Winter in Weimar 1777

I was reviewing some of my recent Goethe Tweets and noticed something interesting.

Goethe was supervising the work on his Gartenhaus on this day in 1777. The roof seemed to have some problems, and, as he wrote in his diary for this day, he was "den ganzen Tag unter den Arbeitern." What might the weather have been in Weimar at the end of March of that year? Maybe not too bad -- just as it is pretty warm this day of 2020 in New York City, with cherry blossoms and forsythia already in bloom in Central Park and people wearing shorts and on bikes -- but if I return to an earlier Tweet, that of January 3, I see that Goethe, besides dictating the first act of Lila, spent the entire day "Im Garten." Did he have a nice warm winter coat?

Entrance to Central Park, March 27

The person to whom he dictated Lila was presumably Philipp Seidel, who had accompanied Goethe from Frankfurt and who, until Christiana moved into the Gartenhaus in 1788, organized most of Goethe's private activities. The relationship between him and Goethe was so close that Philipp was the only person who knew in advance of Goethe's plan to travel to Italy.

Goethe utilized the talents of various scribes, and there have been illustrations of Goethe dictating in later years. In fact, I did a post on Goethe and his scribes back in 2015, and the image I used showed Goethe and the scribe in full-length coats. The picture of Goethe's work space in the garden house at the top of the post suggests a cozy little room, but it must have been pretty cold there at the beginning of January 1777.

Image credit: Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Goethe and Yeats

Phillinen Crowning Wilhelm With a Wreath

This post follows up on the previous one, concerning poetic reinvention, which few poets manage to do, Goethe being an exception and perhaps Yeats. The article I referred to in that post had a footnote to an article on the subject of the title of this post by the wonderful poetry critic and scholar Marjorie Perloff. Her article dates back to 1971, which shows that good scholarship does not go out of date.

Perloff begins by mentioning the writers that led Yeats to Goethe, even as Yeats read no German, namely, Walter Pater and Edward Dowden, the latter an Irish professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, while also president of the English Goethe Society from 1886 to 1908. Dowden translated the West-East Divan. An instructive comment regarding the subject of re-invention occurs in the introduction to the translation (edited by Dowden's wife on its posthumous publication in 1914): "The Divan is the product of Goethe's Indian Summer of art-life, the rejuvenescence that came when he was sixty-five." In this connection, Perloff mentions Yeats' Crazy Jane lyrics and "the rhapsodizing of the joys of sexual life in [Yeats' letters]" in 1930, when he was sixty-five.

When Perloff wrote her article, Yeats' library had not yet been catalogued (has it since then?), so that it was difficult to know which works of Goethe Yeats had read. Despite his deficiency in the German language, however, it appears that he "obviously" knew Werther, Faust, and "the major lyrics," and may well have known Egmont, Tasso, and Iphigenia. The most influential works, however, were Wilhelm Meister, the John Oxenford translation of the conversations with Eckermann, and the Oxenford translation of Goethe's autobiography, which appeared in 1848 (not 1948).

I am not a Yeats' scholar, so I will not go into the particulars of what Yeats absorbed from reading Goethe, especially on the nature of "the Doctrine of the Mask" or the concept of "self-unity." (For those interested, the article is available on JSTOR.) Apparently, Yeats took from Wilhelm Meister less the plot or the characters than its themes, which he seemed to have used as a "book of wisdom." In this connection and in light of what I learned about Yeats' enthusiasm for Eckermann's conversations,  I cannot help thinking of my recent posts on Eckermann pastiches as well as on the appropriation of Goethe's words for all manner of commerce, prophecy, and self-help.

So, in this connection, Perloff quotes William Butler Yeats paraphrasing Goethe in "Anima Hominis" (1917):

"I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in Wilhelm Meister, accident is destiny."

As I did in the earlier posts mentioned above, let us see what Google Translate makes of this:

"Ich denke, dass alle religiösen Männer geglaubt haben, dass es in den Ereignissen des Lebens eine Hand gibt, die nicht unsere ist, und dass, wie jemand in Wilhelm Meister sagt, Zufall Schicksal ist."

To my ears, this sounds too prosaic for Goethe, granted that his thinking ran along these lines.

Image credit: Look and Learn History Picture Archive

Goethe's poetic reinvention

I came across an interesting comment about Goethe in an essay by the literary critic Graham Hough on the subject of "The Modernist Lyric." In the section in which Goethe is mentioned, Hough writes that long-form poetry became out of fashion in the 19th century: "The epic poem expresses a settled ethical choice; the lyric can be the expression of a transitory mood or a momentary illumination." This illumination or mood need not be consistent from lyric to lyric by the same poet, so "poetry becomes habituated to startling changes of mood and style."

