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A Review by Benjamin Schwarz

Few readers — even Atlantic readers — will actually attempt Boyle's entire biography of Goethe. This, his second of a projected three volumes (which covers the years 1790 to 1803, and has just been released in paperback), runs 958 pages, and life, after all, is short. For years I shied away from Volume I (848 pages), and I read Volume II only when forced — I sat on a book-prize jury that was considering it. Once finished, however, I couldn't wait to open the first volume. Even if you don't read this opus, you should know about it: Boyle's will remain one of the few towering works of biography and history of our time. Recognized as the sovereign intellect of his age — he was a poet, a playwright, a theater director, a philosopher, a botanist, and an expert in politics, mining (!), and optics — Goethe knew or corresponded with nearly every important European mind. This is a suitably rich study: Boyle writes with dexterous authority on the French Revolution's impact on the Continent's intellectual and political life; with emotional acuity about "the utter ordinariness" of Goethe's love for his plump mistress (the mother of his son), and on Goethe's ambivalent friendship with Schiller; with novelistic vividness on the Prussians' horrifyingly chaotic campaign against the French revolutionary armies; with stylish engagement in summoning the "philosophical crucible" of late-eighteenth-century Jena ("intellectually speaking ... the most exciting place in the world," where Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Humboldt, Hölderlin, and the Schlegel brothers were all writing); with fluency and originality in dissecting Kantian philosophy and the ideas of nearly all the major figures Goethe moved among (for those, like myself, far more familiar with English and French intellectual history, Boyle, the head of the German department at Cambridge, is a discerning and sympathetic guide to the intricacies of German thought and literature); and with deftness and sureness as he interweaves his (almost daily) account of Goethe's life with an astute and innovative critical assessment of Goethe's writings. Rarely is a definitive and magnificent work of scholarship so engrossing: Boyle's very amplitude captivates the reader, as he slowly, commandingly envelopes you in Goethe's mind and age.

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