Encountering Goethe is like coming face to face with a force of nature that is hard to describe. The challenge is to try to reconcile such a monolithic genius with the friendly access Goethe allows us into himself. So Giant, yet so innocuous and charmingly innocent. An inventor of fairy tales in the same way Dickens was, but Goethe towering so much higher than just being a teller of tales. Goethe is also more than just a poet or a writer of plays. He is greater than even the creator of Faust. He is difficult to fully appreciate unless you love him, and he invites your love, and may need your love. On the other hand, Goethe was also seemingly very happy and content being all by himself. And yet no ego really. His ego had been replaced with a genuine charm coupled with a true love of humanity, and nature.

 

It is a pity that Goethe is not more appreciated in our time, but I’m not entirely sure he was truly appreciated during his own lifetime. It seems that while Goethe was considered a genius by those who knew him, that appreciation might have been directed more at the man than his work. I’m not sure, discounting Werther and Gotz and a few of the poems, that anybody actually read Goethe the way he wished to be read. My sense is that he wanted us to read him not as something to be understood, but rather as something that lightens the load of the world. His biographer calls this renunciation, that Goethe, with good reason, tried to shed the identity given to him by those who considered Werther to be the greatest work of art ever produced by a human being. And they wouldn’t believe that Goethe, their Goethe, could produce anything other than a series of Werthers, filled with more and more strom und drang. More storm and stress, more angst, more emotional despair, and yes, more tenderness as well. 

 

It turned out that Goethe approached life very scientifically. His novels are case studies that explore depths of psychology not previously seen in novels. Likewise his poetry. Much of Goethe’s poetry feels like it could have been written by Whitman, Frost, or Stevens. Some of his poems feel like a blend of Emerson and Dickinson. Bloom is right when he says to get something near equivalent to Goethe in American letters one would have to somehow blend Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson together, and even that doesn’t really work, because you would have to add somebody like Georgia O’Keefe and yet that still doesn’t work.

 

I think it’s best to read a book like Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years by shedding all thoughts of who wrote it, or why or when or for whom it was written. One must enter the world of Wilhelm Meister with a completely open mind and if one does so, strange wonders await. I’m surprised there isn’t more recognition than there is that Goethe really wrote, way before Borges and Cortazar and Marquez, a form of German Romantic Magic Realism. His stories seem to exist in the real world. Superficially, everything that happens in Wilhelm could indeed happen. But look closer. Who are these characters and what are they really doing and why? Are there really such fantastic, massively imaginative genius people walking around in the world? Every character seems extraordinary somehow, they are all symbolic of something. They are larger than they really are. 

 

Does that mean that Goethe lived in a world of his own creation, lived a life full of people with such intelligence, such kindness and benevolence  as the people in his books? I think Goethe liked to play make believe, and play it actively. He saw the world he wanted to see because he created the world in which he lived. There must have been no surprises for Goethe. Everything happened as it should happen, because he created both the everything and the happening. It was all part of his plan, or rather, part of THE PLAN. And the inventor of THE PLAN was Goethe. In that way he did write his own life, and in a way he was a character in a book. But he also wrote the book.

 

And that’s why Goethe was so taken aback, stunned, and sort of jealous of Hamlet, and Shakespeare in general. Who else could have taught Goethe something he didn’t already know? Shakespeare, that’s who. It prompted Goethe to warn himself, and others, when he wrote, Beware of genius or it will swallow you whole. I don’t think Shakespeare swallowed Goethe whole, but he might have come close. Hamlet is a character who knows he’s in a play written by William Shakespeare, and Hamlet dislikes the play he has been forced into, and so Hamlet resents Shakespeare, his creator. The metaphor is pretty straightforward, at least on the surface. But this idea of an only too self conscious character who resents the play he is in is what makes Hamlet the most tragic of anything else Shakespeare ever wrote. And that is saying something. Goethe doesn’t seem to have as deep of a tragic strain as Shakespeare, and he doesn’t portray characters in the same way as Shakespeare. BUT, Goethe the man clearly identified with the character of Hamlet to an extraordinary degree. He saw elements of Hamlet in himself, and it justly frightened him. 

 

For all of Goethe’s praising of Shakespeare, and he did genuinely love Shakespeare, there is still an element of judicious concern for Goethe that Shakespeare could become too big of an influence on Goethe the playwright, especially. In fact, Shakespeare may have inadvertently been responsible for Goethe calling the theater quits after only four or five plays. He struggled in the plays to write himself away from Shakespeare, but then realized that the more he tried this, the more he wrote like Shakespeare. It is a difficult thing to both worship and despise your god, whomever you are. 

 

But even more than a professional or artistic jealousy might have also caused Goethe anxiety when it came to Shakespeare. Goethe very purposefully created himself to be a diverse, multi-varied man, a genius of all things, a man of endless curiosity and knowledge. Poet, story writer, playwright, stage director, painter, mineralogist, scientist, runner of companies, a statesman and trusted advisor to the Duke of Wiemar. There is something quite amazing about how much was crammed into one person, one human being. But in Goethe, crammed they were. 

 

BUT, Goethe created few  if any distinct, completely original personalities/characters, besides perhaps himself, the character of Goethe, as Bloom suggests. 

 

Shakespeare created at least several dozen I can think of right now off the top of my head. This might have frustrated Goethe that Shakespeare was that multivaried in his own imaginative genius to be able to create several dozen unique personalities. Such breadth, such circumference. 

 

Another thing that might have gotten under Goethe’s skin was that nothing was really known about this man Shakespeare. Could he have been more expansive than even Goethe? Goethe must have wondered, What was this man like? Why him? What went on there? And this led him to inevitably ask the final question, Why not me?

 

Questions like these can drive a man to madness. Look at Nietzsche. Too many questions, not enough answers, too little time. Goethe could never become insane. He was, by his own admission, the very definition of sanity, and, of course, Goethe was the one who came up with the definition.

 

I can’t think of an author more enjoyable to read than Goethe.  I delve into his genius wholeheartedly, transported by his approach to life, entranced by his artistic pragmatism, and grateful for his inner light. Goethe remarked of himself, after work after timeless work of his was rejected by the public who thought of him as wisdom incarnate, that his art was only for a select few. I disagree with his self assessment. I think, out of all of the brightest lights in the literary Universe, Goethe’s art is the most accessible. Any age that feels differently is the much poorer for it.