The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Nonetheless, Weimar grew on her and, as her German improved, her reading widened. “Goethe, Schiller and Wieland have more ingenuity, more depth in literature and philosophy than anyone I have ever met,” she wrote to her cousin. “Their conversation is all ideas…Schiller and Goethe are attempting all kinds of innovations in the theatre.”3

  Compared with Weimar, Berlin was a disappointment. She was admitted to the court and introduced to all the aristocracy, but she did not feel settled there, perceiving that it was neither suited to her literary interests nor given over to social life, in which it was far inferior to Paris. Only after several weeks did she meet someone who, as she told her father in a letter, “had more knowledge of literature than almost anyone she had ever met.” August Wilhelm Schlegel “spoke French like a Frenchman and English like an Englishman and while he was only thirty-six, he had read everything in the world.”4 Among the others she met was Fichte, to whom she boldly declared that his philosophy was “beyond her” and challenged him to explain it to her “in a quarter of an hour.” Fichte gallantly made the attempt, but she interrupted him after just ten minutes, conceding that she did now grasp what he was driving at—and illustrated her new understanding with an analogy, a travel story in which someone achieved an improbable feat through the exercise of the will. Fichte was furious at what he saw as a trivialization of his self-important views.

  De l’Allemagne had a difficult birth. In an attempt to rehabilitate herself with Napoleon, de Staël sent him a proof. Reading it, the emperor chose to believe that it was “anti-French” and instructed General Savary, the new minister of police, to seize the book and expel its author. Ten thousand copies were pulped, though one was smuggled to Vienna, enabling it to be published eventually in 1813, when it won widespread acclaim.

  De l’Allemagne, like Corinne and de Staël’s other books, subverted all that Napoleon stood for. Besides the book’s detailed discussion of German poetry, prose, and drama, and Kantian and other philosophies, the central concern was with freedom—inner freedom as well as political freedom. It showed that people who were subjugated politically could not be subjugated intellectually and implied that Kant was the starting point of resistance to oppressors. It was in this book that Madame de Staël coined the word “Romanticism” to describe the new form of poetry she found in Germany: a poetry that celebrated the individual human spirit.5 Her discovery and her translations of the German “greats” had an immediate impact on her French and other European contemporaries (such as the British), who until then were largely ignorant of German culture. The French at that time dismissed German culture as vulgar, but she argued instead that, even if that were true, original thinking (which is what the Germans had) counted for more than good taste. Her hope was that De l’Allemagne would serve to rekindle French literature, which was in her view moribund under Napoleon’s censorship.

  She was not blind to Germany’s faults, finding there a general uncongenial atmosphere of “stoves, beer and tobacco,” and the aristocracy dull. She was aware that people in general were xenophobic, that there was “more imagination than wit” and a surprising contrast between their intellectual daring and submissiveness to authority.6

  “HORAE GERMANICAE”

  One of the fellow travelers that Madame de Staël met in Germany was the Englishman Henry Crabb Robinson. Trained as a lawyer but also a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Crabb Robinson belonged to the Norwich circle of “intellectuals and dissenters” that included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey among its fellow members. He traveled to Germany in 1802–03 to study philosophy, Kant in particular, and sent back articles on German subjects to the Monthly Register.7 But Crabb Robinson was by no means the only Briton to start taking an interest in Germany. William Taylor of Norwich, also a member of the circle around Southey and Wordsworth, described himself as the “first Anglo-Germanist.” He became known for his translation of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and wrote a number of essays on German authors—Herder and Lessing in particular—between 1790 and 1820. In Britain, as it turned out, more influential than Madame de Staël’s book were John Black’s translations of Schlegel’s writings on dramatic art and literature, in which he adapted Kant and Schiller’s aesthetics to a critique of Shakespeare. Both Wordsworth and William Hazlitt found Schlegel’s “Shakespearean insights” instructive. Blackwood’s Magazine, begun in 1817, contained a regular section, “Horae Germanicae” from 1819 on, “in which new German works were the subject of knowledgeable attention.”

  None of the above names, however, had anything like the impact of four writers who between them did succeed in making the contemporary developments in Germany much more widely known across the Channel and, to some extent, in America: Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, George Henry Lewes, and George Eliot.8

  It is not too much to say, Rosemary Ashton tells us in her study of the impact of German thought on nineteenth-century Britain, that it was Coleridge alone who, in the period between 1800 and 1820, induced his fellow Victorians—people like Eliot, Lewes, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Arnold, Richard Holt Hutton, and the philosopher James Hutchison Stirling—to come to terms with the new German developments and ideas. Though France, particularly the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, had a profound impact on political notions in Victorian Britain, it was Germany—its philosophy, history, and aesthetics—which, she says, had the most enduring effects on English thinking.

