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