W.H. Auden (again) on Goethe

This post is an addendum to my last post, in which I mentioned two reviews Auden had written on Goethe subjects. (In the meantime, by the way, a reader of this blog has alerted me to several poems by Auden that directly address Goethe. See the Comments in the earlier post.) Back in 2017 I posted the question "Did Goethe have a pet?" I asked the question in connection with the book Celebrating Charlotte Brontë by Alice Spawls, which devoted much attention to the physical details of Charlotte Brontë's world, including the pets in the Brontë household. One wishes more of such details of Goethe's world.

Auden discusses the issue of animals in the review of Goethe: Conversations and Encounters. He mentions Goethe's "well-known dislike of dogs," which, Auden writes, is no great significance, except that it points to Goethe's lack of curiosity about the animal kingdom, despite his one anatomical discovery. Auden finds such lack of curiosity surprising in a man passionately interested in human beings, weather, stones, and vegetables. The reason for the lack of interest? Animals had no conversation, at least as reported by Riemer:

Animals only interested him as more or less close organizational approximations to man, provisional forerunners of the eventually manifest lord of creation. He did not despise them, indeed he even studied them, but chiefly he pitied them as masked and muffled creatures unable to express their feelings intelligibly and appropriately.

The image above is from Goethezeitportal, which offers other examples of Goethe Sprüche on the subject of animals.

W.H. Auden on Goethe

Goethe by David Levine (NYRB 2/9/67)

Beginning with George Henry Lewes in 1864, English-language scholars have written acclaimed bios of Goethe. Presently these include Nicholas Boyle and Ritchie Robertson, who are recognized among German scholars today as representing the state of the art. Boyle’s work, not yet complete (two volumes have appeared), is one for the ages. Robertson’s is a “very short life” (as per the title of the Oxford series in which it appears), but it manages in 117 pages of text to hit all the bases. Likewise another earlier small biography (114 pp.) by T.J. Reed. Jeremy Adler's new Goethe life is a "critical" one, as per the title of Reaktion’s series on major modern figures in which it appears. I will not say any more about Adler's bio here, as my review of it is to appear in the Times Literary Supplement.

Although he did not write a biography of Goethe, W.H. Auden published pieces on Goethe that not only reveal extensive familiarity with Goethe's oeuvre, but are also very insightful about Goethe himself. For instance, in the introduction to his translation (with Elizabeth Mayer) of the Italian Journey (1962), Auden offers a commonsensical — English, one might say — view of why Goethe remained in Weimar: for Goethe “a meaningful existence” meant a “curb of his subjective emotions which would come from being responsible for people and things other than himself, and this was precisely what Weimar offered.” In Rome, for the first time in almost fifteen years, he was free to choose his own company, even if it was to stick close to his fellow countrymen. This “artistic, somewhat bohemian, foreign colony in a great city gave him a freedom in his personal life” that was unobtainable in a provincial German court.

Unfortunately, as Auden points out, his correspondence back to Weimar reveals little of what was going on with him personally.  “There is no reason to suppose that Goethe’s life in Rome was anything like Byron’s in Venice, but it is impossible to believe that it was quite so respectable, or so exclusively devoted to higher thing, as, in his letters home, for obvious resins, he makes it sound.”

The second Auden essay, which appeared in the New York Review of Books (Feb. 9, 1967), addresses this lack of self-revelation. It is a review of the translation by David Luke and Robert Pick of Goethe: Conversations and Encounters. I have not seen this book (and for obvious reasons cannot now access it). Its length (264 pp.) indicates that it is not a complete translation of Eckermann. Also, because of a reference to Riemer in the review, I am assuming that Conversations and Encounters also offers the witness of other contemporaries.

Auden notes the monologic character of Goethe's reported utterances. He references a passage from Goethe's autobiography that is quoted in Conversations and Encounters that testifies to Goethe's habit in his youth of imaginary monologues on subjects that were occupying him, which apparently became his modus operandi when faced with all the visitors to Weimar in the early decades of the 19th century: "Given a bottle of wine and an attentive audience he would hold forth on whatever was occupying his mind, not for the sake of his listeners, but for his own. He was seldom interrupted."

Schiller & Goethe in conversation (Getty Images)

By then, as Auden writes, Goethe had become an international tourist attraction, and it was among these visitors that Goethe became "a sage and an oracle." With Henry James in mind, Auden compares the prose in which we "hear" Goethe's words to talking "like a good book. ... His spoken words have characteristics which we normally expect to find in words written to be read. The thought unit is the paragraph rather than the sentence: the sentences issue from his lips without hesitation, each syntactically perfect. He is one of the very few person in history whose talk one wishes could have been tape recorded rather than reproduced from memory by others."

Like most of us, Auden laments that Goethe is seldom caught "off mike." If he said anything shocking, people kept what he said to themselves. As Auden writes, his auditors lived in an age that recognized a difference between what may be said in public and what should only be said in private.

Picture credit: New York Review of Books; Getty Images

Masks

The lockdown has been good for getting a lot of work done without distraction. My summer sojourn in British Columbia always offered that respite. Apparently it won't be required this year. One thing I really hate about living in the heart of the Upper West Side of Manhattan is facing my masked neighbors when I go out on the street. While I always maintain safe distance as recommended by the CDC, there are so many people, especially families, who are out on the streets and in Riverside Park that, without a mask, I have to play hopscotch, which often means simply walking in the street. I don a mask, of course, whenever I enter a store, but on the street I generally wear a scarf around my neck, which I can then pull up over my face when I come close to people. Today is overcast, which means (I hope) that fewer people will be on the street when I go out in a little while on my errands.

Goethe for every occasion (photo: David Shankbone)

While casting about on the internet this morning for appropriate photos for Goethe's garden house I came across something amusing, which confirms my utter hate for mask-wearing. The picture at the top of this post is from a "Goethe shaming" that took place last year. Here is a link to a piece in FAZ on the "geistlos" protest. The protesters covered the garden with toilet paper. The second picture posted here reverses the imbecility, quoting Goethe's "wisdom,  a subject on which I have posted here, in this case at an Occupy Wall Street protest.

Image credit: David Shankbone