The result, in the course of a poetic career, is that poets may find themselves "blocked" psychically. I mean, how much material can you dredge out of your subconscious or unconscious? Hough asserts that there are only three ways out of this psychic impasse:"alienation in the clinical sense"; reintegration on a lower level of insight and experience; and the successful individuation of disparate elements, leading to a more comprehensive experience on a higher level of insight." Literary history is littered with a number of "truncated literary careers," indicating that the last way out is the least common. And now the money quote:

"There are no Goethes in modern literature, and few poets whose lives show a long-sustained development, a perpetual re-creation of the self continued into late maturity of old age."

The one outstanding exception is Yeats. The reason, according to Hough, offers a similarity to Goethe's poetic trajectory, In the case of Yeats, Hough attributes his success in part to "a gift of fortune -- the fortune that cast his lot in with that of a small country, comprehensible by individual intelligence and will, rather than with the vast inhospitable movements of the wider world."

Without doubt, the move to Weimar led to a break in the poetic production that characterized Goethe's Sturm und Drang work, after which it took years for the "new Goethe" to appear. The break has intrigued me since I wrote my dissertation, which was precisely on the subject of the pre-Weimar Goethe. Goethe was scarcely cut off from the wider world in Weimar, but it was a "small" and "comprehensible" place in which he had the freedom to nourish his genius and constantly to transform himself.

Goethe in Weimar 1777

There is nothing like a Singspiel to take your mind off of unpleasant subjects and situations. I am referring to Lila, which, as mentioned in my previous post, Goethe was preparing for the duchess's birthday in January of 1777. This diversionary aspect must account for the popularity of this genre of entertainment. And consider this: who imagined that the courtly world would be coming to an end by the end of the century? Such questions are on my mind in connection with the corona virus. There is nothing like immersing oneself in Goethe to keep social distance from the obsession that people (myself included) are beginning to feel. No conversation escapes from discussing it. So, I turn anew to Goethe.

I apologize in advance for the TBC at the end of this post. I am trying to bring together various elements of Goethe's life in Weimar in 1777, of which Singspiel is part (and which Goethe's Tweets to some extent document). The present post is one of these elements.

While I mentioned in my last post that Goethe was becoming fully immersed in the court culture at Weimar, I referenced a letter to Lavater. In fact, there are several letters to Lavater at this time, in connection with the Physiognomische Fragmente, and also to Philip Reich, the Leipzig publisher of the project. As can be seen in the several letters from the early part of 1777, Goethe was apparently handling the transaction with Reich. The Goethe-Handbuch has two excellent contributions by Karl Pestalozzi, one on the Fragmente and Goethe's participation in the project, and the other on Lavater himself, detailing the relationship of Goethe with Lavater, both the early acquaintance and the later estrangement. The letter to Lavater I quoted in the preceding post ends with the following, which seems to indicate that the terms of the relationship are becoming hardened:

Dein Durst nach Christ. hat mich gejammert. Du bist übler daran als wir Heiden und erscheinen doch in der Noth unsre Götter.

TO BE CONTINUED

Goethe at court

Poussin, Landscape in Calm Weather (1651)

My irregularly posted Goethe Tweets, following our poet through his diaries -- I am now in 1777 -- show that, after scarcely a year in Weimar, he is thoroughly immersed in the life of the court. Indeed, a letter of January 8 to Lavater, which opens with comments about the Physiognomische Fragmente, shows that all his old interests are being left behind:

In meinem iezzigen Leben weichen alle entfernte Freunde in Nebel, es mag so lang währen als es will so hab ich doch ein Musterstückgen des bunten treibens der Welt recht herzlich mit genossen.

He goes on to characterize this "hustle and bustle" and indicates that is making the most of it:

Verdruss Hoffnung, Liebe, Arbeit, Noth, Abenteuer, Langeweile, Hass, Albernheiten, Thorheit, Freude, Erwartetes und Unversehnes, flaches und tiefes, wie die Würfel fallen, mit Festen, Tanzen, Schellen, Seide und Fitter ausstaffirt es ist eine treffliche Wirtschaft.

Participating in all this "silliness" means cutting off certain past associations. In a letter a week later to P.E. Reich, publisher of the Fragments, he alludes to Lenz. I am not sure of Reich's assocation with Lenz, but Goethe alludes to such an association in this letter:

Wegen Lenzen bitte ich Sie zu verfahren als wenn ich gar nicht existirte ...

The same month Goethe drew on one of his former acquaintances, A.F. Oeser, for help in procuring a stage decoration for a festivity that was planned for the birthday of Duchess Louise. Oeser was not a stranger to the Weimar court, was often consulted for "art advice." For this occasion a "new piece" was in planning, for which a backdrop was required:

Wir mögten auf diesem Prospket gern eine herrliche Gegend vorstellen mit Haynen Teichen, wenigen Architekturstücken pp. denn es soll einen Parck bedeuten.

Goethe wrote to ask if Oeser happened to have something handy ("Hatten Sie so was vorrathig ...).

