Goethe The Poet and the Age, Vol I The Poetry of Desire (1749 1790)

  title : Goethe. V ol. 1, The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790) : The Poet and the Age author : Boyle, Nicholas. publisher : Oxford University Press isbn10 | asin : 0192829815 print isbn13 : 9780192829818 ebook isbn13 : 9780585317779 language : English subject Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,--1749-1832, Authors, German--

  18th century--Biography, Authors, German--19th century-- Biography. publication date : 1992 lcc : PT2049.B53 1992eb ddc : 831/.6 subject : Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,--1749-1832, Authors, German--

  18th century--Biography, Authors, German--19th century-- Biography.

  cover

  Goethe The Poet and the Age:

  Volume I 'Monumental and massively learned . . . excellent on the intellectual background' Michael Hoffman, Independent on Sunday 'Unusually rich detail . . . lucid and often witty prose . . . In its sovereign command of the biographical and socio- cultural material, its thoughtful and judicious manner, its unifying structure, and its elegance of style . . . it should remain a standard account' Theodore Ziolkowski, Times Literary Supplement 'Should become a milestone in the history of Goethe biographies since its scope and detailed knowledge can scarcely be surpassed' Hans Reiss, Neue Zürcher Zeitung 'There is nothing comparable to this study in any language . . . crammed with reliable and up-to-date information' Christoph Schweitzer, The New York Times Book Review 'It is not every literary historian who could rise to Boyle's narrative verve . . . broad historical understanding and critical reflection' T. J. Reed, Weekend Telegraph 'Brilliant analysis of individual poems' Stephen Spender, Sunday Telegraph Nicholas Boyle is Fellow and Tutor at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and University Lecturer in German

  

  Goethe The Poet and the Age:

  Volume I The Poetry of Desire

  (17491790) Nicholas Boyle

  

  Disclaimer: This book is part of a volume set. netLibrary may or may not have all the companion volumes in eBook format. Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press © Nicholas Boyle 1991 First published 1991 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1992 Reprinted 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Boyle, Nicholas Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. I, The poetry of desire (17491790)

  1. Poetry in German. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17491832

  1. Title 831.6

  ISBN 0198158661

  ISBN 0192829815 (Pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Goethe: The Poet and the Age. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. The poetry of desire (17491790)/Nicholas Boyle.

  1. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17491832. 2. Authors, German18th centuryBiography. 3. Authors, German19th centuryBiography. I. Boyle, Nicholas. PT2049.G66 1991 831'.6dc20 9045050

  Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd. Midsomer Norton, Avon

   page_iv

  For Michael and Rosaleen who made it possible

  

  Preface More must be known, or at any rate there must be more to know, about Goethe than about almost any other human being. As the age of paper passes, so he comes to seem its supreme product. Not only did he do and think more than most menhe, and others, left more written traces of what he did and thought. It is true, he also left monuments of a different kind. Nearly 3,000 drawings by him survive, as do the villa he built, the palace he rebuilt, and the park he first laid out. He amassed very substantial private collections of mineralogical specimens, incised gems, and prints and drawings, and if his own working library was not bibliographically outstanding that was because he had at his disposal the resources, and the buying power, of one of the largest princely libraries in Germany, which he spent a lifetime enriching. He ran a duchy for three years, a theatre for twenty-five, and a university and an art school for longer still. A shrewd contemporary thought his greatest achievement to be his devoted personal guidance of his sovereign, eight years his junior, whom he educated into one of the most enlightened of Germany's minor rulers in the early nineteenth century, and who was a model for his neighbour and relative, the Prince Consort. Goethe deserves his place on the Albert Memorial. But of course what matters now is the writing.

  A national celebrity at the age of 24, a European celebrity twelve months later, Goethe was thereafter, until he died in his eighty-third year, sufficiently prominent, remarkable, and at times powerful, for those who met him to want to record what he said and those who corresponded with him to take care of what he wrote. After he moved to Weimar the daily chronicle of his doings, now being put together for the first time in seven large volumes by Robert Steiger, is practically continuous, especially once he began to keep a regular diary in 1796. Accounts of conversations with him, excluding Eckermann's famous collection, run to some 4,000 printed pages, over 12,000 letters from him are extant and about 20,000 letters addressed to him. His official papers run to four volumes, and Wilhelm Bode filled another three with contemporary gossip about him, extracted from the correspondence and diaries of third parties. There may be parallels to this flood of documentation for an individual life, though few surely can be sustained over so long a periodVoltaire or Gladstone perhaps? certainly not Napoleon. What makes Goethe's case manifestly unique is the quantity, quality, and nature of the literary and scientific writing which caused this interest in him and which expands indefinitely our potential knowledge of his inner life through its unceasing stream of reflection on the events and projects of his outward career. The most important written memorials to Goethe are the literary works in which he sought to make the particular occasions of his individual existence into general symbols whose significance

