The great day is at hand. The Germans have been agog in recent months in anticipation of the 250th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, their polymath extraordinaire who was poet, lawyer, painter, dramatist, botanist, biologist and government minister, and who was born on August 28th, 1749, in Frankfurt.
Goethe graduated in law from the University of Strasbourg, but quickly abandoned that profession, devoting himself - if the lawyers will forgive me - to more intellectual pursuits. He soon settled in Weimar, where he became a trusted confidant of the ruling Duke, and it was there, apart from a brief sojourn in Italy, that he was to spend the reminder of his life.
One of Goethe's earliest works, Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers, or The Sorrows of the Young Werther, caused a sensation when it was published in 1774, and caught the public imagination in a way that had never been previously known. The protagonist is of a sensitive, melancholy and artistic temperament, a misfit in contemporary society, and suffers from an unrequited love for Charlotte; scandalously in the context of the fiction of the period, the story ends with
Werther's suicide. The novel gave rise to the cultural phenomenon of "Wertherism" throughout Europe: young men would wear blue coats and yellow breeches in imitation of their hero; china tea sets decorated with scenes from the novel were produced; and "Werther" perfumes and other toiletries were widely sold. Goethe himself, we are told, was much embarrassed by the fuss.
Of course, Goethe also wrote Faust, and dabbled in science, producing quite respected works in biology and optics. Faust and Goethe's biology proved to be of lasting value, but of his views on optics, a refutation of the classical Newtonian theories, the less said the better. And to meteorologists he is remembered for a little poem entitled Howard's Eulogy.
Luke Howard had devised a way of classifying clouds - a methodology, in essence, still in use today. Goethe, a keen observer of the atmosphere himself, wrote to Howard in 1822 to ask for details, and so enthralled was he by the information he received that he dedicated a poem to the Englishman in gratitude for this enlightenment:
Howard gives us with his clear mind
The gain of lessons new to all mankind;
That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp
He first has gained, first held with mental grasp.
Defined the doubtful, fix'd its limit-line,
And named it fitly - Be the honour thine!
As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall,
Let the world think but of thee, who taught it all.