Goethe
The Poet and the Age: Volume I
'Monumental and massively learned . . . excellent on the intellectual background' Michael Hoffman, Independent on Sunday
'Unusually rich detail . . . lucid and often witty prose . . . In its sovereign command of the biographical and socio-cultural material, its thoughtful and judicious manner, its unifying structure, and its elegance of style . . . it should remain a standard account'
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'Should become a milestone in the history of Goethe biographies since its scope and detailed knowledge can scarcely be surpassed'
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'Brilliant analysis of individual poems' Stephen Spender, Sunday Telegraph
Nicholas Boyle is Fellow and Tutor at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and University Lecturer in German
Goethe
The Poet and the Age: Volume I
The Poetry of Desire (17491790)
Nicholas Boyle
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Boyle, Nicholas
Goethe: The Poet and the Age.
Vol. I, The poetry of desire (17491790)
1. Poetry in German. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17491832 1. Title
831.6
ISBN 0198158661 ISBN 0192829815 (Pbk)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Goethe: The Poet and the Age.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd. Midsomer Norton, Avon
For
Michael and Rosaleen who made it possible
Preface
More must be known, or at any rate there must be more to know, about Goethe than about almost any other human being. As the age of paper passes, so he comes to seem its supreme product. Not only did he do and think more than most menhe, and others, left more written traces of what he did and thought. It is true, he also left monuments of a different kind. Nearly 3,000 drawings by him survive, as do the villa he built, the palace he rebuilt, and the park he first laid out. He amassed very substantial private collections of mineralogical specimens, incised gems, and prints and drawings, and if his own working library was not bibliographically outstanding that was because he had at his disposal the resources, and the buying power, of one of the largest princely libraries in Germany, which he spent a lifetime enriching. He ran a duchy for three years, a theatre for twenty-five, and a university and an art school for longer still. A shrewd contemporary thought his greatest achievement to be his devoted personal guidance of his sovereign, eight years his junior, whom he educated into one of the most enlightened of Germany's minor rulers in the early nineteenth
century, and who was a model for his neighbour and relative, the Prince Consort. Goethe deserves his place on the Albert Memorial. But of course what matters now is the writing.
A national celebrity at the age of 24, a European celebrity twelve months later, Goethe was thereafter, until he died in his eighty-third year, sufficiently prominent, remarkable, and at times powerful, for those who met him to want to record what he said and those who corresponded with him to take care of what he wrote. After he moved to Weimar the daily chronicle of his doings, now being put together for the first time in seven large volumes by Robert Steiger, is practically continuous, especially once he began to keep a regular diary in 1796. Accounts of conversations with him, excluding Eckermann's famous collection, run to some 4,000 printed pages, over 12,000 letters from him are extant and about 20,000 letters addressed to him. His official papers run to four volumes, and Wilhelm Bode filled another three with contemporary gossip about him, extracted from the correspondence and diaries of third parties. There may be parallels to this flood of documentation for an individual life, though few surely can be sustained over so long a periodVoltaire or Gladstone perhaps? certainly not Napoleon. What makes Goethe's case manifestly unique is the quantity, quality, and nature of the literary and scientific writing which caused this interest in him and which expands indefinitely our potential knowledge of his inner life through its unceasing stream of reflection on the events and projects of his outward career. The most important written memorials to Goethe are the literary works in which he sought to make the particular occasions of his individual existence into general symbols whose significance
would be appreciated by readers, initially of his own time and place, but increasingly, in his later years, of other times and places as well.
That individual existence had its eccentricitiesamong them, an English audience may think, that of being German. None the less, this book goes to press at a time when it seems worth remembering that the centre of Europe, if its diameter is drawn from Lisbon to Moscow, lies somewhere between Frankfurt and Weimar. If Germany is now re-emerging from the marginal position into which it was pressed, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, by the overseas
expansion of the western European powers, and by their implacably anti-Imperial policies, particularly their continued fomentation after 1630 of the Thirty Years' War, a first stage in that re-emergence into European centrality occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps because of a different relation between the state power and the middle classes from that which prevailed further west, there occurred in Germany at that time a religious crisis whose explosive energies, channelled through the then uniquely extensive German system of universities, issued in a series of intellectual and cultural innovations which were to have a most powerful influence on the European, and North
American, mind of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biblical criticism, historical and classical scholarship, reinterpretative theology, Idealist (and ultimately materialist) philosophy, sociology, neo-classical art and architecture, aesthetics, and the academic study of modern literature, all were decisively influenced, and in some cases actually originated, by the German cultural revolution which began in the 1790s, and among the last fruits of which in the later nineteenth century, replete with the seeds of the age to come, was the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Probably not coincidentally, it was also the greatest age of German music. A first reason for reading and studying Goethe is that his literary works are the medium in which a superlatively intelligent and unusually well-placed observer discerned and responded to these numerous shifts in the bedrock of intellectual Europe, some of which led to earthquakes in his own time, others only later.
A second reason is that Goethe was a poet. He was a born versifier and phrase-maker, so that Faust to a German audience, like Hamlet to an English one, seems a collection of quotations, and no issue of a German quality newspaper is without a handful of Goethe allusions, acknowledged, or unrecognized. He had a natural affinity with the rhythms of the German language and throughout his life produced, unpredictably, but with dreamlike facility, lyric poems of unique form and character, many of which have become internationally known through their later musical settings (which however sometimes obscure the specifically poetic merits of the original). Faust is certainly the greatest long poem of recent European literature, and it was Goethe's example, not Marlowe's, which inspired the numerous further treatments of the theme in the 150 years after its first publication. But Goethe was not just a poetfor the whole Romantic
generation, in Germany, England
and even France, he was the poet, and through his influence on that generation he affected all subsequent notions of what poets are and poetry does. In 1797, when the first recognizably Romantic movements began, Goethe was already a figure of authority and achievement, a model of worldly competence and success whose ultimate loyalty was none the less only, and avowedly, to his 'art'. Goethe was the first poet who in virtue solely of his poetry, and not of its sublime or sacred subject-matter, or his contingent personal erudition, was also a secular sage. Indeed it would scarcely be too much to say that with the eighth volume of his Literary Works, which was published in 1789 and contained a selection of his shorter poems, Goethe created the very genre of lyric poetry as it is practised today: the book of shorter pieces linked not in the first instance formally or thematically, or by their devotional purpose or their suitability for musical setting, but by their origin in the discrete occasions of the poet's life, what he sees and reads and feels and thinks about, and all given meaning and importance not by any transcendent order but by their reference, explicit or implicit, to the poet's self and his activity of poetic making. Only Petrarch offers a comparable concentration on the self and its vicissitudes, and from Petrarch Goethe is distinguished by the wholly secular context of his thought and feeling. More immediate predecessors there certainly wereKlopstock, Gray, or, particularly, Rousseaubut these furnished only
elements for the compound which Goethe was the first to synthesize and which he bequeathed to the nineteenth century, and beyond.
