This Present Darkness

Now here is something of a paradox. It may be the case that Goethe is a figure of such preposterously enormous consequence and of such bountiful genius that the true story of his life can be told properly only by someone with a gift for writing fiction. This is not to discount the value of the compendious and dutifully dry labors of scholarly biographers—Nicholas Boyle’s vast and still unfolding annals of the great man’s life, for instance, are an invaluable resource for the insatiably curious—but the sheer improbability of Goethe’s achievements seems to call for a chronicler with a flair for the fantastic. It requires someone with an eye for the telling detail, but also the ability to stand back and take in the whole colossal reality at a glance, as well as a certain nimbleness in moving back and forth from one vantage to the other. It also requires a talent for the odd ornamental digression and the odd ornamental omission. A. N. Wilson has long excelled at entertaining biographies, of the sort that do not lack for substance but that also do not dwell on every discrete episode in their subjects’ lives. He genuinely tells stories—true stories, but stories all the same—rather than merely compiling inventories of facts recounted seriatim. And, while he has produced biographies of persons of every conceivable kind and magnitude, from Dickens to Jesus, here he seems to have lighted on the ideal object for his energies. Wilson clearly loves Goethe, perhaps as much for the latter’s flaws as for his titanic creativity, and manages to communicate that passion on every page of this book.

Mind you, this is not the tale simply of Goethe himself; it is principally the tale of his Faust, covering the six-decade course of its conception, writing, reconception, rewriting, amplification, extension, and final realization in the ninth decade of its author’s life. For Wilson, Goethe’s epochal significance lies in part in his emblematic and even prophetic role as a truly modern soul, situated at the juncture of an irrecoverable age of faith and the emergence of a world no longer securely sheltered under the canopy of the sacred. And all the forces present in that transformation are personified in Goethe’s version of Doctor Faust—at least by the end of the poem’s development. The good doctor’s tale may have begun as a conventional cautionary fable about diabolical bargains, haunted by late medieval anxieties, but it ended as a rapturous, if morally ambiguous, exaltation of all the most dangerous and most liberating spiritual impulses of the new age of human experience. And Wilson tells both stories—that of the poet and that of his creature—by beginning at the end, or very nearly the end, in 1828, when a delegation of prominent citizens came to Goethe’s home in Weimar to propose a festal performance of part one of Faust, which is to say the original drama as Goethe had written it many decades before, in celebration of the poet’s approaching eightieth birthday.

As a framing device, this works terrifically well. By beginning with the consummation of both Goethe’s and Faust’s lives and then retreating to the start, where the two began their interweaving paths of development, Wilson allows himself to unravel the tale with a judicious dilatoriness, following one thread and then another, setting one off against the other, demonstrating where they are inextricable from one another, and finally arriving back where he began. It is something of a Penelope’s tapestry of a book. It ranges far over the artistic, scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time, placing its two protagonists at the very center of the drama of the emergence of fully realized modernity in the aftermath of Christendom. In both figures, the exhausted past and the inchoate future vie with and qualify one another.

On the one hand, there is Goethe himself, a Renaissance man of positively Olympian vitality, by turns rebellious and reactionary, creator of a new national literature, apostle of a world literature breaking down national and cultural barriers; an aspiring natural philosopher and scientist at odds both with the settled orthodoxies of the age of faith and with the disenchantments of the Newtonian universe; a practical and indefatigable administrator at the University of Jena and in such mundane affairs as highway commissions, silver mines, and weather bureaus, yet also the voracious student of optics, botany, and Persian Sufi verse; a master of marmoreal Classicism and of storm-tossed Romantic passions; a haughty man proud of the honorific “von” added to his name by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar but also a monster of virility whose twenty-eight years of carnal beatitude with his low-born mistress Christiane Vulpius (whom he made Frau Goethe late in his life to shield her from marauding French troops in Weimar) Wilson recounts with a fine combination of relish and tact.

Then there is Faust, a sort of exaggerated reflection of the same figure, at first more demonic, and at the last more angelic, than the original: pitilessly greedy for knowledge, damnably antinomian, amoral, with a Promethean sense of mission and a Luciferian sense of his own autonomy, a cad and a bounder, a villain and a brute; at once Milton’s Satan but also Camus’s Sisyphus; a man of deep pathos and untiring devotion to the quest for truth, in whom there is always a burning spark of noble striving that will in the end be redeemed by a (somewhat implausible) dea ex machina (whom the drama vaguely identifies only as the Ewig-Weibliche, the Eternal Feminine).

In Goethe and Faust alike, as Wilson makes very clear, it is impossible to distinguish the contradictions from the complementarities, the antinomies from the counterpoints. And this is very much what makes them altogether archetypally modern. In them, all the anxieties and aspirations, all the traumas and elations of the modern period are combined, if not always harmoniously. Both are unable to retreat to the orthodoxies of an earlier age but also unwilling to abandon themselves to the bleak and terrifying infinite spaces opened up by the modern stripping away of the veil of faith. Perhaps this is part of the secret of the titanic creativity, punctuated at times by a divine boredom, that marked every phase of Goethe’s life. He lived at the turning point of the ages, where the gyre was at once narrowing and expanding, and he made his own soul the axis of that transformation. As much as he was aware of the dispiriting skepticism of his time, he was also shaped by it irrevocably, and as much as he rebelled against the dogmas of the Christian past, he never relinquished his sense of the human desire for transcendence. Wilson is very good at laying out the upheavals of the age, both large and small: the metaphysical and theological scandals of the “Spinoza conflict,” the decline of faith and the rise of a mechanistic picture of nature, the post-Cartesian schism of flesh and spirit, emerging nationalisms and Napoleonic imperialism, and so forth.

