Читать книгу Literature and the Cult of Personality - Gregory Maertz - Страница 6

“Überhaupt, der persönliche Charakter des Schriftstellers bringt seine Bedeutung beim Publikum hervor, nicht die Künste seines Talents.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[3]

“This new generation shared a culture which, largely thanks to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, was almost as much German in its origins as it was English.”

Rosemary Ashton[4]

In a letter dated 20 July 1827 Goethe responds to a new English-language biography of Schiller sent to him by the young Thomas Carlyle: “Der Koran sagt: ‘Gott hat jedem Volke einen Propheten gegeben in seiner eignen Sprache.’ So ist Jeder Übersetzer ein Prophet seinem Volke” [The Koran says: ‘God has given every people a prophet in their own language.’ Thus each translator is a prophet to his people].[5] In this memorable tribute to the young Scottish author, who had “learned from the Germans to represent literature as the new liturgy,”[6] Goethe offers an assessment of the privileged status of cultural intermediaries in the age he declared was that of Weltliteratur [world literature]. Until Goethe’s death five years later Carlyle played the combined roles of Dolmetscher [interpreter], Übersetzer [translator], and Vermittler [mediator] of German culture in Britain with unflagging zeal. Recognized by Goethe as successor in this endeavor to Walter Scott (1771–1832), he introduced an exegesis of Goethe’s strong personality that made a lasting impression on the intellectual life of mid- to late nineteenth-century Britain and America. The main vehicle for this subversive force was a diverse body of writing, including critical essays, translations, and prefaces that appeared during the most formative decade of Carlyle’s career, 1822 to 1832.

Klaus Doderer has argued that Carlyle’s cumulative critique of Goethe led to a “Vertiefung und eine neue Wendung” [an intensification and a new departure] in the reception of German thought and literature in Britain. “Obwohl gerade Carlyle die German Romance schrieb und Novalis sehr liebte” [although Carlyle published German Romance and very much admired Novalis], he nonetheless put Goethe squarely in the foreground of his meditations on literature, not merely as Germany’s but also as Europe’s leading poet and critic of comprehensive authority. Accompanying the resulting tendency to consider literature, in Doderer’s phrase, “als moralisches Erziehungsmittel” [as a medium of ethical formation], Carlyle placed new emphasis on the “Dichterperson” [the person of the poet] rather than “Dichtung” [poetry].[7] In focusing on the author rather than the work, Carlyle was building upon Germaine de Staël’s suggestive approach in De l’Allemagne [On Germany] (1813) and anticipating Heinrich Heine’s portrayal of Goethe’s imperial persona in Die Romantische Schule [The Romantic School] (1832–1835). As much as these assessments might differ in emphasis and specific detail, all three critics identified Goethe as the dominant cultural phenomenon of the time. Moreover, the technique employed by all three critics consists of a fusion of biography and practical criticism. Staël’s and Carlyle’s interest in Goethe reveal the impact of interpreting Goethe on the formation of national cultural identity in France and Britain. The naming of a foreign writer as the cultural hero in two national literary traditions more mature and advanced than Germany’s reflects the astonishing permeability of national and cultural boundaries in the early decades of the nineteenth century.[8]

Carlyle also presaged Wilhelm Dilthey’s method in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung [Experience and Poetry] (1905), one of the foundation texts of modern literary hermeneutics. As with Staël (1766–1817) and Heine (1796–1856), both Carlyle (1795–1881) and Dilthey (1833–1911) derived their concepts of the imagination, literariness, authorship, and the function of criticism from an examination of Goethe’s life and works; both critics reached the conclusion that Goethe, perhaps alone of all classic European writers, pursued a life so soaked with meaning that his lived experiences demand to be interpreted for their semaphoric value. It is as if the writer’s life and work formed a palimpsestic unity. The following passage from the second chapter of Dilthey’s book, “Die dichterische Phantasie Goethes” [“The Poetic Imagination of Goethe”], suggests intriguing parallels with Carlyle’s approach in his reverential essays of 1832, “Goethe” and “Goethe’s Works”:

Poesie ist Darstellung und Ausdruck des Lebens. Sie drückt das Erlebnis aus, und sie stellt die äußere Wirklichkeit des Lebens dar . . . . Hieraus erklärt sich, was uns ein lyrisches Gedicht oder eine Erzählung sehen läßt–und was für sie nicht existiert. Die Lebenswerte stehen aber in Beziehungen zueinander, die in dem Zusammenhang des Lebens selbst gegründet sind, und diese geben Personen, Dingen, Situationen, Begebenheiten ihre Bedeutung. So wendet sich der Dichter dem Bedeutsamen zu . . . . Da ist es nun die erste und entscheidende Eigenschaft des Dichtung Goethes, daß sie aus einer außerordentlichen Energie des Erlebens erwächst . . . . Seine Stimmungen schaffen alles Wirkliche um, seine Leidenschaften steigern Bedeutung und Gestalt von Situationen und Dingen ins Ungemeine, und sein rastloser Gestaltungsdrang wandelt alles um sich in Form und Gebilde.[9]

Upon closer examination the comparison with Dilthey seems especially fitting. Indeed, according to Rudolf A. Makreel, Dilthey’s view of literature is biographical “not in the sense of manifesting personal mannerisms, but of revealing a unity of style which derives from the total being of the poet—a being that comprehends more than private states of mind.”[10] Biography as an expression of the organic fusion of style and personality also underlies Carlyle’s hermeneutic as applied to the German author: “Goethe’s poetry is no separate faculty, no mental handicraft, but the voice of the whole harmonious manhood; nay, it is the very harmony, the living and life-giving harmony of that rich manhood which forms his poetry.”[11]

It is a curious feature of the history of the transmission of foreign cultures that in Britain, Goethe’s reputation was not, in contrast to the scene in Russia or France, formed by appropriating or resisting such major texts as Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), Faust (1808 and 1832), and Torquato Tasso (1790). Rather, Goethe’s reputation in Britain grew out of the controversy surrounding his personality, ethics, and character. From the publication of the first English translation of Werther in 1780 to the appearance of Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister in 1824, the criticism of Goethe in Britain and North America was inflected by a series of conflicting interpretations focused not on readings of these and other works—at least not in the sense indicated by Coleridge’s “practical criticism”—but, quite differently, on what George Saintsbury, in his reappraisal of Goethe’s impact on Victorian critics, derided as “anthropological” interpretations or pre-Freudian probings of the authorial psyche as well as moral judgments which were inferred from the text and then projected back onto the author. A process that Saintsbury complains, had the effect of overshadowing the textual features of the literary work.[12]

The biographical impulse in Carlyle’s criticism was in fact assimilated from Goethe’s own reflections on literature and his practice. In Gespräche mit Goethe [Conversations with Goethe] (1836 and 1848), for example, Eckermann notes the poet’s assertion that

“Allerdings,“ sagte Goethe, “ist in der Kunst und Poesie die Persönlichkeit alles; allein hat es doch unter den Kritikern und Kunstrichtern der neuesten Zeit schwache Personagen gegeben, die dieses nicht zugestehen, und die eine große Persönlichkeit bei einem Werke der Poesie oder Kunst nur als eine Art von geringer Zugabe wollten betrachtet wissen. Aber freilich, um eine große Persönlichkeit zu empfinden und zu ehren, muß man auch wiederum selber etwas sein. Alle, die dem Euripides das Erhabene abgesprochen, waren arme Heringe und einer solchen Erhebung nicht fähig; oder sie waren unverschämte Charlatane, die durch Anmaßlichkeit in den Augen einer schwachen Welt mehr aus sich machen wollten und auch wirklich machten, als sie waren.“[13]

In fact, Goethe’s remarks on literature almost invariably lead to speculations on the psychology or personality traits of leading authors. An example of this approach is recorded by Eckermann as a memorable characterization of Dante on 3 December 1824:

Übrigens sprach Goethe von Dante mit aller Ehrfurcht, wobei es mir merkwürdig war, daß ihm das Wort Talent nicht genügte, sondern daß er ihn eine Natur nannte, als womit er ein Umfassenderes, Ahnungsvolleres, tiefer und weiter um sich Blickendes ausdrücken zu wollen schien.[14]

Among contemporary poets Goethe admired Byron more than any other and in all of his recorded discussions of this prodigious talent, Goethe’s emphasis is, rarely if ever, on the special qualities of the Briton’s works, but more on the force and distinctiveness of his personality. On 24 February 1825 Goethe cited Byron’s importance as the major argument in favor of learning English:

“Er ist ein großes Talent, ein geborenes, und die eigentlich poetische Kraft ist mir bei niemand größer vorgekommen, als bei ihm. In Auffassung des Äußeren und klarem Durchblick verganger Zustände ist er eben so groß wie Shakespeare.”[15]

