The Joy of Reading by Charles Van Doren

Author:Charles Van Doren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2010-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

Romantic Spirits

The twenty-six years from 1789 to 1815 saw the violent deaths of millions. Europe was plagued by almost incessant warfare between Britain and her allies and France and hers. Life was difficult, frightening, and, for most people, short. This period of brutal uncertainty produced in many hearts fear that did not subside for decades. These chaotic years brought about many changes, and Europe, at the end of them, was quite different from what it had been before.

Great things happened and great people lived. Three English poets flashed like bright comets across the literary sky. Byron, Shelley, Keats—no matter how you order the three names, they connote youthful genius. A revolution in America was proclaimed, won, and defended. For a while the idea of un carièrre oeuvre aux talents (a career open to talent, not just birth) seemed to open opportunities for people in all walks of life. This idea didn’t last, but it would resurface in the future. A young Corsican adventurer won an empire, lost it, won it again, and lost it a second time. “Liberty and Equality” was the cry everywhere heard.

The time was short—no more than a human generation—but we can’t forget it.

GOETHE

1749–1832

Faust

The statue of Goethe in Lincoln Park in Chicago bears this inscription: “Goethe. The Master Spirit of the German People.” German though he was, Germans alone cannot claim him. Goethe was also one of the master spirits of mankind.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749. He lived to be eighty-two, dying in 1832 in Weimar, his adopted home for more than fifty years. In those years he lived almost every kind of life, wrote almost every kind of book, and enjoyed almost every kind of triumph.

Goethe’s first truly distinctive publication, the play Götz von Berlichingen, not only was an explosive literary event but also inaugurated an epoch in German cultural history, the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period. Two years later, in 1763, he published The Sorrows of Young Werther, his first novel; it made him famous all over Europe at the age of twenty-four.

If the world approved of him, he did not wholly approve of himself. His education, he felt, was far from complete, and above all he still had much to learn about the realities of life. He accepted an invitation from the Duke of Weimar and went to visit his little dukedom—and stayed for the rest of his life. He was soon made prime minister, but he also became chief inspector of mines, superintendent of irrigation, and supervisor of army uniforms. There was nothing that the Duke did not see fit to ask Goethe to do, and Goethe thought he could never refuse the Duke.

With all of his official duties there was time to write lyric poems, but not major works. In 1786, eleven years after his arrival in Weimar, he fled the city and all of his posts, disguised as a salesman en route to Italy, which he thought held the secret of life. But instead of finding Italy in Italy, he found Greece.

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