, in–
vented correspondence chiefly between herself and Goethe which con–
stitutes a feat of sustained rapture not easy to parallel even in the
*
Abridged from the original paper presented at the University of Mississippi
as part of their Centennial Lecture Series.