Indeed, a perusal of the Gespräche mit Goethe, the collected Briefe, and all of Goethe’s criticism confirms that he only rarely discusses a specific work and its literary characteristics; instead, his interest in the writer’s personality nearly always supersedes textual analysis or an explicit discussion of aesthetic qualities. Thus not only does Goethe validate a critical method or hermeneutic based on reading authorial personality, deciphering the allegorical value of his personal history emerges as one of the chief organizing principles in the cultural life of nineteenth-century Europe. The critical response to Goethe displayed in the work of Staël and Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) of France, Heine and other writers associated with the Jungdeutschland [“Young Germany”] literary movement, and Carlyle and his disciples in Britain, suggests Goethe’s pertinent impact on European intellectuals.

Goethe, who is credited with opening “a new world to him,”[16] is the subject of Carlyle’s first significant appearance in print in April 1822, an article on Faust published in the Edinburgh Review. While this modest little piece was not included in the first edition of Carlyle’s complete works, it marked the beginning of his involvement with Goethe and German culture as critic, translator, and editor, and it reveals that at the outset of his career he tied his literary fortunes to the mediation of Goethe in the English-speaking world. Moreover, on this foundation Carlyle staked his first claim to speak with cultural authority and it is clear that his mature views on art, society, economics, and politics were formed in the crucible of his critique of Goethe and German literature. The process of substituting an emphasis on biography for interpretation of the literary work culminates in Carlyle’s five major statements on Goethe—the “Translator’s Preface to the First Edition of Meister’s Apprenticeship” (1824), “Goethe’s Helena” (1828), “Goethe” (1828), “Death of Goethe” (1832), and “Goethe’s Works” (1832). Textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role in Carlyle’s assessment of Goethe; in its place we find the outline of a full-blown cult of personality and a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship and submission to authority that is more fully mapped out in such later major works as On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845), and The History of Frederick the Great (1858, 1862, 1864, 1865).

As the product of a strict nonconforming religious upbringing Carlyle was initially repelled by what critics before him had depicted as Goethe’s tendency to condone or represent licentious behavior in his writings. Even his close identification with Goethe from 1822 to 1832 was initially qualified by feelings of ambivalence and even of disgust.[17] Resistance to Goethe from 1822 to 1823 was replaced by sympathy from 1828 to 1832 but only after Carlyle had interpolated his own idiosyncratic, self-reflexive interpretation, according to which Goethe’s writings embody the drama of

a mind working itself into clearer and clearer freedom; gaining a more and more perfect dominion of its world. The pestilential fever of Skepticism runs through its stages; but happily it ends . . . in clearer, henceforth invulnerable health.[18]

Once Goethe’s biography had been configured according to Carlyle’s plot of redemption—and references in his writings to relevant experiences were identified as pivotal—the process of reading his works triggered a rapturous conversion experience: “The sight of such a man” was to Carlyle “a Gospel of Gospels,” which “literally” offered preservation “from destruction outward and inward.” Goethe, he averred, was the first person who had “travelled the steep rocky road” of self-discovery which he, too, had known, and Goethe thenceforth was to be known as “the first of the moderns.”[19] Formerly, as Carlyle confessed in a letter to Goethe, he, too, had been “an Unbeliever . . . storm-tossed in my imagination; a man divided from men; exasperated, wretched, driven almost to despair.” But Goethe had restored his faith in “the Mercy and Beauty of which it is the Symbol” and helped him attain “to new thoughts, and a composure which I should once have considered as impossible.”[20] Thus Goethe played a key role in the development of what W. H. Bruford calls Carlyle’s “humanistic religion” and laid the foundations for the cult of personality surrounding Goethe.[21]