  

would be appreciated by readers, initially of his own time and place, but increasingly, in his later years, of other times and places as well. That individual existence had its eccentricitiesamong them, an English audience may think, that of being German. None the less, this book goes to press at a time when it seems worth remembering that the centre of Europe, if its diameter is drawn from Lisbon to Moscow, lies somewhere between Frankfurt and Weimar. If Germany is now re-emerging from the marginal position into which it was pressed, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, by the overseas expansion of the western European powers, and by their implacably anti-Imperial policies, particularly their continued fomentation after 1630 of the Thirty Years' War, a first stage in that re-emergence into European centrality occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps because of a different relation between the state power and the middle classes from that which prevailed further west, there occurred in Germany at that time a religious crisis whose explosive energies, channelled through the then uniquely extensive German system of universities, issued in a series of intellectual and cultural innovations which were to have a most powerful influence on the European, and North American, mind of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biblical criticism, historical and classical scholarship, reinterpretative theology, Idealist (and ultimately materialist) philosophy, sociology, neo-classical art and architecture, aesthetics, and the academic study of modern literature, all were decisively influenced, and in some cases actually originated, by the German cultural revolution which began in the 1790s, and among the last fruits of which in the later nineteenth century, replete with the seeds of the age to come, was the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Probably not coincidentally, it was also the greatest age of German music. A first reason for reading and studying Goethe is that his literary works are the medium in which a superlatively intelligent and unusually well-placed observer discerned and responded to these numerous shifts in the bedrock of intellectual Europe, some of which led to earthquakes in his own time, others only later. A second reason is that Goethe was a poet. He was a born versifier and phrase-maker, so that Faust to a German audience, like Hamlet to an English one, seems a collection of quotations, and no issue of a German quality newspaper is without a handful of Goethe allusions, acknowledged, or unrecognized. He had a natural affinity with the rhythms of the German language and throughout his life produced, unpredictably, but with dreamlike facility, lyric poems of unique form and character, many of which have become internationally known through their later musical settings (which however sometimes obscure the specifically poetic merits of the original). Faust is certainly the greatest long poem of recent European literature, and it was Goethe's example, not Marlowe's, which inspired the numerous further treatments of the theme in the 150 years after its first publication. But Goethe was not just a poetfor the whole Romantic generation, in Germany, England

  

and even France, he was the poet, and through his influence on that generation he affected all subsequent notions of what poets are and poetry does. In 1797, when the first recognizably Romantic movements began, Goethe was already a figure of authority and achievement, a model of worldly competence and success whose ultimate loyalty was none the less only, and avowedly, to his 'art'. Goethe was the first poet who in virtue solely of his poetry, and not of its sublime or sacred subject-matter, or his contingent personal erudition, was also a secular sage. Indeed it would scarcely be too much to say that with the eighth volume of his Literary Works, which was published in 1789 and contained a selection of his shorter poems, Goethe created the very genre of lyric poetry as it is practised today: the book of shorter pieces linked not in the first instance formally or thematically, or by their devotional purpose or their suitability for musical setting, but by their origin in the discrete occasions of the poet's life, what he sees and reads and feels and thinks about, and all given meaning and importance not by any transcendent order but by their reference, explicit or implicit, to the poet's self and his activity of poetic making. Only Petrarch offers a comparable concentration on the self and its vicissitudes, and from Petrarch Goethe is distinguished by the wholly secular context of his thought and feeling. More immediate predecessors there certainly wereKlopstock, Gray, or, particularly, Rousseaubut these furnished only elements for the compound which Goethe was the first to synthesize and which he bequeathed to the nineteenth century, and beyond. To come to understand Goethe properly is to adjust one's understanding both of modern literature, its course and derivation, and of Europe, and Germany's place within it, and that equally for an English and for a German reader. Goethe's name has been much used, and abused, in a search for identity by German nations which came into existence after his death. One of the principal difficulties in reaching a dispassionate view of Germany's painful struggle towards nationhood, and of Goethe's part in it, has been that the main critical instrument available for analysing ideological delusions, namely Marxist social theory, is itself a product of the particular process which stands in need of analysis. Since 1945 the alternative to the manifest inadequacies of Marxist Goethe-scholarship has been, in the Federal Republicand more recently, though for different reasons, in the Democratic Republic tooa programmatically non- political approach, which has done marvels in editing, annotation, and the accumulation of source-material, but has not always faced the challenging task of interpretation. In the English-speaking world Goethe's reputation suffered in his lifetime from endlessly repeated charges of immorality and irreligion, then from accusations of obscurantism, nineteenth-century progressivism, antinomianism, and literary incompetence, and latterly from benign neglect. Barker Fairley's admirable literary and psychological Study of Goethe is now well over forty years old, and the last substantial and original English biography, by J. G. Robertson, nearly sixty. The larger and

  

somewhat earlier biography by Peter Hume Brown was the first such undertaking since G. H. Lewes's great monograph of 1855, a most remarkable work of scholarship for its time, and one of the first Goethe biographies in any language. There has been much good writing about Goethe in English since the Second World War, but most of it has been for a specialized audience, the obvious exceptions being Erich Heller's stimulating essays in The Disinherited Mind and W.

