Man on a Winged Horse

GOETHE: THE STORY OF A MAN (929 pp.) -- Edifed by Ludwig Lewlsohn --Farrar, Straus ($10).

GOETHE'S WORLD (422 pp.)--Edited by Berthold Biermann--New Directions ($5).

GOETHE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: POETRY AND TRUTH FROM MY OWN LIFE (700 pp.)--Translated by R. O. Moon--Public Affairs Press ($5).

"Little woman, give me your little paw," said the dying Goethe to his daughter-in-law. Had these been his last words, the great Johann Wolfgang might today seem more human and approachable than generations of followers have made him out to be. Unfortunately he said later: "Open the blind of the other window, so that more light may come in!" This statement (abbreviated to the more impressive command: "More light!") has become Goethe's epitaph, supposedly expressing his yearning that greater illumination might come to the hearts of men. Somewhere along the road the "little paw" has been nearly forgotten.

It is not likely to turn up at the dignified International Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival which will be held from June 27 through July 16 at Aspen, in the mountains of Colorado. The Goethe Bicentennial Foundation--whose board of directors includes such Goethe admirers as Herbert Hoover, Thomas Mann, Marshall Field, Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corp. of America, and Novelist-Playwright Thornton Wilder--chose distant Aspen as the seat of homage because, in the words of Chairman Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago, "we thought such a celebration ought to require a pilgrimage." At Aspen, Goethe will be the center of round-table discussions, seminars, symposia and symphony concerts. There the philosophy of "the last Universal Man," will be re-examined in terms of 20th Century problems.

In three new books, non-pilgrims will have a chance to enjoy a less Olympian portrait. In Goethe: The Story of a Man, admirer Ludwig Lewisohn has assembled two enormous volumes of Goethiana, including letters, table talk, memoirs, extracts from Goethe's writings. In Goethe's World, Journalist Berthold Biermann has made a smaller, illustrated collection. Goethe's own story of his lively youth, Poetry and Truth, is also being published in time for the Aspen festival, in a new translation, the first in a century.

The Stars Look Down. When Goethe was born in Frankfurt in 1749, German music was already entering its day of unparalleled glory (Bach, Handel and Haydn were living, Mozart and Beethoven were soon to come); by comparison, German poetry and drama were blank pages. "Had I been born an Englishman," Goethe once confessed, "and had all those numerous masterpieces (of Shakespeare's) been brought before me ... they would have overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do."

From the cradle, Goethe had both talent and audacity. At seven, he believed that his future greatness was assured by the stars at his birth. When his mother told him that men have to get along without the aid of the stars, the little boy retorted: "I can't get along with what suffices other people."

The stars kept their promise to Goethe. At the University of Leipzig his genius and his striking personal beauty made him so arrogantly self-confident that when his emotional restlessness was attributed to his having failed to conciliate God, he wrote: "I had always imagined that I was on quite good terms with God; in fact, I rather fancied . . . that He was somewhat in my debt and that it was I who had to pardon Him for several circumstances."

After finishing his law studies and beginning his practice, Goethe wrote his first important play, Goetz von Berlichingen, a robust drama of rebellion against the unjust, which introduced a new kind of drama to the German stage. His novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, the most famous story of unrequited love ever written, spread over Europe like a forest fire (Napoleon told Goethe that he had read it seven times). The melancholy Werther's suicide caused some of Goethe's despondent readers to hang, shoot or drown themselves; for many, Goethe's name became synonymous with Satanic influence. Goethe himself, however, believed to his dying day that it was scarcely possible for a book to have a "more immoral effect than life itself." In 1775, a year after Werther appeared, Goethe went to the court of Weimar, where the youthful ruler, Duke Karl August, made him privy councillor and became his devoted patron.

Hot & Cold. Already a double man was visible in Goethe; his unique personality, composed of lyric heat and detached coldness, astonished all who met him. Even his adoring mistress, Charlotte von Stein, once described him as "that monster," given over to "indecent behavior [and] vulgar and obscene expressions ... a male coquette [who] shows no esteem for any." Goethe had a different view. "I can't tell you," he said, "how my earthy smell . . . contrasts with the . . . gray, bowlegged . . . Masters of Arts ... as well as with the whorish, preening, behind-swinging females that abound."

