UNDERSTANDING GOETHE UNDERSTANDING GOETHE E.H. Gombrich Goethe on Art selected, edited and translated by John Gage, London: Scolar Press, 1980, 251 pp., 31 ills, £4.95 paper The Younger Goethe and the Visual Arts (Anglica Germanica Series 2) by W.D. Robson­ Scott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 175 pp., 8 ills, £19.50 The generous selection from Goethe's many writings and utterances on art, made and largely translated by Dr John Gage, should offer a welcome opportunity for English readers to catch a glimpse of this extraordinary multifaceted mind. Such opportunities are rare, for outside academic departments of Germanic Studies Goethe is little more than a name in the Anglo-Saxon world. When T.S. Eliot received the Hanseatic Goethe Prize for 1954 he was compelled by the occasion to comment on Goethe's wide-ranging oeuvre, but in the event he put together a lecture on 'Goethe as a Sage' in which he never really said why he found him so wise but rather contented himself with praising him as the equal of Dante and Shakespeare. Few Germans will question this estimation, but those who cannot read the works in the original will have to take it on credit. Goethe's greatest achievements in lyrical poetry can never survive translation, and stripped of the glory of the language even Faust looks like a bizarre conglomeration of disparate scenes, while Werther and Wilhelm Meister appear to be mainly of historical interest. Without the background of these achievements, of course, Goethe would not be Goethe. If Dante had written on Giotto and Shakespeare on Hilliard we could not possibly divorce our respect for the author from our interest in the texts. Thus it may be a moot point how far the pieces and sayings assembled by Dr Gage would retain their importance if they were not also the manifestations of the genius who, almost single-handed, transformed and shaped German literature. At least a rudimentary familiarity with the chronological and geographical setting of his life seems indispensable. The dates tell their own story. When Goethe was born in Frankfurt in 1749 the Rococo castles of Frederick the Great were still going up in Potsdam, the outpost of that French taste and culture against which Goethe's generation was to rebel. When he died in 1832 Srnirke's building of the British Museum was in progress, to house the Elgin Marbles which, in Goethe's view, should make London rather than Rome the goal of all aspiring artists. Hogarth's March to Finchley and Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades were both created in Goethe's lifetime. In terms of literary movements, he still tried his hand in the gallant style, was swept into the Ossianic current of Sturm und Drang, founded with Schiller the classical drama of German literature, and gave vital impulses to the Romantic Movement. All the time the visual arts were never far from his focus of interest. It is a happy circumstance, therefore, that the publication of Dr Gage's selection coin­ cides with that of Professor W.D. Robson-Scott's handy monograph on The Younger Goethe and the Visual Arts, which traces the poet's love affair with painting from his early years to the end of his ItalianJourney in 1788. In this thoroughly documented account we follow Goethe from his paternal home, where he got to know and to love the local painters in the Dutch style, to his student days in Leipzig where he took drawing lessons with Winckel­ mann's friend Adam Friedrich Oeser, and visited the treasures of the Dresden Gallery where again the Dutch masters impressed him most. Of particular interest in that book are the chapters analysing the background to Goethe's first publication, his hymn on the Gothic facade of the Strasbourg Minster in which he challenged the orthodoxies of conventional taste. We learn that Goethe's own account of that episode in his autobiography is con­ siderably telescoped. The essay was not written in Strasbourg but almost a year after Goethe's return to Frankfurt and may owe less to the direct influence of Herder than to a circle of friends who campaigned in the pages of the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeiger against the domination by France of German culture (Goethe, of course, being unaware of the French origins of the Gothic style). Another of Goethe's early articles actually takes the views of a French heretic, the sculptor Falconet, as its starting point to exalt in passionate 237 UNDERSTANDING GOETHE language the reverence for nature embodied in the art of Rembrandt. In all these years Goethe practised sketching and drawing, and continued to do so when he was called to Weimar as a tutor to the young Duke and soon became his 'right hand