Goethe educates Eckermann in the matter of taste

P. P. Roos, Sheep and Goat in a Rocky Landscape

I wrote previously concerning what might be considered "authentic" about the Conversations, namely, the way Eckermann portrays Goethe as a pedagogue. I am not familiar with the scholarship on the Conversations, but something similar can be seen in his Leipzig letters to his young sister Cornelia. Here is an example from February 26, 1824. They have been examining drawings and engravings in Goethe's possession. Eckermann writes as follows:

Goethe verfährt hiebei in Bezug auf mich sehr sorgfältig, und ich fühle, daß es seine Absicht ist, mich in der Kunstbetrachtung auf eine höhere Stufe der Einsicht zu bringen. Nur das in seiner Art durchaus Vollendete zeigt er mir und macht mir des Künstlers Intention und Verdienst deutlich, damit ich erreich möge, die Gedanken der Besten nachzudenken und den Besten gleich zu empfinden. ... "Ich zeige Ihnen daher nur das Beste; und wenn Sie sich darin befestigen, so haben Sie einen Maßstab für das übrige, das Sie nicht überschätzen, aber doch schätzen werden.”

Here is Margaret Fuller's translation of the passage, which leaves some things out, but for those interested I recommend Google Translate. Simply copy the German passage here, and the translation comes out very quickly, provided I have made no typing errors!

“Goethe takes great interest in forming my taste; he shows me only what is complete and endeavors to make me apprehend the intention of the artist; he would have me think and feel only with the thoughts and feelings of the noblest beings. ... 'I show you the best and when you have thoroughly apprehended these, you will  have a standard, and will know how to value inferior performances without overrating them.'”

It strikes me that Goethe might have said something along those lines. How about the comments attributed to him about the drawings of sheep by the German painter Philipp Peter Roos (1655-1706)? This occurs shortly after the above passage:

"Mir wird immer bange," sagte Goethe, "wenn ich diese Tiere ansehe. Das Beschränkte, Dumpfe, Träumende, Gähnende ihres Zustandes zieht mich in das Mitgefühl desselben hinein, man fürchtet, zum Tier zu werden, und möchte fast glauben, der Künstler sei selber eins gewesen."

This does seem to be a sentiment of Goethe's, even if it was not expressed in the exact words that Eckermann quotes. As I don't have an edition of the Conversations with commentary (I am spending the summer again on an island in British Columbia, far away from any research facility), I do not know for certain that Goethe is referring here to Philipp Peter Roos; he is quoted only as saying "Roos," and there were several painters of that name. Nevertheless, the painting at the top of this post is in the Städel in Frankfurt and was acquired by the museum in 1895 as a gift of Josephine and Anton Brentano. I wonder if Goethe might have seen the original. As I wrote in a post two years ago, he visited the estate of Franz and Antonia Brentano in September of 1814. Perhaps they owned the painting at that time?

In both of the above passages the sentiments do seem to be those of Goethe. Whether he expressed himself in that rather magisterial way is something else. More thoughts on that matter in the future. Familiarity with Goethe's method of composing letters at this time -- dictation to a secretary followed by editing or revisions -- leads one to suspect that Eckermann may likewise had formalized Goethe's speech.

Eckermann's Goethe

"Mit Goethe spazieren gefahren"

I first posted on the Conversations back in December of 2018, planning a series on the topic, and it has taken me this long  to return to it. I brought with me to British Columbia this book and one other on Goethe that I am due to review. My reading of the Conversations has now taken me through 1823 and into 1824, and a few things suggest themselves to me as worth mentioning. At the same time, I confess that I am not familiar with the scholarship on the Conversations, although I do know that they were not composed as such on the dates attributed to them. To what extent the "Goethe" before us, often quoted at length, is factual is thus uncertain.

Most entries open with time and date of encounter with Goethe (e.g., "Um ein Uhr mit Goethe spazieren gefahren"), which suggest that Eckermann kept a diary in which he recorded that information at the end of the day, which might also have been accompanied by notations concerning subjects discussed and also Goethe's personal appearance and state of health. The latter was of concern to the inhabitants of Weimar. Eckermann visited Goethe on November 16, 1823, and described an illness for which "Pflaster" was applied to his chest on the side of the heart. The next day's entry, November 17, notes as follow: "Als ich diesen Abend ins Theater kam, drängten viele Personen mir entgegen und erkundigten sich sehr ängstlich nach Goethes Befinden."