There were, of course, contemporary precedents and parallels for Carlyle’s valorizaton of Goethe’s cultural authority in Britain. Obviously, none was more important than Staël’s De l’Allemagne. Her identification of Goethe as a “living classic” seemed to confirm that a “modern” could indeed be the equal of the “ancients.” Despite bad country roads and a shortage of decent inns, Staël joined the procession of foreign visitors flocking to Weimar, which featured perhaps the most remarkable concentration of literary celebrities in Europe.[22] But even after a long journey her personal interviews with Goethe and Schiller could not alter her ideologically distorted interpretation of German culture.[23] Subjected to strict censorship in Paris, De l’Allemagne was first published in London in 1813. It has been credited with disclosing a contemporary snapshot of the real Germany for the first time to “die ganze Welt” [the entire world].[24] Carlyle found in Staël’s idealized vision of German culture a readily available alternative to the Enlightenment aesthetic consensus associated with the elites of Paris and London from whom he felt alienated. And Carlyle was not alone in coming under the spell of Staël’s portrayal of Germany as the land of poets and thinkers; this picture of German culture dominated British perspectives throughout the nineteenth century and gave impetus to the transformation of Goethe from a foreign reprobate to universal cultural hero.[25] At a time when Goethe’s writings fell short of the popularity shared by those of Kotzebue, Schiller, and Wieland, Staël made the bold claim that Goethe, and not the work of his more accessible and successful contemporaries, “réunit tout ce qui distingué l’esprit allemand” [unites all that distinguishes the German mind] and possessed “les traits principaux du génie allemand” [the chief characteristics of the German genius].[26]

Described by Heine as a “coterie book” and a “kind of salon,” in which a cacophony of voices may be heard crying out from its pages, De l’Allemagne is, indeed a new kind of criticism. René Wellek believed that “the book cannot be judged primarily as a work of literary criticism. It is the picture of a whole nation, a sketch of national psychology and society, and also something of a personal travel book,” and he compared De l’Allemagne to Tacitus’s Germania in its propagandistic intent:

The French were shown the picture of a good, since pious nation of thinkers and poets with few political ambitions and little national feeling: an idyll which already had been refuted by the history of the years between the writing [in 1810] and publication [in France] during the 1814 occupation of Paris by the Allies].

This idealized image of Germany “lingered on in France till” the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, despite the attacks mounted by Heine and others.[27] Staël’s admirers in Britain and America sustained her authority as a cultural guide. Carlyle’s translation of Jean Paul’s review of De l’Allemagne is divided over two issues of Fraser’s Magazine, Numbers 1 and 4 (1830). As he notes in the translator’s Preface: “Students of German literature will be curious to see such a critic as Mme de Staël adequately criticized . . . and what worth the best of [German writers] acknowledge in their chief eulogist and indicator among foreigners.”[28] This review and its translation are signs that the authority exercised by Staël’s utterly biased and thoroughly inaccurate presentation of German culture was transplanted beyond the national, social, political, and aesthetic contexts of its origins. As a result of this process her interpretation acquired new meaning. Jerome J. McGann has argued, “meaning, in a literary event, is a function not of” the text itself but rather the text’s “historical relations with its readers and interpreters.”[29] Indeed, Lilian R. Furst indicated that the book’s main source of interest is to be found in its “creative distortions.”[30]

That Carlyle should have looked abroad for literary predecessors and models for his own criticism is symptomatic of his marginalized status in late Romantic Britain, a condition that was shared by the culturally marginalized exiles Staël, who composed De l’Allemagne in Switzerland, and Heine, whose Die Romantische Schule was produced in Paris. As a Scot who was brought up in a Calvinist sect and lived and worked as a writer in an isolated village Carlyle was at least twice-alienated from mainstream British literary culture: “My case is this: I comport myself wholly like an alien,—like a man who is not in his own country; whose own country lies perhaps a century or two distant.” In his adopted language he once described himself as “an abgerissenes Glied, a limb torn from the family of Man.”[31] Years later, even after Carlyle was celebrated as a sage among writers living in London, he confided to Anthony Froude (1818–1894) that his work had been produced by “a wild man, a man disunited from the fellowship of the world he lives in.”[32]

Carlyle’s alienation from the dominant cultural institutions of Britain was experienced by other contemporaries, whose own literary careers were launched in unconventional paths of mediating mostly foreign cultural artifacts. Indeed, the reception of German thought and literature in Britain from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries was largely the work of culturally ambitious outsiders—Dissenters, women, and Scots—for whom access to the majority culture was impeded by gender, class, or ethnic identity and by the absence of empowering institutional affiliations with prestigious public schools or with Oxford or Cambridge University. In addition to Carlyle, this group includes William Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Holcroft, Walter Scott, R. P. Gillies, J. G. Lockhart, Henry Crabb Robinson, Sarah Austin, and Marian Evans (George Eliot). All of these writers preceded the publication of their original work with the translation and criticism of German texts. Such labors reflected their lower-caste status within the majority culture, since it was left to them to mediate the perceived transgressive moral and political elements in German literature before these texts were suitable as commodities for domestic cultural consumption. These mediating activities embodied the shaman’s traditional function of going-out-of-the-self and leaving-the-familiar in an effort to embrace the foreign and the other. Serving as a meditative link or bridge, however, risked political defilement of the intermediary and brought suspicion upon him or her by critics associated with defending the nationalist status quo.