To come to understand Goethe properly is to adjust one's understanding both of modern literature, its course and derivation, and of Europe, and Germany's place within it, and that equally for an English and for a German reader. Goethe's name has been much used, and abused, in a search for identity by German nations which came into existence after his death. One of the principal difficulties in reaching a dispassionate view of Germany's painful struggle towards nationhood, and of Goethe's part in it, has been that the main critical instrument available for analysing ideological delusions, namely Marxist social theory, is itself a product of the particular process which stands in need of analysis. Since 1945 the alternative to the manifest inadequacies of Marxist Goethe-scholarship has been, in the Federal Republicand more recently, though for different reasons, in the Democratic Republic tooa programmatically non-political approach, which has done marvels in editing, annotation, and the accumulation of source-material, but has not always faced the challenging task of interpretation. In the English-speaking world Goethe's reputation suffered in his lifetime from endlessly repeated charges of immorality and irreligion, then from accusations of obscurantism,
nineteenth-century progressivism, antinomianism, and literary incompetence, and latterly from benign neglect. Barker Fairley's admirable literary and psychological Study of Goethe is now well over forty years old, and the last substantial and original English biography, by J. G. Robertson, nearly sixty. The larger and
somewhat earlier biography by Peter Hume Brown was the first such undertaking since G. H. Lewes's great monograph of 1855, a most remarkable work of scholarship for its time, and one of the first Goethe biographies in any language. There has been much good writing about Goethe in English since the Second World War, but most of it has been for a specialized audience, the obvious exceptions being Erich Heller's stimulating essays in The Disinherited Mind and W. H. Bruford's Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, to both of which my debt is as great as it is obvious.
The present book has been written in the belief that two different needs can be met by a biographical study of Goethe and his works which starts from first principles and assumes as little prior knowledge of its subject as possible. On the one hand the reader with some knowledge of English and French literary history, but unacquainted with the German language or its literature, or anything but the outlines of the nation's political development, should find here enough information to set Goethe's life in the context of his age, and his poetry in the context of his life. On the other hand, those already familiar with Goethe's works will, I hope, learn something from seeing them presented against their biographical, social-historical, and philosophical background, and discussed, as far as possible, in a rigorously
chronological sequence. These have not on the whole been features of the synopses of Goethe's achievement published since 1945, even of the three-volume study, both authoritative and sensitive, of Emil Staiger. To say that, however, is not to be ungrateful, for the present work has been made possible only by the magnificent scholarship of the last half-century. Several annotated editions and selections, Femmel's Corpus der Goethezeichnungen, Flach and Dahl's edition of Goethes amtliche Schriften, the Leopoldina edition of the scientific works, E. and R. Grumach's new collection of
Begegnungen und Gespräche, Steiger's 'documentary chronicle', and various other projects, variously advanced, are the foundation of this studyalong, it must be said, with the indispensable legacies of earlier generations, the Weimar edition of the works and letters, and the many volumes in which Wilhelm Bode recorded his unequalled knowledge of the literary and social world of later eighteenth-century Weimar. What I can offer is only a synthesis of syntheses, whose value will long be outlasted by that of the compilations on which it is based; yet if such a synthesis is not attempted from time to time, and for a particular time, to what end are the compilations made? The secondary writing about Goethe long ago grew to a point at which no one man could hope to encompass it; the primary sources are now not far behind: it is a moment to pause for thought, and to attempt to situate this extraordinary human phenomenon in that widest possible context in which by its own nature it demands to be inserted. For the specialist there may emerge from the exercise a new view of a commanding literary presence: as a free man responding to the social, spiritual and intellectual demands of modernity, as they formulated themselves around him. For the non-specialist there is the promise of a new
acquaintance: limited and even peculiar, no doubt, as we all are, but grand and deep and rich as none of us is, and few of our forebears have been. It is my hope too that the following pages may find some readers in Germany, for they are written in the belief that the Federal Republic has represented not only what is best, and oldest, in the nation's political traditions, but also what is closest to the mind of Goethe, and it is time for the rest of Europe to start to say thank you. To make Goethe accessible, whether to the general reader, to the student, or to the scholar, was my principal concern in the organization and writing of this book. Only passages in verse, or significantly poetic prose, have been cited in German, and always with a translation. Translations, which are my own, are as literal as possible, and in some cases the word order is deliberately closer to the original than normal English usage would allow, in order to hint at important effects that would otherwise be lost. The book has to some extent been conceived as a companion to the Hamburger Ausgabe, as the selection from Goethe's works and correspondence most likely to be readily available to the student, and wherever possible texts have been cited from this edition; where this is not possible recourse is had to the new edition of Der junge Goethe, by Hanna Fischer-Lamberg, for Chapters 13, and thereafter to the Weimar edition. The text is cited precisely as found in the edition of reference, since there seemed no way of imposing consistency on the different editorial practices, and no purpose in it either. Place names are given in anglicized forms, when these are available and not obsolete, personal names, except for a few well-known monarchs, are left in their original form. 'Erbprinz' is inaccurately but conveniently rendered as 'Crown Prince'. To aid pronunciation, feminine forms ina have generally been preferred to those ine (e.g. Amalia). The page has been kept (almost) free of footnotes and references, but sources for quotations and for important facts or assertions are grouped at the end of the volume and identified by page number and a few key words.
