Werther at his desk

Whenever I pick up a book I always look in the index to see if Goethe is mentioned. Eighteenth-century studies invariably include him, if only incidentally. The exhibition catalogue for "Rooms with a View" has Goethe in the index and also refers to his influence on certain of the painters included in the exhibition. One of the painters, Carl Ludwig Kaaz, is said to have had a close friendship with Goethe. As Sabine Rewald writes, Kaaz gave Goethe instruction in gouache and watercolors when he was in Karlsbad. More important perhaps was Carl Gustav Carus, who was also a professor medicine and whom Goethe invited to collaborate with him on his morphological publications. Unfortunately, Carus did not think highly of Goethe's color theory; Goethe thus broke off their correspondence.

The above painting, though not in the exhibition, is included in the catalogue. It is by Georg Friedrich Kersting, whom I mentioned in my first post on this exhibition in connection with the portrait of Louise Seidler. As Rewald writes in the catalogue: the figure's "artfully disheveled blond hair is in tune with his 'Werther'-inspired costume": blue jacket, yellow vest, and grey pants.

"Im Herbst"

There are so many charming paintings in "Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century," an exhibition now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work at the left, however, painted by Anton Dieffenbach (1831-1914) in 1856, reminded me immediately of a poem by Goethe. The poem is "Im Herbst" (In Autumn) and, as in Dieffenbach's painting of Window in Sunlight, describes grape leaves climbing up a trellis outside the window.

Fetter grüne, du Laub,
Das Rebengeländer,
Hier mein Fenster herauf.
Gedrängter quillet,
Zwillingsbeeren, und reifet
Schneller und glänzend voller.

Euch brütet der Mutter Sonne
Scheideblick, euch umsäuselt
Des holden Himmels
Fruchtende Fülle.
Euch kühlet des Monds
Freundlicher Zauberhauch,
Und euch betauen, ach,
Aus diesen Augen
Der ewig belebenden Liebe
Voll schwellende Tränen.

("Autumn Feelings": Flourish greener, as ye clamber,/ Oh ye leaves, to seek my chamber,/ Up the trellis'd vine on high!/ May ye swell, twin berries tender,/ Juicier far, -- and with more splendour/ Ripen, and more speedily! O'er ye broods the sun at even/ As he sinks to rest, and heaven/ Softly breathes into your ear/ All its fertilizing fullness, While the moon's refreshing coolness/ Magic laden, hovers near; And, alas! ye're watered ever/ By a stream of tears that rill/ From mine eyes -- tears ceasing never,/ Tears of love that nought can still.)

Goethe wrote the poem in 1775, shortly before he left for Weimar. "Autumn Feelings" of the English refers to the title Goethe gave the poem in 1789, when he first published his collected writings, at which time he also did some revisions to the earlier texts. According to Metzler's Goethe-Lexikon (one of my favorite reference books), the poem is typical of Goethe's early lyric work, especially the "intimate relationship" it suggests between "I" and nature. The "cosmic powers" of the sun and the moon cause the grapes to grow, but also the tears of the poet, watering them with "the creative natural power [Naturkraft] of love." The last word of the poem -- Tränen (tears) -- adds an elegiac note. Though the title of Dieffenbach's painting is Window in Sunlight, a rather dark mood is suggested, which makes we wonder if Dieffenbach knew Goethe's poem.

"Real life is not a theater"

I was familiar with the name Ronald Blythe from reviews in the London Times Literary Supplement, but I recently picked up a small book of his, The Bookman's Tale, as part of my Lenten readings. Blythe, from Suffolk in England, is known as "Britain's greatest living rural writer," and The Bookman's Tale consists of short chapters in which Blythe relates the progress of his work (often having to do with the poet and Anglican priest George Herbert), his friendships, including with the writer Vikram Seth (who bought and is renovating George Herbert's house), Marina Warner, Imogen Holst (daughter of the composer), and lots of local folks. Blythe reports of evensong, of house calls by plumbers and other workmen, of books he is reading. His thoughts on the letters of W.H. Auden (like Blythe, an Anglican) made me want to order them from Amazon. I learned where T.S. Eliot got the inspiration for Little Gidding. He writes of Chaucer's pilgrims as if they were Suffolk neighbors. Well, no doubt Chaucer portrayed real people.