  Overall, Coleridge’s English contemporaries were puzzled by this seeming obsession with Germany and teased him about it, but later generations took a very different view. In 1866, Walter Pater praised Coleridge for helping to identify the philosophical and literary movement in Germany as an “irresistible…metaphysical synthesis.”9

  Attracted particularly by Schiller’s Die Räuber, Coleridge took up German and in 1798 crossed the Channel for a visit to Germany, where he discovered Kant. He confided to Crabb Robinson in 1812 that there was “more to Kant than any other philosopher.” He was taken particularly with Kant’s third critique, which considered aesthetics as a science. This led Coleridge to the ideas of the Romantics, especially the Schlegels and Schelling. Coleridge’s chief impact, therefore, was on the reception of German philosophy, rather than literature, in Britain.10

  Carlyle had much more influence regarding German literature. Known everywhere, not always flatteringly, as the Vox Germanica of London, Carlyle exhibited a Germanic thoroughness and a Germanic interest in history: he spent fourteen years writing a biography of Friedrich the Great. (Hitler had the German translation read to him during his last days in the bunker.) To begin with, like Coleridge, he was drawn to German philosophy as a counter to British skepticism and materialism, and it was his enthusiastic endorsement of Kant and Fichte in a series of articles he published in the Edinburgh Review that excited his generation. These essays were soon republished in American magazines, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others absorbed the new “German philosophy,” which took root in New England as Transcendentalism.11

  Carlyle’s role can be identified much more directly because so many people spoke or wrote about the effect on them of his “very German” novel, Sartor Resartus (1833–34). “Hardly a young person survived the 1830s without being struck by Sartor and by it inspired to read—even if only in Carlyle’s English translation—Wilhelm Meister.” Carlyle was tireless in his attempt to convince his readers of the value of reading German literature, especially Goethe, and was successful to the extent that he could write in 1838 that “readers of German have increased a hundredfold.” Thanks to him, G. H. Lewes took up German and traveled to Germany in 1838, aware that an understanding of German literature was virtually obligatory for a budding author and critic. Once in Germany he discovered a systematic aesthetic in Hegel. Lewes returned to Britain full of the philosopher, but he also drew attention to Goethe’s inquiries into botany and optics, which had gone unnoticed in Britain until then. (Lewes wrote the first complete
Life of Goethe in any language.)12

  Lewes traveled to Germany more than once with George Eliot, who was no less fascinated, although her focus was the higher criticism of the biblical texts. This form of study was every bit as controversial in Britain as it was in Germany and accounted for much of the prejudice north of the Channel against Germans, the names that were particularly reviled in Britain being Strauss and Feuerbach. George Eliot, however, was a “freethinker” and this made her open to ideas from abroad and gave her the courage to translate Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1846. She too thought that Britain couldn’t afford to ignore German developments.

  Not that she was blind to Germany’s shortcomings any more than was de Staël—she found the “Gelehrten,” the scholars of Weimar, “naively pompous.” And yet, in 1865 she published an article with the title “A Word for the Germans,” in which she conceded that Germans could at times be weighed down by a laborious, cumbrous writing style, but insisted: “If he is an experimenter, he will be thorough in his experiments; if he is a scholar he will be thorough in his researches. Accordingly no one in this day really studies any subject without having recourse to German books.”13 No one, she concluded, could call himself an expert on anything until he had read what the Germans had to say.14

  The pre-eminence of Germany had been the case for some time in education. Francke’s work, for example, attracted interest very early on, and charity schools were founded in Britain on the same principles as those at Halle.15 A description of Halle and its system was published by Dr. Josiah Woodward, as Pietas Hallensis in 1705, and widely read in America too. Anthony Boehm, a graduate of Halle, opened a Francke-inspired school in Britain as early as 1701.

  As interest in German thought grew, an increasing number of boys were sent to Germany for language training, for which the demand was so great as to encourage L. H. Pfeil, father of Goethe’s secretary, to found a school dedicated to the purpose. In 1800 a dedicated periodical was founded for those interested in Germany. Called The German Museum or Monthly Repository of the Literature of Germany, the North and the Continent in General, it lasted for barely three years, but then some of its features were taken up by Blackwood’s Magazine.16

  More important in the long run was Thomas Campbell’s idea that a University of London should be founded along the lines of the Universities of Berlin and Bonn, rather than on the Oxford or Cambridge model. When it was founded, the University of London had a chair of German right from the start, the professor being none other than Schleiermacher’s brother-in-law. German philologists occupied both the chair of Oriental languages and that of Hebrew. Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, who became one of the University of London’s most substantial benefactors, and subsequently Britain’s first Jewish baronet, traveled to Bonn and Berlin to clarify his ideas about what a university should be.17 Before the Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge produced its report in 1850, Oxford had already made an attempt to become more “German” by introducing lay professors and a more practical examination system.

  Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, was the first man north of the Channel to acknowledge the value of philology. He recognized the advances being made in Prussia, going so far as to teach “his” boys German rather than French. After The German Museum had come and gone, a second periodical, The Philological Museum, started in 1831. This did better, becoming virtually a “parish magazine” for the Germanists.18 Hardly less influential than Arnold was his great-nephew, Adolphus William Ward. He studied at Leipzig, caught what he called the “German fever” and, after he had gained the professorship of History and English Language and Literature at Owens College, Manchester (the future University of Manchester) in 1866, set about transforming it to a research-oriented German-style university.

