VII. DE QUINCEY'S RELATION TO GOETHE.

At the time De Quincey wrote Goethe had gained no fixed position in England; and the prejudice against him, which, after a century of criticism, still exists among certain classes in Great Britain and the United States, was then far more strong. The only man who could have given anything like a fair account of Goethe, until Carlyle appeared, was Wm. Taylor of Norwich. But although Taylor had a real appreciation of Goethe and a wide knowledge of his work, he never comprehended his significance. He failed entirely to understand Faust; it marked for him a degeneration. Goethe had been appreciated in a measure by Scott, Monk Lewis, Byron and Shelley. But Scott had done nothing to further an understanding of him since the translation of Götz, twenty-five years before; at best, his sympathies had never passed beyond the romantic world of that drama. Lewis had no understanding for anything more than the wilder ballads. Byron acknowledged the greatness of Goethe; Shelley had at one time thought of writing a new version of Werther; he had translated fragments of Faust; but although both

1 For examples of the best modern English criticism of Goethe cf. J. R. Seeley, Göthe Reviewed after Sixty Years. Leipzig 1894; Edward Dowden, New Studies in Literature, London 1895, p. 142 ff.

were of a nature to sympathize with many tendencies in Goethe, neither of them had attempted a serious interpretation of him. The tone of criticism in the reviews was for the most part cheap and coarse enough. Werther, popular as it was, did not escape censure for its sentimentality and revolutionary tendencies; Stella especially, although praised in other ways, was denounced as a most immoral and disgusting work. The sins of Goethe's characters were fastened upon himself; in the eyes of the Anti-Jacobin, he was little better than a criminal, shameless and irresponsible, with a perverted mind. A large part of the English public looked upon Goethe as the incarnation of all that was to be avoided in the German nature, as a creature without the sense of moral responsibility, the slave of passion. In a review of Madame de Staël's work in the Quarterly for October 1814 there is the following criticism of Faust. It is "one of the most extravagant productions of ill directed though boundless genius. That Faustus is a work of extraordinary merit, and displays the strongest intellect it would be a want of candour to deny, but we neither envy nor admire the talents that produced it, at the expense of feeling, morality and religion: for it not only aims at destroying all the comforts of the present life, by proving that man is destined to misery from his birth, however extensive his future, exalted his rank, or cultivated his intellect, but it tends to deprive him of the only solace that is left for his misfortune, the prospect of a blessed futurity”. The Edinburgh, in a review of the same work (Oct. 1813), calls it the most "odious of all the works of genius"; but this Review reaches its height of ignorance and cheapness in January 1816 and March 1817, in its papers on Goethe's Aus meinem Leben. They are coarse and abusive

...

to the last degree. Yet this was not the universal attitude. Even in the preceding century there was much discriminating praise in the criticisms of Goethe's early dramas; praise for the portrayal of character and knowledge of human nature, for the reality of the feeling, the energy of imagination and invention. The Monthly Review had from the beginning been well-disposed toward Goethe; as early as 1793 it had spoken favorably of Iphigenie, and in 1798 of Wilhelm Meister. The Quarterly (Jan. 1814) calls Goethe "of all men now living the most extraordinary". It compares him, strangely enough, with Gay and Sterne; he is no dramatic poet except in Clavigo; Egmont it calls dull; Stella "harmlessly absurd"; Iphigenie "ponderous". But it speaks with high praise of Werther, of Hermann and Dorothea, and "the marvellous dramatic poem of Faustus". Blackwood's had described the attack of the Edinburgh as a disgrace and given Goethe great praise. The London Magazine, in which De Quincey began his career, had shown (Aug. 1820) a deep sympathy with Faust; Blackwood's had already called it Goethe's greatest work. There were men whose critical opinion would have carried real weight; but Southey and Coleridge had no interest in Goethe; they both preferred Werther to all his other works; indeed, although Goethe had been so freely translated, Werther alone had produced any lasting impression. Coleridge described Faust as vulgar, licentious and blasphemous. Wordsworth thought Goethe a poet of distinctly low rank, with no originality, but with a faculty of artistic imitation.1 He had not been able to read Wilhelm Meister through. Accord

1 For a clear statement of Words worth's opinion of Goethe. cf. Perry, Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 40, p. 129.

ing to a report of a conversation with De Quincey,' Wordsworth regarded Goethe as little better than a quack. Wordsworth, said De Quincey, never read books, but "somehow or other Wilhelm Meister had fallen in his way, and he had gone through it till he came to the scene where the hero, in his mistress" bedroom, becomes sentimental over her dirty towels, etc., which struck him with such a disgust that he flung the book out of his hand and declared that surely no English lady would ever read such a book". With the exception of Byron and Shelley Goethe had made no impression on a mind capable of interpreting, even of understanding him, until Carlyle became his apostle; but their interest in him was transitory and their position in English society would have nullified any influence they might have sought to exert. Even Carlyle whose reverence for Goethe was a passion, was not altogether free from the antipathy which lay so deep in the English mind. He writes: "There is poetry in the book (Wilhelm Meister), and prose, prose for ever. When I read of players and their sorry pasteboard apparatus for beautifying the moral world, I render it into grammatical English with a feeling mild and charitable as that of a starving hyaena. "Goethe is the greatest genius who has lived for a century, and the greatest ass who has lived for three." Or again; "Meister himself is perhaps one of the greatest ganaches that ever was created by quill and ink. I am going to write a fierce preface disclaiming all concern with the literary or the moral merit of the work, grounding my claims to recompense or toleration on the fact that I have accurately copied a striking portrait of Goethe's mind the strangest,

1

1 J. R. Findlay, in De Quincey and his Friends, 144.

and in many points the greatest, now extant. What a work! Bushels of dust and straw and feathers with here and there a diamond of the purest water."1

nature to

The English antagonism to Goethe De Quincey represents in its most intense form. He was not appreciate Goethe's aim or work; his experience and his interests were far more narrow than the world revealed in Meister. His mind had never grappled seriously with the problems which interested Goethe. Moreover he read the book as he would have read any novel; he saw in it Goethe's ideal world, his "pattern people". With such expectations his feelings were perhaps natural; he received the same impression as Wordsworth; De Quincey found instead of the poetry and wisdom which Carlyle insisted were in the book, a lack of skill and interest in the narrative and an unaccountable use of unpleasant and revolting motives. With such a disposition, writing from vague and casual knowledge, seizing the first and most obvious impression, without even the original at hand, De Quincey reviewed Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meister.2

One can scarcely imagine a more complete misunderstanding of an author's meaning than De Quincey here exhibits; and even were his impressions perfectly true, the tone of his paper is common and vulgarly smart. Of the real drift of the book he has no suspicion. Even the warning preface of Carlyle, written with the fullest beauty and sincerity, cannot deter him from handling the novel as so much material for the reviewer, or per

1 Carlyle's Early Letters, Ed. by Norton. London 1886. Vol. II, p. 223 f.

2 Froude's Early Life I, 212.