The reader will see from the contents list that within each chapter sections mainly devoted to Goethe's life alternate, on the whole, with sections mainly devoted to his works. Not that the two subjects can be separatedon the contrary, it is a main theme of the whole book that they cannot. But to make orientation easier, and to make the biographical narrative more continuous, it seemed better to confine the literary discussion of major works to discrete sections. The
biographical sections still contain some discussion of minor and shorter works, such as lyrical poems, and also of Goethe's scientific concerns and of his drawingenough, I hope, to confirm the general principle of the inseparability of mind and matter. Works composed over a long period are treated as far as possible stage by stage in the course of their development. With Goethe's æuvre the biographical approach has great analytical power, and to abstract from the gradual process of composition is the surest way of reintroducing those ideological preconceptions and conventional judgements which I am trying to eliminate. The headings to the pages, and the index of
Goethe's works, should help the reader to find the main passages relevant to any particular work.
It is always a pleasure to write about Goethe, and naturally it is a pleasure to express one's gratitude to those who have enabled one to do so. I should like to thank Stephen Brook, who first suggested, more than ten years ago, that I should write this book, and Virginia Llewellyn-Smith and Catherine Clarke, of Oxford University Press, who encouraged me to continue with the project. A scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung made it possible for me, under the benevolent direction of Professor A. Schöne, to write a first draft of Chapters 1 to 3, and the generosity of that
remarkable institution deserves the warmest recognition in these chill times. My work was rendered much easier by the helpfulness of the staff in the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Gättingen and in the Cambridge University Library, and by the protracted loan of many volumes from the Beit Library of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in Cambridge. I am grateful to my colleagues, and especially to Dr J. Cameron Wilson of Jesus College, Cambridge, who readily took over my normal duties while I was on study leave, and to Wolfgang and
Rosemarie Bleichroth, who were the kindest of hosts and who drew my attention to many of the silhouettes which adorn the book. They, and Paul Connerton, proved indefatigably tolerant of Goethocentric conversation and so have left their mark on much of my exposition. A timely gift of books from Anneliese Winkler, to whom I owe any facility in the German language I may have, greatly eased the later stages of my work. Dr M. R. Minden kindly passed on to me a number of books from the library of Trevor Jones, who I like to think would have enjoyed the use I have made of them. I wish particularly to thank those who have given their time and attention to read and comment, often at greater length than I had any right to expect, on parts of the manuscript as it has developed: Professor J. P. Stern, Professor and Mrs J. C. O'Neill, Professor T. J. Reed, Dr E. C. Stopp, and my dear colleague the late Professor U. Limentani, who gave me invaluable assistance with Chapter 7. They have saved me from many errors, obscurities, and fatuities which the reader will not see: those which remain on view are all my own work.
I am grateful to the editors of German Life and Letters for permitting the republication of some material in Chapter 3 which first appeared in their journal. A general word of thanks is also appropriate here to those who have furnished me with illustrative material and given permission for its use, and who are more specifically acknowledged in the List of Illustrations. That there are any illustrations at all is a result of the generosity of the MorsheadSalter Fund of Magdalene College, Cambridge, of the Tiarks Fund and the Jebb Fund of the University of Cambridge, and especially, and once again, of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, who have all made substantial grants towards the cost of reproductions. My thanks go not only to the institutions themselves, but also to their individual representatives who have helped and encouraged me.
A project of this kind has necessarily passed beneath the fingers of many typists who deserve grateful
acknowledgement: Rosemary Baines, Marion Lettau, Nicholas and Deborah Hopkin, and above all my wife, Rosemary, a busy solicitor who none the less not only typed Chapters 4 to 8 but was also their most rigorous critic. To her support throughout, but especially in the difficult hours and days of what has been a more demanding undertaking than I hope is now apparent, I owe both the completion of this first volume and the prospect that the second volume will follow it with reasonable expedition. My parents-in-law spared neither their time nor their energy in sustaining us both and in
managing a household which, despite including two children under three, at times seemed to revolve around a man dead one and a half centuries ago. This book is their work also, and I dedicate it to them.
N.B.
JANUARY 1990
Preface to the Paperback Edition
This reissue has made it possible to introduce a number of minor corrections. I am particularly indebted to Professor T. J. Reed for his helpful vigilance.
When I wrote the Preface to the original edition I did not know that thanks to a Research Readership awarded by the British Academy I would be able to compose the Index to this volume much more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case. I am glad to be able to take this first opportunity to express in public my gratitude to the Academy for their support for this project.
N.B.
NOVEMBER 1991
Contents
List of Illustrations xvii
1
Germany in the Eighteenth Century 1
The Age of Goethe? 3
Princes, Pietists, and Professors 8
The Literary Context, to 1770 19
2
Origins of a Poet 41
Frankfurt and the Goethes 43
'More chatterbox than substance': 17491765 53
A Burnt-out Case?: 17651770 62
First Writings 77
3
Prometheus Unbound (1770775) 89
The Awakening: 17701771 91
Life and Literature: Works, 17701771 107
Between Sentimentalism and Storm and Stress: 17721774 125
4
Displacement 231
Weimar in 1775 233
Why Goethe Stayed 239
The Minister 251
Frau von Stein 256
Literary Difficulties of a Statesman 266
5
Court Favourite (17751780) 281
Confidence and Indeterminacy: 17751777 283
Works, 17751777 288
Tragedy and Symbolism: 17771780 294
Works, 17771780 312
6
The Baron (17801786) 333
Between Society and Nature: 17801784 335
Works, 17801784 356
'I thought I was dead': 17851786 379
7
To Italy at Last (17861788) 413
The Road to Rome 415
'Quite as much toil as enjoyment': October 1786February 1787 431
A Glimpse of Fulfilment: Iphigenia and 'Forest. Cavern' 447
Uneasy Paradise 458
The Gardens of Alcinous 466
In the High School of Art: 17871788 482
The Great Soul: Works, 17871788 514
8
The Watershed (17881790) 531
Old and New Faces: JuneDecember 1788 533
Rome in Weimar: December 1788May 1789 550
'I Am a Different Man': JuneDecember 1789 579
Summa Summarum: The Edition Completed 600
Farewell to Italy: JanuaryJune 1790 641
Works Cited in the Notes 667
Notes 673
List of lllustrations
1. J. H. W. Tischbein: Goethe at the Window of His Lodgings in Rome (1787)
2. J. P. Melchior: Johann Caspar Goethe (1779)
3. J. P. Melchior: Catharina Elisabeth Goethe (1779)
4. The Goethes' house in Frankfurt after Rebuilding, a Print of 1823 after F. W. Delkeskamp
5. Goethe: Self-portrait (?) in his attic room in Frankfurt (176870)
6. J. L. E. Morgenstern: Cornelia Goethe (c. 1770)
7. Goethe: Parsonage and farmyard, Sesenheim ( 17701)
8. J. H. Schröder: Charlotte Kestner, née Buff (1782)
9. E. M. von Türckheim: Portrait Miniature of Her Parents, Anna Elisabeth ('Lili') von Türckheim, née Schönemann, and B. F. von Türckheim (c. 1798)
10. A. Graff: Herder (1785)
11. H. Strecker: Merck (1772)
12. S. Collings and T. Rowlandson: More of Werter. The Seperation. Charlotte perserved from Destruction by Albert and Hymen whilst Werter in the Excess of Frenzy Puts an End to His Existance (1786)
