Publications of the English Goethe Society

ISSN: 0959-3683 (Print) 1749-6284 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ypeg20

VI. Goethe's Letters

Elizabeth M. Wilkinson

To cite this article: Elizabeth M. Wilkinson (1954) VI. Goethe's Letters, Publications of the English
Goethe Society, 23:1, 121-125, DOI: 10.1080/09593683.1954.11785650

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09593683.1954.11785650

Published online: 08 Oct 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 3

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ypeg20
 VI. GOETHE'S LETTERS
By Elizabeth M. Wilkinson

will always be two ways of approaching Goethe,

T HERE
Professor Fairley declared in a centenary article en-
titled "Inspiration and Letter Writing: A Note on
Goethe's Beginnings as a Poet." 1 The general reader, for
lack of time, will normally content himself with the poetic
work as such. The scholar, ideally at least, will take into
account all that he wrote and spoke-letters, diaries and
conversations as well as plays, novels and lyrics-for
only thus can he arrive at an understanding of the true
Goethe. (In another context Professor Fairley would
certainly have included the scientific writings too. For
who has done more than he-from his pioneer article on
"Goethe's Attitude to Science" 2 to his full scale Stuc!J of
Goethe-to present the natural philosophy to English
readers as an integral part of the unity of Goethe's
mind?) The purpose of his Selected Letters (I 77 o- 86), a the
second volume of which will shortly ·appear, is thus to
initiate the young scholar into a vital aspect of Goethe's
mind and work.
In his advocacy of Goethe the letter writer Professor
Fairley is in the best company. "Goethes Briefe,"
Professor Beutler writes in his Introduction to the Letters
in the Gedenkausgabe,
sind sein Leben. Wenn nichts von ihm erhalten ware, kein
Gedicht, kein Drama, kein Roman, nichts als diese Briefe, er
sttinde doch vor uns als einer der Grossten im Reiche des
Geistes. Ja sogar als ein Dichter-denn ohne Reim und ohne
Versmass grenzt die Sprache in diesen Briefen oft so eng an
1 Germank Review, October, 1949, xxiv, 3·
2 Bulletin of the john Rylandr Library, 1936, xx.
3 Blackwell's German Texts, Oxford, 1949.

121
12.2. GOETHE'S LETTERS

die Sphare der Poesie, class der Dichter in diesen Zeilen trans-
parent wird, auch wenn sie von den gleichgiiltigsten Dingen
handeln ... erst diese Briefe offenbaren den ganzen Menschen
Goethe .. .
This, incidentally, is where the Gedenkausgabe scores
over others, inasmuch as it presents "den ganzen Men-
schen Goethe"-not only through his letters but also
through his Gesprache-whereas the Jubilaumsausgabe
fifty years ago did not include a single volume of letters,
not even the crucial correspondence with Schiller.
Even Professor Beutler, with 4,ooo pages at his disposal,
had a hard task in selecting from the fifty volumes of
Briefe in the Weimar Edition. Professor Fairley, with
his slender volume of I 5o letters, can obviously do no
more than skim the cream off the milk. Here the art of
selection is tested to the utmost, and of Professor
Fairley's skill in this art there can be no doubt. All who
try to give students some insight into the workings of
Goethe's mind must be grateful to him for having made
this material easily available and relieved them of the
arduous labours of annotation. That his selection cannot
be entirely to everyone's taste was inevitable considering
that for every letter chosen fifteen had to be rejected.
I myself, for instance, would have liked to see some of
the Leipzig letters, if only because to omit them is to
miss early signs of an aspect of Goethe which, in modified
form, was to remain all his life the complementary pole
of his demonic irrational. Without them one understands
how this young man was to become the author of Werther
or of parts of Faust, but not how he was to become the poet
of the Divan, or of other parts of Faust which, like this,
stand under the sign of Geist rather than Gefiihl. Not
that Professor Fairley's reason for omitting them is that
he finds their style too cultivated and literary. On the
contrary, he calls them "noisy," "voluble," written
"blindly, even crudely." But is this entirely so? And is
 GOETHE'S LETTERS

there not more quality to some of them than he admits?

