Merve Emre on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, via some biographies and Walter Benjamin.
Goethe’s great tragedy, “Faust: The First Part,” was published that year. Faust, a thwarted scholar, is desperate to know “what it is that holds the world together” and to personally experience “all that is given to humanity, total humanity, to experience.” The demonic Mephistopheles appears in the absurd form of a yapping black poodle and grants Faust his wish. But, before he does, he pretends to show him another way to discover the secrets of the world. Why not write poetry?
Take my advice. Engage a poet. Let him turn on his imagination and load you with all the virtues and distinction—the courage of the lion, the speed of the stag, the hot blood of Italy, the endurance of the North. Let him solve the problem of combining generosity with cunning, and plan a young man’s impulsive love-affair for you. I’d like to know the gentleman. I’d call him Mr. Microcosm.
Faust raves that he will soar to the heights of “pleasures that hurt,” and swoop to the depths of “torments that enliven.” In dizzying changes of scene, he leaps from a tavern to a witch’s kitchen and from a forest cavern to a mountaintop, where the whole range of living things will pass before his eyes. But, to gain a total understanding of human experience, he must sacrifice his humanity, his moral sensibility. The victim of his sacrifice is Gretchen, a virgin whom Faust seduces and abandons in his devilish reverie, and who kills their illegitimate child. The Faustian-bargain hunter, a third Goethean type, strikes a deal whose cost is all-consuming. His antithesis is “Mr. Microcosm,” a poet of imagination and virtue, generosity and cunning, hot-blooded, coolheaded—a portrait of the artist as a mature man, the creator of a little world unto himself.
Also, am I not learning when at the shape of her bosom,
Graceful lines, I can glance, guide a light hand down her hips?
Only thus I appreciate marble; reflecting, comparing,
See with an eye that can feel, feel with a hand that can see. . . .
Often too in her arms I’ve lain composing a poem,
Gently with fingering hand count the hexameter’s beat
Out on her back.
Roman Elegies, Goethe
A materialist biography, … , would measure both the freedom evinced by a great man’s creations and their determination by external forces.
