The English: the world was theirs, it seemed to Goethe, and as one of his Irish visitors, William Swifte, put it: “travelling Englishmen,”
unlike continentals, would “take their country along, wherever they go” (G 3/2: 156). Thus, as the world (which Goethe had read about voraciously in travelogues ever since he devoured Anson’s Voyage round the World as a boy)53 came to Weimar, it would — in those coveted conversations — reveal its glories to the possessor of a “glory” of a different kind. Much as Alexander von Humboldt (whom Ottilie in Wahlverwandtschaften is dying to listen to) could tell Goethe more about the real world in an hour than he could read in books in a week, or more in a day than he could have discovered on his own in years,54and just as Georg Forster, when Goethe sought his company in Kassel in 1779, was asked a lot of questions about what life was like in the South Seas (“viel ausgefragt […], wies in der Südsee aussieht,” WA 4, 4: 61–62), so, too, the English visitors were systematically pressed into service to enlarge Goethe’s knowledge of the world, especially the world beyond Europe.
Who but the English themselves could have told the author of the Novelle those stories about the “lion-hunting” English that he proudly repeated to Edmund Spencer (G 3/2: 925). Even as a teenager in Frankfurt Goethe was able, or so he claimed in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, written at the high tide of English pilgrimages to Weimar, to use his teacher Harry Lupton to soak up a lot of information about his country and its people (WA 1, 27: 26). William Hamilton’s company was appreciated in Naples, primarily because he had roamed through all the realms of Creation (“alle Reiche der Schöpfung,” WA 1, 31: 68). But to return to Weimar, Charles Gore, a temporary Weimar resident, was to be ranked high among Weimar’s major assets (“bedeutende Vortheile”) because he had “seen and experienced much” on his extensive travels
53 Arthur R. Schultz, “Goethe and the Literature of Travel,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XLVIII (1949), 445–468; Uwe Hentschel, “Goethe und die Reiseliteratur am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts, 1993, 93–127. An important purveyor of such books was J. Chr. Hüttner;
see Walter Wadepuhl, “Hüttner, a New Source for Anglo-German Relations,”
Germanic Review, XIV (1939), 23–27; Hennig, Goethe and the English Speaking World, 37–51; Guthke, Goethes Weimar und “die große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (Wiesbaden, 2001).
54 WA 4, 12: 54; Eckermann, 3 May 1827.
in southern Europe (WA, 1, 46: 337). Two Australians, the brothers Edward and James Macarthur from Sydney, were eagerly admitted on 15 December 1829, without regret: they had much of interest to tell about their country and their life, with “savages” living nearby (“erzählten viel Interessantes von ihren dortigen Zuständen, Landesart der benachbarten Wilden” (WA 3, 12: 166) — which compares favorably with Samuel Johnson’s remark about the exploration of Australia: too much bother for just one new animal.
The conversation was hardly less informative when, in August 1827, a Madame Vogel, “a Scotswoman who had travelled to Brazil,”
was invited for the evening (WA 3, 11: 98), or when, the following year, Dr. Michael Clare, whom Weimar Prince Bernhard had met at the Niagara Falls, turned up in nearby Dornburg and proved well-informed about Jamaica (“unterrichtet und mittheilend. Das Gespräch bezog sich meist auf Jamaica, wo er mehrere Jahre residirt hatte,” WA 3, 11: 262). Similarly, Goethe wrote to his son that Cogswell, “ein freyer Nordamerikaner”(soon to be director of Harvard College Library) had brought him books and essays and told him many pleasant things about his country (“auch viel Erfreuliches von dort her erzählt,” WA 4, 31:
154). Goethe followed up with a letter to Cogswell, requesting him to report more, from time to time, “from that part of the world,” which is surely not a euphemism for Harvard College Library (ibid., 246).
Granville, who presented his Essay on Egyptian Mummies to Goethe in 1828 (WA 3, 11: 158), reported on Goethe’s “great eagerness after general information,” not so much about mummies as about St. Petersburg, where Granville had spent some time a little earlier (G 3/2: 249).
