Return to Weimar and the French Revolution (1788–94)

Charles Augustus crowned his generosity, however, by agreeing to a wholly new basis for Goethe’s presence in his duchy: Goethe was to be relieved of virtually all routine administrative tasks and freed to concentrate on the task of being a poet. Goethe resolved to preserve as much as he could of the Roman atmosphere in Weimar, set about hiring artists he had met in Italy, and at once—before there was time for any second thoughts—took himself a mistress, Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of the duke’s late archivist. She bore Goethe a son, August, on December 25, 1789. She was a busy and very competent housewife, but Weimar aristocratic society was merciless to her and grew suspicious of her lover. Goethe refused to undergo the church ceremony that was the only way of being legally married, and so her very existence could not formally be acknowledged. Frau von Stein suffered a kind of nervous collapse, and all but the most superficial communication between her and Goethe ceased.

In literary terms the Italian journey had not been a particularly successful time: Egmont had been completed, though with a shift of focus that blurred its political point, and some minor plays had been rewritten and ruined in the process. Almost no lyric poems had been written. Goethe had become taken with the notion that art was impersonal, and in this he was perhaps affected by the ideas of the aesthetician Karl Philipp Moritz, whom he had met in Rome and who freely avowed an idolatrous worship of Goethe, whom he called “God.” These ideas continued to constrain Goethe for some time, but the two years after his return from Italy saw a resurgence of personal poetry, if in a more distanced style. His misery at leaving Italy found an outlet in the play Torquato Tasso (1790; Eng. trans. Torquato Tasso), the first tragedy in European literature with a poet as its hero, which was written largely in 1788–89, though it had been begun in 1780. In richly plangent verse but at inordinately untheatrical length, Tasso descends into madness, uncomprehended by the court around him. In old age Goethe acknowledged the closeness of this story of self-destruction to that of Werther. The erotic poems Goethe wrote in the first months of his love for Christiane, some of the earliest German imitations of Classical elegiac couplets, are among his most remarkable achievements. Later published (in part) as the Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies)—their conventional, though not their original, title—they only confirmed Frau von Stein’s view of her rival as a harlot.

By his 40th birthday, in 1789, Goethe had all but completed the collected edition of his works, including a revision of Werther, 16 plays, and a volume of poems. The only fragmentary drama it contained was Faust, which he saw no chance yet of finishing and which appeared in print for the first time in 1790 as Faust: Ein Fragment. In the same year, Goethe spent two months in and around Venice, and in the autumn he accompanied Charles Augustus to Silesia and Kraków, but the literary rewards of these journeys were slight: distichs in the Classical manner on his experiences, some of them bitterly satirical of contemporary political and intellectual developments. Together with some of the shorter poems on Christiane, they appeared in 1795 in the collection now known as the Venetianische Epigramme (Venetian Epigrams).

The years from 1788 to 1794 were lonely years for Goethe. His household was warm and happy enough, though no second child survived from Christiane’s repeated pregnancies. But outside the house, apart from Herder, who was increasingly disenchanted with Weimar, his only close friend was the duke. Personal loyalty to Charles Augustus partly explains Goethe’s hostility from the start to the French Revolution, of which Herder was a vocal supporter, and his accompanying Charles Augustus on campaigns against France in 1792 and 1793. These campaigns were Goethe’s first direct experience of war, and he found them a nightmare. He was lucky to survive the disastrous retreat from Valmy, in France, and to return home in December 1792, but he was back on campaign in 1793, observing the siege and virtual destruction of French-occupied Mainz. As a reward for his loyal support, Charles Augustus presented him with the freehold of the house on the Frauenplan in Weimar, which he remodelled into the form that has been preserved to the present day and which now also houses the Goethe National Museum.

Goethe’s distance from the Revolution can be overstated, but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he clearly understood that Germany’s political, social, and economic circumstances were so different from those of France that there could be no question of simply importing Revolutionary principles. He had a distaste for the hypocrisy of German intellectuals who ate the bread of princes while preaching their abolition, and his political attitude has been well described as “enlightened feudalism.” He disliked the militarism and centralism of modern, would-be rational states such as Prussia or, later, Napoleon’s France (which he thought promised “hell on earth”); he felt at home in Germany’s multiplicity of states small enough for rulers and ruled to have a sense of personal obligation to each other; he believed in the possibility, and necessity, of gradual and rational reform. But within the federal and feudal structure he thought established authority had an overriding right and duty to impose order, and he had little interest in procedures of representation or theories of the popular will. The creed was subtle, pragmatic, and benevolently paternalist, but it would be a travesty to see Goethe as a servile courtier or unprincipled egoist, though many have seen him in this light during his lifetime and afterward.

After the remarkable effort of completing his collected edition, Goethe seems not to have known where to go next as a poet. A new prose drama, Der Gross-Cophta (1792; “The Grand Kofta”), was a failure on the stage in 1791. A satire on Freemasonry, it was also the first of several unsatisfactory or fragmentary attempts to deal in a literary form with recent events in France (Der Bürgergeneral [1793; “The Citizen-General”]; Die Aufgeregten [1817; “Agitation”], written in 1793; Das Mädchen von Oberkirch [1895; “The Maid of Oberkirch”], written in 1795). As an exercise in political satire and in German equivalents of Classical metres, he put Johann Christoph Gottsched’s prose translation of the medieval stories of Reynard the Fox into hexameters (Reineke Fuchs, written in 1793 and published the following year).

Perhaps by way of compensation for his lack of literary success, he turned to science. In 1790 he published his theory of the principles of botany, Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (“Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants”; Eng. trans. in Goethe’s Botany), an attempt to show that all plant forms are determined by a process of alternating expansion and contraction of a basic unit, the leaf. He also began to try to apply the same principle to anatomy in order to explain the skeletal development of vertebrates. This concern with apparent structure—for which he later coined the term Morphologie (“morphology”)—was not fundamentally different from the impulse that had originally brought him to geology. In 1791, however, a completely new scientific issue began to obsess him: the theory of colour. Convinced that Sir Isaac Newton was wrong to assume that white light could be broken into light of different colours, Goethe proposed a new approach of his own. Colour was to be seen as emerging from the mingling of light and darkness. At first he attempted, unconvincingly, to expound these ideas as new, alternative laws of physics (Beiträge zur Optik [1791–92; Optical Essays]). Later, however, he saw that it is of the essence of colour to require cooperation between the physical behaviour of light and the human perceptual apparatus. Goethe’s colour theory has real originality as a theory of vision rather than as a theory of light. In making this change to what one might call a more subjective science, Goethe was greatly helped by his study of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which was completely transforming the German intellectual landscape and was in particular being vigorously furthered in the University of Jena. The openness to Kant in turn made it easier for Goethe to respond positively when in 1794 one of Kant’s most prominent disciples, the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, who was then living in Jena, suggested that he and Goethe should collaborate on a new journal, Die Horen (The Horae), intended to give literature a voice in an age increasingly dominated by politics.