Carlyle endorsed and then appropriated Staël’s vision of German literature (which emphasized Sturm-und-Drang heroic individualism and sublimity) because it offered a vehicle of self-cultivation and spiritual fulfillment that surpassed what could be accomplished by the neoclassical aesthetic consensus. Heine, by contrast, finds these very same qualities—especially hero worship—dangerous because they contradict the egalitarian values enshrined by the French Revolution. In his view there was a direct correspondence and a reciprocal relationship between “the lack of political freedom in Germany” and the cultural dominance enjoyed by Goethe’s aesthetic “indifference.” Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s description of Heine’s treatise could also be applied to De l’Allemagne and Carlyle’s essays on Goethe. He argues that Die Romantische Schule “combines in a highly unorthodox manner personal characteristics, descriptions of works, satire, historical commentary, and critique of ideology.” What Heine calls “this constant assertion of my personality” in his satire, which also breaks through in Staël’s highly idiosyncratic interpretations and in Carlyle’s worshipful essays (and is denoted by his baroque style), is considered “the most suitable means of encouraging self-evaluation from the reader.”[33]

All three critics’ readings of Goethe are based on an interpretation of his personality. While he is actually the one literary figure linking the Sturm und Drang, Classicism, and Romanticism, Goethe’s mere presence seems to have so distracted Staël that she, as Furst observed, “hardly touches the fringe of German Romanticism” proper in her evaluation of the state of German literature.[34] Heine condemns Goethe for the “zweideutige Rolle” [ambivalent role] he played in the cultural politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: “Offen gestanden, Goethe hat damals eine sehr zweideutige Rolle gespielt und man kann ihn nicht unbedingt loben.” [Speaking frankly, at that time Goethe’s contribution was extremely equivocal and is not deserving of unqualified praise.][35] To the disappointment of Heine and other liberals, Goethe was thoroughly the product as well as the proponent of aristocratic culture. Moreover, Goethe is responsible for condoning the formation of a cult of personality that, as Heine notes, surrounded him like a cloud of incense and adversely influenced Germany’s younger poets, including the Schlegel brothers, who counted among Goethe’s most dedicated followers. In Heine’s colorful retelling of their initial meeting in Weimar, we read that Goethe “so barsch die Schlegel aus dem Tempel jagte und . . . begründete er seine Alleinherschaft in der deutschen Literature” [brusquely drove the Schlegel brothers from the temple . . . and established his autocratic reign in German literature]. Throughout their conversation “man sprach nicht mehr von Romantik und klassischer Poesie, sondern von Goethe und wieder von Goethe” [one spoke no more of Romanticism or classical poetry, but of Goethe and again of Goethe].[36]

The same could be said of Carlyle after he got over his infatuation with the sublimity of Schiller and the arabesques of Jean Paul. It has often been remarked that the European mind in the modern age “spricht Deutsch.” Goethe’s impact on Carlyle reflects the initial phase of this tendency and is a factor of overwhelming importance in his own intellectual development. The extent of this influence is apparent from the outset of Carlyle’s career. The major essays and translations published from 1822 to 1832 promote the Dichterfurst as a viable leader of British culture. Carlyle’s objective in this body of writing is to instigate Britain’s breakthrough into a broader cultural compass and to emulate the cosmopolitanism that Goethe himself embodied and propagated. Goethe’s reputation in early nineteenth-century Britain is not as he reveals indicative of his true worth. Unlike August von Kotzebue (1761–1819) and other objects of transient literary fashion in London, Goethe is to be revered as a living classic, a writer who possesses “some touches of that old divine spirit” and is worthy of comparison with “the masters of Italian painting, and the fathers of Poetry in England.” Goethe represents that singular example of a writer who is “what Philosophy can call a Man,” and his writings serve as an expression of “the voice of [his] whole harmonious manhood . . . . [I]t is the very harmony, the living and life-giving harmony of that rich manhood which forms his poetry.”[37]

