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

Goethe in the Campagna

I have posted on this subject before, indeed a decade ago, but one of my domestic tasks in the present lockdown has been to go through my filing cabinet and create some order. Obviously I have a huge Goethe file, and I have selected some items out for this blog. I would like to add one detail on the charming sketch above by Tischbein (as always, click to enlarge) that I overlooked in my earlier post (2009!).

The 2009 post concerned the drawing's acquisition by the Freies Deutsches Hochstift and the information it added to the gestation of Tischbein's iconic portrait of Goethe in the Campagna. Judging by the gesture of the left hand and by the attentive position of the other figures, Goethe is apparently imparting some story, while his hat and his coat suggest the motif of Der Wanderer. It was this hat that caught my attention this morning. I might be mistaken -- and if so I hope someone will correct me -- but I can't recall any other representation of Goethe with a hat on. Certainly he wore a hat; people -- men and women -- wore hats in those days.

In the Tischbein portrait Goethe wears a hat, but it is not the hat of a "wanderer." It resembles more closely the hat worn by Nicholaes Berchem (1620-1683), a painter of pastoral landscapes. I mention Berchem only because he is referenced in the Bersani article I quoted in the earlier post as a source of the pastoral imagery in the portrait. The above image of Berchem is by Jan Stolker (d. 1785), a near contemporary of Tischbein. Maybe Tischbein was referring to the Dutch Golden Age? I'm not an art historian and welcome any enlightening on this particular sartorial style, especially in the portrait of Goethe.

Goethe in Ettersberg

Karl Eibl, in his Goethe Handbuch entry on Goethe's poetry in the first Weimar decade, addresses the "ambivalent world feeling" (Weltgefühl) to which Goethe would give expression when mentioning his early years in Weimar and to which most Goethe scholars have assented. Evidence is a letter Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein on July 16, 1777, which expresses what Eibl writes could be regarded as a "deep-seated ambivalence." Goethe was on his way home after a bird shooting with the duke in Apoldo. We must imagine Goethe on horseback (as always cut and paste into Google translate):

Der Etterberg! Die unbedeutenden Hügel! Und mir fuhrs durch die Seele -- Wenn du nun auch das einmal verlassen mußt! das Land wo du so viel gefunden hast, alle Glückseligkeit gefunden hast, die ein Sterblicher träumen darf, wo du zwischen Behagen und Mißbehagen, in ewig klingender Existenz schwebst ...!

Eibl, however, doubts that Goethe really felt existentially ambivalent, instead contending that the mixed feelings (Behagen und Mißbehagen) were primarily an expression of the restrictions on him that gave him little time for poetic production.

The above-mentioned Ettersberg -- called here "unbedeutend" (insignificant) -- is interesting because this range is associated with one of Goethe's best-known poems from the Weimar years, "Wandrers Nachtlied," written "Am Hang des Ettersberg d. 12. Feb. 76."

In my last post I mentioned Wolfgang Vulpius's volume on Goethe in Thuringia, the focus of which is less the poetry and more the natural world that Goethe was introduced to in the duchy of Weimar. The opening sentence of Vulpius's chapter on the Ettersberg mentions the abundant fossils of the shell limestone era in this mountain range. Ultimately Ettersberg was not insignificant at all. The entire area, including the Harz, was important for his mineralogical forays. Vulpius quotes from notes of Goethe, made in 1780 for J.C. Voigt in the context of the geological survey of the duchy:

Auf einer mineralogischen Reise durch das Herzogtum Weimar wäre der Ettersberg zuerst zu besteigen und alsdenn herunterwärts nach Zimmern und Hopfgarten zu, als auch herüber bis an die Ilm, was von Lage zu entdecken sein möchte, zu untersuchen, in was für Ordnung sie aufeinander folgen und in welcher Höhe gewisse Arten von Versteinerungen besonders der Bufonites stehen. Die Erfurter Bemühungen nach Steinkohen bei Hopfgarten sind zu untersuchen und nach den ... auf dem Ettersberg geschehenen Bemühungen sich zu erkunden.

It was the Harz journey of 1777 that inaugurated Goethe's enthusiasm for and learning on the subject of mineralogy, which increased with each journey (mostly on horseback) through this region. Vulpius mentions other Ettersberg landmarks associated with Goethe (e.g., the meteorological station established in 1817 in Schöndorf, on the back side of the Ettersberg), and also from Eckermann's report of September 26, 1827, including this well-known appreciation:

Ich war sehr oft an dieser Stelle und dachte in späteren Zeiten sehr oft, es würde das letztemal sein, daß ich von hier aus die Reiche der Welt und ihre Herrlichkeiten überblickte.

