The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin notably gave his own arcane take on Goethe’s style in his essay, “Discourse in the Novel”, but his view of style goes well beyond the author’s surface manner and instead describes his themes, his totality of effect, for which Bakhtin uses Goethe’s preoccupation with depicting the world in geological time as an example. Now this may arguably be a “style,” and I’m not going spend a whole review arguing with one of the most brilliant literary critics of all time–that would be punching above my weight–but I still think that style, colloquially speaking, is something you can just glance at a page and waft the scent of, which is what average people on the street–again, the literate ones–are talking about when they use the word style. (Yeah, Mikhail, I know, that’s *Formalism* and I’m a boob for talking about it, when instead I should be worshipping every jarring polysyllable you heteroglozed, because page-for-page, no critic accomplishes more than you.)

To Germans, defining Goethe’s style is not nearly so hard: early Goethe is known to them as a raging Romantic poet whose volatile, drastic-action-taking heroes like Werther and Götz von Berlichingen created the necessity for the term Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) before Schiller took that indication to a whole new level of insanity that struck English-speaking observers at the turn of the 19th century as shocking and impressive; and it certainly was impressive compared with their own polite, jangling Augustan productions (in the same way that Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster were also more impressive to the generation succeeding the French Revolution.) This was all part of a centuries-long tug-of-war between the opinion of French Classicism–these are the rules, they were invented 2000 years ago, deviate from them and you’re wrong–and Romanticism/Realism/Naturalism–the paint-from-nature crowd. Early Goethe belongs with this latter group of nature-and-pathos-loving Rousseaus, Wordsworths, Shelleys, Byrons, and Mr. Rochesters (the latter is a send-up of the whole race), albeit Werther is also an early critique of that whole mindset. The later Goethe is more contemplative and philosophical; he has that stateliness of language and thought which came to be defined by literary historians as Weimar Classicism (an intellectual abutment partly thrown up by the reflected force of one Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the art historian and father of modern archaeology.)