The young Goethe reads

 

Paracelsus

The pandemic and the resulting lockdown have led to Goethe Girl doing some intensive reading in connection with her earliest work on Goethe, namely, the pre-Weimar Goethe. My interest has always been “how Goethe became Goethe,” and it is in the period before 1775 that we see (so I contend) the seeds of this development. On my shelves are the five-volume set of Der junge Goethe, which I have again been making my way through, and I have also been able to profit from very early studies of Goethe’s life and literary output in the pre-Weimar period. In this lockdown situation, there was no need to go to libraries; these studies are available online. Among others, they include Elisabeth Mentzel’s (1909) study of Wolfgang and Cornelia’s childhood teachers (see previous post) and Julius Vogel’s Goethes Leipziger Studentenjahre (1923). Just the other day I was able to download Adolf Strack’s Goethes Leipziger Liederbuch (1893).

Both Mentzel and Vogel drew on archival sources, from contemporary Frankfurt and Leipzig, but Strack’s study exemplifies the immersion in detail that characterized the philological scholarship of 19th-century German scholars. Strack, for instance, subjects to minute analysis each line and verse of the 19 poems in The Leipziger Liederbuch of 1769, Goethe’s first “publication.” We learn that some of Goethe’s favorite poetic terms — heiter, munter — were common vocabulary among Anacreontic poets, while Goethe’s use of “Liebste” was uncommon among these predecessors. Strack goes on and on. Goethe was imitating, if not really copying, poetic conceits that were in circulation and that he adapted to his own particular use.

One of the most interesting sections of the first volume of Der junge Goethe is the thirty-four pages of “Ephemerides,” notes that Goethe wrote between January and March 1770, right before he left Frankfurt for his second course of legal study in Strassburg. They give insight into what Goethe was reading in the year and a half after his return from Leipzig in August 1768. The first entry concerns Paracelsus (1493–1541), described by Wikipedia as “a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance.”

Many of the entries concern legal matters (the Code of Justinian), to which Goethe appears to have been directing his mind before going to Strassburg, and are written in Latin. Goethe was very competent in Latin, and it would be required for his doctoral dissertation. Strictly speaking, the Ephemerides contain little about literary matters, although one sees the influence (with the help of Strack) of Lessing and of Wieland, especially of the latter’s Idris and of his translation of Shakespeare’s plays. There are a number of entries from the Institutio Oratoria (again per Wikipedia), “a twelve-volume textbook on the theory and practice of rhetoric by Roman rhetorician Quintilian” from ca. 95 A.D.

Count Carl Gustav Tessin

It was these references to works of humanists of earlier centuries that brings home how much Goethe was steeped in another world. Even the image above of Paracelsus testifies to that. (Click on images to enlarge.) As does the more or less contemporary portrait of Carl Gustaf Tessin, a Swedish count and politician, whose bewigged representation recalls Goethe’s account of Gottsched. That there was a transition away from such accoutrements in the 1770s can be seen in another portrait of the count (below), by Jacques-André Aved. Of interest is that Goethe mentions in the Ephemerides reading “die Briefe des Grafen von Tessin,” although what Goethe writes of these letters does not quite accord with the youthful features of the count in these portraits: “ein liebenswürdiger, erfahrender Greiss blickt aus jeder Zeile.” It turns out that the count died in January 1770, which may situate Goethe’s reading of the letters.

The latter pages of the Ephemerides contain less Latin and more German, and in this connection my interest was caught by a translation of a passage from Act 4, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s play King John. According to Adolf Schöll (Briefe und Aufsatze von Goethe aus den Jahren 1766 to 1786, publ. 1857), the translation is Wieland's, “mit Abweichungen.” Here is the English version.

I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news;
Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste
Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
Told of a many thousand warlike French
That were embattailed and rank'd in Kent:
Another lean unwash'd artificer
Cuts off his tale and talks of Arthur's death.

The Gossiping Blacksmith

It turns out that there is a painting from the year 1769 of this very subject —  The Gossiping Blacksmith —  by the English artist Edward Penny. Would Goethe have known of this painting? In the Ephemerides he writes of an address given by Joshua Reynolds on the opening of the Royal Academy of Art on January 2, 1769. The Tate, where the Penny painting resides, does not offer a provenance for the work, so I can’t tell whether it was exhibited at that date. But as with the mention of Count Tessin, one might infer that Goethe had read “news” accounts of both matters.

Image credits: Science Photo Library; Swedish Furniture; The Tate