13. Goethe: Swiss Mountain Huts (June 1775)
14. J. Juel: Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1779)
15. G. O. May: Goethe (1779)
16. G. M. Kraus: Duchess Luise of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (c. 1781)
17. Charlotte von Stein: Self-portrait (1790)
21. J. P. Hackert: St Peter's in Rome, from the Ponte Molle (Ponte Milvio) (1769)
22. J. H. W. Tischbein: Goethe in the Campagna (1787)
23. J. H. W. Tischbein: Duchess Anna Amalia among the Ruins of Pompeü (1789)
24. J. H. W. Tischbein: Self-Portrait in His Roman Studio (1785)
25. Goethe: Balcony with Vase (1787)
26. Goethe: Italian Seacoast with Full Moon (June 1787)
27. C. H. Kniep: Temple of Segesta (1787?)
28. Goethe: Schloss Wörlitz (1778)
29. Goethe: Imaginary Landscape with Bay and Castello (Autumn/Winter 1787)
30. F. Bury: Self-Portrait (1782)
31. C. H. Kniep: Self-portrait (1785)
32. J. H. Lips: Carl Philipp Moritz (1786)
33. J. H. W. Tischbein: 'Emma Hart' (Later Lady Hamilton) as a Sibyl (1788)
34. Goethe: Trees (1788)
35. J. H. Meyer: Ulysses and Circe, Copy after Carracci
36. C. Küchler: Schiller (after J. C. Reinhart) (1787)
37. Goethe: Christiana Vulpius, with Shawl (17889)
Silhouettes
H. E. Stark: Wieland, 1806 1
anon.: Goethe at 14 (left) and 20 41
anon.: F. H. Jacobi (left) and J. W. Wendt: Lavater, 1782 89
anon.: Ladies of the Weimar Court, 1790s? 231
G. M. Klauer (?): Goethe and Fritz von Stein, Early 1780s 281
anon.: Caroline Herder and Her Sons, 1782 (left) and Goethe, early 1780s? 333
Central Europe in the 1780s, after a Map in The New Cambridge Modern History Atlas xx
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce the illustrations:
Freies Deutches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt on Main. Photo Ursula Edelmann: plates 14, 6, 8, 9
Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar: plates 21, 24, 32
Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar: plates 5, 7, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 2528, 29, 33, 34, 37, silhouettes on pages 1, 89, 231, 281, 333, 413, 531
Bildarchiv Foto Marburg: plates 10, 11, 15, 23, 30, 31
Trustees of the British Museum: plate 12
Ullstein Bilderdienst: plate 17
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: plate 20
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt on Main. Photo Ursula Edelmann: plate 22 Bild-Archiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna: plate 36
Goethe-Museum, Düsseldorf. Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Stiftung: silhouette on page 41 (left).
The silhouette on page 41 (right) is from J. Vogel, Goethes Leipziger Studentenjahre (Leipzig, 1899). Plate 35 is from O. Harnack, Zur Nachgeschichte der italienischen Reise (Weimar, 1890). The map is reproduced by permission of George Philip and Son Ltd.
8. J. H. Schröder: Charlotte Kestner, née Buff (1782)
11 . H. Strecker: Merck (1772)
22. J. H. W. Tischbein: Goethe in the Campagna (1787)
1
Germany in the Eighteenth Century
The Age of Goethe?
When Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in the free city of Frankfurt on the Main on 28 August 1749, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa had just, after nearly a decade of war, confirmed her right to rule Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and, through her husband Francis I, Frankfurt's nominal sovereign, the Imperial German territories, a right which she was to exercise for the next thirty years; Frederick II, not yet 'the Great', of Prussia, just installed in the enjoyment of illegally annexed Silesia, had nearly forty years still before him as 'first servant of his state'; Louis XV was half-way through his sixty-year reign over a wealthy but mismanaged France that was still the supreme power of Europe; George II, Elector of Hanover, and the last English king to lead his troops into battle, had done so on behalf of Maria Theresa, and against the French, at Dettingen, not far from Frankfurt, in 1743 (the occasion for Handel's Dettingen Te Deum) three years later his own throne had been successfully defended in the last pitched battle on British soil, Culloden. Within living memory England had had a Catholic king, and Vienna had been besieged by the Turks. In 1749 the North American colonies were loyal to Britain; Quebec and Louisiana were French; Clive and Dupleix were rivals in India; and Australia was effectively unknown. The mail from London to Edinburgh took over a week, Moët and Chandon had begun to export the recently invented champagne, and a pineapple cost as much as a horse. In 1749 Pope was five years dead, Johnson had begun, but not completed, the publication of his Dictionary, Voltaire had yet to move to, and from, Potsdam, Rousseau had yet to deny publicly the moral benefits of civilization, and Mozart had yet to be born.
When the ennobled Privy Councillor von Goethe* died in Weimar on 22 March 1832 there had for a quarter of a century been no Holy Roman Empire; France had just passed through a second revolution and was ruled by a citizen-king; and England, having emancipated Roman Catholics, had begun to reform its Parliament. Napoleon, Beethoven, and Hegel were dead, Walter Scott and Jeremy Benthaman almost exact contemporary of Goethe's, born in 1748were to die in the same year. In 1832 Alexis de Tocqueville was touring the America of seventh President Jackson, in search of democracy, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, having resigned from the ministry, was touring Europe in search of religion. The first photographs had been taken by Niepce and Daguerre; the first passenger-carrying steam railway line was operating between Liverpool and Manchester; The Times had been publishing for nearly
* The 'von', the particle indicating nobility, bestowed on Goethe in 1782, is nowadays usually dropped.
forty years. Otto von Bismarck was a student in Göttingen, where Gauss and Weber were about to erect the first electric telegraph, and Dr Arnold was headmaster of Rugby, already the home of a less useful invention. University College, London, had a professorial chair of German, and German philosophy was being taught in the Antipodes. Tolstoy was 3, Baudelaire was 11, Wagner was 19 and composing his first opera. In the next five years Sketches by Boz would be published; Victoria would become Queen of England, so putting an end to the personal union with the Electorate of Hanover; the British Raj would displace the East India Company; Germany too would acquire its first railway line, from Nuremberg to Fürth, and Karl Marx would begin his studies at the University of Berlin. Probably the last person with her own adult memories of Goethe, an innkeeper's wife, would not die until 1906.
