This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
In his 82 years on earth, Goethe seemed to have lived many lives, for no man in history has shown glimpses of genius across such a wide range of human endeavour. The first Life of Goethe was by G.H. Lewes (better known today as George Eliot’s lover). Its two volumes sold well to a Victorian readership already disposed to revere the hero of Scott, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold.
Matthew Bell’s biography follows those by Rüdiger Safranski, Nicholas Boyle (two volumes published so far, two more to come) and A.N. Wilson. Each is a masterpiece in its own right. Boyle gives us l’uomo universale; Safranski the human work of art; Wilson the Faustian man prey to inner demons, from alcohol to homosexuality.
Bell’s Goethe, by contrast, is the man of ideas — and what ideas! Even to list alphabetically the academic fields in which he was a pioneer is exhausting: anatomy, anthropology, botany, dramaturgy, ecology, ethnography, evolutionary biology, geology, history of art and architecture, meteorology, mineralogy, optics, philology, philosophy of science, and political thought.
All these, however, were essentially peripheral to his self-appointed vocation as the national poet of the German-speaking world. Here, too, his achievements are astonishing. Faust alone gives him a claim to be the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare; Bell considers his poetic corpus to be unique in the Western canon.
His first two major works, Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand and The Sorrows of Young Werther, inaugurated the romantic movement with the rediscovery of the Middle Ages and a wave of sentimental suicides across Europe. Wilhelm Meister was the archetypal Bildungsroman.
Goethe transformed everything he touched. The German infatuation with the “the land where the lemon trees grow” was not his invention, but his Italian Journey elevated an aristocratic fashion into a national obsession. His Roman Elegies and Venetian Epigrams, like his West-Eastern Divan sensuous and subversive verses that scandalised and titillated a pious, provincial and prudish nation, were merely the most visible aspect of a lifelong defiance of conventional morality.
His status as Europe’s most celebrated man of letters enabled him to open his compatriots’ eyes to the possibility of a more open-minded way of life. In this sense, Hitler was the negation of Goethe’s Germany.
Goethe knew that literary fame, his own included, was ultimately no less ephemeral than any other. Hence he sought to leave his mark in other ways. He was a devoted son, brother, lover, father and friend; his correspondence is one of the richest and most voluminous in history. The Conversations recorded in his old age by his amanuensis Eckermann are simply marvellous, the German equivalent of Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
As tutor and privy counsellor to Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Goethe spent many years on thankless administrative responsibilities, from copper mines and military expeditions to running the University of Jena and the theatre of Weimar. But his official career provided an inexhaustible seam of material for his literary and scientific pursuits, as well as the status, wealth and leisure he needed. No other German writer has enjoyed such prestige in their lifetime. None has bequeathed such a prodigious documentary legacy, which continues to grow even now.
Bell organises this material by focusing on Goethe’s place in intellectual history. Having mastered the philosophical and scientific context, he guides us through the often complex relationship between an academic establishment and a writer who always preserved his status as an independent outsider.
He defends Goethe against the charge of dilettantism, explaining how, for instance, his grasp of the evolutionary niche anticipated Darwin’s theory of natural selection, or why he was able to inspire Alexander von Humboldt’s foundation of geoscience and ecology.
Goethe’s stubborn defence of his Theory of Colour against the experimental physics of Newton’s Opticks brought him into conflict with the scientific consensus of his day. As in his investigations of the morphology of plants, microorganisms, rocks and anatomy, Goethe’s approach was empirical and phenomenological, relying on observation rather than a priori theorising. Long before physicists formulated the observer effect, he was aware of the interaction of subject and object.
Goethe rejected Christianity, both his father’s Lutheranism and his mother’s Pietism, from early adulthood. He read philosophy voraciously, particularly Spinoza, throughout his life. Whilst he never claimed to be more than an amateur and in later life even hired a tutor to help him understand the “Copernican Revolution” wrought by his contemporary Immanuel Kant, he had strong views on the flaws in German idealism as it developed around him.
Bell traces the emergence of what one might call Goethe’s Weltanschauung, his world view: a naturalistic Spinozism with an admixture of Humean scepticism. His Faustian alter ego is in awe of the Earth Spirit, the inchoate source of existence, more than Mephistopheles, the nihilistic spirit of denial.
He was disgusted by Kant’s espousal of the principle of “radical evil”, a residue (as he saw it) of the “shitty” Christian doctrine of original sin. There is a whiff of moral relativism about Goethe’s easygoing ethics.
When it came to politics, however, Goethe was a firm advocate of law and order, however arbitrary, and the traditional Obrigkeitsstaat. In his works he tempers this defence of princely authority with an appeal to ancient liberties, but his heroes (Götz and Egmont, for example) are quixotic noblemen defending their rights under the ancien régime against alien forces.
His repudiation of Christianity was of a piece with his defence of a legal system that seldom tempered justice with mercy. Bell does not defend Goethe’s conduct towards Johanna Catharina Höhn, a young woman convicted of infanticide in 1783 — a case very like Faust’s beloved Gretchen. As a privy counsellor, he could have urged the Duke to exercise clemency. He chose not to do so, and she was beheaded.
A splinter of ice, deep in Goethe’s heart, manifested itself from time to time. When, after the siege of Mainz, its defenders (supporters of the French Revolution) were given safe passage, a mob turned on them. Goethe, by his own account, intervened on behalf of his Duke and quelled the riot. Bell has doubts about this story. Whilst Goethe admired Napoleon, he had no time for the Revolution, let alone the peasants or sans-culottes.
A charitable view might be that Goethe was a Burkean conservative of a peculiarly Teutonic stamp. He was liberal in matters of conscience, illiberal in politics; a freethinker with a weakness for autocrats. Bell’s brilliant biography does full justice to this greatest of German Dichter und Denker, a poet and thinker with plenty to say to our times of Sturm und Drang.