One other aspect that seems authentic to me is a decided pedagogical impulse on Goethe's part vis à vis Eckermann. This aspect is on view in Goethe's letters to his sister Cornelia when he was a student in Leipzig. His letters to her are full of recommendations for improvement of her mind. As we know, the Leipzig letters were written by Goethe himself, not dictated to a secretary, and, one suspects, were sent off to Frankfurt without being edited.

In my next post on the Conversations I will discuss some of the life lessons dished up by Goethe for Eckermann.

Goethe scribblings

Notgeld Weimar 1921

I came across an old notebook and going through it came across all matter of notes on Goethe and many other subjects. Let me note some of what I wrote concerning Goethe's finances, often only a few lines from a scholarly article. (I have written on Goethe and money a couple of times: in 2008; and in 2015).

For instance, of an article by Dieter Hein on Goethe's "Haushaltsführung," I noted that Goethe was in the 8.2 percent of Weimar taxpayers who had a yearly income of ca. 4000 talers in 1820. By then, he was drawing considerable honoraria from publishing. From a book entitled Goethe und das Geld: Der Dichter und die moderne Wissenschaft (an edited volume by Vera Hierholzer and Sandra Richter), I noted Goethe's ambivalent relationship with Bertuch, whose activities employed between 100 and 150 persons, supporting 10 percent of Weimar's population (including families of employees).

Jochen Klauß, in Goethe und Geld: Goethes Finanzen, mentioned that Goethe's negotiations, from 1827, with publishers, especially Cotta re his Ausgabe letzter Hand, reveal a hard-headed bargainer and an understanding of his commercial worth. According to Klauß, Goethe received in 1816 a yearly honorarium of 3000 talers, corresponding to 20 years of his annual salary of 3,100 talers, what today would be worth 2.5 milion Euro: "etwa das Doppelte von dem, was für den Literatur-Nobelpreis vergeben wird."

Fritz Strich on world literature

My essay on the above subject has just appeared in vol. 26 of Goethe Yearbook and is probably available at JStor for those who are interested. I have worked for a long time on this subject. Among the issues that interested me were the omission of Fritz Strich from the scholarship concerning world literature and the prevalence of an interpretation of world literature that has little to do with what Goethe had in mind when he began speaking on the subject in the 1820s. That said, it must be admitted that Goethe was breaking new ground. Strich also was breaking new ground when he began to write on world literature in the 1920s, and it may surprise Germanists in particular that Goethe und die Weltliteratur (1946) was the first comprehensive treatment of world literature to be written. Within a decade of that publication, the world literature "industry" began, although even the 1965 edition of Pyritz's Goethe bibliography still had no separate section on world literature.

It can't be said, of course, that Strich faithfully reproduces what Goethe may or may not have had in mind. Strick began his writing on world literature in the 1920s, when Germany was at a low point internationally, to put it mildly, and his writings were an attempt, I believe, to write Germany back into the historical continuity of European nations that was also to be seen in two almost contemporaneous studies: Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature and Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. In Strich's treatment, world literature was a process leading to tolerance, amity among the nations, a felt humanity, and so on, and was grounded on the verifiable cross-fertilization of the European literary vernaculars since the Renaissance, with the various "national" literary idioms borrowing or passing on the distinctive features of their literary production. Thus, sonnets, for instance, originated in one country, but were passed on to others, with each becoming nationally inflected: compare the difference between those of Petrarch and Shakespeare, not to forget the vast production in the Baroque period in Germany.

It was the peaceful nature of this cultural contact, unlike the often warlike, cross-borders political relations, that suggested to Strich a "universal" spirit (Geist) absorbing all the individual national spirits and uniting the nations into a shared universal destiny. No doubt, it is this "spiritual" approach -- that of Geistesgeschichte -- that was already out of date when Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared and that has led to undervaluation of Strich's role in scholarship. The orthodox view today of world literature seems to be "literature of the world," a marketplace..