  H. Bruford's Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, to both of which my debt is as great as it is obvious. The present book has been written in the belief that two different needs can be met by a biographical study of Goethe and his works which starts from first principles and assumes as little prior knowledge of its subject as possible. On the one hand the reader with some knowledge of English and French literary history, but unacquainted with the German language or its literature, or anything but the outlines of the nation's political development, should find here enough information to set Goethe's life in the context of his age, and his poetry in the context of his life. On the other hand, those already familiar with Goethe's works will, I hope, learn something from seeing them presented against their biographical, social-historical, and philosophical background, and discussed, as far as possible, in a rigorously chronological sequence. These have not on the whole been features of the synopses of Goethe's achievement published since 1945, even of the three-volume study, both authoritative and sensitive, of Emil Staiger. To say that, however, is not to be ungrateful, for the present work has been made possible only by the magnificent scholarship of the last half- century. Several annotated editions and selections, Femmel's Corpus der Goethezeichnungen, Flach and Dahl's edition of Goethes amtliche Schriften, the Leopoldina edition of the scientific works, E. and R. Grumach's new collection of

  

Begegnungen und Gespräche, Steiger's 'documentary chronicle', and various other projects, variously advanced, are the

  foundation of this studyalong, it must be said, with the indispensable legacies of earlier generations, the Weimar edition of the works and letters, and the many volumes in which Wilhelm Bode recorded his unequalled knowledge of the literary and social world of later eighteenth-century Weimar. What I can offer is only a synthesis of syntheses, whose value will long be outlasted by that of the compilations on which it is based; yet if such a synthesis is not attempted from time to time, and for a particular time, to what end are the compilations made? The secondary writing about Goethe long ago grew to a point at which no one man could hope to encompass it; the primary sources are now not far behind: it is a moment to pause for thought, and to attempt to situate this extraordinary human phenomenon in that widest possible context in which by its own nature it demands to be inserted. For the specialist there may emerge from the exercise a new view of a commanding literary presence: as a free man responding to the social, spiritual and intellectual demands of modernity, as they formulated themselves around him. For the non-specialist there is the promise of a new

  

acquaintance: limited and even peculiar, no doubt, as we all are, but grand and deep and rich as none of us is, and few of our forebears have been. It is my hope too that the following pages may find some readers in Germany, for they are written in the belief that the Federal Republic has represented not only what is best, and oldest, in the nation's political traditions, but also what is closest to the mind of Goethe, and it is time for the rest of Europe to start to say thank you.

  To make Goethe accessible, whether to the general reader, to the student, or to the scholar, was my principal concern in the organization and writing of this book. Only passages in verse, or significantly poetic prose, have been cited in German, and always with a translation. Translations, which are my own, are as literal as possible, and in some cases the word order is deliberately closer to the original than normal English usage would allow, in order to hint at important effects that would otherwise be lost. The book has to some extent been conceived as a companion to the Hamburger Ausgabe, as the selection from Goethe's works and correspondence most likely to be readily available to the student, and wherever possible texts have been cited from this edition; where this is not possible recourse is had to the new edition of Der junge Goethe, by Hanna Fischer-Lamberg, for Chapters 13, and thereafter to the Weimar edition. The text is cited precisely as found in the edition of reference, since there seemed no way of imposing consistency on the different editorial practices, and no purpose in it either. Place names are given in anglicized forms, when these are available and not obsolete, personal names, except for a few well-known monarchs, are left in their original form. 'Erbprinz' is inaccurately but conveniently rendered as 'Crown Prince'. To aid pronunciation, feminine forms ina have generally been preferred to those ine (e.g. Amalia). The page has been kept (almost) free of footnotes and references, but sources for quotations and for important facts or assertions are grouped at the end of the volume and identified by page number and a few key words.