The nearness to us of the world in which Goethe died may seem only to emphasize the remoteness of the world into which he was born. If we look at Goethe's end he seems to stand on the verge of modernity, if we turn to his beginning we seem to be reaching the limits of a normal historical consciousness. Between Goethe's beginning and his end, striking directly into the middle of his life, only a few weeks before his fortieth birthday, came the event which initiated the modern form of the State and the modern international political system, and from whose consequences no
contemporary could escape: the storming of the Bastille by the Paris mob, the French Revolution as almost immediately it was called. This, largely, is the source of our alienation. If Goethe's works, and the German literature of the age that bears his name, the Goethezeit, are difficult of access to English-speaking readers, one reason, far from superficial, is that it is difficult for such readers to credit that an age bisected by so colossal an event can be a unitary period at all. There are other reasons too. Our English-speaking readers are not helped by the lack of a familiar contemporary literature with which they could make comparisons, for the period of Germany's greatest cultural floweringfrom about 1780 to about 1806coincides with a relatively fallow time in their own literature and, understandably, in that of France. They are not used to attributing literary wealth and an exemplary sensibility to the period from the death of Johnson to the youth of Keats, nor even to that from Gray's Elegy to the death of Byron: 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, may well stay in the mind as the moment of a new start, a literary revolution to accompany the political, but in Germany it is the date of the high point of a movement of cultural reform which had been in preparation for decades and which was the work of mature men. There are also problems of literary genre. The 'classical' literature of modern Germany is a product of the age of Cowper and Crabbe, and that provides us with an approximate orientation in the matter of tone, but the preferred form of that literature is the dramaand what possible standard of comparison have English readers here? The utterly forgotten dramas of the Della Cruscans? the almost equally deservedly unperformed verse-tragedies of the Romantics, Otho the Great, The Borderers, even Cain?
Conversely, moreover, the most striking feature of eighteenth-century German classicism for readers approaching it from a knowledge of English literature is its failure to produce a single readable representative of that eighteenth-century form par excellence, the novel. If in the course of classicism's violent prologue Goethe produced a best-selling novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), with but one fully realized character, and if in the course of the
movement's long Romantic epilogue he produced another novel, The Elective Affinities (1809), whose shimmering elusiveness seems now that of Blake and now that of Jane Austen, this surely only confirms the difficulty of grasping him and his age in the literary and historical concepts appropriate to the rest of Western Europe.
It is one of the premisses of this book that the very notion of the Goethezeit is a serious obstacle to the proper
understanding of Goethe himself. There never was such a thing as the 'Age of Goethe'. In the first place, our intuitive recognition is correct that Goethe's exceptionally long writing career spans a great divide not only in European, but specifically in German, history. It is true that in Germany the earthquake was so delayed that paradoxically a period of highest intellectual achievement could coincide in the 1790s with a period of extreme political convulsion in the rest of Europe. But this appearance of unworldly calm should not be allowed to conceal the fact that in 1806, the year in which Prussia died and was reborn, a new age began for all Germany, and not just for its intellectual stratum. It is sheer
obscurantism to gloss over this great crisis with some such concept as 'the Age of Goethe'. Germany is not so different that it too did not have its Revolutiontrue, it was a revolution of a peculiar and unobvious kind, but the political and cultural difference between 1780 and 1820 was in the German-speaking world nearly as great as in France, and certainly greater than in England. What did make Germany unique was that what in France was achieved by an intellectual
bourgeoisie was in Germany the work of an intellectual bureaucracy. If the German revolutionaries of the 1790s are men of learning and letters, above all of the universities, such that in Germany at this time literary and philosophical schools succeed one another with the rapidity of French ruling cliques, the next generation shows us the pupils of these men, or these men themselves, in new roles, not simply as the reformers but as the new masters of the state machines of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and, to a lesser extent, of Austria. The Prussian revolutionaries, for example, were men like Gerhard von Scharnhorst (17551813), the reorganizer of the army, Carl August von Hardenberg (17501822), reformer of the entire political and administrative apparatus, Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), founder of the (present German) educational system, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (17681834), not only a theologian but also an important agent in the unification of the Prussian Protestant churches. Their work, like that of their more demonstrative French counterparts, outlasted their, sometimes short, official careers. We should not, however, assume that because in Germany a great, unbloody, political change took place, in which men were
instrumental who looked to France as their model, therefore the change was of the same nature, or even occasioned by the same forces, as in France. In name 'liberals', the great reformers were in fact the founders of that bureaucratic autocracy which, partly as a result of the political expansion of Prussia, was to determine the character of German societyand ultimately not only Germanwell into the twentieth century, perhaps even to the present day. The German revolution was the transformation of a monarchical into a bureaucratic absolutism, preceded and accompanied by an intellectual explosion, partly determined by French initiatives (including of course the violent intervention of
Napoleon), but also, and largely, autonomous. In Germany, and as a result of German actions, the ancien régime passed away. Its place was taken by a society as peculiarly German as it was clearly post-revolutionary, the middle-class world of Biedermeiera sort of Victorianism without (until the middle of the nineteenth century) industrial capitalism.
It is Goethe's singular greatness that he responded intellectually, and in the form of literary production, to every stage of thisfor a contemporary hardly graspable (Goethe called it 'daemonic')metamorphosis. At each new birth-pang of
modernity, specifically in Germany, but also generally in Europe, he felt the pain, recollected and recovered himself, and attained and expressed understanding. His beginnings are without revolutionary chiliasm and his end without reactionary nostalgia, yet in over sixty years of writing (the standard edition of his works and letters runs to 138 volumes) he never seriously repeated himself. Always judicious, he none the less always grew. If he thereby brought sense, and perhaps also unity, into an experience more profoundly fractured than is now any longer possible (the twentieth century can offer greater disasters than the eighteenth, but not greater revolutions)that is his personal
achievement. It is in the nature of the achievement that the sense and the unity belong to him, not to the several ages in which he lived. To think otherwise is to diminish the man, and to misrepresent the timehis time, and ours.
