Even though they led to the same conclusion as Vico’s, Wolf’s arguments were strictly historical and philological. According to Wolf, the books we attribute to Homer are the fruit of a long development in which many poets and performers played a part, and he argued that the original source cannot ever be retraced, only surmised from much later echoes. For Wolf, the Iliad and the Odyssey were like archaeological sites, to be dug up and scrutinized in order to establish the different levels of their construction. Consequently, Homer was not the composer of his books but their end product, a colophon added by generations of bards to lend authority and coherence to the text. For Wolf too, Homer was ‘an idea’, but an idea that came to close, not to set in motion, the creative process.
Wolf’s criticism sounded a warning note not only among literary critics but also among theologians. If the unity of the ‘Bible of the Greeks’ could be called into question, why not the Bible itself? If Scripture’s purpose was not to tell stories but to tell the truth, following Cicero’s prescription for the writing of history, ‘that it shall not dare say anything false’,11 then even the Bible wasn’t exempt from scientific scrutiny. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe thought that this was going too far, and that there was a line to be drawn between the criticism of Homer’s writings and the criticism of God’s word. ‘They are now pulling to pieces the Five Books of Moses,’ he complained, late in life, to his friend Johann Peter Eckermann, ‘and if destructive criticism is noxious in anything, it is so in religious matters, because in these everything depends on faith, to which we can’t return once we’ve lost it.’12
Goethe was very familiar with Wolf and his work. In the summer of 1805, he stopped in Halle and decided to attend one of Wolf’s lectures. Wolf’s daughter agreed to allow the illustrious visitor into her father’s classroom. Goethe then told her that he wouldn’t sit among the students but would hide behind a curtain to listen. This curious gesture might have an explanation. Goethe had met Wolf ten years earlier, immediately after reading the newly published Prolegomena. He liked the man as much as he disliked the book. To Friedrich Schiller, he wrote that Wolf’s Prolegomena was ‘interesting enough, though it sits with me badly. The idea might be good and the effort respectable, if only the gentleman, in order to dress its weak flanks, had not stripped the richest gardens of the Realm of Aesthetics and turned them into boring fortifications.’13 At the same time (he didn’t say this to Schiller), Wolf’s dismantlement of Homer granted Goethe the right to aspire to the rank of epic poet himself. If, as Wolf argued, Homer did not exist as author, and if the Iliad and the Odyssey were a ragbag of different compositions, then surely a later poet, with some understanding and talent, might dig in them to find material with which to build new masterpieces. Goethe’s unfinished poem ‘Achilles’, begun in 1799, stems from an exploratory reading of Homer in search of ideas for an epic. ‘These days I was away in order to study the Iliad, to see whether between it and the Odyssey there might not lie an epic story. I only find tragic material, but is that really true or is it rather I who can’t find the epic? The end of Achilles’ life and its background allow for an epic handling… but the question arises, is it right to handle tragic material as if it were at best epic?’14 Goethe found the project so daring that, writing to Wilhelm von Humboldt about his work, he refrains from mentioning particulars for fear of appearing ‘too bold’.15 The same reason may have prompted him not to make himself visible at Wolf’s lecture.
If Homer, as Wolf maintained, was an idea, a collective noun, a concept, then for Goethe and his contemporaries it was one that changed with every age and with the needs and talents of every age, becoming an emblem of the time. In spite of Wolf’s criticism, Homer’s ancient Greece was a tempting replacement for their shattered world in the aftermath of the French Revolution, a world in which Germany held together precariously, torn by internal quarrels and enfeebled by religious differences. Johann Gottfried Herder in his histories of European philosophy, Christoph Martin Wieland in his historical novels and imaginary dialogues, Wilhelm Heinse in his utopist fiction, Friedrich Schlegel in his essays on classical antiquity, Karl Philipp Moritz in his guide to ancient mythology, and, above all, Friedrich Hölderlin in every one of his fragmented books – all, however different their visions, found in Homer and his universe a model for their ideal Germany where men were noble and brave, and poetry and philosophy their principal activities.16
For Goethe, Homer as a shifting mirror was the primordial example of the poet who first embodies the truth of his people and then allows himself to embody the truth of future men and women in faraway and inscrutable ages. Artists like Homer, whether they existed in flesh and blood or only as spirit, stood outside time because they were divine beings, intercessors between gods and men. To the poet’s craft (Homer’s and his own) Goethe lent the word Schöpfertum, ‘creative activity’,17 an act of imaginative generation that sublimates the people’s innermost needs and becomes defined through that which their nation wants. As a concept in search of a conceiver, Homer might have uttered the words which Goethe lends Christ in another context: ‘Oh my people, how I yearn for you!’18 – a god seeking believers. In Goethe’s reading, the divine Homer brought for each new generation the possibility of a cultural redemption to which Goethe himself aspired for Germany. Perhaps exaggerating a little this relationship between the two poets, the literary historian Ernst Robert Curtius declared that ‘The founding hero (heros ktistes) of European literature is Homer. Its last universal author is Goethe.’19
CHAPTER 15
The Eternal Feminine
All the argument is a cuckold and a whore.