man'. Though scien­ tific studies began to rival Goethe's artistic interests, he increasingly longed to see the art treasures of Italy and finally absconded in the autumn of 1786. In Italy he experienced something like a conversion to classical art and made himself and others believe that he still wanted to take up an artistic career. The testimonials to this effect assembled in Robson-Scott's final chapter leave no doubt about the intensity of Goethe's desire and the wrench he felt when he finally saw that he was too old for such a switch. And yet it re­ mains surprising that the author never stepped back to ask himself how seriously we should take these aborted plans? Did Goethe really contemplate returning to Weimar and setting up a workshop or studio, living by his brush or chisel, two instruments he had hardly learned to wield? Or was it all self-deception, a dream he knew in his heart of hearts to be quite unrealistic? He must have known that he was born a writer, but he also knew and repeatedly said that all his writings were confessions in which he laid bare his soul. May not the practice of art have offered itself as an escape from this psychological burden which he always knew he would have to bear? One must regret that Professor Robson-Scott did not live to continue the story in another volume and to address himself to these intriguing questions. It is all the more fortunate that Dr Gage's anthology fills at least some of the gap that remains. Only two of the essays (and one fragmentary letter) contained in the volume came from the pen of 'The Younger Goethe', the bulk was written after his return from Italy and after his renunciation of an artistic career when he felt called upon to practise art at least vicariously. Together with like-minded friends, notably the Swiss painter Heinrich Meyer, he founded and ran a series of periodicals through which the Weimarer Kunstfreunde tried to raise the standing and knowledge of art in German lands. It is doubtful, though, whether the compiler did well to opt for a systematic rather than a chronological arrangement; for the latter would have introduced the reader first to Goethe as a revolutionary heretic before acquainting him with the serene arbiter of taste. The tone and message of Goethe's more programmatic writings undeniably provoked some resis­ tance among contemporaries and may continue to do so today. Ultimately this resistance is likely to be overcome by the depth and range of Goethe's knowledge and by the lucidity of his insights scattered throughout these pages, but it needs time to grasp what he was driving at. Dr Gage in his thoughtful Introduction is right in reminding us that 'to term Goethe's taste in art "classicist" is unhelpful.' He is equally right in stressing that 'Goethe never reduced his thoughts to systems in the manner of his friend and collaborator Schiller.' The selection here presented bears ample testimony to that 'looseness of Goethe's frame of reference' mentioned by Dr Gage, but in a way this looseness itself was part of the system. Just as during his Strasbourg period he admired tapestries after Raphael (hardly after the School ofAthens as he wrote to Langer, but more probably after the cartoon of Paul preach­ ing in Athens) while extolling the teutonic vigour of the Gothic Minster, so he allowed him­ self in his old age to be converted to a love ofJan van Eyck without therefore surrendering his right to admire Phidias: 'Wie aber kann sich Hans van Eyck Mit Phidias nur messen?' Ihr miisset, so lehr ich, alsogleich Einen urn den Andern vergessen. Denn wiirt ihr stets bei Einer geblieben, Wie Konntet ihr noch immer lieben? Das ist die Kunst, das ist die Welt, Dass Eins urns Andere gefallt, [Modernes] 238 UNDERSTANDING GOETHE ('But how can ever Jan van Eyck/ By Phidias' side be set?'/ You must, if my advice you like,/ Learn each in turn to forget./ For if with One we did remain,/ How could we fall in love again?/ Such is the world, and such is art,/ That passions come, as passions part.) Goethe certainly knew how to fall in and out of love, but there is more in this advice than a latitudinarian aestheticism. He, who had coined the term Weltliteratur, had con­ sciously striven in his poetry to enter into the spirit of all available traditions, the ancients and the German folk poets, the Persians, the Indians and even the Chinese. He likewise wanted to discard the exclusiveness of taste in the arts without for that reason disowning the classical approach to sculpture and painting. Pedagogically it is indeed one of the profits the student can derive from his acquaintance with Goethe's writings on art that they bring him into contact with this mainstream of the Western tradition.