  The reader will see from the contents list that within each chapter sections mainly devoted to Goethe's life alternate, on the whole, with sections mainly devoted to his works. Not that the two subjects can be separatedon the contrary, it is a main theme of the whole book that they cannot. But to make orientation easier, and to make the biographical narrative more continuous, it seemed better to confine the literary discussion of major works to discrete sections. The biographical sections still contain some discussion of minor and shorter works, such as lyrical poems, and also of Goethe's scientific concerns and of his drawingenough, I hope, to confirm the general principle of the inseparability of mind and matter. Works composed over a long period are treated as far as possible stage by stage in the course of their development. With Goethe's æuvre the biographical approach has great analytical power, and to abstract from the gradual process of composition is the surest way of reintroducing those ideological preconceptions and conventional judgements which I am trying to eliminate. The headings to the pages, and the index of

  

  Goethe's works, should help the reader to find the main passages relevant to any particular work. It is always a pleasure to write about Goethe, and naturally it is a pleasure to express one's gratitude to those who have enabled one to do so. I should like to thank Stephen Brook, who first suggested, more than ten years ago, that I should write this book, and Virginia Llewellyn-Smith and Catherine Clarke, of Oxford University Press, who encouraged me to continue with the project. A scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung made it possible for me, under the benevolent direction of Professor A. Schöne, to write a first draft of Chapters 1 to 3, and the generosity of that remarkable institution deserves the warmest recognition in these chill times. My work was rendered much easier by the helpfulness of the staff in the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Gättingen and in the Cambridge University Library, and by the protracted loan of many volumes from the Beit Library of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in Cambridge. I am grateful to my colleagues, and especially to Dr J. Cameron Wilson of Jesus College, Cambridge, who readily took over my normal duties while I was on study leave, and to Wolfgang and Rosemarie Bleichroth, who were the kindest of hosts and who drew my attention to many of the silhouettes which adorn the book. They, and Paul Connerton, proved indefatigably tolerant of Goethocentric conversation and so have left their mark on much of my exposition. A timely gift of books from Anneliese Winkler, to whom I owe any facility in the German language I may have, greatly eased the later stages of my work. Dr M. R. Minden kindly passed on to me a number of books from the library of Trevor Jones, who I like to think would have enjoyed the use I have made of them. I wish particularly to thank those who have given their time and attention to read and comment, often at greater length than I had any right to expect, on parts of the manuscript as it has developed: Professor J. P. Stern, Professor and Mrs J.

  C. O'Neill, Professor T. J. Reed, Dr E. C. Stopp, and my dear colleague the late Professor U. Limentani, who gave me invaluable assistance with Chapter 7. They have saved me from many errors, obscurities, and fatuities which the reader will not see: those which remain on view are all my own work. I am grateful to the editors of German Life and Letters for permitting the republication of some material in Chapter 3 which first appeared in their journal. A general word of thanks is also appropriate here to those who have furnished me with illustrative material and given permission for its use, and who are more specifically acknowledged in the List of Illustrations. That there are any illustrations at all is a result of the generosity of the MorsheadSalter Fund of Magdalene College, Cambridge, of the Tiarks Fund and the Jebb Fund of the University of Cambridge, and especially, and once again, of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, who have all made substantial grants towards the cost of reproductions. My thanks go not only to the institutions themselves, but also to their individual representatives who have helped and encouraged me.

  

  A project of this kind has necessarily passed beneath the fingers of many typists who deserve grateful acknowledgement: Rosemary Baines, Marion Lettau, Nicholas and Deborah Hopkin, and above all my wife, Rosemary, a busy solicitor who none the less not only typed Chapters 4 to 8 but was also their most rigorous critic. To her support throughout, but especially in the difficult hours and days of what has been a more demanding undertaking than I hope is now apparent, I owe both the completion of this first volume and the prospect that the second volume will follow it with reasonable expedition. My parents-in-law spared neither their time nor their energy in sustaining us both and in managing a household which, despite including two children under three, at times seemed to revolve around a man dead one and a half centuries ago. This book is their work also, and I dedicate it to them.

  N.B. JANUARY 1990 Preface to the Paperback Edition This reissue has made it possible to introduce a number of minor corrections. I am particularly indebted to Professor T. J. Reed for his helpful vigilance. When I wrote the Preface to the original edition I did not know that thanks to a Research Readership awarded by the British Academy I would be able to compose the Index to this volume much more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case. I am glad to be able to take this first opportunity to express in public my gratitude to the Academy for their support for this project.