Carlyle’s preoccupation with Goethe’s “manhood” or humanity reflects a signal tendency of much nineteenth-century literary criticism: the pursuit of a critical agenda combining ethics and aesthetics through biography. This propensity reaches its culmination in the cultural criticism and historical writings of Carlyle’s disciples Froude, Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), and Leslie Stephen (1832–1904). Carlyle puts the matter concisely: “All good men may be called poets in act, or in word; all good poets are so in both.” By equating moral and literary excellence, Carlyle identifies Goethe as the “Teacher and exemplar of his age,” whose writings embody “the beautiful, religious Wisdom . . . which is proper to his time . . . [and] which may still . . . speak to the whole soul” because in addition to

his natural gifts, he has cultivated himself and his art, he has now studied how to live and to write, with a fidelity, an unwearied earnestness, of which there is not [or no] other living instance; of which among British poets especially, Wordsworth alone offers any resemblance.[38]

The emphasis placed by Stäel on Goethe’s genius and the comprehensive greatness of his personality suggests a framework for Carlyle’s own interpretative strategy that unfolds in the four major essays. He simply transposes Stäel’s influential reading of Goethe from an overtly political to a quasi-theological key. Thus Goethe emerges from Carlyle’s reading as far more than a dominant cultural figure; his works reveal a divine presence immanent in the world, a deus absconditus, a god in the guise of a poet, whose appearance inaugurates a new epoch of faith in a post-Enlightenment world grown weary of doubt and relativism. Carlyle’s identification of Goethe as “the Strong One of his time,”[39] exerting religious, ethical, and cultural authority, received corroboration from Matthew Arnold in terms that are so strikingly similar that it is well-worth quoting at length:

when Goethe came, Europe had lost her basis of spiritual life; she had to find it again; Goethe’s task was,—the inevitable task for the modern poet henceforth is . . . to interpret human life afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it . . . . Goethe is the greatest poet of modern times, not because he is one of the half-dozen human beings who in the history of our race have shown the most signal gift for poetry, but because, having a very considerable gift for poetry, he was at the same time, in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.[40]

If Goethe served as Arnold’s most eminent example of cosmopolitan literary culture, it was Carlyle’s efforts as a Vermittler of German literature that stimulated Goethe’s expression of a coming multicultural utopia of Weltliteratur. Concerning the broad intercultural value of translation, in a letter dated 1 January 1828 Goethe asks Carlyle’s opinion of Charles de Voeux’s English translation of his own Torquato Tasso (1827):

Nun aber möcht’ ich von Ihnen wissen, in wiefern dieser Tasso als Englisch gelten kann. Sie werden mich höchlich verbinden, wenn Sie mich hierüber aufklären und erleuchten; den eben diese Bezüge vom Originale zur Übersetzung sind es ja, welche die Verhältnisse von Nation zu Nation am allersdeutlichsten aussprechen, und die man zu Förderung der vor- und obwaltenden allgemeinen Weltliteratur vorzüglich zu kennen und zu beurtheilen hat.[41]

Starting with his early critical writings and translations, Carlyle established a pattern of cultural emulation of German writers that has continued into the present time and is especially noticeable in the prestige enjoyed by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Jürgen Habermas in Anglo-American academic circles. When viewed as a contribution to intellectual history, Carlyle’s essays on Goethe are comparable to T. S. Eliot’s reassessment of the cultural significance of the Metaphysical Poets. But the focus on Goethe and other German writers—Schiller, Wieland, Jean Paul, Novalis, and Friederich Schlegel—suggests that Carlyle’s critical essays are unique among the works of major British critics from after the time of Dryden until the late nineteenth century. As a coherent, sustained critique of an entire tradition, only Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781) approaches Carlyle’s essays both in scope and in method, which is best described as a fusion of biography and practical criticism. Indeed, Carlyle’s guiding conviction that biography provides the most authentic basis for literary criticism—“Would that I saw the Poet and knew him [I] could then fully understand him!”[42]—anticipated Dilthey’s psycho-biographical hermeneutic in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, Freud’s investigations of the psychology of artists and writers, and, in the post-war era, the biographical approaches in the work of W. J. Bate, Harold Bloom, John Bowlby, Joseph Frank, William St. Clair, Claire Tomalin, among others.[43]

