Some biographers, perhaps more than we know of, come to resent, despise and, in extreme cases, loathe their subjects during the long process of writing about them. Not so AN Wilson. He approaches Goethe with an almost Goethean fervour. His book is a double biography, since it is as much concerned with the conception, development and difficult birth of the drama Faust as it is with the life and doings of the play’s magisterial and tirelessly self-regarding author. Indeed, an alternative title for this work could be Faust: His Goethean Life.
It is not a biography in the accepted sense, nor is it intended to be, and is all the better for it. At the outset we are spared the usual wearying trudge through the ancestral foothills; instead, in the opening pages we encounter Goethe towards the end of his life, receiving at his house in Weimar a delegation proposing to put on a production of Faust to mark his 80th birthday the following year, 1829. The delegates got a dusty response; the great man was not in an accommodating mood.
In fact, what his visitors wished to see at the Court Theatre in Weimar was not Faust but Faust Part One, which ends with the death of Gretchen and the disappearance in a puff of smoke of the doomed protagonist in the company of Mephistopheles. Over the years, however, that relatively manageable drama had been extended by what some critics regard as a monstrous outgrowth, Faust Part Two, which even Wilson considers to be wholly unstageable, although it is, he contends, “the first great modern work of literature which… reveals us to ourselves”: us, and much more.
Although Wilson adduces a great deal of detailed information about his subject and the times in which he lived – and the aftertime of his immortality – his book seems to have been written on the assumption that readers would be already more or less familiar with the titanic phenomenon that he takes Goethe to have been, and to be.
This is no bad thing. As he writes in a brief preface to the bibliography, “I have tried to limit my book to the story of how Faust evolved. That inevitably involves considering much else besides, since Goethe, over the years, put so many of his vast range of interests into this single work.”
To an uncommon degree, Goethe was what he did; as Faust himself declares, “In the beginning was the deed.” As Wilson is at pains to emphasise, Goethe did not regard himself primarily as a poet, much less as a dramatist. His greatest work, he believed, was his scientific treatise on colour, which was intended, not to confound Newton’s theories on optics, but to expand them and to humanise them.
Until recently, scientists saw Goethe as wrong and Newton as right in their versions of what colour is and how it works in the world and in our eyes. Now, opinion is changing, and Goethe’s scientific theories, and his account of reality in general, are coming to be taken as what might be characterised as an alternative set of truths. Wilson writes: “We share our planet with the other animals, with plants, with the atmosphere and weather conditions, all of which fascinated [Goethe] and about all of which he had things to say. We alone among our brothers and sisters the beetles, baboons and buzzards have the capacity to be aware of our own awareness; and aware of our place in the whole. This whole, this vast Everything, is not, as Newton and the proto-mathematicians and scientists of the Enlightenment supposed, best seen as a mighty machine. It is better seen as a living organism.”
Lest such assertions might be taken to present his hero as a green activist avant la lettre, Wilson emphasises that Goethe – the man, the poet and the scientist – was a thoroughgoing conservative who certainly in his later years pined for the lost civilities and certainties of the Holy Roman Empire, which was finally dissolved in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars.
The obvious irony here, of course, is that Goethe had the highest admiration for Napoleon, seeing in him a fellow colossus and bender of the world’s will to his own. When the two met, the Corsican Übermensch gave the playwright a lecture on the shortcomings of Faust and offered helpful hints as to how to remedy them.
Wilson traces the origins of the Faust legend to the early 16th century, when a schoolteacher called George Sabellicus secured a degree in theology at the University of Heidelberg and transformed himself into Dr Johannes Faust. As Wilson concedes, we cannot be sure that Sabellicus and Faust were one and the same, but it seems likely they were.
From teaching, Faust turned to making magic, in particular as a caster of horoscopes. In 1520, a Dr George Faust was banished from Ingolstadt for sorcery, and “on 10 May 1532”, Wilson writes, “the city of Nuremberg refused ‘the great sodomite and necromancer’ safe passage through its gates”.