There is nothing unsophisticated, either psychologically
or artistically, about those letters to Behrisch in which
his impulse to self-probing is already married to his
instinct for dramatic presentation-and for both he had
the sanction of literary models.
The principle governing Professor Fairley's selection
follows, I think, from his conviction that for the young
Goethe letter writing was irresponsible (xviii), unguarded
(xx), effortless, unpremeditated self-expression (xxiv),
and that he continued his Sturm und Drang in his letters
long after he had left it behind in his poetry (xxiv).
"Until he is not far from forty we find him exposing
himself to his correspondents as transparently as when
he was a youngster ... the frankness, the spontaneity
is the same throughout" (xxv).
As a practical guide this has much to be said for it in
this particular period. It results in a choice which brings
home the frequent interaction between the works and the
letters. As an interpretation of the letters, however, it
raises problems-problems on which Professor Fairley
and I have long agreed to differ: the meaning of "spon-
taneity" and the nature of artistic "self-expression."
My own view is, roughly, that the more convincing the
artlessness the greater the art that has gone to its making.
This is not to disagree with Professor Fairley's final
conclusion that "few men have revealed their inner life
as nakedly as Goethe in his pre-Italian letters." It is
simply to interpret differently the fact that if this is so
it is because a poet is at work in them: to contend that
if the inner life is laid so naked before us it is because the
forms of language are being made to take on the very
contours of the forms of feeling; in other words, that
the revelation is most complete when the shaping impulse
is at its most intense.
The letter form was very much a literary preoccupation
124 GOETHE'S LETTERS

of the eighteenth century, and it was but natural that

Gellert, as Professor of Rhetoric, should have held a
colloquium on the subject, which Goethe attended.
"Schreibe nur wie du reden wiirdest," he admonishes his
sister, probably taking his cue from what Gellert had
said there. Professor Fairley thinks that "his own letters
tell us at every turn that he either did not know what
Gellert meant by this or preferred to ignore it and go his
own way" (since Gellert's aim was merely the substitution
of a letter style based on the vocabulary and accents of
cultivated speech for the unnatural jargon of the law-
courts). I think they tell us that he put his own construc-
tion on what Gellert said-a quite literal construction.
Like other great literary innovators Goethe explored new
possibilities of "wie du reden wiirdest" for the enrich-
ment of the written language. The way he went was
Gellert's way, in the sense that he followed a new canon
of composition. The interpretation of the canon was his
own-later approved and further stimulated by Herder's
views on the nature of language and literature. In other
words Goethe's "spontaneity" is itself the pursuit of a
form, whether in his letters or in his poetry. The new,
spontaneous, style is as much a reflection of the new
nature cult as the abandonment of the wig or the culti-
vation of the English garden. In this sense I would say
that his best letters are often "composed," composed to
reflect with exactitude and immediacy the nature of his
own feeling, and with an eye to the other pole of the
epistolary situation, their effect on the individual recipient.
What could be less spontaneous in Professor Fairley's
sense than the love letter to Friederike of which he made
a rough draft with alternative beginnings? Or the perfect
symmetry of the one to Auguste von Stolberg in which
he balances the inward Goethe against the outward?
And how he delights in stylistic experimentation! He
writes in Knittelversen to Gotter, to Lotte Buff in the
 GOETHE'S LETTERS

style of the Nouvelle HC!oise, in the Kurialstil to Kastner,

lards a letter to Herder with quotations from Pindar out
of compliment to "Euch von den Griechen redenden,"
and addresses Frau von Stein in terms which might, and
did, go straight into poetic form (or vice-versa. Who
shall say which came first?)
I am not, of course, suggesting that the principle of
composition is the same, either in degree or in kind, as
in the works. If with Professor Stuart Atkins 1 I think the
sudden emergence of the finished epistolary style of
Werther is only to be explained by Goethe's long practice
in letter writing from Leipzig days onwards, and with
Professor Henel 2 that the beginnings of a new Werther
are to be discerned in the letters to Auguste, I would
certainly also, with Professor Wortriede, 3 want to
investigate the difference between Werther's Briefe aus
der Schweiz and Goethe's own. With this Selection
Professor Fairley has provided students with the epistolary
material for doing all these things. With his Introduc-
tion he has drawn their attention to the need for doing
them. Compared with this service, differences of opinion
are unimportant. The mark of the good critic, after all,
is not that he makes us agree with him, but that he brings
the crucial problems to the forefront of critical con-
sciousness, and by elaborating his point of view with
precision provokes us to define our own more clearly.
This Professor Fairley can always be relied on to do,
and we anticipate with pleasure the stimulus of his second
volume.
1 "The Apprentice Novelist. Goethe's Letters, 1765-67." Modern Language
Quarterly, 1949, x.
2 "Der junge Goethe" Monatshefte, I 949, xli.
3 "Kunst und Natur in Werthers Schweizerreise." Ibid.