by Stuart Kelly
Edward Gibbon
{1737–1794}
LOOKING BACK OVER his career in his Memoirs of My Life and Writing, Edward Gibbon asserted that, despite his friend Dr. Johnson’s denial of “any natural propensity of the mind to one art or science rather than another,” his intellectual inclinations were formed practically in the womb. “I know, by experience,” he wrote, “that from my early youth I aspired to the character of an historian.” But “of what” remained a moot question.
As a child, he amassed a “stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.” His reading was haphazard and exotic; “the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks” were all devoured, and “the dynasties of Assyria and Egypt were [his] top and cricket-ball.” At the age of fifteen, he embarked on his first attempt at writing: a Life of Sesostris.
The Greek historian Herodotus mentioned Sesostris as an Egyptian pharaoh whose agricultural reforms led to the introduction of geometry. He conquered Asia, erecting pillars marking his glorious victories over the tribes who attempted to withstand him, and monuments over the peoples who meekly submitted, calling them “a nation of women.” Gibbon’s youthful plan was to reconcile the various Egyptian, classical, and biblical chronologies. It was “wisely relinquished,” although only destroyed during a “general clear of papers” in 1772. However, one of Gibbon’s strategies for making sense of the disparate sequences was sufficiently relevant to his later career for him to remember it when writing the Memoirs.
During his time as a captain in the Hampshire Militia, Gibbon read equally voraciously and comprehensively, still in search of a subject. Beginning with the expedition of Charles VIII, which he judged as rather too “preliminary” a topic, he “successively chose and rejected the crusade of Richard I, the barons’ wars against John and Henry III, the history of Edward the Black Prince, the lives and comparisons of Henry V and the Emperor Titus, the life of Sir Philip Sidney, of the Marquis of Montrose.” He thought he had eventually found a suitable hero in Sir Walter Raleigh, and assiduously researched the available biographies, histories of the period, and state papers before reluctantly concluding that he had nothing to add. Although Oldys had “read everything relative to his subject” for the Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, he had turned out “a very poor performance.” Moreover, having lived on the Continent for nearly five years, Gibbon was aware that Raleigh’s fame was “confined to the narrow limits of our language and our island.” He may not have found a central figure, or even a broad period, but he already had an enviably ambitious aim.
Finally, he hit upon a subject equal to his aspirations and intelligence: The History of the Liberty of the Swiss. Having immersed himself in Schilling, Tschudi, Lauffer, and Leu, he read the first chapters, written in French, to a literary society in London. Whatever caveats and criticisms they made, they were taken to heart. Gibbon “delivered [his] imperfect sheets to the flames, and for ever renounced a design in which some expense, much labour, and more time had been so vainly consumed.”
On a visit to Italy in 1764, while sitting in the ruins of the Roman Capitol, listening to the friars singing vespers, he had fleetingly entertained “the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city.” At the time, the project extended only to the actual city, not the empire it governed, and was dismissed in favor of his laborious study of Helvetican politics. In 1776, the first volume of the work that made him famous, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, appeared. Over the next twelve years, this mammoth achievement covered thirteen centuries, from the Antonine emperors to the fall of Constantinople, and the rise of the religions of Christ and Muhammad.
The end of volume I, on the earliest forms and spread of Christianity, made Gibbon notorious. In his juvenile Life of Sesostris, he had explained the Egyptian priest Manetho’s claim that the pharaoh was the brother of the Greek king Danaus, who lived 1,500 years before Christ, in terms of his allegiance to the Ptolemies, who claimed a mythic descent through Danaus and Hercules. This piece of propaganda skewed the chronology by half a millennium. “Flattery is the prolific parent of falsehood,” he wrote in the Memoirs, “and falsehood, I will now add, is not incompatible with the sacerdotal.” His unwillingness to take ecclesiastical pronouncements at face value was already active in childhood and blossomed in The Decline and Fall.
His approach was characterized by a slyly ironic style, a nod at orthodoxy followed by a plethora of polite qualifications. Why had Christianity taken root in the Roman Empire? Because it was divine Truth. But, Gibbon averred, the world is not overly partial to the unvarnished truth, as the crucifixion itself demonstrates (though he wonders why the Roman authors never mentioned the three hours of darkness that accompanied it).
Why else, then, did it flourish? “So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition,” he wrote, then congratulated the Creator for his wisdom in intervening in history at just the point when paganism was eroding.
Gibbon not only addressed the simplistic level of history—the mere chronology of what happened, like his early synthesis of dynasties—but, as a rational eighteenth-century thinker, sought causes and consequences. He also understood that the way in which people read their own history influences their interpretations. His comments on the early church fathers, such as Origen, and their relationship to the Gnostic heresy, skewers particular modes of thought. “Acknowledging that the literal sense is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as reason, they deem themselves secure and invulnerable behind the ample veil of allegory, which they carefully spread over every tender part of the Mosaic dispensation.”
He was, therefore, a historiographer as well as a historian, skeptical about the factual truth of beliefs while sensitive to the way in which what is believed to be true, and even written, determines its own reaction. David Hume wrote admiringly, “You have the courage to despise the clamour of bigots.”
