Time to ask: what was in it for Goethe? Looking back on the summer of that Brit-ridden year 1827, he wrote to the art collector and historian Sulpiz Boisserée on 12 October of the “countless English men and women who were well received by my daughter-in-law and with whom I talked, more or less. If one knows how to make use of such visits, they eventually provide an idea of the nation, […] and so one does not get out of the habit of thinking about them” (“unzählige Engländer und Engländerinnen, die bey meiner Schwiegertochter gute Aufnahme fanden, und die ich denn auch mehr oder weniger sah und sprach.
Weiß man solche Besuche zu nutzen, so geben sie denn doch zuletzt einen Begriff von der Nation, […] und so kommt man gar nicht aus
32 G 3/2: 66 (Downes); WA 3, 10: 60 (George Knox); John Hennig, Goethe and the English Speaking World (Bern, 1988), 125.
der Gewohnheit, über sie nachzudenken,” WA 4, 43: 107–108). One thing to think about in this connection was Weltliteratur, the pet project first mentioned that year. The English visitors proved useful in the promotion of this “geistiger Handelsverkehr” which was to create the mutual familiarity, tolerance, and appreciation that Goethe thought was
“the great benefit that world literature has to offer.”33
The English visitors’ contribution to such a worldwide literary life took many forms. The very act of — entirely unmetaphorical — conversation was of course the basic ingredient, in this age when social culture was developing even among the normally solitary German intellectuals cooped up in their small and cantankerous worlds.34 Hence Goethe’s eagerness to meet the English travellers — now and then. “You see, my dear children, what would I be if I had not always been in touch with intelligent people and had learned from them. You should learn not from books but through a lively exchange of ideas, through easy-going sociability!” (“Seht, lieben Kinder, was wäre ich denn, wenn ich nicht immer mit klugen Leuten umgegangen wäre und von ihnen gelernt hätte? Nicht aus Büchern, sondern durch lebendigen Ideenaustausch, durch heitre Geselligkeit müßt ihr lernen!”)35
Many of his English and American visitors were well-informed and highly educated, in touch with the literary scene at home; they brought literary gossip, local minerals, and English books, which they sometimes read to Goethe, often following up with correspondence, more books, and journals. So Goethe did indeed learn a lot from his visitors about English literature and culture and life in the colonies, not to mention American and Irish mineralogy.36 Conversely, the visitors, back home again, or earlier, would bubble over, in letters and conversation, with reports of
33 Eckermann, 15 July 1827; WA 1, 41/2: 299, 348; WA 1, 42/1: 187; WA 4, 44: 257. See the collection of Goethe’s remarks on Weltliteratur in Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern, 1946), 397–400; also Reiner Wild, “Überlegungen zu Goethes Konzept einer Weltliteratur,” Bausteine zu einem transatlantischen Literaturverständnis, eds. Hans W. Panthel and Peter Rau (Frankfurt, 1994), 3–11.
34 Strich, 64, 77; Walther Killy, Von Berlin bis Wandsbeck (München, 1996), passim.
35 G 3/1: 48; see also Strich, 55–58 on the value Goethe put on conversation. “Goethe’s knowledge of […] most subjects was personal rather than book-knowledge”
(Hennig, 126).
36 “In time Goethe became known in America as an authority on European and American mineralogy, long before he was acknowledged for his literary genius”
(Walter Wadepuhl, Goethe’s Interest in the New World [Jena, 1934; reprint New York, 1973], 43).
their encounters with the “majestic” man whom literary historian Fritz Strich was to call the “head” of the intellectual capital of Europe (68).
More likely than not, Goethe would have read and interpreted his own writings to the intermediaries, correcting misunderstandings as he went along — Werther to Lord Bristol (G 3/2: 593–95), Hermann und Dorothea to James Macdonald (WA 3, 2: 65). He even explicated his “connection”
with Byron to Henry Crabb Robinson (G 3/2: 451), thus giving a helpful hand in shaping his own image abroad. The visitors moreover, as well as translating some of Goethe’s works into English, would eventually publish books and essays on the author and his writings. These were sometimes brought to his attention so that he could inform himself first-hand about the progress of Weltliteratur, comment on it and thus promote it (and himself) even more.
This exchange covers a lot of ground. A few examples may suffice.
By all accounts, Goethe was eager for “information,” rather than opinion (G 3/2: 249, 670; 3/1: 255). George Henry Calvert, an American blue blood from the South, described him at their first meeting as an
“expectant naturalist, eagerly awaiting the transatlantic phenomenon”
(G 3/1: 760). Most welcome, always, was news about Byron and his literary and other activities, with the Irishman Charles Sterling acting as the most important, though by no means only intermediary (WA 1, 42/1: 101–103). Scott ran a close second to Byron, with R. P. Gillies introducing himself as a friend of Scott and Lady Jane Davy and J. G.
Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law, no doubt reporting the latest.37 Captain David Skinner brought news from Carlyle (WA 4, 44: 137; 45: 302);
Robinson was in touch with, and could give information about, Lamb, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Scott and Carlyle, among others, telling Goethe, for example, that Byron’s The Deformed Transformed owed much to Faust, whereupon Goethe praised it to the high heavens (G 3/2:
452); he also read Byron, Coleridge as well as Milton to Goethe (G 3/2:
455–58); Charles Murray even helped him with Anglo-Saxon literature (G 3/2: 708). More tangible was information through books that Goethe received from his English visitors: a volume of Byron from Ticknor (G 2: 1168), Sylvester O’Halloran’s Antiquities from Anthony O’Hara (WA 3, 4: 130, 133), Charles Dupin’s Voyages dans la Grande Bretagne from
37 Scott, 36; WA 3, 9: 266; G 3/1: 271.
Des Voeux (WA 3, 11: 46, 332), a volume on mineralogy and geology, published in Boston, from Cogswell,38 who also sent his essay “On the State of Literature in the United States.” On his visit he had presented D.
