Literature and the Cult of Personality

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.”