Goethe's Faustian Life

Summary

In the English-speaking world today, Goethe is still, in A. N. Wilson’s pithy phrase, “the Great Unread.” This was not always the case. “Close thy Byron,” wrote the reactionary prophet Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s; “Open thy Goethe.” The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe. George Eliot, whose worldview was profoundly shaped by nineteenth-century German thought, called him “the last true polymath ever to walk the earth.” To Wilson, his newest English biographer, Goethe possessed “surely the most interesting brain which ever inhabited a human skull.” Wilson’s book, the expansively titled Goethe: His Faustian Life - The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World, should be welcomed. Wilson has written over sixty volumes of fiction, biography, and history in a fifty-plus-year career. He is also a former candidate for the priesthood in the Church of England and has a strong interest in science, though his study of Darwin was acrimoniously received (a former editor of Nature called Wilson’s unique spin on evolution “deranged”). This range and manic level of productivity can lead to occasional sloppiness, but it also makes him well-equipped to grasp the contours of Goethe: inspired poet; original man of science; rigorous philosopher; prophetic visionary; stern believer in order, tradition, and realpolitik; and sui generis freethinking mystic. The Anglosphere’s ignorance of Goethe today likely has two primary causes: anti-German sentiment in the earlier part of the twentieth century and the demands of reading Goethe himself. Some appreciation of nineteenth-century German philosophical context—and the complexities of which its practitioners were so fond—is required to understand him. Meanwhile, his poetry is almost uniquely untranslatable, according to Wilson, and his novels seem bound up with cultural debates that feel obsolete to us now. Yet Goethe, Wilson co...