The German Genius

lectures, at the academy of drawing in Weimar. 23
    At the same time that Goethe was pursuing his multifarious activities, he was also writing 1,800 letters to another Charlotte, Charlotte von Stein (the standard edition of Goethe’s works and letters runs to 138 volumes). She carefully hoarded these, “well aware that they were a unique record of an exceptional man’s inner life.” Their relationship is alluded to in Goethe’s two “Charlotte” plays, Iphigenie auf Tauris and Torquato Tasso , where she is presented as the best in German womanhood, “a German Beatrice,” who aids the development of the immature poet and introduces him to “the pleasures and responsibilities of Humanity.” 24
    Goethe never really lost the central interest he explored in his “Charlotte” period: his pursuit of “Bildung” (a word he used quite a bit). The inward pursuit of perfection is never again mentioned so directly as in his letters, but Goethe never lost his concern with the individual’s responsibility for his own inner development. 25
    From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimar for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as “ Sie ,” and must use the more intimate “ du .” This brought about a sea change. As one critic put it, Goethe’s letters now became “prose poems of happy love with few parallels in any literature.” However, at the very moment their relationship should have matured, it didn’t—and the results were catastrophic. So far as we know, Charlotte, in her “strange ménage,” never made any move to leave her husband. When she did confess her love for Goethe, Goethe responded by leaving for Italy without even telling her that he was going, and by the time of his return from the warm south (Verona, Venice, Ferrara, Florence, Arezzo, Rome, Naples) the situation had deteriorated. 26 He had enjoyed his time (“this journey is really like a ripe apple falling from the tree”), but his views on love had been transformed (from a romantic view to a “pagan” view, it was said by some). 27 A sketch by his friend Tischbein, made in Rome, shows Goethe irritably pushing away “the second pillow”—i.e., Charlotte’s husband. 28 Also, Charlotte found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that Goethe had begun another affair, with Christiane Vulpius. (“I am only interested in the real thing, eager eyes and smacking kisses.”) Charlotte made a lame attempt to pillory Goethe in her play Dido , but it was not a success. 29 Their once-beautiful relationship had turned sour, and though they patched it up eventually, things were never the same again.
    Through it all, Goethe continued to write. A mixture of the realist and the romantic, not given overmuch to abstract speculation, Goethe subscribed to the view, explored in Chapter 2, that “God does not exercise influence on earth except through outstanding chosen men.” 30 He knew he had it in him to be an outstanding man, “a great soul,” as he had described the character of Iphigenia. 31 He was also deeply affected by his discovery of the Greeks (thanks to Herder) and their idea that individuals—even geniuses—may contain within them unconscious creative urges that other people will find superlative, but those works still need to be realized, to be produced, and that task involves craft, perseverance, individual effort. The idea that life is a task , was, of course, Pietist in origin, but the Greek influence seems to have induced Goethe to craft his next masterpiece, Wilhelm Meister , and so successfully that even a sarcastic skeptic like James Joyce had to put him on a par with Shakespeare and Dante (Joyce’s trinity was “Shopkeeper,” “Daunty” and “Gouty”). 32
    In 1798, in a famous “Fragment” published in the Athenäum , the periodical of the early German Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel identified the French Revolution, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794), and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister , as “the three greatest ‘tendencies’ of the age.” 33 Schlegel was being deliberately provocative, but even in retrospect this takes some swallowing. Schlegel we shall encounter presently, where we can examine what, exactly, he meant by his choice. Fichte we shall also come to later, where we can explore the meaning and significance of his Wissenschaftslehre . But whatever Schlegel meant, when he put Wilhelm Meister in this exalted company, he was doing us a