A couple of days ago I read his chapter on "The Great Essex Earthquake" and was thinking of a way to post something about it. A month ago I had posted on earthquakes, drawing on Bodmer's problematic category of "the turbulent" (das Ungestüme) as it relates to the sublime. Earthquakes and other catastrophes, as I wrote, are unlike "the great in nature." The latter refers to natural phenomena the extent of which is too large for us to grasp at first sight. These would include the heavens above, the oceans, natural grandeur (e.g., the Grand Canyon, the Swiss Alps). Despite our inability to get hold of their extent, they don't literally knock us over. Moreover, these phenomena are accessible to study by us, as modern science shows. The turbulent, however, literally disarms us and indeed is occasionally annihilating. Thus, earthquakes, such as recently occurred in Japan and New Zealand. The turbulent allows us no freedom, unlike the great and the beautiful, to which we are free to react or even to ignore.

The events of the morning of September 11, 2001, represent the turbulent. The very issue of freedom arose after the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called the attacks "the biggest work of art that there has ever been." In comparison with the attacks, he said, his own compositions were as nothing. Of course, as he also said, the people affected (the ones, for instance, jumping from the Towers) had not "come to the concert." Thus, the difference between art -- a realm of freedom -- and real life. Such catastrophes are not theater. In real life we are often affected by things over which we have no control.

So, what did Ronald Blythe say about the Great Essex Earthquake of April 22, 1884? He mentions that a local photographer happened to be around on the "lovely spring day" and was thus able to record the after effects. No deaths, but the property damage was extensive. "A thousand roofs slid to the ground; 20 churches were in ruins. Three entire villages went to wreckage. Boats were thrown from the harbours on to the shore. There was a noise that nobody would ever forget. There was a blinding dust, and there was the pathos of what would later be the exposed interior, the wallpapered rooms hanging in the air, the fires blazing in the suspended grates, the unmade bed."

Mr. Damant, the photographer, "hurried around with his fine plate camera." Ronald Blythe writes that one of his favorite photos shows an "elegantly grouped picture of the Rector of Langenhoe and his friends standing in the ruins of his church clasping umbrellas and gently smiling." There then follows a paragraph that seems apropos to today, a reminder of the fragility and also the resilience of our civilization. Perhaps it is this fragility to which Bodmer was presciently alluding with his category of the turbulent:

"They had curiously prophetic expressions, which would appear again and again during the next century, shaken looks that hid the shock, the automatic grin. And the strange stench of fallen architecture. All this would repeat itself -- all over the world. And human beings would stand and stare at the swift demolition of their achievements as the dust settled, and would look so differently from how they felt."

Picture credit: Hornbeam

Rooms with a View

There is a lovely, small exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, "Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century," curated by Sabine Rewald. According to Rewald's essay in the catalogue, it was two sepia drawings from about 1805 by Caspar David Friedrich that inaugurated the motif of paintings and drawings of open windows, a "potent symbol" for Romantic-period artists. (The other "potent" motif was that of the moon, which fascinated many writers and philosophers as well.)

One of the paintings in the exhibit (above), by Georg Friedrich Kersting, portrays a woman embroidering. Since the appearance of her memoir in 1873, we know that the sitter here was the painter Louise Seidler (1786-1866), daughter of an equerry at the university in Jena. Her memoir, according to Rewald, "offers a fascinating account of the artistic life in Jena, Dresden, Weimar, Munich, and Rome between 1786 and 1823." I have not read this memoir, but would certainly like to do so. Rewald calls this painting "a study of contemplation and morning light."

