Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s

Patrick Bridgwater

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781900755245
• eBook ISBN: 9781351198691
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"This is a study of what the main ""aesthetic"" writers of late 19th-century Britain made of German literature, and of how Germany in turn reacted to them. The impact of Anglo-Scottish art nouveau in fin-de-siecle Austria and Germany made it predictable that Keats, Pater and Rossetti, among others, would be well received, but no one could have known in advance that by the time of their deaths, Swinburne and Wilde would be more highly regarded in Germany than in Britain. Bridgwater's documented study casts light on the central cultural issues of the day, including ideas of morality, truth and subjectivism in art, comparing Pater and Wilde with Nietzsche, and George Moore, that chameleon of the decadent 90s, with Schopenhauer."

Chapter 1
❖
Introduction

The impact of ‘English’ art nouveau (which in this context is predominantly Scottish) in fin-de-siècle Austria and Germany was such as to make it predictable that Keats, Pater, Rossetti, Swinburne and Wilde would enjoy a comparable success there. Anyone surprised to find Keats in these pages needs to remember that his German contemporary Hölderlin remained similarly forgotten. There was also, in Germany, a much sharper reaction against Romanticism than there was in England, where Pre-Raphaelitism in the person of Dante Gabriel Rossetti provided a direct link between Romanticism and neo-Romanticism, Keats and Wilde. In Germany it was not until the fin de siècle that poets were ready (and, in terms of the availability of translations, able) to consider the implications of Keats’s work, and when they did, he seemed to them a part of the ‘aesthetic’ movement, a kind of elder brother to Rossetti and Wilde.

Spilling over, as they do, into the Edwardian early years of the twentieth century, the 1890s mark the end of the great period of Anglo-German literary relations: the century-and-a-half of cross-stimulation which began with the German cult of Richardson and Sterne, and included the English cults of Goethe, Heine, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. The cult of particular books included that iconic classic of the 1890s, Meinhold’s Sidonia, the story of which will take us briefly back to Defoe, and ended with the German cult of The. Picture of Dorian Gray. The two last-named are part of another vogue which remains alive today, that of the Gothic novel. All these involved an impact exceeding the bounds of mere ‘reception’.

Until the late nineteenth century German interest in things English had mostly been bound up with political liberalism, but in the 1890s the opposite is the case. The starting-point of German interest in Swinburne was puritanical England’s failure to grant him the poet-laureateship in 1892, and the German reception of Wilde was to lead to a campaign of denigration of England for its moral and political illiberalism. Given that Victorian England originally took its moral tone from Germany in the person of the Prince Consort, this is not without its irony. While the men (and the occasional woman, e.g. Vernon Lee [Violet Paget], who, like George Meredith, went to school there) of the ‘nineties drew some of their inspiration from Germany, that country tended to disapprove of what it considered their lack of moral fibre and high seriousness. German reactions to Pater’s aesthetic Germanism is a case in point. From Germany came, in this context, both the idea of art for art’s sake and moral disapproval of it. Of the opposite approaches to art of Ruskin and Pater, it is (ironically, given Pater’s indebtedness to German thought) Ruskin’s that is closer to the German tradition of aesthetic education. The idea of a work of art without moral or metaphysical content, and therefore an improving tendency, proved even more shocking to conservative German critics than to their English counterparts, although it would be quite wrong to get the idea that moral high dudgeon is a German characteristic. The most notorious attack on English aestheticism and all its works was mounted by the Austrian Max Nordau, with whose Degeneration one can and should compare Charles Dickens’s no less insensate attack on Pre-Raphaelite art in the form of Millais’s ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’. This work may still look rather naive, gauche even, but, like Brecht’s entirely comparable poem ‘Maria’, it has long since lost its ability to shock. Other cases in point are Buchanan’s furious attack on Rossetti’s poetry, and the howls of protest—the baying of puritanical wolves—that greeted the first volume of 7 he Yellow Book in April 1894. However, if moral indignation is a conservative rather than a national reaction, the fact remains that, at times, British aestheticism proved too much for German critics to swallow. All of which makes for entertaining reading.

The peculiarly verbal literary art of the 1890s is, typically, void of all morality save that which is, to the poet-aesthete, the most important of all—the morality of form. The idea that characterizes the end of the nineteenth century more than any other is the idea that truth is what Wilde calls it, a matter of style. What is significant, the argument goes, is not what is said, but how it is said, the spin the words are given—in a word, style. It is only by examining the style that we can tell what is really being said, for anything can be made to mean anything else, including its own opposite, by how it is said; style includes not only the register or tone of voice, not only the words on the lines, but those between them. This is a subject to which we shall find ourselves returning in relation to Pater, Moore, Wilde and Nietzsche.