William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 1609
Goethe started quite early making Homer his own: among the first books he read as a child were, together with the Arabian Nights, Fénelon’s Télémaque and the Iliad and Odyssey.1 By the age of twenty-one, in 1770, he was shamed by Herder, who had befriended the young student in Strasbourg, into perfecting his Greek by reading Homer with the help of a parallel Latin translation. The acquaintance with the original no doubt provided Goethe with the impetus of lending Homer’s books to his hero in The Sorrows of the Young Werther, the sensationally popular novel that Goethe wrote three years later and in less than ninety days. Shortly after arriving in the country village where he will meet for the first time the love of his life (alas, promised to another man), Werther writes to the receiver of his confidences that he longs for no new books, he needs no guidance, he wants no encouragement: all he requires is ‘a lullaby to cradle me and that I find plenty in my Homer’.2 Homer provides for Werther (and for the young Goethe, if we may confuse in this instance author and fictional character) not instruction or information, not even a text to meditate upon, but a gratifying spectrum of vicarious emotions, ‘from sorrow to joy, and from delicious melancholy to violent passion’.
The distinction between books that instruct and books that lull is one that Schiller was to address more than twenty years later, in an essay published in Die Horen, the magazine he had founded with Goethe’s support. On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry3 separates writers into two categories: those who are at one with Nature, depicting it in the truest fashion, and those who, aware of their separation from Nature, long to return to it imaginatively. For Schiller, both Homer and Goethe belonged to the first category, while he himself chose the second. Carl Gustav Jung remarked in 1921 that Schiller’s distinction was profounder than it appeared at first glance.4 What Schiller implied, said Jung, was not a distinction between fundamental classes of poets but between ‘certain characteristics or qualities of the individual product. Hence it is at once obvious that an introverted poet can, on occasion, be just as naïve as he is sentimental.’ Schiller, Jung argued, was not concerned with the question of ‘types’ but of ‘typical mechanisms’.
Homer ‘as naïve poet’, Schiller had written, ‘allows Nature to have unlimited hold over him’.5 For Jung, this meant that Homer unconsciously identified with Nature, crea
ting by analogy an association between the subject poet and his thematic object, lending it his creative power and representing it in a certain way because that is the way it shapes itself within him. ‘He is himself Nature: Nature creates in him the product.’ For Schiller, according to Jung, Homer is his own poems.
Goethe’s perception of Homer both embraced and expanded Schiller’s. He too identified Homer with the Homeric creations but, for Goethe, the relationship was not a closed circle. Every reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey rescued from the mesh something of Homer’s gift, freeing the ancient poet, over and over again, from Nature’s ‘unlimited hold’. This ongoing exchange regularly bore new fruit, as Goethe’s own writings attested. Homer’s poems provided the naïve (and sentimental) Goethe with copy for his plays, whether for entire conflated plots – Ulysses and the Phaeacians, or Ulysses and Circe, or for his Nausicaa, for example – or, more importantly, for the central material of his Faust, Part Two.
In April 1827, when Goethe was seventy-eight years old, he decided to include in the fourth volume of the authorized edition of his works (known as Ausgabe letzter Hand or ALH) a poetic fragment he called ‘Helena: a classical-romantic phantasmagoria’, subtitled ‘An Intermezzo for Faust’. Writing to a French editor interested in including the fragment in a translated edition of Faust, Goethe stressed that it was essential to understand that both texts bore no resemblance to one another, and that the story of Faust and Helen of Troy was utterly different from that of Faust and Gretchen which, in another context, he described as a ‘relationship that came to grief in the chaos of misunderstood learning, middle-class narrow-mindedness, moral disorder and superstitious delusions.’6 A synopsis, written by Goethe a year earlier, explains how Faust, Part Two differs from Faust, Part One. ‘The old legend,’ wrote Goethe, ‘tells us (and the scene is duly included in the puppet play) that Faust in his lordly arrogance requires Mephistopheles to procure for him the beautiful Helen of Greece, and that Mephistopheles after some demur consents to do so. In our own version, we felt in duty bound not to omit so significant a motif.’7
Goethe lends a tone of satire to the scene. Commanded by the German Emperor, Mephistopheles conjures up Paris and Helen at the imperial court. The courtiers are divided: the men criticize Paris while the women swoon over his handsome features, and when the men admire Helen, the women make fun of her big feet and pale complexion. Faust, overcome by Helen’s beauty, tries to cast Paris aside but, as he does, the apparitions vanish and the feast ends in a riot. Faust faints. When he wakes, he demands that Mephistopheles procure Helen for him and the two set off on a long, fantastical journey to the Kingdom of the Dead. Persephone, moved by an eloquent plea, allows Helen to return to the Land of the Living on condition that she remain in an imaginary palace resembling that of Menelaus in Sparta: there Faust must try to seduce her. Faust succeeds and a child is born from their union, but the child is killed in an accident and his death draws Faust and Helen apart. The final acts see Faust back in the Emperor’s realm where, as a reward for helping him defeat a rival, Faust is given a tract of imperial land covered by the sea. Faust ends his life blinded by Care for having despoiled and murdered an elderly couple who occupied part of his land. Mephistopheles, however, does not succeed in obtaining his soul, which is taken to heaven by mystical spirits led by the soul of Gretchen.