Goethe’s response to the movements of his period was always an attempt, either conscious or unconscious, at achieving some sort of dynamic unity. His temperamental leaning toward pantheism and a kind of polytheism was a resistance at once to the severity of dogmatic Christian tradition and also to the sterile disenchantments of mechanism. The frank eroticism of, say, his Roman Elegies—to say nothing of the more surreptitious eroticism of his private conduct—was a rebellion against both the dark repression of Christian moralism and the enervating materialism of the new scientific picture of reality. His advocacy for a generous Europeanism open to the East and for a new study of Weltliteratur was a rejection at once of triumphalist Christendom and of the confining parochialism of pure nationalism. Even his theory of colors was a sort of spiritual agon with both a too rigidly Platonizing picture of experience and the modern severance between the “scientific” and the “manifest” images of things (to use the terms of Wilfrid Sellars).

I should stress that this is not a worshipful biography, however much Wilson may revere Goethe (which, commendably, he does). On the one hand, it is a loving portrait of someone who had a fair claim to being the greatest incarnation of the ideal of the truly civilized man, as well as of a soul in which everything was in balance: the Classical and the Romantic, the right and the left hemispheres of the brain, the pre-Christian and the post-Christian, even the masculine and the feminine. It is also, however, a candid picture of someone who was not only the majestic poet and novelist who created Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust but also an irrepressible hedonist who was no less prolific in the consumption of alcohol and exuberant copulation; a man whose heart was open to the world but often sealed fast against the common man, universalist in cultural sympathy and yet utterly undemocratic in social philosophy; a proud son of the literate aspiring bourgeoisie and also a class-conscious climber avid for and delighted by his eventual ennoblement. He was a demigod, but the human and the divine aspects of his nature were not so much blended as always in a state of fruitful tension. As I say, this is an exceedingly entertaining biography; it is also opinionated, extremely intelligent, and absorbing. That said, it has its eccentricities, to which some readers may object but which are a large part of its appeal. One may demur to some of its judgements, and one may find some of its claims slightly jarring (I will refrain from divulging how Wilson calls upon Disney’s Fantasia to cast a slightly candy-colored light on his subject), but no one is likely to regret diving into the book and surrendering to its flow.

And that concludes my formal review. Buy the book, read it, and enjoy it (I certainly did, immensely). But, if I may detain you a little longer, I have a last reflection I want to offer.

There is something at once both soberingly untimely and poignantly timely about this book. As Wilson notes, for many of even the most literate readers outside German-speaking lands, Goethe is more an imposing name than a genuinely familiar author. He is perhaps the greatest of the “great unread.” But, to be honest, that is becoming less and less of a distinction. As the decades roll along, every author who demands more than casual attention will want for readers. Anglophone culture may fail to appreciate Goethe properly, but these days one could say much the same in regard to Milton, or even Shakespeare. In our time of rapidly vanishing attention spans and of a virtual culture fixated upon the trivial, the fragmentary, the momentary, and the banal, this book asks us to love a man and a body of work that demand the deepest and most thoughtful kind of attention. There is no way to take in either Goethe or his Faust in passing, or in summary; one has to dwell upon the ideas and the intuitions, to linger over the beauties, to return almost obsessively to the small details, to pause in wonder before the larger picture. Just now, it is impossible for a book like Wilson’s not occasionally to ring with a few elegiac notes. And there is always a danger that, even among the educated, there will be many who will read Wilson on Goethe without ever reading Goethe himself and will think that enough to tell them all they need to know. But what can one do?

The more striking untimeliness and timeliness of this book is that, at a cultural and political moment when the forces of barbarism and decadence are both conspiring with one another to exclude the middle term of civilization, and then making war with one another over the shape of the future, here is Wilson offering a loving panegyric to this regal and demotic, serene and tempestuous, impossibly polymathic and impossibly carnal embodiment of civilization as such—this towering genius who loved and took pride in his native tongue and culture but who was also boundlessly open to and welcoming of the whole world of human experience and human creativity. Goethe had a fine and exquisitely poised understanding that the local cannot be preserved by jealously guarding it against the universal or the universal achieved by imperiously forcing it upon the local, and that both can be fully alive only through their vital and dynamic interaction with one another, each surrendering to the other’s beauty, each offering its riches to the other, and each being changed over time by the other and thus becoming something new. We live now in an age of, on the one hand, xenophobia and cruelty and, on the other, nihilistic global capitalism—an age of the squalor of nativisms and “national conservatisms” but also of the sterile tyranny of endless material production and consumption—with often no visible path between the sullen pettiness of the tiny and brutal voracity of the gigantic. In that sense, Goethe is our great contrary, a figure of absolute contradiction, emblematic of another modernity, one that was promised but that never came to pass. For all his personal failings, he looks now like a kind of unheeded prophet and unrecognized saint, at least in long retrospect. Or, if nothing else, he looks like something far better than what we now are or are ever likely to be. But where there is life there is hope, I suppose, and so it is always worth the effort of trying to recover him and his works from the general forgetfulness in which they languish, in the hope that they might lend some light to our struggles against this present darkness.