The Reception of Goethe in Victorian Literature

Abstract

The reception of Goethe in Victorian literature (1837-1901) is shaped, on the one hand, by the fact that Goethe was himself a changing and developing genius. The progress from Goetz von Berlichingen (1771) and Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (1774) to the second part of Faust (1832) is one of the most amazing known to us. On the other, to this are added the personal limitations, prejudices, enthusiasms and aberrations of his early English readers as well as inner controversies of Victorian cultural mindset arising from a set of opposing and, often mutually exclusive, ideological, moral, and aesthetic values, currents and undercurrents, both central and peripheral, dominant and marginal.

The present paper does not aim at providing an exhaustive characterization of the Victorian reception of Goethe. Rather, it tries to demonstrate the ways in which the German author was instrumental in shaping the Victorian literary landscape. In addition, it focuses on the ways in which inner controversies of Victorian society and culture are reflected in the divergent and contradictory critical reflections on Goethe and his creative reception through translation.

 It seems relevant to start the study of the reception of Goethe in Victorian literature (1837-1901) with Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) who published his essay on Faust as early as 1820 and translated Wilhelm Meister into English in 1823. The critical reception of the book was controversial. However, the translation paved its way into the 19^th century English literature and turned into an “English” book. Carlyle’s works were instrumental in shaping the Victorian reception of Goethe.

Goethe’s Victorian reception was also, to a certain extent, influenced by George Henry Lewes’s (1817-1878) book The Life of Goethe (1885) – a controversial but brilliant piece of scholarship of the era, one of the first biographies of the great German writer in all languages that scrutinizes Goethe’s life against historical and socio-cultural background.   

It were Carlyle’s works that sparked George Eliot’s (penname of Mary Ann Evans, 1819 – 1880) interest to Goethe. She traveled with Lewes in Germany assisting him in collecting materials for Goethe’s biography. George Eliot’s connection with Goethe is deeply rooted in her novels The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876) that are modelled on Goethe’s ‘bildungsroman’ Wilhelm Meister. The connecting ring between the two authors is Goethe’s favorite philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) whose treatise Ethics was translated from Latin by Eliot while she was reading Wilhelm Meister. The ethic credo of both authors was shaped by Spinoza’s work. Eliot learned from Goethe how to unify the opposites such as subject(ive) and object(ive), masculine and feminine, social and individual into one whole.

One can find the new variations on Faustian paradigm in Robert Browning’s (1812-1889) Paracelsus (1835) and Arthur Hugh Clough’s (1819-1861) Dipsychus (1850). The latter is tremendously indebted to Goethe. For him, Goethe was equally an inspiration and a spiritual guide.

During the last decades of the 19^th century, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was Goethe’s most ardent follower in England. Arnold values him above all his predecessors except for William Wordsworth. In his essays and letters Goethe is referred to and/or quoted almost as frequently as English romantic poet. Arnold’s private correspondence also gives proof of his life-long admiration and reverence for the German author.

The attitudes of the Victorian academic and intellectual community towards the Goethe heritage vary from negative/critical to unconditional acceptance and admiration. The monumental figure of Goethe serves as a source of inspiration equally for ardent adherents of Victorianism as well as their opponents, the followers of English aestheticism.