Carlyle first came to the general attention of the British reading public with his translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1824) and this text played a key role in situating Goethe on Britain’s intellectual horizon. Indeed, prior to its publication and the appearance of Carlyle’s essays on Goethe (1828–1832), the canonical niche that Goethe would occupy beside Dante and Shakespeare as a representative European poet was not yet established, nor conceivable. Carlyle, however, singlehandedly created a template for the reception of Goethe. This combined speculation on the links between aesthetics and ethics with homilies on the indispensability of great men. In additional essays on Schiller, Jean Paul, Novalis, and other German writers, Carlyle anticipates the enthusiastic appropriation of German culture throughout nineteenth-century Europe in the later nineteenth century. Echoing Carlyle’s intuition of the centrality of German thought in forming the modern mind, Taine insisted that “l’Allemagne a produit toutes les idées de notre âge historique” [Germany has produced all the ideas of our historical epoch].[44] Taken as a body of critical writing Carlyle’s essays provide much more than a rebuttal to the less gifted William Taylor or to ideologically antagonistic critics such as the antiquarian poet George Ellis (1753–1815) and the critic John Hookam Frere (1769–1846) who wrote for the Tory newspaper the Anti-Jacobin; they also comprise a fulfillment of Coleridge’s envisioned “history of Belles Lettres in Germany” that he wished to combine with “a biographical and critical analysis” of “Goethe as poet and philosopher” plus an additional component unplanned by Coleridge: a consideration of the relevance of German culture for post-Romantic Britain, a theme that would recur in Carlyle’s writing and conversation to the end of his life.[45] Despite insisting upon a caveat concerning Carlyle’s “avowed tendency towards ‘philosophical’ rather than ‘formal’ criticism,” even the usually skeptical George Saintsbury concedes that “altogether there are few things in English Criticism better worth reading, marking, and learning than the literary parts of these earlier volumes of Essays.”[46]

In spite of such heart-felt conviction, voices of dissent regarding Goethe’s influence open and close the nineteenth century. Coleridge denounced Goethe’s works of imagination as “utterly unprincipled” and Saintsbury, in his massive revisionist literary history, compared Goethe’s reputation as a critic to a “stale superstition.” Goethe’s neglect of purely literary criteria spurred Saintsbury to subject the legacy of Romanticism to a proto-modernist reevaluation, according to which an overriding concern for personality, moral conduct, and character is paramount. In rejecting Goethe’s emphasis on the role of the author’s personality, Saintsbury refashioned the predominantly ethical or social-cultural function of criticism, which was almost universally adopted by Victorian critics. This is the nativity of Modernism. Coleridge’s main objection to Goethe was likewise based on a concern for morality. In a remark made to Henry Crabb Robinson in 1810, Coleridge “conceded to Goethe universal talent, but felt a want of moral life to be the defect of his poetry.” Some time later Coleridge elaborated on this position in conversation with Wordsworth. In denying “merit to Goethe’s Torquato Tasso,” he expressed “the improbability of being a good poet without being a good man.”[47] It becomes apparent in further conversations with Crabb Robinson that Coleridge’s attitude towards Goethe was capable of a certain degree of modification. The appearance of a complete edition of Faust compelled him to acknowledge “the genius of Goethe in a manner he never did before.” And yet, as in the past, “the want of religion and enthusiasm in Goethe” remains “in Coleridge’s mind an irreparable defect.” In addition, he found fault with the beginning of Faust and with what he describes as the inadequately developed character of Mephistopheles. As for the protagonist of the drama, Coleridge found that “the character of Faust is not motivirt [motivated]” because Goethe fails to offer a convincing explanation for the “state of mind which led to the catastrophe.” But Crabb Robinson knew Coleridge well enough to remark on his plan to write “a new Faust” that “he would never get out of vague conceptions—he would lose himself in dreams.”[48]

As we shall see in Chapter Four, Coleridge’s enthusiasm for Goethe during the mid-1810s, like his interest in Schiller during the previous decade, did not endure. Inexplicably, his attitude toward Goethe slipped back into a familiar mood of moral uneasiness.

Twenty years previously Crabb Robinson had published a series of essays that represented the first coherent effort by a British writer to evaluate and to translate Goethe’s lyric poetry and epigrams.[49] At the same time he made the first tentative strides toward an interpretation of Goethe as a cultural authority of pan-European significance. He was, moreover, aware of the symbolic quality with which the events in a poet’s life are invested. He recognized that in such matters there is always an appeal open to nature, which is ultimately the bond between “Dichtung” and “Wahrheit,” poetry and truth: “in a truly great man everything is important.” And the greatness of Goethe has to do with his concern for realism: “Goethe has done more than any man to bring back the public taste to works of imagination—a faculty which does not refuse all alliance with frightful realities, but which refines and idealizes them.”[50] The first in his generation to perceive the broader importance of Goethe, Crabb Robinson prefigured Carlyle’s extension of Goethe’s influence from art to ethics. Twenty years later, in his essays for the Edinburgh Review, Goethe is described as a prophet and medium through which supernatural revelation in the modern world has taken place.

