In these circumstances, and also no doubt inspired to renewed affection by Christiane’s brave behaviour, Goethe at last decided he must give her the security of regular wifehood, and he put his decision into effect at once. There is no reason to think – on the contrary, there is every reason to doubt – that he would have taken any such step had he not been driven to it almost literally at the point of a bayonet.

But now that he was a married man, he discovered that he had all along harboured very stern moral principles with regard to the marriage tie, and he became an emphatic critic of the laxity displayed by the society in which he lived. Franz Volkmar Reinhard, who met him during the summer ‘cure’ at Karlsbad in 1807, records that he was taken aback at the vehemence of Goethe’s utterances on the sanctity and in-dissolubility of marriage – and Reinhard was head court chaplain at Dresden. There is, of course, no logical inconsistency involved in holding marriage in high regard and at the same time ‘living in sin’, but the two things do not lie very comfortably together and feeling rebels at their juxtaposition. Until his journey to Italy of 1786–8, Goethe avoided not only marriage but any binding relationship with women, and it was not from any strictness of principle but because until this epoch there had been a good deal of Georgie Porgie in that great man. Within a month of his return to Weimar, however, he had taken Christiane into his home and was openly living with her, in imitation, one may think, not only of the artists and bohemians with whom he had mixed while in Italy, but also of the Roman poets whose style he now began to adopt as his own: one understands Goethe’s ‘classicism’ better when one realizes that it meant not only writing like ‘Amor’s triumvirate’ Propertius, Catullus and Tibullus but also living like them; that ‘classicism’ meant to Goethe, not coldness and rigidity and suppression of emotion, but exactly the reverse. Emotionally he was far more relaxed and happy than he had been, and he was quite content to live as if married without actually being so, which suggests that he had no very strong feelings at all on the subject of marriage, that he was ‘pagan’ in that matter. When he was finally propelled into matrimony, it is clear that the acquisition of this novel status had a far more powerful effect on him than he had thought possible; and the first effect seems to have been to make him critical of the easy wedding and divorcing and wedding again sanctioned by custom among the petty aristocracy and bourgeoisie among which he moved.

In the winter of 1807–8, however, a complication appeared in the person of a young lady with the lovely name of Minna Herzlieb. Minna was the foster-daughter of the printer and publisher Karl Friedrich Frommann, at whose home in Jena Goethe had first met her in 1803; then she had been only a girl, but now she had reached the ripe old age of eighteen, and Goethe began to feel towards her an emotion which, while again not involving any logical inconsistency with a high regard for marriage, does not lie very comfortably beside it. He fell in love with Minna Herzlieb: the first of the affairs of his later life with women far younger than he which, because of the difference in ages, could come to nothing in the prosaic world and were for that reason sublimated into poetry. Its first product was the cycle of seventeen sonnets written as a duel with Minna’s other admirer, the Romantic poet Zacharias Werner, who was nineteen years younger than Goethe and, having just dissolved his third marriage, once more a single man. The weapons were of Werner’s choosing: he was a specialist in Italian sonnets, while to Goethe it was a strange form. But to challenge Goethe to a contest of verse-writing was a foolhardy and foredoomed undertaking, for he was and remains the heavyweight champion of the world in that sport. Schiller, who had to work hard at his poetry, has left on record his amazement at the ease with which Goethe could reel off poems in any and every form without any kind of effort or preparation: he could, if he wished, speak poems as other men speak slabs of prose, and the ability was clearly innate, in the way composing music was innate in Mozart. His sonnets to Fräulein Herzlieb are, as one could have expected, perfect imitations of the Italian model: very smooth-flowing rhythm, effortless rhyming, each poem the vehicle of one mildly ingenious idea. But they are not serious work, and were quite inadequate as a vehicle for his passion for Minna.

Of far greater weight is the drama Pandora which, although unfinished, must be counted among the most remarkable of his achievements: that it is comparatively unknown is due entirely to the existence of the second part of Faust, completed a quarter of a century later, in which the poetical innovations of Pandora are employed with even greater virtuosity and at much greater length. Goethe made no secret of the fact that this glittering imitation of Greek tragedy owed its substance to his passion for a girl forty years his junior and that such a passion could find no expression except a sublimated one in the form of art. But this vehicle too was insufficient to carry all that was now weighing on his mind and heart; it was in particular altogether silent on the subject of the conflict, of which he was at just this time acutely aware, between his idea of marriage and his experience of the waywardness of passion; and so, simultaneously with Pandora, he began a story whose immediate theme is precisely this conflict and to which he gave the odd and, when correctly understood, provocative title Die Wahlverwandtschaften – Elective Affinities.

The first time the story is mentioned is in his diary entry for 11 April 1808, where the title occurs along with plans for stories to be inserted into the loosely constructed novel Wilhelm Meister’s Travels to illustrate its sub-title The Renouncers (Die Entsagenden): the entry records that on that day he was engaged in plotting the stories for the novel, especially Elective Affinities and The Man of Fifty. The latter story has certain affinities with Elective Affinities: the man of fifty is in love with his niece but gives her up when he discovers she is in love with his son. Elective Affinities, as a short story, was begun on 29 May 1808 and finished at the end of July. But in April 1809 Goethe decided to expand it, employing the existing story as an outline upon which to work. He devoted the spring and summer to its composition, and on 28 July he sent the opening chapters to the printer so that he would be compelled to proceed with the rest at a brisk pace. The work was completed on 4 October and published by Cotta in two volumes the same autumn.

2

I have called the original form of Elective Affinities a story: the German is Novelle, for which there is no exact English equivalent. It means first of all a fictional narrative longer than a story (Erzählung, French conte) but shorter than a novel (Roman, the same word in French), but as a rule too short to be called a short novel. A long story is, I suppose, the English expression. But the classic German Novelle possesses distinguishing characteristics other than its length which make it a distinct species of narrative. These characteristics are: strict economy, deliberate avoidance of the breadth and relaxed tempo of the Roman; emphasis on plot, so that the characters of the story are subordinate to it and their characteristics are functions of it; as a consequence, they are given only forenames or titles or the names of their professions or an ironic surname, but not naturalistic names; the milieu is not naturalistic, natural scenes possess a function beyond their function as the setting of the action; the action itself is not naturalistic, it proceeds in a more orderly fashion than everyday life or everyday life in a novel, there is a symmetry of action foreign to reality and often the outcome is prefigured, so that there is a sense of inevitability about it; finally, there is always an explicit or implied narrator, the story is supposed to be something the narrator has experienced or heard about and not something he has invented, his function is to reproduce an actual event as a conscious work of art, so that his manner will display a higher degree of artistry and artificiality than is normally found in a novel. These ‘rules’ were, of course, extracted from the practice of German writers and not invented in advance: but by the late eighteenth century German literature had become a very self-conscious affair, and Novellen were then deliberately framed so as to accord with the ‘rules’, the object being, as with all ‘formalism’, to impose shape and order upon the flux of experience. The outcome was a type of fictional narrative as immediately identifiable as a strict fugue or an Italian operatic aria: although the reader or listener (for the Novelle clearly originates in the spoken story) will not know in advance the details of what is coming he will know the kind of artistic experience to expect. Perhaps the best-known Novelle is Goethe’s story called simply Novelle and intended, as its title (or rather lack of title) indicates, as a model of the form.