GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG von. – Poet, born in Frankfurt am Main on 28 August 1749, died in Weimar on 22 March 1832. He owed his early education to the lively and affectionate intelligence of his mother (Frau Rath), who tempered the severity of his father, a doctor of law and imperial councillor. He studied in Leipzig and then in Strasbourg, where he completed his studies in jurisprudence and met Herder, who revealed to his spirit of inquiry and his desire for knowledge a broader world, in which, alongside the problems of nature and enthusiasm for art, the problems of history found a place. At the warmth of Herder’s revelatory words, for whom he had an unreserved admiration, there germinated the plans for his first truly significant theatrical work, Goetz von Berlichingen, just as circumstances in life gave him the opportunity to conceive Werther, whose success immediately crossed the borders of Germany. A worthy culmination of his youthful activity is provided by other dramatic works and a group of lyrics, now graceful, now stirred by powerful passion, now impetuous. In 1775 G. moved to Weimar, to the court of Prince Charles Augustus, where he devoted himself to the affairs of the small State, was showered with honours, and lived for many years in affectionate intimacy with Herder, Schiller, and Wieland, until their deaths. His stay in Weimar was interrupted only in 1786, when the poet went to Italy, where, on two occasions, he spent almost two years, giving himself wholeheartedly to our cities, feasting his eyes on our natural and artistic beauties, and where his poetic genius matured.
The fruits of this sojourn were, several years later, the Italienische Reise and Die römischen Elegien and, to a considerable extent, the completeness and new form of his dramatic masterpieces, such as Tasso and Ichigenie auf Tauris, wholly imbued with classical spirits, as was also the gentle idyll, in epic lines, Hermann und Dorothea, one of the most brilliant gems in his poetic crown. Meanwhile, he added to the long series of lyrics, of exquisite workmanship, two novels, Wilhelm Meister, in two parts, rich in splendid pages and unforgettable scenes, and Die Wahlverwandtschaften, as well as the dramatic poem Faust, which is considered not only his masterpiece but one of the loftiest works to honour human thought.
The life and poetry of G. are characterised by an inexhaustible yearning toward what is highest, which in itself contradicts the common and erroneous notion of an Olympian G., imperturbable above all the storms of life. Instead, until his final years he preserved the Faustian desire to ascend, in an uninterrupted struggle to transcend and perfect himself. Yet there is a difference between the titanism of the young G. and the Faustian spirit of the mature man: it is the difference between a « Streben », made up of impulses and reactions, and an activism founded upon a new conception of life; two positions expressed in the damnation of Prometheus and the salvation of Faust. Similarly, while the young G. rushes toward catastrophe in the drama of Margarete, the man who has become wise even envisages a transcendental catharsis; just as Prometheus’s bold inventive challenge, hurled against Jupiter, will be followed by the humble act of contrition of the wise man who recognises the impossibility for man of measuring himself against the gods.
But what, for G., is the limit of human activity? To limit a priori this activity, which gives possession of things, is impossible. Creative activity reaches and expands toward infinity, and G. thus translates this absence of limitation: « if I work tirelessly until the end, nature is obliged to assign me another form of existence, where
But for G., action is above all the source of knowledge and the foundation of living in the manner suited and proportioned to each person. We cannot know ourselves except when and insofar as we are active: here is another fundamental thought that would become for him a rule of life. And when he asserts that every action directed toward knowledge is in itself moral, or that between the man who carries out such activity and the community to which he belongs there is neither exists nor can exist any conflict, or again that « the sum of individual activities, provided they are directed toward this same end, leads to a universal harmony », it is clear that he intends to express thoughts dense with ideal content, which always presuppose in human beings a good nature and also the possibility, in each person, of progressive perfection, provided only that he follows the impulse and voice of his own nature. And this conviction
is so deeply rooted in his thought that, with a greater detachment from reality, it suggests to him transferring his ideal into the metaphysical realm, in order to make of it an immutable truth inherent in the very life of the cosmos. “No essence,” he asserts, “can dissolve into nothingness. No age, no power is capable of breaking the form that evolves.” This is the destiny of Faust, whose longing for knowledge transforms his life into a struggle and whose activity leads to salvation. G. thus completes the vision of the Romantics, also giving a moral seal to their inexhaustible desire to know and to go further. But since Goethean thought precisely seeks also to contain a moral value, one cannot listen without dismay to the sad word of Mephistopheles, whispered into the ear of Faust, who is tempted to destroy without pity the peaceful dwelling and even the happy life of two innocent old people: Filemone and Bausi. And one is dismayed that the demon’s word might be accepted as a norm for individual or collective life. Certainly, not even when he came into direct contact with the Latin world, happy to feel that he had “eyes and mind freed from the last northern mists,” did G. possess an entirely clear awareness that man’s creative activity could never equal that of nature, God’s creation, and God himself. Without accepting this dualistic conception, he continued to experience divinity as the supreme term of human becoming and thus to pursue the mirage of transforming becoming into being—a mirage in which the deepest tragedy of German thought is to be seen. On the other hand, his own intellectual development had led him to knowledge of the hidden mysteries of life, and it was this knowledge that his spirit ultimately knew how to find satisfying, thereby helping to create that inner equilibrium and harmony which are precisely the most evident gifts of his personality: an equilibrium and a harmony that he ardently desired for all human beings. A desire for human fraternity also inspired his apostolate, directed toward intimate and broad collaboration in the fields of science and culture; and the same dream of a Weltliteratur has its deepest roots in this sentiment of human solidarity that unites peoples as brothers, breaking down all the barriers that divide them and too often make them enemies.