Goethe, Fuseli, and von Humboldt

 

Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt with Schiller and Goethe in Jena

After having finished the previous two posts, I have been brooding on certain commonalities of the three. All were “geniuses,” in the 18th-19th century sense of that term, and all of German-speaking background. From youth onward, their path forward in life would have been to follow in the path of their father. Fuseli would become a pastor, Goethe a lawyer, and Humboldt a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Prussian civil service. Nothing of the sort happened. All three might be said to have followed their own star.

As I mentioned in the post on Fuseli, that his life took such an unanticipated turn, that he became a great and original painter in England, rather than in Switzerland or Germany, was the result of a youthful imprudence, engaged in with Lavater, who did return to Switzerland and did become a pastor. As I mentioned in that post, the amount of scholarship on Fuseli is very sparse, but the alacrity with which he accepted the offer to travel to London in 1764 with the British ambassador to the Prussian court is perhaps an indication of a desire to mark out a new path.

About Goethe and von Humboldt, however, we know from their own writings how adverse they were, from a young age, to following in the well-trod path of their own fathers.

Goethe’s father, Caspar, had studied law as a young man in Leipzig and Strassburg, and followed up his studies with a grand tour that included Italy. He had inherited quite a fortune from his father, and it seems to have been the time of his life. Professionally, however, he made a wrong step on his return to Frankfurt in 1742, which left him without a position in the city’s administration.  He married into a prominent and old Frankfurt family, which raised his status considerably, but with a lot of time on his hands, he appears to have devoted it to the education of young Goethe and his sister Cornelia. Cornelia of course married, while his son was supposed to follow in his footsteps. So it was that young Goethe studied in both Leipzig and Frankfurt and was supposed to go to Italy before becoming a lawyer.

Johann Caspar Goethe

Well, Goethe did study law in Leipzig and Strassburg, and he even studied (as had Caspar) at the imperial court in Wetzlar, but between Leipzig and Wetzlar other things intervened, The Sorrows of Young Werther of course being the most notable. Already in 1768, however, when Goethe was still only nineteen, he wrote to a friend of his “efforts to become, and his fairly well founded hopes of becoming, a good writer.” (Mein feuriger Kopf, mein Witz, meine Bemühung und ziemlich gegründete Hoffnung, mit der Zeit ein guter Autor zu werden.) Nicholas Boyle in his biography of Goethe writes that Goethe “was no Rimbaud” (Goethe’s earliest surviving poetry gives evidence of that), but Rimbaud (b. 1854) came of age in a far different literary milieu. The French language was a well-formed literary language by the time of his birth, whereas Germany in 1749, the year of Goethe’s birth, was not even a united nation, while its writers were in the process of forging a common literary language. So, too, Goethe’s earliest efforts were a pastiche, a hodgepodge, a babel, a collage: imitation on a wide scale. It took him several years to get his feet on the ground, so to speak, and craft his own inimitable idiom.

Alexander von Humboldt’s father died when Alexander was still a child, but his mother undertook his education with the aim of outfitting him to occupy a role in the Prussian civil service. He did follow her orders for a while, went as far as becoming an inspector of mines, a very important position. Unlike with Goethe we have more evidence of his youthful unhappiness and of his many forays into different pursuits. For instance, he associated with members of the important Berlin salons. As Maren Meinhardt writes of Humboldt’s integration into this “new and mysterious world,” it offered him “the prospect of transformation, of being not quite who he was. The unknown, shimmering and colorful always seemed enticing to him.”

Guests at Henriette Herz's Literary Salon, ca. 1800

In the end, he didn’t even know what he would discover when he took off for South America in 1799: “no colonial power had sent him, nor did he represent any political or mercantile interest. Nor, for that matter, was anyone funding him. Instead, Humboldt put his own inheritance in the service of a scientific expedition for himself and his collaborator Aimé Bonpland, a journey that would last five years, the foremost purpose of which would be to satisfy his scientific curiosity.”

What Meinhardt writes of Humboldt could also be applied to Goethe’s early path in life: “his motivations were complex and the goal of his journey was to a very high degree unspecified.” Along with Fuseli, they were travelers, and their achievements came from uprooting themselves from familiar soil.