In the second place, the term Goethezeit carries a seriously misleading implication about the nature of Goethe's unceasingly energetic engagement with the literary and intellectual culture of his German contemporaries. With the possible exception of the first five years of his public literary career, Goethe was never a model which a whole generation chose to imitate. Nor, on the other hand, was he ever the most typical figure of a particular literary
movement. 'People are always wanting me to join in and take sideswell, then, I am on my side', he remarked in 1831. Even in 1880 Nietzsche was one of the few to have understood what he meant:
Goethe . . . lived and lives only for a few: for most he is nothing but a conceited fanfare trumpeted from time to time across the German borders. Goethenot just a good and great man, but an entire cultureGoethe is an episode without consequences in the history of the Germans: who for example could demonstrate one bit of Goethe in the
German politics of the last seventy years! (While a bit of Schiller has certainly played its part and perhaps even a little bit of Lessing.)
But the more careful phrase of T. S. Eliot is also the more just: 'Goethe is about as unrepresentative of his Age as a man of genius can be.' There must be a limit to the extent to which greatness can be detached from its time, and slight though Goethe's influence on his contemporaries may have been, their influence on him was, and had to be, constitutive. 'The artist must have an origin, he must know where he comes from', he said in the same conversation in 1831, and 'Do not take me amissI too am a joiner.'
In one of those moments of 'joining in', in 1798, he wrote, with an appropriate wishfulness, in the inaugural issue of the (short-lived) periodical The Propylaea:
after all, the artist too is a part of the public, he too has been formed amid the same times and events, he too feels the same needs. He strives in the same direction, and so he moves on serenely with the mass, that bears him up, that is enlivened by him.
If a poet's age does not give him his subject-matter, his own resources will prove a shallow well. Perhaps it was belated recognition of a kindred spirit that eventually revealed to Eliot the true relation between Goethe and the follies, heresies, and enthusiasms of his time, on which he had had to draw, for there was nothing else: 'The more I have learnt about Goethe . . . the less I find it possible to identify him with his age. I find him sometimes in complete opposition to his age, so complete perhaps as to have been greatly misunderstood.' 'The Age of Goethe' is not least a misnomer because the enormous powers of absorption, which Goethe, so repeatedly and astonishingly and at every stage of life, brought to the understanding of his world were complemented by a spirit of opposition so unyielding as to be without parallel in the literature that is timelessly great, but which makes of him the authentic, the classic, poet of modernity. 'The Age of Goethe' is simply the series of literary and intellectual temptations which, as it happens, Goethe resisted. That series may have its own logic, but it is not that logic which entitles it to bear the name of Goethe. Goethe's association with it was fortuitousthe stroke of undeserved good fortune that genius isand Goethe's interest in it was to a large extent polemical.
But even Goethe's uniqueness had its origin: Goethe knew where he came from, and never denied it, even though he finally resolved that he could carry out his life's work only by leaving home for good. 'If someone were to ask me where I could imagine my cradle standing in an easier place, more appropriate to my opinions in civil affairs or more suited to my views of poetry, I could name no sweeter town than Frankfurt.' To understand the relationship, simultaneously of dependence and detachment, between Goethe and that native German literary tradition which assorts so oddly with the contemporary literatures of France and England, we shall eventually have to examine his
position as a citizen of Frankfurt. To understand Frankfurt, however, we must first examine the relation between civil and poetic culture throughout the rest of eighteenth-century Germany.
Princes, Pietists, and Professors
'Germany' in the eighteenth century was not even a geographical, at most it was a linguistic expression. No natural boundaries, and certainly no single political structure, enclosed all the speakers of the various dialects of the German tongue, scattered in every degree of concentration from Alsace to the Volga and what is now Romania (where there is still a German-language newspaper), and from the Gulf of Finland to the Swiss Alps and the Adriatic. Not even if we confine our attention to the areas which were to be represented by the German and (non-Balkan) Austrian Empires in 1914 can we find a hint of a national framework, or of a national consciousness. Constitutionally speaking, these areas, which in the late eighteenth century were occupied by some 20 and 27 million human beings respectively (at a time when the population of France was 24 million but that of England and Wales just under 10 million), were composed of three distinct, but partially overlapping complexes, which may be given the short-hand titles of the Empire, Prussia, and Austria. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, whose claim to lineal descent not merely from the Empire of Charlemagne but also from that of Ancient Rome was apparent in the Imperial title itself (Kaiser = Caesar), covered approximately the territory of the modern states of Austria, Belgium, Germany, and half of Czechoslovakia, covered them, it may be said, with confusion. In the north and south of the Empire's unbelievably elaborate geographical and constitutional jigsaw, however, two states were emerging in the eighteenth century which could act as identities on the European stage in something like the same sense as France or England or Sweden or Portugal. In each case a substantial nucleus of Imperial territory was extended and supported by a 'tail' of lands stretching away to the east, and outside the Empire. The Austrian tail, notably Hungary, Slovenia, and Galicia, and the Italian satellites, need not concern us further since the German-speaking subjects of the Habsburgs at this time, perhaps a quarter of the total, were largely to be found within the Imperial boundaries. The Prussian 'tail', however, land of German settlement, originally by the Teutonic Knights, from 1226 until the expulsions of 1945, and reaching around the Baltic to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) and Memel, was to be of profound significance for the cultural development of all Germany. For by expanding in the seventeenth century into the only semi-Imperial Pomerania, and the wholly non-Imperial Duchy of Prussia, the Electors of Brandenburg shifted the centre of gravity of their nascent state towards a land of vast latifundia (now part of Poland and the Soviet Union) where a scattered population of mainly Slavonic serfs was autocratically ruled by an arrogant and
untutored nobility (the 'Junkers'). An element of east European agrarian despotism entered the regime in Berlin, which harmonized ill with the traditions of corporate liberty of the towns and small territories in western, Imperial, Germany which over the next two centuries were to be eaten up by the new giant. Indeed, the kings who from 1701 succeeded the Electors deliberately took their title from their independent eastern, 'Prussian', domains, and not from their historic origin, the Mark of Brandenburg, which remained in theory a fief of the Emperor in Vienna.
