The Invention of Nature

Then in his mid-forties, Goethe was Germany’s most celebrated literary figure. Exactly two decades previously, he had been catapulted to international fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about a forlorn lover who commits suicide, which had encapsulated the sentimentality of that time. It became the book of a whole generation and many identified with the eponymous protagonist. The novel was published in most European languages and became so popular that countless men, including young Karl August, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed in a Werther uniform consisting of a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat, brown boots and round felt hat. People talked of Werther fever and the Chinese even produced Werther porcelain aimed at the European market.

When Goethe first met Humboldt, he was no longer the dazzling young poet of the Sturm und Drang, the era of ‘Storm and Stress’. This German pre-Romantic period had celebrated individuality and a full spectrum of extreme feelings – from dramatic love to deep melancholy – all filled with passion, emotions, romantic poems and novels. In 1775, when Goethe had first been invited to Weimar by the then eighteen-year-old Karl August, he had embarked on a long round of love affairs, drunkenness and pranks. Goethe and Karl August had roistered through the streets of Weimar, sometimes wrapped in white sheets to scare those who believed in ghosts. They had stolen barrels from a local merchant to roll down hills, and flirted with peasant girls – all in the name of genius and freedom. And, of course, no one could complain since Karl August, the young ruler, was involved. But those wild years were long gone, and with them the theatrical declamations of love, the tears, the smashing of glasses and naked swimming that had scandalized the locals. In 1788, six years before Humboldt’s first visit, Goethe had shocked Weimar society one more time when he had taken the uneducated Christiane Vulpius as his lover. Christiane, who worked as a seamstress in Weimar, gave birth to their son August less than two years later. Ignoring convention and malicious gossip, Christiane and August lived with Goethe.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1787 (Illustration Credit 2.1)

By the time Goethe met Humboldt, he had calmed down and grown corpulent, with a double chin and a stomach cruelly described by one acquaintance as ‘that of a woman in the last stages of pregnancy’. His looks had gone – his beautiful eyes had disappeared into the ‘fat of his cheeks’ and many remarked that he was no longer a dashing ‘Apollo’. Goethe was still the confidant of and adviser to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar who had ennobled him (thus the ‘von’ in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s name). He was the director of the court theatre and held several well-paid administrative positions which included the control of the duchy’s mines and manufacturing. Like Humboldt, Goethe adored geology (and mining) – so much so that on special occasions he dressed his young son in a miner’s uniform.

Goethe had become the Zeus of Germany’s intellectual circles, towering above all other poets and writers, but he could also be a ‘cold, mono-syllabled God’. Some described him as melancholic, others as arrogant, proud and bitter. Goethe had never been a great listener if the topic was not to his liking and could end a discussion with a blatant display of his lack of interest or by abruptly changing the subject. He was sometimes so rude particularly to young poets and thinkers that they regularly ran out of the room. None of this mattered to his admirers. The ‘sacred poetic fire’, as one British visitor to Weimar said, had only burned to perfection in Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare and now it did so in Goethe.

But Goethe wasn’t happy. ‘No one was more isolated than I was then.’ He was more fascinated by nature – ‘the great Mother’ – than by people. His large house in Weimar’s town centre reflected his tastes and status. It was elegantly furnished, filled with art and Italian statues but also with vast collections of rocks, fossils and dried plants. At the back of the house was a suite of plainer rooms that Goethe used as his study and library, overlooking a garden that he had designed for scientific study. In one corner of the garden was the small building that housed his huge geological collection.

Goethe’s house in Weimar (Illustration Credit 2.2)