Few of those who were thus repelled by Goethe knew one reason for his "horribly unbending" behavior. As privy councillor, a post which he handled with extraordinary efficiency, he became more & more occupied with official business and officious visitors, with the result that as poet and playwright, he spent much of his life in the frustrated rage and agony of feeling that he had "only one foot in the stirrup of the winged horse." He detested the time-consuming admirers who flocked to kiss his feet. "You would understand [my disgust]," he assured a friend, "if you could watch the daily stream of foreigners who come to admire me, many of whom have never read a line that I have written . . . And most of those who have read, have not understood. The meaning and significance of my works and of my life is the triumph of the purely human ... I hold life to be more precious than art."

"If My Girl Remains." Goethe explained what he meant by this when, to the horror of his admirers, he took Christiane Vulpius, a simple girl who earned her living by making artificial flowers, to bed & board with him. Almost illiterate ("She has not read a line of all my works," said Goethe), Christiane not only loved Goethe but delighted him by her absolute refusal to be anything but' what nature had intended her to be. She bore him several children. It was the hidden, human Goethe, warm behind the icy mask, who told his friend Johann Herder: "If you continue to be fond of me and a few friends stick to me and my girl remains faithful and my baby lives and my big stove works well--why, I have nothing left to wish for."

In 1806, when drunken French soldiers invaded Goethe's house, faithful Christiane defied them. Conscience-stricken and deeply impressed, Goethe rushed her to the church and made her his wife. When later asked by an admirer how he had fared in those critical days of invasion, Goethe instantly assumed his statuary expression: "I was like a man who from the height of a cliff surveys the raging sea. Though he cannot succor the shipwrecked, neither can he be reached by the tumultuous waters."

With his magnum opus, Faust, which he began in his 20s and worked over repeatedly until just before his death at 82, Goethe raised a poetic monument to himself that is comparable to those of England's Shakespeare and Italy's Dante. An ardent sideline scientist (he discovered that the intermaxillary bone in apes was also present in a rudimentary form in man, and developed a new theory regarding the nature of colors), he took special delight in noting the similarities that related phenomena of the most diverse kinds. When his son, August, showed no particular interest in a literary life, Goethe was no more upset than he had been by the strange ways of mistress Christiane. "In the last analysis," he said, "all sane and sensible things coincide."

Silence on the Pedestal. It was this breadth of vision and unity of spirit, plus a high scorn for the battles of the metaphysicians, that aroused the indignation of German pedants and specialists. "People were never thoroughly contented with me," Goethe confided in his last years to Johann Peter Eckermann, the youth who was to become his Boswell. "[They] always wished me otherwise than it has pleased God to make me ... People expected from me some modest expression, humbly setting forth the total unworthiness of my person and my work ... I believed in God and in Nature, and in the triumph of good over evil; but this was not enough for pious souls: I was also required to believe other points, which were opposed to the feeling of my soul for truth . . ."

In 1832, the poet-philosopher lay on his deathbed, and the idolaters whom he could no longer fight off set up on a pedestal the godlike image that has persisted ever since. The unhappy transubstantiation is described by Eckermann himself:

"Stretched upon his back, he reposed as if asleep; profound peace and security reigned in the features of his sublimely noble countenance. The mighty brow seemed yet to harbor thoughts. I wished for a lock of his hair; but reverence prevented me from cutting it off. The body lay naked, only wrapped in a white sheet; large pieces of ice had been placed near it, to keep it fresh as long as possible. [A manservant] drew aside the sheet, and I was astonished at the divine magnificence of the limbs. The breast was powerful, broad, and arched; the arms and thighs were full, and softly muscular; the feet were elegant, and of the most perfect shape; nowhere . . . was there a trace either of fat or of leanness and decay. A perfect man lay in great beauty before me; and the rapture which the sight caused made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had left such an abode. I laid my hand on his heart--there was a deep silence--and I turned away to give free vent to my suppressed tears."

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