Nicholas Boyle mentions in his Goethe bio that Goethe quickly established January 30, the duchess's birthday, "as the high point in the Weimar theatrical calendar." In 1777 the "new piece" was Goethe's Singpiel Lila. The backdrop Goethe had in mind was evidently planned for act 2 of the piece, characterized as a "Romantische Gegend eines Parks." Since he mentions Poussin in his letter to Oeser, the foreground in the painting at the top of this post may be what he had in mind. (Poussin never omitted architecture in his paintings.)

What interests me is that Goethe was composing Singspiele at this point, a genre that would seem to represent a real change of direction for the author of Götz von Berlichingen and The Sorrows of Young Werther. But perhaps not such a change. In my next post, I will digress on the subject of Goethe's Singspiele.

Goethe at Christmas Anno Domini 1776

I have been Tweeting entries from Goethe's diary, day by day, now in the year 1776. Today's diary entry mentions Goethe's attendance at a "Christbescherung" or "handing out of Christmas presents." According to the Commentary volume for the diaries, it was Anna Amalia's custom on this day to invited members of her inner circle for gift giving. Here is a description of the occasion (go to Google Translate if necessary):

In einem geräumigen Zimmer waren Tische, Gestelle, Pyramiden und Baulichkeiten errichtet, wo jeder Einzelne solche Gaben fand, die ihn theils für seine Verdienste um die Gesellschaft belohnen und erfreuen, theils auch wegen einiger Unarten, Angewohnheiten und Mißgriffe bestrafen und vermahnen sollten.

One would like to know what the "bad habits" and "blunders" certain individuals were admonished or punished for.

The last part of Goethe's diary entry records his mood: Druck Wehmut und und Glauben: "pressure, melancholy, and belief (or faith)."

Picture credit: AKG-Images

"Things Go Better with Goethe"

The title of this post is a New York Times headline over a feature by Martin Walser that apeared in the Sunday Book Review in the year 1986. (The translator is noted as Leigh Hafrey.) That was a year when the New York Times actually deserved its reputation. Among other things, it featured pieces by writers who really knew what they were talking about, in contrast to the presently favored blowhards, who merely opinionate. The piece by Walser is also quite long, long pieces having been abandoned by the NYT in favor of large print and large photos, even on the front page.

I digress.

Walser begins by noting the appropriation of Goethe's words for commerce, prophecy, self-help, and general all-around good feeling. The first example he cites bearing Goethe's words occurs in the advertising copy for a medical journal that appeared in FAZ: ''Goethe'': ''Beginnings are always hard; they often don't lie ready to hand . . . and what everybody wants will emerge only slowly.''

Walser goes on to give examples of other Goethe wisdom in various national and personal contexts, but his aim is to point out the way Goethe has come to seem a model of how to live. As Walser writes: "Everyone who quotes Goethe becomes a little bit like Goethe. If I doubt I can make this assertion on my authority alone, I draw support from Goethe: 'The virtues we appreciate are rooted in us as well.'"

The heart of Walser's piece is quite serious and takes us through Goethe's life stages via his literary production, especially Wilhelm Meister. I quote herewith a small portion:

At Weimar, Goethe housed himself in a snail's shell grand enough to be the cosmos. If, as was the case with Socrates, not a line of his had survived, nothing but the letters and diaries of his contemporaries to tell us how he lived and what he said on this or that occasion, we would still have a sense of him.

Goethe only took his autobiography up to the day in 1775 when he received the invitation to go to Weimar. With that, for him, the most important questions had been answered. He probably would have been less of a model for the German people if he had gone to Italy then, as his father and he himself wanted. He was actually on the way; one can imagine he would have become just another artist burning himself out on the Roman Corso in one disguise after another, as contemptuous of the world as he was narcissistic. He would in any case have encountered few real obstacles. His Wilhelm Meister novel would have remained an art novel - Wilhelm would have lived out his coming of age under interestingly rarefied circumstances.

But Goethe, though he was already considered a genius for ''Gotz'' and ''Werther,'' chose - no doubt in response to his deepest instincts - the more difficult environment. He faced real obstacles and engaged in self-fulfillment not for its own sake, but in confrontation with a kind of duty - an almost Schillerian abstraction for Goethe's sense of the absolutely real. That is how I see him - he was always drawn to what was most alive. Not to a life running free, but a life still suppressed, still disoriented, one that demands more than it has, has a right to more than it is given - that is, a life as yet unsure of its claim to legitimacy. In that situation, one has to help oneself without knowing how. Life is at its most lively when it still lacks something.

Having posted several times on the practice of quoting Goethe in various contexts, I now regularly run quotes through Google Translate. The one in the image at the top of this post strikes me as inauthentic:

Sie müssen nicht um die Welt reisen, um zu verstehen, dass der Himmel überall blau ist.

It doesn't have enough gravity to come from Goethe. What do you think?