Carlyle found the British Romantics on the whole deficient in the philosophical vision and moral seriousness that he felt were necessary if poets were to bring about a new cultural dispensation. Scott’s “deep recognition of the Past” is deemed superficial because it lacks a philosophical foundation and he is parodied as “the great Restaurateur of Europe.” Byron is ridiculed as “a Dandy of Sorrows,” and Wordsworth is dismissed as “genuine but a small diluted man.” Hazlitt is rejected because he “has discovered nothing; been able to believe nothing.” Coleridge’s “cardinal sin” is a lack of will power:

He has no resolution . . . . The conversation of the man is much as I anticipated—a forest of thoughts . . . . But there is no method in his talk . . . he is like the hulk of a huge ship—his masts and sails and rudder have rotted quite away.[51]

What is lacking, then, in Britain is a “modern spiritseer,” a genius with the “spiritual eye” to discern the potential for the aestheticization of modern life. Goethe, whom he designates as just such a genius, “had opened a new world to him” and countered the loss of a spiritual center in his existence. Thus Goethe’s writings represent

a mind working itself into clearer and clearer freedom; gaining a more and more perfect dominion of its world. The pestilential fever of Skepticism runs through its stages; but happily it ends . . . in clearer, henceforth invulnerable health.[52]

Carlyle’s assertion that “Biography is the only History” reflects how, in an age in which literature has usurped functions once served exclusively by religion, the lives of the poets—and of Goethe in particular—become as important as Acts of Apostles and Lives of the Saints were in ages of faith.[53]

In opposition to “these hard unbelieving utilitarian days” Carlyle was convinced that Goethe’s writings “reveal to us glimpses of the Unseen but not unreal world, so that the Actual and the Ideal may again meet together, and clear knowledge be again wedded to Religion in the life and business of men.” Carlyle admits that his critique of Goethe is intuitive, irrational, unscientific, and wholly “interested” in nature, even though he insists “the merits and characteristics of a poet are not to be set forth by logic,” but rather “by personal, and by deep and careful inspection of his works.” Understanding is gained through an exertion of imagination, sympathy, and openness of mind, without which it is impossible to “transfer ourselves in any measure into [the author’s] peculiar point of vision.”[54]

The openness and objectivity that are, for Carlyle, the first duties of the critic are once again to be inferred from Goethe’s personality. Indeed, “clearness of sight” is “the foundation of all talent,” to which “all other gifts are superadded,”[55] and the superior “Spiritual Endowment” of Goethe and Shakespeare is derived from this “utmost Clearness” and an “all-piercing faculty of Vision”:

For Goethe, as for Shakespeare, the world lies all translucent, all fusible we might call it, encircled with WONDER; the Natural is in reality the Supernatural, for to the seer’s eyes both become one. What are the Hamlets and Tempests, the Fausts and Mignons, but glimpses accorded us into the translucent, wonder-encircled world; revelations of the mystery of all mysteries, Man’s life as it actually is?[56]

The writings of Goethe and Shakespeare are vital because they were formed in a process that started from within and moved outwards to the surface manifestations of reality. As a result, those “Macbeths and Falstaffs . . . these Fausts and Philinas have a verisimilitude and life that separates them from all other fictions of later ages.”[57] Decisive in this judgment is the perception of Goethe’s “sincerity,” which here takes on overtones of Hazlitt’s “gusto” or Keatsean intensity, as Arnold, aged twenty-five, makes clear in a letter to his mother. He contrasts this quality in Goethe with what he finds in Wordsworth:

I have been returning to Goethe’s life and think higher of him than ever. His thorough sincerity—writing about nothing he had not experienced—is in modern literature almost unrivaled. Wordsworth resembles him in this respect; but the difference between the range of their two experiences is immense and not in the Englishman’s favor.[58]

As we have seen, this position is opposed to Heine’s view of Goethe, whose indifference to politics is contrasted unfavorably with Schiller’s sympathy with the revolutionary spirit of the age as revealed in his sensational play, Die Räuber [The Robbers] (1781). In the essay “State of German Literature” Carlyle nonetheless stresses Goethe’s engagement with the material world and concrete human existence. Indeed, Goethe’s greatness is found in his adaptation of “the actual aspects of life” to literature; this “realism” shows us that “the end of Poetry is higher; she must dwell in Reality and become manifest to men in the forms among which they live and move.”