  N.B. NOVEMBER 1991

  

  Contents List of Illustrations xvii

  1

  1 Germany in the Eighteenth Century

  3 The Age of Goethe?

  8 Princes, Pietists, and Professors

  19 The Literary Context, to 1770

  2

  41 Origins of a Poet

  43 Frankfurt and the Goethes 53 'More chatterbox than substance': 17491765

  62 A Burnt-out Case?: 17651770

  77 First Writings

  3

  89 Prometheus Unbound (1770775)

  91 The Awakening: 17701771 107 Life and Literature: Works, 17701771 125 Between Sentimentalism and Storm and Stress: 17721774 152 Detonating the Bomb: Works, 17721774 178 The Messiah and His Nation: 17741775

  4 Displacement 231 Weimar in 1775 233 Why Goethe Stayed 239 The Minister 251 Frau von Stein 256 Literary Difficulties of a Statesman 266

  5 Court Favourite (17751780) 281 Confidence and Indeterminacy: 17751777 283 Works, 17751777 288 Tragedy and Symbolism: 17771780 294 Works, 17771780 312

  6 The Baron (17801786) 333 Between Society and Nature: 17801784 335 Works, 17801784 356 'I thought I was dead': 17851786 379 Works, 17851786 397

   page_xv

  7 413 To Italy at Last (17861788) 415 The Road to Rome 431 'Quite as much toil as enjoyment': October 1786February 1787 447 A Glimpse of Fulfilment: Iphigenia and 'Forest. Cavern' 458 Uneasy Paradise 466 The Gardens of Alcinous 482 In the High School of Art: 17871788 514 The Great Soul: Works, 17871788

  8 531 The Watershed (17881790) 533 Old and New Faces: JuneDecember 1788 550 Rome in Weimar: December 1788May 1789 579 'I Am a Different Man': JuneDecember 1789 600

  Summa Summarum: The Edition Completed 641 Farewell to Italy: JanuaryJune 1790

  Works Cited in the Notes 667 Notes 673 General Index 765 Index of Goethe's Works 803

   page_xvi

  List of lllustrations

  1. J. H. W. Tischbein: Goethe at the Window of His Lodgings in Rome (1787)

  2. J. P. Melchior: Johann Caspar Goethe (1779)

  3. J. P. Melchior: Catharina Elisabeth Goethe (1779)

  4. The Goethes' house in Frankfurt after Rebuilding, a Print of 1823 after F. W. Delkeskamp

  5. Goethe: Self-portrait (?) in his attic room in Frankfurt (176870)

  6. J. L. E. Morgenstern: Cornelia Goethe (c. 1770)

  7. Goethe: Parsonage and farmyard, Sesenheim ( 17701)

  8. J. H. Schröder: Charlotte Kestner, née Buff (1782)

  9. E. M. von Türckheim: Portrait Miniature of Her Parents, Anna Elisabeth ('Lili') von Türckheim, née Schönemann, and B. F. von Türckheim (c. 1798)

  10. A. Graff: Herder (1785)

  11. H. Strecker: Merck (1772)

  12. S. Collings and T. Rowlandson: More of Werter. The Seperation. Charlotte perserved from Destruction by Albert and Hymen whilst Werter in the Excess of Frenzy Puts an End to His Existance (1786)

  13. Goethe: Swiss Mountain Huts (June 1775)

  14. J. Juel: Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1779)

  15. G. O. May: Goethe (1779)

  16. G. M. Kraus: Duchess Luise of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (c. 1781)

  17. Charlotte von Stein: Self-portrait (1790)

  18. Goethe: The Brocken by Moonlight (December 1777)

  19. Goethe: Mist Rising from the Valleys Near Ilmenau (223 July 1776)

  21. J. P. Hackert: St Peter's in Rome, from the Ponte Molle (Ponte Milvio) (1769)

  22. J. H. W. Tischbein: Goethe in the Campagna (1787)

  23. J. H. W. Tischbein: Duchess Anna Amalia among the Ruins of Pompeü (1789)

  24. J. H. W. Tischbein: Self-Portrait in His Roman Studio (1785)

  25. Goethe: Balcony with Vase (1787)

  26. Goethe: Italian Seacoast with Full Moon (June 1787)

  27. C. H. Kniep: Temple of Segesta (1787?)

  28. Goethe: Schloss Wörlitz (1778)

  29. Goethe: Imaginary Landscape with Bay and Castello (Autumn/Winter 1787)

  30. F. Bury: Self-Portrait (1782)

  31. C. H. Kniep: Self-portrait (1785)

  32. J. H. Lips: Carl Philipp Moritz (1786)

  33. J. H. W. Tischbein: 'Emma Hart' (Later Lady Hamilton) as a Sibyl (1788)

  34. Goethe: Trees (1788)

  35. J. H. Meyer: Ulysses and Circe, Copy after Carracci

  36. C. Küchler: Schiller (after J. C. Reinhart) (1787)

  37. Goethe: Christiana Vulpius, with Shawl (17889) Silhouettes H. E. Stark: Wieland, 1806

  1 anon.: Goethe at 14 (left) and 20 41 anon.: F. H. Jacobi (left) and J. W. Wendt: Lavater, 1782 89 anon.: Ladies of the Weimar Court, 1790s?