James Henry Lawrence, the Chevalier Lawrence, returned to Weimar in 1829 after a nine years’ absence and told Goethe about his far-flung travels (WA 3, 12: 145). So did Captain Reding, “who has seen much of the world with his clear eyes” (“der viel Welt mit klaren Augen gesehen hat”) in 1831 (WA 3, 13: 119). And then there was Anthony O’Hara, an Irish adventurer who had travelled extensively in Eastern Europe and had been the tsar’s last ambassador to the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta; he resided in Weimar for a time in 1811, repeatedly treating Goethe to accounts of his manifold odysseys (“die Geschichten seiner vielfältigen Irrfahrten”) and to the best mocca in town (WA 1, 36: 70–71;
cp. WA 3, 4: 126). On 21 May 1825 the diary records: “Herr Stratford
Canning [the diplomat and former ambassador to Constantinople]
arriving from Petersburg” (WA 3, 10: 58), and on 4 July 1831: a “talkative Englishman” who had seen the midnight sun at Torneå (WA 3, 13: 104). On 28 October 1818 it was Hare Naylor, an Englishman “who had travelled throughout Europe and briefly into Asia” (WA 3, 6: 258). Another English visitor was Ottilie’s would-be beau Charles Sterling, who in 1823 came to Weimar on horseback straight from the Mediterranean, and talked, if not about real experiences, then about his pipe dreams (plausible, being British) of living among exotic “savages”55 — which Sterling eventually did. Englishmen, these examples suggest, were world-travellers almost by definition in Goethe’s eyes, and Goethe benefited from their expeditions by hearing what it was like anywhere in the inhabited world (“wie es auf irgend einem Puncte der bewohnten Welt aussieht,” WA 4, 47: 31). And he loved to have his geographical expertise confirmed: with Michael Clare he recapitulated what he knew about the Antilles, gratified to find that he was pretty much “at home”
there and to be able to learn something new as well (“Mit Sir Clare habe ich die Antillen in möglichster Geschwindigkeit recapituliert und, indem ich zu einiger Zufriedenheit fand, daß ich dort ziemlich zu Hause bin, machte ich mir durch seine Mittheilung noch einiges Besondere zu eigen,” WA 4, 44: 276).
One could go on. But instead it is worth pointing out that the world as seen through English eyes was not necessarily accepted as heaven on earth by Goethe (right or wrong, my visitor’s country). Goethe did muster up the courage to tell off Lord Bristol, the bishop of Derry, in 1797 on the general subject of the morality of world domination, bringing up colonial exploitation and wars of conquest (G 3/2: 593–95;
Eckermann, 17 March 1830); on another occasion he held forth on the commercially profitable evils of slavery (Eckermann, 1 September 1829); Werther was not as harmful as British commercial practices, one hears in a curious exercise in comparative literature (G 2: 904). Yet the point is that even in the case of Lord Bristol, whom he called coarse, inflexible, and dimwitted (“grob,” “starr,” and “beschränkt”) such national shortcomings (“nationale Einseitigkeit”) are typically made
55 Hennig, Goethe and the English Speaking World, 13–16.
up for in Goethe’s eyes by extensive knowledge of the world (“große Weltkenntniß,” WA 1, 36: 256–257).
In this respect, then, even the lord of the eccentric Hervey family conformed to the image that Goethe had begun to form of the English early on and was apparently determined to have confirmed by any and all English visitors. This image was the obverse of his impression of the Germans, and both had more than a nodding acquaintance with well-established national clichés, tiresome even then.56 In short, the British had “knowledge of the world” and the ever-ready self-confident common sense that comes with it; Germans had a speculative and introspective bent of mind. The British, as citizens of a worldwide empire, though essentially without talent for “Reflexion” (Eckermann, 24 February 1825), were surrounded from early on by an important world (“von Jugend auf von einer bedeutenden Welt umgeben”), even if they stayed put, simply by absorbing the imperial atmosphere: they grew up with daily news from the far corners of the world; many had family connections with the colonies, and virtually all could see exotic wares and artefacts and people all around them, day in, day out.57 In a word, they had experience in dealing with the world at large (“Weltgeschäften,” WA 1, 28: 212). Germans, by contrast, might, like Wieland, have moral and aesthetic “Bildung,” but even Wieland, for all his urbanity, lacked Shaftesbury’s world-encompassing vision (“Weltumsicht,” WA 1, 36: 323); Germans see nothing of the world (“sehen nichts von der Welt”).58 While they bedevil themselves trying to solve philosophical problems, the English gain the world (“während die Deutschen sich mit der Auflösung philosophischer Probleme quälen, […]
gewinnen die Engländer die Welt,” Eckermann, 1 September 1829). No wonder his English visitors, who, it will be remembered, brought their country with them, struck Goethe as acting as though the whole world was theirs (“als gehöre die Welt überall ihnen,” Eckermann, 12 March 1828), even if they were not colonial administrators themselves but Ottilie’s heartthrobs hoofing it in her quarters upstairs. No philistines,
56 See David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century (London, 1997), 270–271; see also Richard Dobel, Lexikon der Zitate (Zürich, 1968); H. B. Nisbet, Goethe-Handbuch (Stuttgart, 1996–1999), IV/1, 257–58.
57 WA 1, 28: 212; see also WA 1, 46: 337–338; Eckermann, 15 May 1826.
58 Soret, 630.
they were “komplette Menschen”; to be sure, there were some fools among them, but they too were complete, “complete fools” — a state of grace Germans evidently aspired to in vain. Indeed, to the extent that
“the old heathen” believed in a second coming, he hoped that the new savior would be British in outlook and theory-resistent (Eckermann, 12 March 1828).