Pertinent to the importance of the area for what Goethe learned about the natural world is this passage from the same report :

Immer der alte Meeresboden! Wenn man von dieser Höhe auf Weimar hinabblickt und auf die mancherlei Dörfer umher, so kommt es einem vor wie ein Wunder, wenn man sich sagt, daß es eine Zeit gegeben, wo in dem weiten Tale dort unten die Walfische ihr Spiel getrieben. Und doch ist es so, wenigstens höchst wahrscheinlich.

"The Road to Hell"

I cannot finish up this post on the Ettersberg without mentioning, as does Vulpius, that the Nazis cleared one of the Ettersberg forests and built a concentration camp there. The two maps in this post (click to enlarge) come from the blog of the British historian, Ian Friel. In a blogpost back in 2014, Friel writes of buying in a bookshop in Germany the 1935 publication of Conti-Atlas für Kraftfahrer (‘Conti-Atlas for  the Motorist’). The map directly above shows the renaming of street names in Weimar by that date. After World War II, Adolf Hitler Strasse was renamed by the DDR government  Ernst-Thälmann Strasse. I am a terrible map reader and cannot tell from the book I mentioned in the previous post (Weimars Stadtbild ...) what the street's name was in Goethe's day.

Goethe's Garden House

Setting of Goethe's Garden House (click to enlarge)

The diary entries of winter and spring 1777 concerning the garden house, the mention of workmen and further work on the roof, got me interested in exploring it. According to Nicholas Boyle, Goethe took possession of the two-storied cottage in April 1776. More or less a ruin, it required several months of repair before it was habitable. Boyle writes that the duke employed up to 26 workmen at a time, repairing roof and floors, painting walls, clearing the garden, while court carpenter Johann Martin Mieding constructed furniture: a 3-part pine dining table and two beds, one for Goethe, the other for Seidel. Boyle speaks of the hut as allowing Goethe to live out “Werther’s fantasy of the simple life at a symbolic, but not inconvenient, distance from the town,” where he spent half his time and also had an emergency apartment for his use. Goethe’s diaries of early 1777

Wolfgang Vulpius (1897–1978) has a take on Goethe's early years in Weimar that throws a different light on the garden house. Vulpius, a  literary scholar and writer, was a descendent of Christian August Vulpius, brother of Christiana. Wolfgang published in 1955 — thus, when Weimar was still in the DDR — Goethe in Thüringen: Stätten seines Lebens und Wirkens, which I have in my possession. He touches on practically every place in Thuringia that Goethe visited or in which he left some trace of himself, not only the big names (Erfurt, Gotha, Ilmenau), but also places unfamiliar to me (Paulinzella, Pößneck, Kötschau).

According to Goethe In Thüringen, biographies of Goethe dwell on the court life and the literary pursuits but shortchange the effect of the “new world” that Weimar revealed to him, “eine grenzenlos weite, unerschöplich reiche: die Natur.” According to Vulpius, before Weimar Goethe’s acquaintance with the world of “natural produce” (Naturerzeugnisse) consisted of table fruit (Tafelobst) and ornamental gardens. Vulpius drew my attention to “Die Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums” of 1817 in Goethe’s morphological writings, which opens as follows:

Sogleich bei meinem Eintritt in den edlen weimarischen Lebenskreis ward mir der unschätzbare Gewinn zuteil, Stuben- und Stadtluft mit Land-, Wald- und Gartenatmosphäre zu vertauschen.

Goethe continues in the opening paragraph to mention that in his first winter in Weimar, while partaking in the pleasures of the chase and hunt, activities that most of us are familiar with, he had many conversations with foresters about “Holzkultur.” In the rest of the text he gives credit to the many individuals who imparted botanical instruction: Dr. Buchholz (“Inhaber der Stadtapotheke am Markt”), Johann Friedrich August Göttling, Johann Georg Karl Batsch, Friedrich Gottlieb Dietrich. The basis of botanical knowledge was Linnaean, and it was the young Friedrich Gottlieb who explained the Linnaean classification to him, while Linnaeus’ Philosophy of Botany became his daily study. It is here that Goethe writes that the greatest influence on him, after Spinoza and Shakespeare, was Linnaeus.

Already in 1776, according to Boyle, Goethe planted lime trees, and in 1777 oaks and beeches, spruce and Juniper. Jasmine, honeysuckle, and climbing roses soon decorated the place, and before long he was sending fresh vegetable from his garden to Frau von Stein. It strikes me that Goethe was not simply living Werther’s fantasy of the simple life, but was making a home for himself in a very un-Werther kind of way.

The very cool images here (click to enlarge) come from Weimars Stadtbild 1784-1828-1900 (Mit den Strassennamen und einen Stadtplan zur Zeit von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) by Guido Schnaubert.

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