Helen begins with Homer and, it could be said, ends with Goethe. It is in the Iliad that she first appears as the beautiful woman ‘for whom so many Argives/lost their lives in Troy, far from native land’,8 a land that now seems to her unreal: ‘There was a world,’ she wonders, ‘or was it all a dream?’9 But like the other women in Homer, Helen is not just a pawn in the war of men. Everything about her is complex, even her beauty, which is never described except through the eyes of her beholders. There is a moment of great pathos when the old men of Troy, aloft on a tower while the Greek armies gather outside the walls for what will be yet another bloody battle, realize that everything and everyone might be lost to the enemy and know that they might be spared if Paris’s bride is returned to her rightful husband. And then they see Helen moving along the ramparts and say to one another:
‘Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder
the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty!’10
Even though the protagonists of both the Iliad and the Odyssey are men, at the core of each poem are extraordinary women. In the Odyssey, Ulysses’ troubled journey would be meaningless without Penelope at the end: not waiting idly but supporting his efforts to reach Ithaca with her unravelling of her tapestry, his advances in space counterpoised by her retreating strands in time. In the Iliad, Achilles defines the battle as ‘fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes’, since the long war hinges on kidnapped Helen, and progresses through the dispute over Chryseis (promised to Agamemnon) and Briseis (to Achilles). The action is driven by the fighting men, the justification they give for it lies with the women: the relationship between the two weaves the story into the future. Helen is magically aware of her emblematic role. She says to Paris:
Zeus planted a killing doom within us both,
so even for generations still unborn
we will live in song.11
In the last years of the sixteenth century, Christopher Marlowe, inspired by the early German versions of the Faust story, was the first to dramatize in English, in his Tragical History of Dr Faustus, the legendary encounter between the wizard doctor whose ‘study fits a mercenary drudge,/Who aims at nothing but external trash’12 and the woman who is the world’s paragon of beauty, describing her with the famous lines:
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.13
The ‘thousand ships’ belong to the catalogue of the Greek fleet in Book II of the Iliad, the ‘topless towers’ to the elders’ watch in Book III and to the Aeneid, II:56, the kiss that makes its receiver ‘immortal’ comes from Helen’s power as ‘deathless goddess’, also in Book III.14 She is, as Marlowe interprets Homer’s creation, the measure of comparison with all beauty, female or male, whether with the lovely Zenocrate in his Tamburlaine or with the handsome Gaveston in Edward II.
Two and a half centuries later, Edgar Allan Poe would equate Helen’s immortal beauty with the immortality of the ancient world itself, whose knowledge reaches us ‘from regions which are Holy Land’, thereby closing a circle in which Homer’s Helen can provide the exhausted intellectual (Faust or Poe) with all that which the world of books (including presumably those of Homer) cannot give him.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicaean barks of yore
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.15
Helen, however, not only grants immortality; she is also an eternal casus belli, a tag repeated several times in the Iliad. (though King Priam magnanimously tells her that he does not blame her but the gods: ‘They are the ones who brought this war upon me.’)16 When Goethe has her appear in Faust, Part Two, she painfully recalls the suffering that has taken place because of her, and asks if she is cursed with the dreadful gift of always having men fight for her:
Is it a memory? Has delusion seized my mind?
Was I all that? And am I? And shall I still be
The nightmare image, Helena the cities’ bane?17
If Gretchen in Faust, Part One is the seduced innocent who ends up murdering her baby, then Helen in Faust, Part Two is her counterpart, the innocent seducer whose son dies because of his own recklessness. And yet, of all the main characters, only Helen appears condemned to an eternity in which she will always be, as she herself declares, ‘so much admired and so much censured’. Helen is all ambiguity: upon seeing her, Faust cannot decide if this creature,
‘conjured out of time’,18 is a dream or a memory. All he knows is that nothing but her love will fulfil him, and in fact Faust’s only time of contentment is during his time in Helen’s arms. Perhaps, for Goethe, it is this fulfilled love that justifies the decision of saving the ‘great sinner Faust’ in the end. And yet the doctor’s salvation is not achieved through Helen’s hand. Faust, Part One ends with a ‘voice from above’ declaring Gretchen redeemed and it is Gretchen’s spirit who, in Faust, Part Two, leads the doctor’s soul to heaven, to the ‘Eternal Feminine’ of the last verses. Helen, the other incarnation of that same ‘Eternal Feminine’, must instead return to Homer’s realm: she can appear, but not remain visible in Goethe’s modern world which, in spite of its enthusiasm for the ancients, refuses (in Werther’s words) ‘to be guided or encouraged or sent into raptures.’19
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