The Empire itself, the German heartland, would be better described as an extremely loose confederation of states of very unequal size and importance. In the eighteenth century, the nine Electors (the title refers to the office, largely ceremonial, of electing the Emperor and his heir apparent, the King of the Romans), 94 spiritual and temporal princes, 103 counts, 40 prelates, and 51 free cities (including Frankfurt) were all equally sovereign rulers over their own territories, feudally dependent directly and only on the Emperor. To these must be added some 1,000 Imperial knights claiming equal 'immediacy' in the derivation of their authority but ruling altogether over a total of not more than 200,000 subjects. Not merely, however, was the Empire fragmented, but the fragments of which it was composed were themselves fragmented too. Geographical integrity of the possessions united under a single princely dynasty was the exception rather than the rule. From the seventeenth century Brandenburg-Prussia, for example, had ruled several territories on the Lower Rhine near the Dutch border, and one in Württemberg in the south-west. The Archbishop of Mainz, at the confluence of the Main and the Rhine down-river from Frankfurt, was also the overlord of the Eichsfeld two hundred miles to the north-east, on the edge of the Harz mountains, and an island of Catholicism to the present day. The duchy of Weimar, in Goethe's time, consisted of four separate territorial units, with a total area of 700 square miles. The resultant complexity of frontiers, customs dues, and transport may be left to the imagination.
Apart from the person of the Emperor, the institutions unifying this magnificent chaos were few and shadowy. The Reichstag, the Imperial Diet, at Regensburg (Ratisbon), though divided into three chambers of Electors, other princes, and free cities (the Imperial knights were not represented), was not so much an assembly as a standing conference of ambassadors. There were no debates and business was conducted in writing. The Imperial Supreme Court, the Reichskammergericht, which from 1693 was housed in Wetzlar, north-east of Frankfurt, was very expensivethe fee alone for entering an appeal was 1,500 guildersand slower by far than Dickens's Chancery: in the middle of the eighteenth century there were over 16,000 cases still outstanding. The Imperial Tribunal, the Reichshofrat, in Vienna, was a rival appeal court whose competence was never adequately defined. Certain towns, finally, had a special relationship to the Imperial office: the Crown Jewels were kept in Aachen (Aixla-Chapelle) and Nuremberg, and Frankfurt was the town in which the election
and coronation of a new Emperor had to take place, in accordance with an elaborate ceremonial laid down in the Golden Bull of 1356. On the other hand, there was no Empire-wide system of taxation (nor even of currency) and certainly no standing Imperial army. Nor of course was there a single state Church. The Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 had put an end to the terrible devastation of the Thirty Years' War, while confirming the three Churches, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic, in their possessions of the 'normative year' 1624, had laid down the principle that each territory should have its own established religion, that of the local sovereign, with a sort of limited right of persecution of the other two ('cujus regio ejus religio').
It would, however, be a mistake to regard the Holy Roman Empire as a hollow sham simply because it did not have the characteristics of a modern nation-state. It provided a historical, emotional, and juridical framework which, in the eighteenth century alone, survived eight major wars fought on German soil, and even at the political level it was a diplomatic mechanism through which a certain necessary balance of power could be maintained. For 'Germany' was not lacking in ambitious, and thus rival, forces aiming precisely at the establishment of such a modern state or states, nor-in forces that were anxious to resist these ambitions. In addition to Prussia and to Austria under Joseph II (Emperor with Maria Theresa from 1765, and sole Emperor from 1780 to 1790) there were the Electorates of Saxony and Bavaria, the Duchy of Württemberg and the Landgraviate of Hesse (Cassel), all substantial powers aiming at their own unification, expansion, and enrichment. The smaller territories, the Imperial knights, and the free cities were the carp or the
minnows in this world of pike. Their only protection was the Imperial power, and the historic order that the Empire sanctioned. Frederick the Great was of course very willing to assist the city councillors of Frankfurt when they quarrelled with the Emperor about constitutional matters, but his true opinion of the city's traditional freedoms was indicated rather by his arbitrary arrest, through his Frankfurt agent, of the departing Voltaire, whom he happened to wish relieved of certain compromising manuscripts. The old Emperor and the ramshackle Empire were the natural patrons of those who had nothing to hope from the expansion of the busily centralizing enlightened autocracies with their splendid new geometrical palaces and parks, show-cases of absolute power, dominating unfree cities of residence (Residenzstädte)Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, and, its street-plan, like its rulers, the most brutal of all, Cassel. Cassel is situated in a broad valley, closed off at one end by steep hills. Halfway up this rampart stands the huge and sombre palace of the Landgrave: down from its main entrance a broad swathe is cut in a straight line through the town and across the entire valley. Above the palace rise, along the same axis, the terraced gardens which culminate in a stone spire, the highest point for miles around, surmounted by a colossal statue of Hercules (who gave his name to various Hessian rulers)with club.
To understand the peculiarity of Goethe's upbringing and of his natural loyalties, it is important to realize how much, and for how long, the mainstream of German culture was determined by the despotic structure of the major states, centred in cultural as in all other matters on the court, and the person of the prince. From the middle of the seventeenth century the combination of incessantly destructive war and protracted economic depression had sent into irreversible decline the great trading, banking, and manufacturing cities of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German
bourgeoisiein 1800 the population of Nuremberg was still only one half of what it had been in 1600, and other cities, Augsburg, Cologne, Ulm, and even Frankfurt, similarly suffered losses ranging from the serious to the catastrophic (the average loss was around one-third of the original population). In the period, still far from peaceful, that followed on the Peace of Westphaliatowards the end of the century the megalomaniac campaigns of Louis XIV reduced western
Germany to a state reminiscent of the Thirty Years' Warthe responsibility for social and economic reconstruction was taken over not by the entrepreneurs but by the princes, whose undemobilized armies gave both political strength andsince they had to be fed, clothed, and equippedeconomic impetus to an increasingly dirigiste, absolutist order of things. The towns that now prospered were precisely the residence towns where the ruler set up his local Versailles, where the traditional rights of the citizens were suppressed, and where the original artisan and merchant economy was replaced by the servicing of the court. By 1660 the cultural pattern of Germany's bourgeois periodthe combination of the local master in the local form (such as the Master-singer Hans Sachs (14941576) of Nuremberg), the workshop artist executing commissions for any patron willing to pay (such as the great wood-carver Tilman Riemenschneider (c.