There is a touch of personal ambition in all this. Goethe was fond of fantasizing along the lines of: if I had been born an Englishman… (“Wäre ich aber als Engländer geboren…”),59 wondering what might have become of him if he had gone to America as a young man and had never heard of “Kant, etc.” (G 2: 1028). Vicariously, of course, he had gone to America and had been born English — through his conversations with his English visitors (and “der Amerikaner ist im Grunde Engländer,”
according to an eminent German Goethe specialist).60
Being only vicarious, Goethe’s experience of the “world” and its meaningful or important life (“bedeutendes Leben,” Eckermann, 15 May 1826) rubbed in the corresponding feeling of Weimar’s provinciality.
“It is scarcely possible to mention one without thinking of the other,”
reported a visitor, George Downes (G 3/2: 65). There is no denying that even the young among the English visitors possessed not only a real sense of urbanity but also a cosmopolitan perspective (which is surprising only if it should be true that they came to Weimar in search of the ultimate social polish, as a much-used German source has it).61 In their eyes, Weimar, “the German Athens” by the “muddy stream,” with
“scarcely a straight street,” where “knitting and needlework know no interruption,”62 was the “village-like capital” of a miniature state, with a “miniature palace,” a “miniature theatre,” and miniature everything else, as Charles Lever noted in 182963 — miniatures compensated for by huge titles. George Butler (see n. 87) committed Böttiger’s three-part title to memory, and all doors opened, while Lockhart got nowhere when he
59 Eckermann, 2 January 1824; cp. Soret, 405.
60 Beutler, 511. See also Goethe’s similar remarks on Stefan Schütze (Eckermann, 15 May 1826) and Jean Paul (Xenion “Richter in London”).
61 Hugo Landgraf, Goethe und seine ausländischen Besucher (München, 1932), 48:
“letzten gesellschaftlichen Schliff.”
62 John Russell, A Tour in Germany […] in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1825), 35, 55. “The German Athens” also in Downes, II, 438.
63 W. J. Fitzpatrick, The Life of Charles Lever (London, 1879), I, 77; cp. Downes, G 3/2: 65.
inquired about Goethe as just plain “Goethe” or even “Goethe, the great poet”: the title, “Geheimer Rat,” was the key to name recognition (G 3/1:
271). One hears Lord Chesterfield chuckling in his grave.
Professional charity requires one to be brief on this point, and in any case who could hope to equal Vanity Fair’s vignette of the Duchy of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel, with its court teeming with assorted homely but stuck-up “Transparencies” (high-ranking German aristocrats) — the court that Goethe himself had described as well-meaning, but not quite rising above mediocrity yet (WA 1, 53: 383). M. G. Lewis, heir to great quantities of Jamaican sugar, arriving in 1792 eager to “speak very fluently in my throat,” reported that “some things” were “not quite so elegant […] as in England: for instance, the knives and forks are never changed, even at the duke’s table; and the ladies hawk and spit about the room in a manner most disgusting.”64 Professor Melos thought that the young Englishmen who boarded in his house made unheard-of demands for luxuries like fresh tablecloths and napkins every day, and this was only “for example.”65 Aaron Burr, passing through in 1810, not only found that nobody at the hotel “Elephant” understood what he considered to be French and that his room there was triangular, but also managed to mistake the Grand Duchess for a chamber-maid.66 Ticknor, every bit the Harvard-trained American, was “displeased” in 1816 by the parochial “servility” shown to his baronial host as well as to the baron’s “dinner.”67 Thackeray, of course, Weimar class of 1831, takes the prize. He, too, found the court “absurdly ceremonious,” presided over by “as silly a piece of Royalty as a man may meet,” with the local
“delights” running the narrow range from schnaps and “huge quantities of cabbage” to stoves and rheumatism, not to mention that “great bore,”
Madame de Goethe, though she did have three volumes of Byron sitting on her coffee table. Here is Thackeray, studying “the manners of the natives” much like an anthropologist on a field trip: required court dress suggests “something like a cross between a footman and a Methodist parson”; the moment an Englishman arrives, “the round of
64 The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis (London, 1839), I, 71, 80.
65 Soret, 208.
66 Erwin G. Gudde, “Aaron Burr in Weimar,” South Atlantic Quarterly, XL (1941), 384, 67 388.Ryder, Modern Language Quarterly, 415.
mothers offer the round of daughters who are […] by this time rather stale” as so many Englishmen had already visited; there is lots of tea and card-games and French with an oddly un-English pronunciation, but fortunately, at half past nine “all the world [!] at Weimar goes to bed.”68 In matters cultural, as Goethe said to Eckermann, German life was indeed cut off from the world and miserable (“isoliert, armselig,”
3 May 1827).