Goethe's Faustian Life

In the English-speaking world today, Goethe is still, in A. N. Wilson’s pithy phrase, “the Great Unread.” This was not always the case. “Close thy Byron,” wrote the reactionary prophet Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s; “Open thy Goethe.” The Victorians––Hapsburg-descended Queen Victoria and Saxon Prince Albert among them––were steeped in Goethe. George Eliot, whose worldview was profoundly shaped by nineteenth-century German thought, called him “the last true polymath ever to walk the earth.” To Wilson, his newest English biographer, Goethe possessed “surely the most interesting brain which ever inhabited a human skull.” Wilson’s book, the expansively titled Goethe: His Faustian Life - The Extraordinary Story of Modern Germany, a Troubled Genius and the Poem that Made Our World, should be welcomed. Wilson has written over sixty volumes of fiction, biography, and history in a fifty-plus-year career. He is also a former candidate for the priesthood in the Church of England and has a strong i ... Read full article.