  231

  G. M. Klauer (?): Goethe and Fritz von Stein, Early 1780s 281 anon.: Caroline Herder and Her Sons, 1782 (left) and Goethe, early 1780s? 333

  L. Duttenhofer (?): Angelica Kauffmann, c. 1806 413 anon.: Duchess Anna Amalia, Early 1790s? 531

  Central Europe in the 1780s, after a Map in The New Cambridge Modern History Atlas xx The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce the illustrations: Freies Deutches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt on Main. Photo Ursula Edelmann: plates 14, 6, 8, 9 Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar: plates 21, 24, 32

Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar: plates 5, 7, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 2528,

29, 33, 34, 37, silhouettes on pages 1, 89, 231, 281, 333, 413, 531 Bildarchiv Foto Marburg: plates 10, 11, 15, 23, 30, 31 Trustees of the British Museum: plate 12 Ullstein Bilderdienst: plate 17

   page_xviii

  Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: plate 20 Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt on Main. Photo Ursula Edelmann: plate 22 Bild-Archiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna: plate 36 Goethe-Museum, Düsseldorf. Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung: silhouette on page 41 (left).

  The silhouette on page 41 (right) is from J. Vogel, Goethes Leipziger Studentenjahre (Leipzig, 1899). Plate 35 is from O. Harnack, Zur Nachgeschichte der italienischen Reise (Weimar, 1890). The map is reproduced by permission of George Philip and Son Ltd.

  

  Central Europe in the 1780s

  

  Photo Section

  1. J. H. W. Tischbein: Goethe at the window of his lodgings in Rome (1787)

  

  2. J. P. Melchior: Johann Caspar Goethe (1779)

  4. The Goethes' house in Frankfurt after rebuilding, print after F. W. Delkeskamp, 1823

  5. Goethe: Self-portrait(?) in his attic room in Frankfurt (176870)

  

plate_2

  6. J. L. E. Morgenstern: Cornelia Goethe (c. 1770)

  7. Goethe: Parsonage and farmyard, Sesenheim (17701)

   plate_6

  8. J. H. Schröder: Charlotte Kestner, née Buff (1782)

  

  9. E. M. von Türckheim: Anna Elisabeth ('Lili') von Türckheim, née Schönemann and B. F. von Türckheim (c. 1798)

  11 . H. Strecker: Merck (1772)

  

plate_9

  12. S. Collings and T. Rowlandson: More of Werter. The Seperation (1786)

  13. Goethe: Swiss mountain huts (June 1775)

   plate_12

  14. J. Juel: Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1779)

  15. G. O. May: Goethe (1779)

  

plate_14

  16. G. M. Kraus: Duchess Luise of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (c. 1781)

  17. Charlotte von Stein: Self-portrait (1790)

  

plate_16

  18. Goethe: The Brocken by moonlight (December 1777)

  19. Goethe: Mist rising from the valleys near Ilmenau (223 July 1776)

  20. Giandomenico Tiepolo: Venetian mailboat (17603)

  21. J. P. Hackert: St Peter's, Rome, from the Ponte molle or Ponte milvio (1769)

   plate_22

  23. J. H. W. Tischbein: Duchess Anna Amalia among the ruins of Pompeü (1789)

  24. J. H. W. Tischbein: Self-portrait in his Roman studio (1785)

  

plate_23

  25. Goethe: Balcony with vase (1787)

   plate_25

  27. C. H. Kniep: Temple of Segesta (1787?)

  28. Goethe: Schloss Wörlitz (1778)

  29. Goethe: Imaginary landscape with bay and castello (autumn/winter 1787)

  

plate_27

  30. F. Bury: Self-portrait (1782)

  32. J. H. Lips: Carl Philipp Moritz (1786)

  33. J. H. W. Tischbein: 'Emma Hart' (later Lady Hamilton) as a Sibyl (1788)

  

plate_30

  34. Goethe: Trees (1788)

  35. J. H. Meyer, copy after Carracci: Ulysses and Circe

   plate_34

  36. C. Küchler, after J. C. Reinhart: Schiller (1787)

  37. Goethe: Christiana Vulpius, with shawl (17889)

  

plate_36

  1 Germany in the Eighteenth Century

  

  The Age of Goethe? When Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in the free city of Frankfurt on the Main on 28 August 1749, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa had just, after nearly a decade of war, confirmed her right to rule Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and, through her husband Francis I, Frankfurt's nominal sovereign, the Imperial German territories, a right which she was to exercise for the next thirty years; Frederick II, not yet 'the Great', of Prussia, just installed in the enjoyment of illegally annexed Silesia, had nearly forty years still before him as 'first servant of his state'; Louis XV was half-way through his sixty-year reign over a wealthy but mismanaged France that was still the supreme power of Europe; George

