Quote of the Day (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on Nature and Art)

“Nature, it seems, must always clash with Art,
And yet, before we know it, both are one;
I too have learned: Their enmity is none,
Since each compels me, and in equal part.”— German man of letters Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), “Nature and Art” (c. 1800; published 1807), translated from the German by Michael Hamburger, in Selected Works (Everyman’s Library, 2000)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—born 275 years ago today in Frankfurt, Germany—was to German literature what William Shakespeare was to England’s and Alexander Pushkin to Russia’s—a titanic figure who decisively influenced its language and literary standing around the world.

But, because of his attitude to nature and art, he was so much more. I think that Goethe might have been the last of the Enlightenment figures who were able to make their marks in multiple fields.

Had he confined his endeavors to literature, Goethe still would have been acclaimed for his versatility in multiple genres: the novel (The Sorrows of Young Werther, a bestseller in 1774), travelogues (Italian Journey), drama (Faust), and assorted poems eventually set to music.

Like Thomas Jefferson—born only six years before—Goethe trained in the law before dabbling in science (he formulated the concept of morphology, a kind of forerunner to Darwin’s theory of evolution) and practicing statecraft (as an aide to Duke Carl August, who later became Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach).

I mentioned that he was an Enlightenment figure, but in another sense, he harked back to the Renaissance who could excel at multiple areas of endeavor. Besides the above activities, Goethe was also a skilled painter and, well into middle age, an enthusiastic athlete.

(For more on Goethe as Renaissance man, see this August 2020 post from the Sarkologist blog.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, using Goethe as a representative of “The Writer” type in his seven lectures on Representative Men (1850), saw him as someone who “in conversation, in calamity…finds new materials” 

Such was his capacity, that the magazines of the world’s ancient or modern wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command,—he wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used it as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical, painter, composer,—all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed to look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men breathe. Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at home in it as he. He was not afraid to live.