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of the high points of the Enlightenment. When he finished it, Gibbon mused on writing a “dialogue of the dead,” in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire would compare their experiences in “exposing an old superstition”; and fondly hoped he might write a series on “the most eminent persons in Arms and Arts, in Church and State, who have flourished in Britain from the reign of Henry the Eighth to the present age.” Neither came about and it is, perhaps, sheer greediness to wish that there were more from his exquisite pen.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
{1749–1832}
COMPARED WITH SUCH similar literary colossi as Homer and Shakespeare, we know a great deal about the life, opinions, and amours of Goethe. This wealth of information and anecdote does not, however, make it any easier to neatly encapsulate the man who gave his name to a whole period—the Goethezeit—of German literature. His work resists any attempt to bracket it in a single adjective; the inelegance of an invention like “Goethean” is surpassed only by its useless vacuity as a definition.
Describing Goethe is like drawing a silhouette: whatever line or angle you choose cannot compensate for the necessary loss of a dimension, nor can the inked shadow ever hope to illuminate the shades and wrinkles of skin. One cannot imply, while praising the Sturm und Drang individualism and cinematic scope of his early play Götz von Berlichingen, the beauties of the formal rigor of Torquato Tasso in his Weimar classicism phase. An investigation into the Europe-wide sociopathic hysteria that accompanied his sentimentally melancholic, slightly overwrought novel The Sorrows of Young Werther does not simultaneously evoke the brilliantly recondite application of chemical experimentation to human emotions in Elective Affinities. The gentle charm of his epic of small romances, Hermann and Dorothea, seems radically at odds with the cynical panache of the Venetian Epigrams, or the classically erotic enthusiasms of the Roman Elegies. As Goethe hi
mself said, he did not have a style: he had styles.
Goethe is, at one and the same time, the man attuned to the niceties of etiquette at the court and the bohemian poet who “lived in sin”; an artist who thought his scientific studies meant more than his writings and a Promethean rebel combined with an Olympian judge. Yet he does not seem self-contradictory, and trying to contain him in a simple story about a daring youth who became a doctrinaire old man—or a feckless adolescent who was corrupted into a sycophantic reactionary—simply will not work. Too much of the plenitude of data seeps in, confuses, confutes the easy précis: the sixty-year-old very nearly entered into a ménage à trois with a woman half his age, and the twenty-year-old was drawn to pietistic religion.
As a boy, Goethe was already ambitiously striving to create a work of magnitude, while doubting his own abilities to do so. An early poem, called “A Song over the Unconfidence Towards Myself” and written in English, is tortured between his admission
And other thought is misfortune
Is death and night to me:
I hum no supportable tune,
I can no poet be
and an earnest invocation to the Muses, beseeching them: “O Sisters, let me sing.” More evidence of his precocity, rather than ability, might have been found in the epistolary novel he conceived, written in six different languages. This particular demonstration of his desire to encompass everything is, alas, lost.
So too is his juvenile novel on Joseph and his brothers, which Thomas Mann was destined to write in the twentieth century. Goethe remembered his attempt ruefully, and suggested that the fact that Joseph “has nothing to do but to pray” might have been the reason why it was discarded. But the idea that Goethe needed an archetypal hero to embody his talents would persist throughout his career.
Prometheus, Belshazzar, Socrates, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Ahasuerus (the so-called Wandering Jew), and Muhammad were all considered as apposite subjects for Goethe’s own titanic aspirations. He even wrote an opening canto for an Achilleis, which would have continued Homer’s epic through to the marriage and death of the Greek warrior, but abandoned it, along with the idea that it might be better as a novel. In the end it was a German magician who would supply him with his requisite protagonist; though the masterpiece would take him sixty years to write.
Goethe’s first published foray into the legend of Faust’s pact with the Devil appeared in 1790, and advertised itself as a glimpse of the Gesamtskunstwerk that the whole would be: it was Faust: A Fragment, not the “total work of art” of which he was capable. The public would have to wait thirty-seven years for the next—again brief—installment, entitled Helen: Classical-Romantic Phantasmagoria. Interlude to Faust, and it was only the niggling and cajoling of his friend and Boswellish confidant Eckermann that led to the final Part II being published at all, albeit posthumously. The very first draft, called the Urfaust, was rediscovered in 1887, at which point it became even more obvious just how far Goethe had gone in transforming an almost middle-class domestic tragedy about the arrogant scholar’s seduction of Gretchen, who then commits infanticide and is executed, into a cosmological exploration of the nature of exertion, celestial intervention, and the unification of Greece and Germany.
Faust combines pageantry, singspiel, masques, trionfi, satirical swipes, and epic swaths (act III of Part II, for example, covers three thousand years of history and includes a symbolized version of Byron as the child of Faust and Helen). At a profound level, it is unstageable, except in the theater of the mind. Goethe’s facility in making new combinatory adjectives, his transubstantiation of lowbrow poetic forms, and his moments of almost supernatural grandeur make his masterpiece untranslatable as well. As the Goethe scholar and translator David Luke opined, in an introduction to a selection of Goethe’s poetry, aiming to represent him at his best means representing him at his most intractable.