  II, Elector of Hanover, and the last English king to lead his troops into battle, had done so on behalf of Maria Theresa, and against the French, at Dettingen, not far from Frankfurt, in 1743 (the occasion for Handel's Dettingen Te Deum) three years later his own throne had been successfully defended in the last pitched battle on British soil, Culloden. Within living memory England had had a Catholic king, and Vienna had been besieged by the Turks. In 1749 the North American colonies were loyal to Britain; Quebec and Louisiana were French; Clive and Dupleix were rivals in India; and Australia was effectively unknown. The mail from London to Edinburgh took over a week, Moët and Chandon had begun to export the recently invented champagne, and a pineapple cost as much as a horse. In 1749 Pope was five years dead, Johnson had begun, but not completed, the publication of his Dictionary, Voltaire had yet to move to, and from, Potsdam, Rousseau had yet to deny publicly the moral benefits of civilization, and Mozart had yet to be born. When the ennobled Privy Councillor von Goethe* died in Weimar on 22 March 1832 there had for a quarter of a century been no Holy Roman Empire; France had just passed through a second revolution and was ruled by a citizen- king; and England, having emancipated Roman Catholics, had begun to reform its Parliament. Napoleon, Beethoven, and Hegel were dead, Walter Scott and Jeremy Benthaman almost exact contemporary of Goethe's, born in 1748were to die in the same year. In 1832 Alexis de Tocqueville was touring the America of seventh President Jackson, in search of democracy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, having resigned from the ministry, was touring Europe in search of religion. The first photographs had been taken by Niepce and Daguerre; the first passenger-carrying steam railway line was operating between Liverpool and Manchester; The Times had been publishing for nearly

• The 'von', the particle indicating nobility, bestowed on Goethe in 1782, is nowadays usually dropped.

  

forty years. Otto von Bismarck was a student in Göttingen, where Gauss and Weber were about to erect the first electric telegraph, and Dr Arnold was headmaster of Rugby, already the home of a less useful invention. University College, London, had a professorial chair of German, and German philosophy was being taught in the Antipodes. Tolstoy was 3, Baudelaire was 11, Wagner was 19 and composing his first opera. In the next five years Sketches by Boz would be published; Victoria would become Queen of England, so putting an end to the personal union with the Electorate of Hanover; the British Raj would displace the East India Company; Germany too would acquire its first railway line, from Nuremberg to Fürth, and Karl Marx would begin his studies at the University of Berlin. Probably the last person with her own adult memories of Goethe, an innkeeper's wife, would not die until 1906.

  The nearness to us of the world in which Goethe died may seem only to emphasize the remoteness of the world into which he was born. If we look at Goethe's end he seems to stand on the verge of modernity, if we turn to his beginning we seem to be reaching the limits of a normal historical consciousness. Between Goethe's beginning and his end, striking directly into the middle of his life, only a few weeks before his fortieth birthday, came the event which initiated the modern form of the State and the modern international political system, and from whose consequences no contemporary could escape: the storming of the Bastille by the Paris mob, the French Revolution as almost immediately it was called. This, largely, is the source of our alienation. If Goethe's works, and the German literature of the age that bears his name, the Goethezeit, are difficult of access to English-speaking readers, one reason, far from superficial, is that it is difficult for such readers to credit that an age bisected by so colossal an event can be a unitary period at all. There are other reasons too. Our English-speaking readers are not helped by the lack of a familiar contemporary literature with which they could make comparisons, for the period of Germany's greatest cultural floweringfrom about 1780 to about 1806coincides with a relatively fallow time in their own literature and, understandably, in that of France. They are not used to attributing literary wealth and an exemplary sensibility to the period from the death of Johnson to the youth of Keats, nor even to that from Gray's Elegy to the death of Byron: 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, may well stay in the mind as the moment of a new start, a literary revolution to accompany the political, but in Germany it is the date of the high point of a movement of cultural reform which had been in preparation for decades and which was the work of mature men. There are also problems of literary genre. The 'classical' literature of modern Germany is a product of the age of Cowper and Crabbe, and that provides us with an approximate orientation in the matter of tone, but the preferred form of that literature is the dramaand what possible standard of comparison have English readers here? The utterly forgotten dramas of the Della Cruscans? the almost equally deservedly unperformed verse-tragedies of the Romantics, Otho the Great, The Borderers, even Cain?