B. Warden’s Statistical […] Account of the United States of North America, which Goethe assured him he had studied most carefully.39 Journals, those all-important agents of Weltliteratur, were sent by Randall Edward Plunkett40 and others. Such was the inflow of information that Goethe claimed to be quite at home in England, while American visitors time and again commented on his thorough familiarity, encouraged by such contacts, with conditions in their country, down to the layout of the University of Virginia,41 though he did seem to think that life in the state of Indiana was such that women were driven to the spinning wheel (G 3/1: 69).
To turn to the flow in the other direction: the best known visitors passed their impressions of Goethe and his work on to those who mattered in the literary life of their country. H. C. Robinson apparently gushed about his conversations with Goethe at the slightest provocation or even without it, and “with disconcerting regularity,”42 to Carlyle and Madame de Staël most notably, but also to Wordsworth, Lamb, Hazlitt, and, perhaps most effectively, Sarah Austin, whose Characteristics of Goethe (1833) was authoritative for a long time, until G. H. Lewes’s biography (1855) in fact, which in turn contained a famous letter from Thackeray about his encounters with Goethe in Weimar. Lockhart reported to Scott (G 3/1: 271). So did James Henry Lawrence; Charles Murray reported to Carlyle;43 M. G. Lewis to Byron, etc. Lewis, famously, also translated parts of Faust to Byron when he was turning Manfred over in his mind, and Goethe was pleased with what came of it — so very much like his own Faust. Other visitors subsequently published translations of works of Goethe’s: Mellish tackled Hermann und Dorothea, Charles Des Voeux Tasso, benefiting from feedback from Goethe (G 3/2: 193–94); George
38 MacKall, 8.
39 WA 4, 31: 246, 394–395 (“aufs fleißigste studirt”).
40 John Hennig, Goethes Europakunde (Amsterdam, 1987), 68.
41 England: Eckermann, 10 January 1825; America: G 2: 1180–1181; 3/1: 140; 3/2: 598;
Univ. of Virginia: G 3/2: 598.
42 F. Norman, 105; Hertha Marquardt, Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde, I (Göttingen, 1964), 17; W. D. Robson-Scott, “Goethe through English Eyes,” Contemporary Review, no. 1005 (Sept., 1949), 151. Norman’s article provides the most plentiful documentation of Robinson’s “conversational activities.”
43 Scott, 33; Herbert Maxwell, Sir Charles Murray (Edinburgh and London, 1898), 78.
Seymour translated Dichtung und Wahrheit, Calvert some poetry and the correspondence with Schiller, while Samuel Naylor was encouraged by Goethe to undertake an English rendering of the medieval Reineke Fuchs (G 5: 144). Calvert, who visited in 1825, was to be the author of the first American biography of Goethe (in 1872, by which time New England was no longer “stumbling over the correct pronunciation of his name”).44
William Fraser, who visited in 1827, no doubt for longer than the
“few minutes” requested, was editor and, with R. P. Gillies, cofounder of the Foreign Review, where Carlyle’s essay on the second part of Faust appeared.45 Robinson wrote on Goethe in journals, as did Gillies, preparing the way for Carlyle, it has been said.46 Everett and Bancroft published widely noted articles on Goethe in the North American Review in 1817 and 1824. The former is considered to be “the first significant paper on Goethe in an American journal.”47 Of the latter, Goethe received two copies within hours of each other — Weltliteratur in high gear (G 3/1: 762). This was Bancroft’s review of Dichtung und Wahrheit — an essay that heaped fulsome praise on Goethe, which Goethe himself, in a letter to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, took, without irony, as an indication of transatlantic good judgement (“Verstand und Einsicht,”
WA 4, 39: 167), delighted that his works were making an impact not just on the world, but the New World. As Robinson observed, also without irony, Goethe “ardently enjoyed the prospect of his own extended reputation,”48 or of his very own Weltliteratur. Also, American professors who had talked to Goethe, Ticknor and Calvert definitely, but no doubt also Everett, Cogswell and Bancroft, lectured on or at least mentioned Goethe in their lectures, though, regrettably, “with the even then critical eyes of Boston and Harvard,” according to Professor Jacob Beam of Princeton University.49 Weltliteratur, academic-style. Cogswell introduced Goethe to American undergraduates by arranging for the
44 Orie W. Long, Literary Pioneers (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 196.
45 Scott, 69–70, 73–74.
46 On Gillies, see Scott, 43, and Scott, “English Visitors to Weimar,” German Life and Letters, New Series, II (1949), 337.
47 Long, 68.
48 G 3/2: 438. Cp. 3/2: 448: “interested in the progress of his fame in England.”
49 Beam, 118, see also 116–118; Frank Ryder, “George Ticknor and Goethe: Europe and Harvard,” Modern Language Quarterly XIV (1953), 421; Harry W. Pfund,
“George Henry Calvert, Admirer of Goethe,” Studies in Honor of John Albrecht Walz (Lancaster, PA, 1941), 138.
gift, in 1819, of thirty-nine volumes of his publications to Harvard College, bookplated to this day as “The Gift of the Author, John W.
von Goethe, of Germany.” It was meant, Goethe said, as a token of recognition for the “promotion of solid and elegant education”; and Cogswell, anticipating the spirit of Weltliteratur, thanked Goethe in 1819 on behalf of “the whole literary community of my country.”50
This was the time when the tide of Goethe’s mixed reputation in the English-speaking world was beginning to turn, for the better; the contributions of his English-speaking visitors to this reversal of fortune, while hard to quantify, are probably also hard to overlook.