The influence of Goethe and Humboldt has been enormous, while the effect of Fuseli both during his life and afterward is still up in the air. While he occupied an important position in London literary and artistic life, his non-English background may have shortened his “outreach.”

 Image Credits: London Remembers; Schule.Judentum

Alexander von Humboldt (and a little Goethe)

 

Humboldt's Naturgemälde

Alexander von Humboldt has attracted some interest in recent years. (In what follows, I am assuming  that readers have heard of Humboldt’s famous five-year South American expedition, but, if not, I recommend the Britannica link.) First, in 2006, there was Daniel Kehlmann’s delightful novel Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt), in which Humboldt shared the stage with the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss. It was followed in 2015 by The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf, an in-depth biography that offers a  “global view” of Humboldt and his scientific achievements. As Wulf writes early on, the individual disciplines we recognize today as “science” — chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on — were taking on distinct form by the end of the 18th century, breaking away from natural philosophy, which subsumed natural phenomena within a metaphysical framework. Humboldt was an experimentalist par excellence (as Wulf writes, “a man who discarded a life of privilege to learn how the world works”), but was not content to examine natural phenomena in isolation (think of Linneus’s neat classification of plants), but sought to study them within larger relationships in which they were embedded. Humboldt’s conception is graphically on view in his famous Naturgemälde der Anden, a depiction of the volcanoes Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in cross section, with detailed information about plant geography. (Click on the image above to enlarge.) The illustration was published in The Geography of Plants, 1807, in a large format. Wulf also trace Humboldt’s influence on later generations, especially writers and others who are concerned with the effects of human habitation of the Earth  (e.g., Thoreau and Ernst Haeckel), including subjects like deforestation and climate change.

A third book on Humboldt, by Maren Meinhardt, appeared in 2018 -- A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things -- which I discussed briefly in a post several years ago. Meinhardt was probably in the process of writing her own book on Humboldt in 2015, as can be seen by a long article she published in the magazine Guernica that year. (Very readable, much to be recommended.) She must have felt blind sided by the appearance of Wolf’s book, but she has produced a very different kind of study. It is a “life,” and not, as in Wulf, “a global Humboldt.” One learns more about the man close up. Meinhardt’s notes, for instance, which include the bibliographic references, are only thirty pages (in contrast to Wulf’s walloping 120 pages), and are drawn for the most part from contemporary documents, including correspondence.

Humboldt and Bonpland at Mt. Chimborazo, Ecuador

In places this biography is uncomfortable reading. Humboldt’s obsessive quests for knowledge of the natural world seemed reflected in several relationships, apparently non-sexual, with various men. Meinhardt treats these, quoting from effusive letters, which may suggest homosexuality, but, interestingly, there was one man whom he would seem to have known closest, Aimé Bonpland, and with whom he inhabited the closest quarters during their American travels, but with whom apparently no sexual relationship occurred. Meinhardt, and Wulf to some extent, deals with the Humboldt mother-son relationship, which seems to have had little room for close emotional contact. In Meinhardt, however, one learns that Humboldt’s desire to understand natural phenomena in terms of relationships also extended to his views of those between humans.

Which brings me to Goethe, who plays a major role in both books. In fact, already the second chapter of Wulf’s book is entitled “Imagination and Nature: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Humboldt.” It is a very thorough discussion of Goethe’s scientific pursuits, which the relationship with Humboldt revivified on their first meeting in Jena in 1794. Wulf’s wealth of bibliographic sources allows her a closer look at their get togethers. (For instance, it was freezing cold in Jena in December of that year: “The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for French troops on their warpath through Europe.”) It was a period when Goethe’s scientific ideas found little resonance among contemporaries, including Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) or his essays on optics (Beiträge zur Optik, 1791), a preface to his theory of colors. Meeting Humboldt, a “sparring partner,” caused him to start working on his scientific studies more intensely. We also learn that the young Goethe who had stormed Europe with his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was now corpulent, “with a double chin and a stomach cruelly described by one acquaintance as ‘that of a woman in the last stages of pregnancy.’ His looks had gone — his beautiful eyes had disappeared into the ‘fat of his cheeks’ and many remarked that he was no longer a dashing ‘Apollo.’”

