Goethe: More Than Just An Old Romantic

George Steiner at The Guardian:

Boyle’s treatment of Goethe’s readings and uses of Kant would make for a tidy monograph in itself. As would Boyle’s analysis of Goethe’s studies and experiments in optics, in the meaning and structure of light. The conclusions drawn were erroneous, but it has been argued that the treatise on colours, the Farbenlehre, is a stylistic, intellectual masterpiece at the heart of Goethe’s achievements. An achievement relating Goethe to Spinoza on the one hand, and to various schools of light-mysticism, of ‘illuminism’ in a literal vein, both Western and Oriental (Persian doctrines and literature fascinated Goethe).

But Boyle is also a literary expositor and critic of vivacious perspicacity. His treatment of Wilhelm Meister, Goethe’s didactic roman-fleuve, of the domestic epic, Hermann und Dorothea, of that enigmatic yet somehow pivotal drama, The Natural Daughter, of individual lyrics and of the gestation of Faust, already 25 years in the making and legendary prior to its publication, could be combined into a most useful guide to realms largely unknown to English literacy. In appendix, one would find Boyle’s analyses of Schiller’s aesthetics, dramas, historical narratives.

more here.

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