One contemporary source notes that Faust had boasted of being in league with the devil. It was not long before the first Faustbuch was published, being “the story”, Wilson writes, “of a man whose inquiring mind led him to offer himself to the devil in exchange for forbidden knowledge”. This could only lead in one direction: “The Damnation of Faust is an essential part of the story.”
But not, oddly enough, for Goethe, who in old age, after 60 years of working on and off at his masterpiece, tacked on to it an ending that the kitschiest Hollywood director would have baulked at. Faust’s soul is wafted upwards by a band of angels – whom the irrepressible Mephistopheles lusts after – the Virgin Mary appears, and Gretchen, now called Una Poenitentium, pleads with the Mother of God for the soul of her seducer and promises to lead him to the higher spheres of Heaven. The Mater Gloriosa agrees, and the Chorus Mysticus brings proceedings to a close with a hymn to the somewhat mysterious concept of the Ewig-Weibliche, the eternal feminine.
Shaking our heads over such tosh, we recall a remark that Goethe made of another untiring maker of the myth of himself: “Byron is only great as a poet. As soon as he makes reflections, he is childish.” And at the close of Faust, Goethe surely had given up as a poet.
The critic Erich Heller suggested, in relation to the closing scene of Faust, that Goethe had no sense of the tragic. Wilson accepts this, and to a certain extent sees it not as a lack but as a positive quality: “Goethe anticipates the Modern Age. This was partly because he was a natural post-Christian, whose sexual morals, scientific outlook and belief in reasonableness as well as reason simply bypass the burden of the Christian centuries and speak directly to the post-Christian time in which we (whether or not we are Christians) now live.”
There is one figure whose absence from Wilson’s pages – he is mentioned only once, in passing – is surprising. Heinrich von Kleist’s play The Broken Jug was produced by Goethe in his theatre at Weimar on 2 March 1808. It was a disaster, for which the playwright never forgave the producer, declaring in his rage that he would rip the laurel wreath from Goethe’s brow. Goethe, for his part, referred disgustedly to Kleist as diese Unnatürlich, “this unnatural”.
These two artists could be seen as the opposite poles of early-19th-century German literature. Goethe was myriad-minded yet never less than a whole human being, while Kleist, as his translator David Constantine has remarked, “wondered that there could be so many dwelling in the small space of one human heart (his)”. The darkness of Kleist’s vision is a challenge to Goethe’s luminosity – the latter’s last words are famously reputed to have been “mehr Licht!” (“more light!”).
Surely the most startling conjunction Wilson engineers is that between Goethe and – wait for it – Walt Disney. Fantasia, a “two-hour-long, musical extravaganza” released in 1940, began as a modest project to animate Goethe’s poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, with Mickey Mouse as the inept young man who conjures magic to help him in cleaning his house and ends up flooding the place.
Wilson asserts that, “for all its pink, candyfloss gaudiness, and its vulgar sentimentality, Fantasia is, at the same time, a work of genius. More than this, it is, surely deliberately, a tribute to the poet who inspired the original Mickey Mouse scene” – Goethe.
As Wilson observes, Goethe constantly harked back to the world of the Greeks, to the bold but doomed venture that was the Enlightenment, “to the clean, ordered, pre-revolutionary world of his youth”, even though as a young man he had helped “to blow that world to bits”. He was shocked by the French Revolution and all that it led to in his lifetime, but as Wilson insists, he had no interest in maintaining the status quo, in his public or in his private life.
“Yes, it was terrifying when human beings summoned up spirits which they could not control. On the other hand… it is only those who live dangerously who achieve anything in the world.
You will be no more than a dismal guest
On the dark Earth,
For as long as you have not grasped this truth:
Die and become something!”
Wilson’s Goethe is a serious work in an increasingly trivial time, a book that sheds light – mehr Licht! – as the age darkens. For that much, and for the so much more that it offers, it is to be treasured.
Goethe’s Faustian Life
AN Wilson
Bloomsbury Continuum, 416pp, £25
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[See also: WH Auden’s visions of England]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?