  

  Conversely, moreover, the most striking feature of eighteenth-century German classicism for readers approaching it from a knowledge of English literature is its failure to produce a single readable representative of that eighteenth- century form par excellence, the novel. If in the course of classicism's violent prologue Goethe produced a best-selling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), with but one fully realized character, and if in the course of the movement's long Romantic epilogue he produced another novel, The Elective Affinities (1809), whose shimmering elusiveness seems now that of Blake and now that of Jane Austen, this surely only confirms the difficulty of grasping him and his age in the literary and historical concepts appropriate to the rest of Western Europe. It is one of the premisses of this book that the very notion of the Goethezeit is a serious obstacle to the proper understanding of Goethe himself. There never was such a thing as the 'Age of Goethe'. In the first place, our intuitive recognition is correct that Goethe's exceptionally long writing career spans a great divide not only in European, but specifically in German, history. It is true that in Germany the earthquake was so delayed that paradoxically a period of highest intellectual achievement could coincide in the 1790s with a period of extreme political convulsion in the rest of Europe. But this appearance of unworldly calm should not be allowed to conceal the fact that in 1806, the year in which Prussia died and was reborn, a new age began for all Germany, and not just for its intellectual stratum. It is sheer obscurantism to gloss over this great crisis with some such concept as 'the Age of Goethe'. Germany is not so different that it too did not have its Revolutiontrue, it was a revolution of a peculiar and unobvious kind, but the political and cultural difference between 1780 and 1820 was in the German-speaking world nearly as great as in France, and certainly greater than in England. What did make Germany unique was that what in France was achieved by an intellectual bourgeoisie was in Germany the work of an intellectual bureaucracy. If the German revolutionaries of the 1790s are men of learning and letters, above all of the universities, such that in Germany at this time literary and philosophical schools succeed one another with the rapidity of French ruling cliques, the next generation shows us the pupils of these men, or these men themselves, in new roles, not simply as the reformers but as the new masters of the state machines of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and, to a lesser extent, of Austria. The Prussian revolutionaries, for example, were men like Gerhard von Scharnhorst (17551813), the reorganizer of the army, Carl August von Hardenberg (17501822), reformer of the entire political and administrative apparatus, Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), founder of the (present German) educational system, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (17681834), not only a theologian but also an important agent in the unification of the Prussian Protestant churches. Their work, like that of their more demonstrative French counterparts, outlasted their, sometimes short, official careers. We should not, however, assume that because in Germany a great, unbloody, political change took place, in which men were

  

instrumental who looked to France as their model, therefore the change was of the same nature, or even occasioned by the same forces, as in France. In name 'liberals', the great reformers were in fact the founders of that bureaucratic autocracy which, partly as a result of the political expansion of Prussia, was to determine the character of German societyand ultimately not only Germanwell into the twentieth century, perhaps even to the present day. The German revolution was the transformation of a monarchical into a bureaucratic absolutism, preceded and accompanied by an intellectual explosion, partly determined by French initiatives (including of course the violent intervention of Napoleon), but also, and largely, autonomous. In Germany, and as a result of German actions, the ancien régime passed away. Its place was taken by a society as peculiarly German as it was clearly post-revolutionary, the middle-class world of Biedermeiera sort of Victorianism without (until the middle of the nineteenth century) industrial capitalism. It is Goethe's singular greatness that he responded intellectually, and in the form of literary production, to every stage of thisfor a contemporary hardly graspable (Goethe called it 'daemonic')metamorphosis. At each new birth-pang of modernity, specifically in Germany, but also generally in Europe, he felt the pain, recollected and recovered himself, and attained and expressed understanding. His beginnings are without revolutionary chiliasm and his end without reactionary nostalgia, yet in over sixty years of writing (the standard edition of his works and letters runs to 138 volumes) he never seriously repeated himself. Always judicious, he none the less always grew. If he thereby brought sense, and perhaps also unity, into an experience more profoundly fractured than is now any longer possible (the twentieth century can offer greater disasters than the eighteenth, but not greater revolutions)that is his personal achievement. It is in the nature of the achievement that the sense and the unity belong to him, not to the several ages in which he lived. To think otherwise is to diminish the man, and to misrepresent the timehis time, and ours.

  In the second place, the term Goethezeit carries a seriously misleading implication about the nature of Goethe's unceasingly energetic engagement with the literary and intellectual culture of his German contemporaries. With the possible exception of the first five years of his public literary career, Goethe was never a model which a whole generation chose to imitate. Nor, on the other hand, was he ever the most typical figure of a particular literary movement. 'People are always wanting me to join in and take sideswell, then, I am on my side', he remarked in 1831. Even in 1880 Nietzsche was one of the few to have understood what he meant:

  Goethe . . . lived and lives only for a few: for most he is nothing but a conceited fanfare trumpeted from time to time across the German borders. Goethenot just a good and great man, but an entire cultureGoethe is an episode without consequences in the history of the Germans: who for example could demonstrate one bit of Goethe in the