  The most famous British academic of that time was John Emerich Edward Dalberg (later Lord) Acton (1834–1902). He had a German mother, and partly for this reason spent eight years studying under the historian Johann Döllinger at Munich. Acton became known for his survey in the English Historical Review of “The German Schools of History.” No less inspired by Germany was Florence Nightingale, who was much taken by the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserworth near Düsseldorf, which trained teachers and nurses. It was her visit to the institute in 1850 that convinced her that nursing could be a profession, much more than menial employment. She returned the following year for training herself.19

  The interest in German—and especially Prussian—education was growing in England (“Look at Germany” was a frequent mantra). In 1861, Mark Pattison, an Oxford don who had been the London Times correspondent in Berlin, was appointed to a commission that was asked to report on German schools. In the published document, he argued that the real bedrock of the German success story with its schools—which had now been in existence for half a century—was compulsory attendance; this was, he concluded, “a precious tradition.” Arnold himself, when he gave evidence to the Taunton Commission on Endowed Schools, also recommended German (and French) practices, his arguments proving so compelling that his report was later published separately as Higher Schools and Universities in Germany (1882). He advocated a much greater concentration on science, again as was true in Prussia.20 Philology was still central, in the German way, and Max Müller, a German polymath whose knowledge of Sanskrit was such that the East India Company commissioned an edition of the Rig Veda, settled in Oxford. Despite all this, in 1860 Germany still had six times as many students per capita of the population than did Britain.21

  BRITAIN’S GERMAN REAGENT

  Following the visit of Justus von Liebig, the biologist, to Britain, at the invitation of the British Association (see Chapter 13), two “outstations” of Giessen were founded: these were the Rothamsted Experimental Station in 1843 and the Royal College of Chemistry in 1845. Von Liebig’s advice was sought in regard to the presidency of the Royal College, and he recommended August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s German consort, met Hofmann at Brühl on the Rhine and subsequently interceded with the king of Prussia to allow the chemist a leave of absence from the University of Bonn for two years. Hofmann stayed in Britain for more than a decade, and the various aspects of his multifarious career are considered later.22

  “The most active German reagent in Britain from 1840 to 1859 was Prince Albert.” History has been kind to Albert. His great contribution, according to Hermione Hobhouse, was “to free the British monarchy from the Party allegiances which had hitherto been accepted, to pave the way for a constitutional model in which there was a place for Her Majesty’s Opposition as much as for Her Majesty’s Government.”23 His most tangible monuments were the royal palaces which, we are apt to forget, were built or remodeled in his lifetime: Buckingham Palace, Balmoral Castle, Osborne on the Isle of Wight, and the farm buildings at Windsor Castle.

  Born in 1819 at the Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg, Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was the second son of Duke Ernest I, and grew up in a world with intimate links to British royalty. Queen Victoria was Albert’s cousin, her own mother, the Duchess of Kent, being Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg.

  Albert was an intelligent and above all interested consort, who did much to stimulate proliferation of the arts and sciences in Britain. He became known for his visits to the studios of living artists, persuaded the queen to be more practically involved in philanthropic matters, and was himself president of the British Association at the association’s meeting in Aberdeen in 1859, and chairman of the international conference on statistics (very close to his heart, for he had been tutored by M. Quetelet, one of the French founders of the subject) in 1860. It was the prince who suggested in 1855 that the entry to the diplomatic service should be by competitive examination, rather than by patronage, as was traditional.24

  He was the most important figure in the British collecting world in the 1840s and 1850s, his taste enriching the National Gallery as well as the Royal Collections. Consulting Lud
wig Gruner, an art expert from Dresden, among the works he acquired were Duccio’s Crucifixion, Fra Angelico’s St. Peter Martyr, and Lucas Cranach’s Apollo and Diana and Madonna and Child. Albert set in train several major studies of his favorite painter, Raphael, the intention being to create a corpus of material on the artist. Eventually some 1,500 photographs, prints, and engravings were collected and deposited in the British Museum for the use of scholars. He was helped by two German art historians.25

  As a clever man who could see the changes taking place around him, he recognized the need for education and industry to work together. He joined the Society of Arts (founded in 1754 “for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce”) very soon after his arrival in Britain and became its president in 1843. It was officials of this society who, in 1844, revived the idea of an annual exhibition of manufacturers, which would eventually lead to the Great Exhibition of 1851. This was, perhaps, Albert’s greatest contribution, his role in making the Great Exhibition happen. He was chairman of the Royal Commission on the exhibition and intimately involved in all the detailed planning.

  The displays of the German-speaking states at the exhibition easily outstripped those of the United States in magnitude and rivaled those of France.26 The best work from the Prussian government’s iron and zinc foundries was shown, together with Saxony’s Meissen porcelain, musical instruments, and clocks, and telegraphs produced by Siemens and Halske, revealing the advanced state of communications in the country. There were textiles—dyed many colors—lenses, machines for creating newspaper type, plus sculptures from the Berlin and Munich schools. It was an early view of Germany’s looming industrial power.