Louise Seidler seems not to have been a particularly great artist, excelling in portraits of young women and girls, e.g., Minna Herzlieb (at the left; see my post on Minna), endowing them with "ein liebliches Dasein" (a charming presence or existence), according to Goethes Weimar. Though Goethe himself liked her pastel of him (below), from 1811, Goethes Weimar is not impressed with it, calling it "weichlich-verblassen" (effeminate-pale).

Rewald makes a strange claim, asserting that Kersting portrayed Louise Seidler pursuing a feminine activity, embroidering, instead of painting, "most likely because the image of a woman pursuing a man's profession would have raised more than one eyebrow in Germany at the time." That claim, however, goes against the facts on the ground. Goethe was a friend of Seidler's -- he had known her since she was a child and a playmate of his own son August -- and, since she was otherwise without means, later promoted her career, which included having Duke Carl August award her funds to train in Munich and then in Rome, Naples, and Florence between 1817 and 1823.

She seems to have had a charming personality -- Goethes Weimar speaks of her "Liebenswürdigkeit" -- which opened many doors to her, especially in the Romantic circles of Jena. She was a frequent, welcome visitor at Goethe's house am Frauenplan. When she returned from her studies, Goethe arranged free lodging for her, with atelier, and then obtained a position for her, with a yearly salary of 100 talers, teaching drawing to the duke's daughters and managing the collections of the "free drawing academy" (founded by the duke in 1776). It doesn't seem to me that anyone would have been affronted (or "raised an eyebrow") by a portrait of a woman painting.

By the way, Rewald mentions in her catalogue essay "a curious and riveting precedent" to Friedrich's painting of Woman at the Window: the water color of 1787 by Tischbein of Goethe at his window on the via del Corso in Rome. (See also my post on this water color.) According to Rewald, Friedrich did not know of Tischbein's drawing, despite the similarities in the two works: "the emptiness of their settings and the near symmetry of their compositions." Both, according to Rewald, may have as their precedent a work of 1654 by Jacobus Vrel, a painting of a servant woman (above left) at a window, though this "plump model" is unlike the "large, erect, centered figures" in Tischbein's and Friedrich's works.

Dutch painters seem to have made a specialty of women at windows. Think, for instance, of Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window, which, according to Rewald, was on view in the painting galleries of the Dresden museum when Kersting painted his images of "hushed rooms."

Natural Beauty

My last post, on the natural sublime, contained two images: one was a photograph by Ansel Adams, the other a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe. Both were of the same subject -- a leaf -- but the difference between the two shows that there can be no "objective" view of even an ordinary object. Of course, we all recognize that a leaf is being represented. To that extent, we all possess (as Kant might say) a common cognitive apparatus. The representation, however -- the photograph or the painting -- is evidence of the artist's "distinctive soul" (as Roger Scruton says, in his book Beauty). All of us, likewise, when viewing nature, see something different. Thus, according to Kant, the subjective aspect of our view of nature or of art. As Scruton notes, for Kant the appreciation of arts became a "secondary exercise of aesthetic interest." It is our appreciation of nature -- even the most utilitarian people respond to their surroundings -- that is the "primary exercise of judgment."

The lovely image at the top is of a species of butterfly, Kallima inachus, that mimics dry leaves for camouflage.

The Natural Sublime

I have occasionally read articles by Roger Scruton over the years, but recently my friend Maureen Mullarkey posted an item on her blog about his book Beauty. Maureen has great taste in writing and in artists, so I immediately acquired the book. Scruton writes the clearest, most accessible prose, breaking down really big ideas into portion athat non-philosophical minds (like mine can grasp. Herewith an example, from the chapter "Natural Beauty," in which he distinguishes our experience of, say, the songs of birds and the colors or shapes of flowers from works of art:

"Works of art are expressly presented as objects of contemplation. They are framed on a wall, contained between the covers of a book, installed in the museum or reverently performed in the concert hall. To change them without the artist's consent is to violate a fundamental aesthetic propriety. Works of art stand as the eternal receptacles of intensely intended messages. ... Nature, by contrast, is generous, content to mean only herself, uncontained, without an external frame, and changing from day to day."