Chemical attractions in Elective Affinities

So be it. It is only in chapter 9 that Goethe gets his own chapter in Meinhardt, the title of which is “Chemical Attractions.” While discussing the coming together of Humboldt and Goethe and its electrifying effect on Goethe’s enthusiasm for scientific matters (Humboldt had by 1794, writes Meinhardt, “developed an almost obsessive interest in the idea of animal electricity, generally referred to as ‘galvanism’”), she focuses on the literary effect, namely, Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, in which the relationships between natural phenomena offer a model for those chemical and human relationships portrayed in the novel. As Meinhardt writes: “Goethe puts his characters in the positions of chemical substances in the course of an experiment.” Further, “the novel is strongly preoccupied with the equilibrium that needs to be maintained,” but that, in the case of the relationship between Eduard and Charlotte, is disturbed by new elements. “Chemistry, following its inevitable course, quickly goes beyond the experimental setting and draws the characters into a destructive maelstrom.” Wulf mentions the novel in her study, but only in passing. Similarly, Meinhardt’s focus on the milieu of the first meeting of Humboldt and Goethe brought out something I had not known, namely, the role Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s brother, played in “engineering” the course of events that led to the fabled encounter between Schiller and Goethe, which was followed by dinner at the home of Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt in Jena in July of 1794. The rest is literary history.

Another chapter in which Goethe plays a role takes place after Humboldt’s famous American tour, when he and a group of friends, despite the warlike conditions in Europe, plan a trip to Italy in 1797. It is entitled “Goethe’s Caravan,” and at some point, according to Meinhardt, Goethe actually considered joining the group. The group venture “went south,” so to speak, not to Italy, but by now, Humboldt’s renown as a scientist “smoothed his path wherever he went.” His brother Wilhelm and Caroline did go to Italy, however, where they were neighbors with the German-Danish writer Friederike Brun, about whom I wrote a blog post back in 2012 in connection with “Goethe in Venice” and have also written an essay on Brun that appeared in this volume.

Like Fuseli (see previous post), Humboldt doesn’t inhabit a single world, escapes easy classification. He was “one of the most captivating and inspiring men of his time” (writes Wulf) and the most famous scientist of his day. The 100th anniversary of his birth, September 1869, was celebrated all over the world. Imagine that the streets of downtown New York City were lined with flags, and posters with his picture appeared on building fronts. Today, of course, as Wulf writes, very few outside of academia have heard of him, although that is probably only true in North America and the European world. Humboldt's name is everywhere in Latin America and in several African countires. According to the Alexander Humboldt Foundation, mountain peaks, bodies of waters, and entire regions bear his name, including the Humboldt Current.

Image credit:  Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten / Hermann Buresch; Sofatutor

Henri Fuseli anew

Fuseli and Bodmer

Goethe Girl has been occupied with a couple of literary projects the past couple of months that kept me away from devoting as much time as I would like to Goethe and to this blog. But I have been saving up for a couple of weeks now a review in the New York Review of Books (4/20/23) of a book entitled Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age in which the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (Heinrich Füessli) prominently features. Johnson was an English bookseller and befriended Fuseli after the latter's arrival in England in 1763. Considering that Goethe never met Fuseli, there are many posts on this site in which Fuseli and his work are mentioned. There were, after all, many links connecting Goethe and Fuseli. Goethe's first "foreign" travel, after all, was to Switzerland, where he met Bodmer, who had been Fuseli's mentor. If any reader wishes to know more about these connections, please enter "Fuseli" in the "Q" box at the top left, and you will be directed to quite a few posts.

Goethe's closest connection to Fuseli was through Johann Kaspar Lavater, a friend of Fuseli from Zurich. Both Lavater and Fuseli were fellow theology students, and the two were partners in the denunciation of a Swiss magistrate for his misdemeanors. It was a very celebrated affair that caused the magistrate to be condemned and exiled from Zurich, but since such youthful actions might affect their own future in the canton, they both undertook an educational tour of German lands in 1763, accompanied by Johann Georg Sulzer, a friend of Bodmer. In Berlin, Fuseli met the English ambassador at the Prussian court, and headed off to England with him. Lavater, meanwhile, through Sulzer's influence came in contact with individuals who (according to Goethe Handbuch 4/2) represented the leading theological, philosophical, and literary tendencies, among others Klopstock and Mendelssohn, Gellert and Gleim.