Part II of Faust was not the only sequel with which Goethe struggled. After having organized for a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Court Theatre in 1794, he spent two years trying to write the libretto for a sequel, Die Zauberharfe, The Magic Harp. In the extant fragments, we learn that the resurgent Queen of the Night has abducted the child of Tamino and Pamina and sealed him in a golden casket. The parents must undergo similar trials by flood and flame to free the infant; and their story is counterpoised to the misadventures of Papageno and Papagena and their children, born, with feathers, from huge eggs. Goethe seemed to want to outdo Mozart’s spectacular stage effects: the Queen of the Night enters accompanied by ball lightning and St. Elmo’s fire. Goethe claimed to lose interest in the project since no one could recapture the musical genius of Mozart (not even Beethoven); the fact that the original librettist, Schikaneder, produced his own follow-up in 1798 may also have contributed to the waning of his enthusiasm. Faust was not, perhaps, the least ambitious work Goethe projected. “The Romance of the Universe” would have been an equal to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, a scientific exposition of immense extent. Goethe’s standing as a scientist has been rather overshadowed by his eccentric fixation in disproving Newtonian optics: the fact that Goethe’s theory of colors is for the most part completely wrong further diminishes his claims. In the field of morphology, however, he did make advances. Although his claim, in 1784, to have “discovered” the intermaxillary bone in the human fetus is open to question (since Félix d’Azyr observed the same connection four years prior to Goethe, but did not publish his finding until 1784), and its meaning is open to interpretation (humans do not strictly speaking “have” an intermaxillary bone any more than they have tails, gills, or any of the other features that are embryonically discernible), it nonetheless earned him a place in the footnotes of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.
Morphology is the study of shape and variation, and was the background to the long, incomplete series of poems Goethe intended for his “Romance of the Universe”—the “Metamorphosis of Plants” and the “Metamorphosis of Animals”—and he also published a number of prose studies on the topic. He identified parallels between species (such as the similarity of air sacs in fish and lungs in mammals, or between wings and arms) to posit the limitations under which forms can change. He had extravagantly wondered whether, on his trip to Sicily, he might even find the Urpflanze, the aboriginal form of which all other flowers, heathers, and trees are merely elaborate extrapolations. Needless to say, he did not; nor did he complete his grand fusion of science and poetry.
When Goethe buttonholed a friend in 1830, keen to discuss the momentous events in Paris, one might be forgiven for thinking he was referring to the July Revolution. In fact, he was more concerned with the debate at the Académie des Sciences between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire on comparative anatomy. The recent political history of France was a source of continuing concern for Goethe, and despite many false starts and fumbled attempts, he never adequately responded to the Revolution, the Terror, and the rise and fall of Napoleon.
In 1792, Goethe accompanied Duke Karl August on the campaign by a coalition of German princes and French royalist émigrés to counter the Citizens’ Army and, they thought, take back Paris. As the battle turned against them, Goethe famously commented, “From here and now begins a new epoch in world history.” His similes for the Revolution tended to emphasize its inhuman, irreversible quality: it was an earthquake, an eruption, a cataclysm of nature.
Goethe tried to analyze the preconditions that had led to the Revolution in the abandoned drama The Mystified. Elements from this work were incorporated into The Great Copt (1791), in which he obliquely commented on the so-called Necklace scandal (which Dumas was to make the central plot of The Three Musketeers), and castigated the negligence and naïveté of the French aristocracy that had led to the Revolution. The Great Copt is a comedy on the notorious charlatan and supposed sorcerer Count Cagliostro, whom Goethe had met in Sicily, and whose mendacity and trickery are reflected in the corruption and susceptibility of the court. Nonetheless, the Revoluti
on failed to be contained within the conventions of comic drama, though Goethe tried again with The Citizen General and abandoned another attempt, The Agitated.
The French Revolution provides a contemporary backdrop to Hermannand Dorothea, but little else. Similarly, the Conversations Among German Emigrants, a work conceived along the lines of Boccaccio’s convocation of stories, The Decameron, substituted the tactical withdrawal from General Custine’s advance on the Rhine for the escape from plague-ridden Florence in the Italian version. Goethe did not even come close to finishing this prose collection, and the actual political setting barely impinges on the tales, or their tellers. A Rabelaisian satire, The Journey of the Sons of Megaprazon, contains some spirited nonsense and heavy-handed allegory about a “fever” for factionalism that ruins a society, but remains fragmentary.
The Natural Daughter of 1799 was his most sustained attempt at a drama that dealt with the causes of the Revolution; and even its proposed sequel, or second and third volumes of a trilogy, remained unwritten. Derived from the memoirs of Princess Stéphanie-Louis de Bourbon Conti, the play re-creates her as Eugénie, who is abducted and forced into a marriage with a social inferior by her contemptible half-brother. The widespread abuses of the ancien régime are glimpsed through this minor, unpleasant incident, and in a prophetic speech delivered by a monk in the play, who describes an impending, unstoppable flood. But Goethe never completed the postulated continuation, and the actual guillotine itself is again avoided.