14601536)), and the travelling humanist willing to settle in any municipality anxious to retain him (such as Sebastian Brant (14571521), author of The Ship of Fools)that pattern had almost completely faded away. Its last representatives include some of the best-known writers of the so-called 'baroque' movement in Germany (the word unfortunately fails to distinguish between bourgeois and princely art), such as the realistic novelist J. J. C. von Grimmelshausen (1620 or 162176), who was also mayor of the village of Renchen, and the poet and dramatist Andreas Gryphius (161664), town clerk of Glogau (now Glogow). For the next two generations the arts that were to flourish in Germany were to be performative arts, largely, or even wholly, dependent on princely patronage or dedicated to princely glory: architecture, masque, and opera. As for German literature, it would not be too much to say that in the half-century from 1675 to 1725 it simply collapsed. A middle class with literary interests had practically ceased to exist. The Renaissance tradition of cultivating and embellishing the vernacular was kept alive, just, by a few learned 'language
societies' ('Sprachgesellschaften'), whose productions, apart from voluminous works of theory, were largely of an escapist
pastoral nature, which still has a certain faded charm. Otherwise literary talent grew only to be stifled, as is apparent from the abbreviated career of the satirical and 'galant' novelist C. Hunold ('Menantes') (16801721), and from the bitterly early death of the gifted Silesian poet J. C. Günther (16951723): often described as a Goethe born before his time, Günther could equally be called a Gryphius born too late. For the middle ground once occupied by the alliance of burghers and humanists had disappeared, and a gulf now yawned between popular and princely literature, between mass-produced and ill-printed trash romances on the one hand, and the prestige productions of the court-printer, the folio anthologies of flattering poems and the thousand-page fictional handbooks of statecraft on the other. The gulf was even more crassly evident in the realm of drama, which was divided between strolling players rising no higher than farce or even puppetry, and court-theatres devoted to tragedies in French and operas in Italian. (It is from this polarization, around 1700, that the distinction between 'art' and 'kitsch' ultimately derives, which still plays an important part in German literary criticism.) Cowed, dutiful, and profoundly insecure, such of the middle class as remained contented itself with devotional literature, with books of hymns, and eventually with morally edifying weeklies, on the pattern of Addison's Spectator, but much more earnest. Indeed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries religious revival could be said to have taken the place of literature as far as the German middle classes were concerned. It was a sign of the times that in the 1690s the citizens of Frankfurt were prepared to accept, as part of the cost of a more
stringent religious censorship, the transfer of a large part of the business of their book-fair to their age-old rival, Leipzig. It was, in fact, from Frankfurt that one of the major impulses to revival came, in the figure of Philipp Jakob Spener (16351705), who was head of the established Lutheran Church in Frankfurt from 1666 to 1686. In this position, in similar subsequent positions in Dresden and Berlin, and through an immensely extended correspondence, Spener, the spiritual adviser, together with the more worldly-wise August Hermann Francke (16631727) whom he distrusted, became the initiator of that form of radical Lutheranism known as Pietism which was to be of immense importance for German religious life for the next two centuries. The particular feature of Pietism which makes it of interest to us is its natural affinity for state absolutism. A religion which concentrates to the point of anxiety, not to say hypochondria, on those inner motions, whether of dryness or abundance, of despair or of confident love of God, from which the individual may deduce the state of his immortal soul; a religion whose members meet for preference not publicly, but privately in conventicles gathered round a charismatic personality who may well not be an ordained minister; a religion which disregards all earthly (and especially all ecclesiastical) differentiation of rank, and sees its proper role in the visible world in charitable activity as nearly as possible harmonious with the prevailing
order (such as Francke's famous orphanage in Halle, one of the functions of which was the recruitment of Prussian military chaplains)such a religion was tailor-made for a state system in which all, regardless of rank, were to be equally servants of the one purpose; in which antiquated rights and differentiae were to be abolished; and in which ecclesiastical opposition was particularly unwelcome, whether it came from assertive prelates or from vociferous enthusiasts unable to keep their religious lives to themselves. It was not chance that both Spener and Francke gravitated towards Prussia, the most energetic and revolutionary of the new absolutisms, and the most hostile to the Imperial order; and that under Frederick William I (King from 1713 to 1740) Pietism became in practice the Prussian state religion. On Frankfurt, however, Spener left little markhe was disappointed in the town, his flock retired into privacy, no Pietist was given his post again, and the Lutheran clergy remained rigidly orthodox until the late eighteenth century.
Reconciling the individual with a unified rational order by interpreting individual life in terms of pure inwardness is also a theme in the philosophy of the one towering genius intellectual Germany produced in the period of transition from bourgeois to absolutist culture. The thought of G. W. Leibniz (16461716), mathematician, logician, inventor, jurist, diplomat, theologian, philosopher, historian, courtier, and librarian, has at least as many facets as his eventful life. But he himself saw the relationship between the individual and the continuum, as he put it, as one of the two major problems of philosophy (the other being the problem of free will), and he laid particular emphasis on the implications for the German social order of his answer to this most abstract metaphysical question. How can a thing both have an identity of its own and yet also belong to a larger order, also be acted upon by other things, for example, to the extent even of being or becoming a part of them? Leibniz's answer contains three features which make of it a prophetic
exposition of the entire eighteenth-century German world-view. In the first place, the ultimate constituents of the world, for Leibniz, are not things, but forcesforces, however, with an identity, 'substantial forms', he calls them, or 'monads', and his prime example is the human soul. It is in the nature of such a force, or monad, to be always changing its state, to be always developing: its identity lies not in any one particular state but in the rule of its development that describes all its states, like the single algebraical formula that describes all the positions of a point moving along a curve. In the second place, although all the different states of a monad, such as a human soul, may appear to involve it with the rest of the universe, that is, with other monads, so that it appears to come into contact with them, to act upon them or be acted on by them, none the less, according to Leibniz, all these changes are understandable not as the interaction of several monads one upon the other, but as the autonomous development of each monad singly, fulfilling in isolation the law of its being. All change is internal and there are no such things as relations. That there appear to be relations, that monads appear to act