Lavater, Goethe, & Basedow

Lavater returned eventually to Switzerland, and by 1772 he was a well-known author outside his homeland with his Aussichten in die Ewigkeit (speculation re eternity), which Goethe reviewed in the Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen that year; skeptically, according to Goethe Handbuch. In the same year, Lavater's small volume on physiognomy was reviewed in FGA by Johann Georg Schlosser. Goethe's own small tract, Briefe des Pastors zu *** an den Pastor zu ***, prompted Lavater to write to Goethe. It was in the summer of 1774 that they met and, for a while, formed a firm friendship and even partnership in connection with the subject of physiognomy. Together with Johann Bernhard Basedow they made a journey down the Rhine and the Lahn. (Richie Robertson has written a nice story of their "unusual friendship.") The friendship, as such, went from hot to cold within a decade or so, but Goethe wrote a wonderful account of the trio and their Rhein-Lahn journey in Book 14 of his autobiography.

This post is supposed to be about Fuseli and has turned out to be about Lavater, about whom there are also plenty of posts on this blog. As I mentioned, both he and Lavater were students of theology in Zurich, but while Lavater remained dedicated to the religious calling, Fuseli was apparently more of a free thinker. By 1779, Fuseli was firmly ensconced in London, but he remained in correspondence with Lavater. As I have discovered from some online research, Fuseli produced not only the first English translation of Winckelmann's history of Greek art, but also a book by Lavater entitled "Aphorisms on Man." The last-named was illustrated by William Blake. The review mentions Fuseli's plan to create a series of thirty huge paintings on the works of John Milton, which would be reduced to book size to illustrate the edition. Fuseli's interest is this English writer must certainly be traced back to his Swiss roots, to Bodmer, whose translation of Paradise Lost  made Milton accessible to Germans. The book did not come to fruition, but Fuseli apparently opened a Milton Gallery in 1799. Fuseli liked to portray literary topics.

Lady Macbeth Walking in Her Sleep (1784)

In London Fuseli really became "English." He was a member of Joseph Johnson's own "club" (similar to that of the 1760s of Dr. Johnson, memorialized by Boswell), which included such eminences as Joseph Priestly, William Godwin, Tom Paine, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That guest list indicates the changing times, politically and socially. Moreover, Fuseli's most famous painting, The Nightmare ("unnervingly sexy," according to NYRB reviewer Miranda Seymour) dominated the room in which they convened. Joseph Johnson's table include women as well, e.g., Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft. Fuseli must have been a very attractive man. The review points out that Wollstonecraft "became close enough to Fuseli to seek even to join the artist's marriage," a "bold suggestion," which Fuseli later claimed "was fiercely rejected by this wife." In 1792 Johnson and the Fuselis and Wollestonecraft terminated their plans to travel to France to observe the revolution after the news of the royal family's failure to escape the country, and Wollstonecraft, "anxious to snap the painful chain of association with Fuseli," traveled on her own to Paris, where she met "a charming but fickle adventurer," with whom she gave birth to her first child.

As per the review in the NYRB review, the encounter of Johnson and Fuseli had the "most enduring effect on Johnson's life." Fuseli took rooms at Johnson's premises already in 1766 and, at Johnson's death in 1809, he was, with his wife, Johnson's "devoted caregiver."

One can't help wondering what Fuseli's status would be today if he had remained in Switzerland. He is something of an in-between figure, despite his role in this important circle of early 19th-century British life as well as a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a professor there. (Sir Joshua Reynolds was a friend.) The Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt has the largest collection of his works in Germany, while Fuseli has featured prominently in various exhibitions in recent decades, e.g., at the Getty.  Even in Germany there has been only one biography in recent decades, and only two in the 20th century in English.

Images: Lavater, Goethe & Basedow; Lady Macbeth (Musée du Louvre, Paris)