I also like his use of the term "apartness" to speak of natural phenomena, "their capacity to show that the world contains things other than us, which are just as interesting as we are."

Now, it was in the 18th century that people discovered nature as an object of aesthetic interest. Starting with the English critic John Dennis and then expanded on by Joseph Addison, the experience of the natural sublime was practically synonymous with an encounter with grand mountains (and also with the starry skies above and so on). In the essay I am writing on Bodmer, I have posed this question: Why in none of his treatises on poetry did Bodmer consider natural experience or natural beauties as potential poetic subjects? Surrounded his entire life long (1698-1783) by the mountains of Switzerland, about which otherwise so much ink was spilled in the 18th century, he never even mentions them when writing of "the Great" in nature, a notion he took over from Addison. Bodmer never uses the term "sublime" in reference to nature's effects. "Sublime" is reserved for the portrayal of noble and grand actions. Even the actions of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost can be described as sublime, exceeding as they do in evil. When speaking of the grand in nature he resorts to stock formulas that are repeated by almost every writer on the sublime in the 18th century -- mountain gorges and abysses, violent storms, shipwrecks -- all drawn from literary accounts. The real world of nature does not interest him.

Bodmer's late essay on the sublime of 1746 indicates that he was aware of the connection that was being made between the sublime and personal encounters with nature. Reading Scruton, I seem to see that Bodmer's conventional references to nature, whether of natural beauty or of grandeur, are attempts to "frame" nature, to place it in a poetic world of its own, where the imagination can, as Scruton writes, "wander freely, with our own interests and desires in abeyance." Thus, his literary examples came from Homer and Virgil and even from some early 18th-century German poets (e.g., Brockes). Whether it is scenes of nature or of human action, the works of those poets, as Scruton writes, "come to us soaked in thought." Art is thus "freed from the contingencies of everyday life."

Scruton doesn't mention it, but it may be that freedom "from the contingencies of everyday life" is what attracts us to nature, whether to walks in the country or, in my case, kayaking on the river in the summer. (Kayak season starts in exactly one month, when the water temperature reaches 55 degrees.) Just being lazy, without any purpose.

Aesthetic Impressions

The essay on Bodmer and the sublime ("Where Are the Mountains?") is reaching a conclusion. I had hoped to finish it by the end of January, and here we are in April. Well, this week I am working on the footnotes, so that must mean I will soon be finished, right?

I was going through Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of the Enlightenment this morning, trying to locate a reference he had made to Bodmer's "Lockean sensualism." I haven't found it yet, but I came across this gem: "The observation of an object under the microscope may reveal to the naturalist its composition and thereby its real objective nature, but its aesthetic imrpession becomes a total loss." This comes up in the section on Alexander Baumgarten and "the new science of aesthetics," which, as Cassirer writes, "abandons itself to sensory appearance, without attempting to go beyond it to something entirely different, to the grounds of all appearance." For example, a geologist could tell us about the composition of a landscape, from which we would gain much "scientific insight," but "not the slightest trace of the beauty of the landscape would be preserved."

Cassirer quotes a very early poem by Goethe (from his Leipzig student days), which gives poetic expression to the difference between scientific observation and aesthetic impression:

Fluttering the fountain nigh
The iridescent dragonfly
An hour mine eye has dwelt upon;
Now dark, now light alternately
Like the chameleon;
Now red, now blue,
Now blue, now green:
How would its hues appear
If one could but come near!

It flits and hovers, resting not --
Hush! on a willow bough it lights;
I have it in my fingers caught,
And now I seek its colors true
And find a melancholy blue --

Such is thy lot, dissector of delights!

Wherever one looks, Goethe is always there!

Photo credit: Butterfly blogspot