While Strich was certainly correct about the literary cross-fertilization, there were other processes, of a material nature, that also began in the period of the Renaissance and that have indeed produced a common European -- or, better put, Western -- "spirit." I am speaking of trade and commerce, which, within a decade of the discovery of the New World, jump-started the material transformation of the various European countries. Locally produced inventions and technology crossed borders as well, spreading the findings, despite existing historical animosities, despite the attempts of governments to control the flow and making knowledge "proprietary." The result has been the spread of common institutions and a shared ethos concerning civil liberties, which, for those who share them, are universal values.

Picture credit: University of Bern

Proust on Goethe

Swann in Love

Recently I have been reading "Swann in Love," a novella-like episode within Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. "Classic" authors, such as Proust, always serve as something of a foil for considerations of Goethe, and the major difference that struck me was the lack of "society" in Goethe's novels. One does discern some idea of German social relations circa 1770s in The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the obsession that drives Swann in regard to Odette is similar to that of both Werther and Eduard, but where in the heck are we, anyway? There are no recognizable landmarks, no Faubourg Saint-Germain, no Bois de Boulogne, only generic places and settings. I have actually written on this subject before, in connection with Trollope and Jane Austen. In that earlier post, I pointed out that Goethe knew a lot about government, first hand, in contrast to Anthony Trollope, who only worked in a post office. It was Trollope, however, who wrote about the workings of government and politics.

At home I have a volume entitled Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, which besides Proust's well-known "Contre Saint-Beuve," also contains the section "Proust the Reader," the first essay of which is on Goethe. Editors date it to the period of Jean Santeuil, Proust's first novel, between 1899 and 1904 . Here are a few nuggets:

The habits we constantly recur to in our books show what has fired our imagination ... In Goethe sites are extremely important. We often come upon a place where there is a wide and varied prospect. Valleys extend before us, with villages and a fine river on which the light of morning dazzles, and we look down on all of this from a little mountain. Various private collections, too, are dwelt on with pleasure, collections of pictures, natural history collections. One feels that these things were not merely put in to please, but that they had an extremely serious bearing on his intellectual life; that the concern of his intellect and its essential aim was to analyze the pleasure he drew from them ... and to ascertain their effect on his mind.

Characters, likewise, show us "the habitual preoccupations of Goethe's mind." Proust also draws attention to an aspect that is sometimes mentioned in connection with his own work, i.e., allegory, and to the seeming importance to Goethe of symbolizing "what is seen and unseen in our lives by ceremonies."

Proust's reading of Goethe appears to have been fairly wide. He mentions the Wilhelm Meister novels (of which the quote above might refer to the opening of the second novel) and Elective Affinities (commenting on the Count and the Baroness and on the laying out of gardens), as well as to what the translation calls "the Reflections," which I assume means the Maximen und Reflexionen. I can't help thinking back to my post a few weeks back in which I discussed what I considered the deficits of J.M. Coetzee's piece on Goethe in the New York Review of Books. Proust's take on Goethe, in contrast, shows the mind of a great writer thinking deeply about another great writer.

Goethe calligraphed

I stopped by the Grolier Club today to see "Alphabet Magic," an exhibit of the work of calligraphers and type designers Hermann and Gudrun Zapf. Typefaces with which book lovers are familiar were created by Hermann Zapf, including Optima and Aldus. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me and could not get images of poems by Goethe in Hermann's calligraphy. Here are a couple of nice examples from the internet. The Buch Suleika was on exhibit, a gorgeous volume. (Click on images to enlarge.)

"Faust" conference in Boston

Having discussed Peter Schwartz's translation of André Jolles's Einfache Formen yesterday, let me mention another undertaking of his at Boston University, where he is a member of the Department of World Languages and Literatures. This is a symposium this coming Saturday, April 13, on the theme of "selling one's soul," sponsored by the WLL Department. The keynote address, by Jane K. Brown, illustrious Goethe scholar and former president of the GSNA, is entitled " Irrlichtelieren: Knowledge in Faust and in Goethe’s Theory of Color." If only I had a magic carpet and could travel there.

Is it my imagination, or does the person of Faust in the above image not look like Edgar Allan Poe?