The German Genius

alchemy, he himself is conjured up by Faust, whereupon he broaches his famous proposal: Mephistopheles will introduce Faust to all the pleasures the world has to offer, the only proviso being that if, at any point, Faust should wish to sample any delight “for longer than the moment it is on offer,” his life will end and he will belong to the devil. Bored, unfulfilled, Faust accepts.
    In Part One the main theme is Faust’s seduction and subsequent desertion of Margareta (Gretchen), a beautiful girl he meets outside a church. In Part Two—written decades later—Faust, waking from a long sleep during which he has forgotten Margareta, now becomes enamored of Helen of Troy (this is a magical world, after all). 41
    No brief summary can do justice to the attractions of Faust —its language, its wit, its pithy insights into human nature, not to mention Mephistopheles’ brand of cynicism, “an original and highly effective, not to say sympathetic conception of the devil.” Faust and Mephistopheles have even been compared to the Book of Job as a meditation on the nature of evil (in Job too there is a compact with God). Goethe also took a leaf out of Shakespeare’s book: like the Bard’s plays, Faust resists Christianization. God is not the petty-minded jealous God of the Israelites but a more generous—and yes, even witty—deity.
    Goethe began writing the book in the early 1770s, later destroying the manuscript—or so he thought. The very existence of this early manuscript, the Urfaust , was unknown until 1887, when it was discovered sixty-five years after his death. Apparently it was copied by a young lady at the Weimar court, and her manuscript was never destroyed. Goethe’s description of Faust as “fragments of a great confession” should not be forgotten. He himself wrote:
    …Our play is rather like the life of Man:
We make a start, we make an end—
But make a whole of it? Well, do so if you can. *
     
    Was he saying that was the best way to treat life? Absorb its disparate parts, “Kiss the moment,” as Schiller was to put it, but don’t try too hard to impose too much unity. 42 For Faust, it is not the search for unity that matters, it is movement, creation, activity , over and above and before mere enjoyment. Mere contemplation of beauty is empty. In this Goethe is a pre-Romantic.
    Nicholas Boyle, in his biography of Goethe and his age, argues that “more must be known, or at any rate there must be more to know, about Goethe than any other human being…Nearly 3,000 drawings by him survive, as do the villa he built, the palace he rebuilt, and the park he first laid out. He amassed very substantial private collections of mineralogical specimens, [and] incised gems…After he moved to Weimar the daily chronicle of his doings, now being put together for the first time in seven large volumes by Robert Steiger, is practically continuous, especially once he began to keep a regular diary in 1796. Accounts of conversations with him…run to some 4,000 printed pages, over 12,000 letters from him are extant, and about 20,000 letters addressed to him.” As for his writing, Boyle concludes, “As the age of paper passes, so he comes to seem its supreme product.”
    A N EW M EANING FOR “N ATION” AND “C ULTURE”
     
    Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was five years older than Goethe and, like Winckelmann, like Heyne and like Fichte, a poor boy who had risen out of his class through sheer ability, along with a chance meeting with a Russian army surgeon who, on his way back from the Seven Years’ War, was quartered in 1761–62 in the east Prussian town where Herder lived. Conceiving a liking for Herder, the surgeon proposed to take him to Königsberg, where the young man could study medicine at the university. In return, Herder would translate a medical treatise into Latin. Herder accepted the proposal but, once in Königsberg, he found medicine uncongenial and switched to theology.
    This was a second fortuitous turn, for it brought Herder to study under Kant, and it was Kant who introduced Herder to Rousseau and Hume, who were to have such an effect on his thinking. Ordained in 1767, Herder found his way to Paris where he was received by some of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, including Denis Diderot and d’Alembert. But he was still chronically poor and so accepted a position as the tutor and traveling companion to the son of the Prince of Lübeck and Holstein. This was the third