(2 of 4)
The stars kept their promise to Goethe. At the University of Leipzig his genius and his striking personal beauty made him so arrogantly self-confident that when his emotional restlessness was attributed to his having failed to conciliate God, he wrote: "I had always imagined that I was on quite good terms with God; in fact, I rather fancied . . . that He was somewhat in my debt and that it was I who had to pardon Him for several circumstances."
After finishing his law studies and beginning his practice, Goethe wrote his first important play, Götz von Berlichingen, a robust drama of rebellion against the unjust, which introduced a new kind of drama to the German stage. His novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, the most famous story of unrequited love ever written, spread over Europe like a forest fire (Napoleon told Goethe that he had read it seven times). The melancholy Werther's suicide caused some of Goethe's despondent readers to hang, shoot or drown themselves; for many, Goethe's name became synonymous with Satanic influence. Goethe himself, however, believed to his dying day that it was scarcely possible for a book to have a "more immoral effect than life itself." In 1775, a year after Werther appeared, Goethe went to the court of Weimar, where the youthful ruler, Duke Karl August, made him privy councillor and became his devoted patron.
Hot & Cold. Already a double man was visible in Goethe; his unique personality, composed of lyric heat and detached coldness, astonished all who met him. Even his adoring mistress, Charlotte von Stein, once described him as "that monster," given over to "indecent behavior [and] vulgar and obscene expressions ... a male coquette [who] shows no esteem for any." Goethe had a different view. "I can't tell you," he said, "how my earthy smell . . . contrasts with the . . . gray, bowlegged . . . Masters of Arts ... as well as with the whorish, preening, behind-swinging females that abound."
Few of those who were thus repelled by Goethe knew one reason for his "horribly unbending" behavior. As privy councillor, a post which he handled with extraordinary efficiency, he became more & more occupied with official business and officious visitors, with the result that as poet and playwright, he spent much of his life in the frustrated rage and agony of feeling that he had "only one foot in the stirrup of the winged horse." He detested the time-consuming admirers who flocked to kiss his feet. "You would understand [my disgust]," he assured a friend, "if you could watch the daily stream of foreigners who come to admire me, many of whom have never read a line that I have written . . . And most of those who have read, have not understood. The meaning and significance of my works and of my life is the triumph of the purely human ... I hold life to be more precious than art."