The ‘nineties arguably began in 1888 with the publication of George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man, successive editions of which were deliberately given a different spin by Moore as he proclaimed his allegiance to the latest intellectual fashion of the day, showing that for him truth was what he wanted to believe. Of all the many ways in which Moore (b. 1852) and Wilde (b. 1854) belong together, perhaps the most revealing in the present context is the way in which they both use dialogue as an oblique, non-committal way of expressing a maybe shocking attitude, and, at the same time, of dissociating themselves from it, as often as not subverting it by proceeding to express the opposite point of view. The past master at this is Nietzsche, whose idea of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon is typical of the ‘nineties, as is ‘the desire of beauty quickened by the sense of death’ which Pater saw as informing ‘aesthetic poetry’ (as though all poetry is not, in the end, ‘aesthetic’). Nietzsches work is built on the shifting sands of generalization, and as soon as one starts to generalize, one begins to mythologize, as the myth of the ’nineties shows. Even before his death the ‘real’ Dowson had been supplanted by a myth which, for all its oversimplification and inaccuracy, has proved stronger than the truth it displaced. Well might Dowson write ‘Non sum qualis eram’ (which of us ever is?). It is the myth of Rossetti and Swinburne, Pater and Wilde, against which we have to measure our words, and on the German side of the literary equation it is the same: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, perceived by Jeeves as ‘a pronounced grouch’ and ‘unsound’ respectively, are similarly mythofacts, personifications of the Will-to-Life and the Will-to-Power respectively. It is not only the Dandy who creates himself: most of the writers of the ’nineties wore masks behind which to hide their uncertainties; it is the decade of the persona. At no other time have so many writers had such doubts about their very identity.

To no writer does this apply more than to Walter Pater, who is in many ways the tutelary spirit of these pages, in order to see Pater clearly we need to appreciate the extent to which first the country in general and then Oxford in particular were subject to widespread German influence. Pater grew up, let us remember, in the 1840s, the first full decade of the new reign, when the young queen (whose first language was German) was relying a good deal on German advisers in the persons of Baron Stockmar and Baroness Lehzen and there was an explosion of interest in everything to do with Germany. It having become the fashion for men and women of letters to go ‘up the Rhine’, there was a sudden proliferation of views of the Rhine in the print-sellers’ shops in 1838, and in the 1840s they were full of German prints and illustrated books. Translations of German books in the fields of fiction and non-fiction alike were appearing all the time and were accompanied by a similar influx of German art. It was thanks to Germany in the genial persons of the Brothers Grimm that English childhood had been freed from the moral tale, or at least from the obligatory ingestation of it in the absence of finer fare, and given back its fairyland (German Popular Stories, trans. E. Taylor, illus. G. Cruikshank, 1823—6, 2 vols., reprinted continually throughout the century). From Grimm young readers graduated to grimmer fare: the Pre-Raphaelites, as we shall see, show that young men and women continued to read German-inspired Gothic fiction long after the Gothic craze had peaked m 1820. Nor would Pre-Raphaelite painting have developed as it did if it had not been for the austere Christian revivalist art of Peter von Cornelius and Friedrich Overbeck, which, like that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sought to revive the art of the early Renaissance.

In the 1840s the ‘German Manner’ was increasingly influential, although German art, like German philosophy, was popularly supposed to have more mind than manner, and the word ‘germanism’ still retained, at least exceptionally, the pejorative sense it had carried since the Renaissance. When Ruskin, in Modern Painters (1843), referred to Salvator Rosa’s ‘germanism’, he was alluding to his mannered anti-classical style, for in painting, as in theology, ‘germanism’ smacked of revolution. Two years earlier, in 1841, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805—73) had been summoned to the British court to begin his series of royal portraits. The germanophile Art Unions established following Prince Albert’s assumption of the presidency of the Fine Art Commission, also in 1841, were modelled on the German Kunstvereine of the time. An Art Union report of 1842 smugly set the tone of the time: ‘A taste for the production of the schools of Germany is growing up amongst us, in proportion as our progressive education in art prepares the many to understand its higher purpose’.¹ German art was, in mid-century England, nothing if not controversial:

The interest taken by English painters and designers during the early Victorian era in […] aspects of German Romantic art is undoubtedly the most spectacular event in the history of English responses to the pictorial production of that country. […] there has never been a period either before or since the mid nineteeth century when German art was the source of so much emulation and controversy. (Vaughan, German Romanticism, 1)

Admired by some and disliked by others, German art could not easily be ignored, although it must be said that what was the subject of such interest was the work of the Nazarenes and the petits maîtres of late Romanticism rather than the Romantic grands maîtres as we now know them in the persons of Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. In other words, the emphasis was on the decorative and the didactic. The successive competitions organized by the Commission in 1843—6 for the decoration of the Palace of Westminster favoured artists with a ‘Germanic’ style, and in 1862, the year in which Pater took his degree, the largest exhibition of German nineteenth-century art of the entire century was to be seen in South Kensington. It would, however, be wrong to conclude that the pervasive German influence of the time all had to do with Teutonic didacticism, for the Germanization of Oxford University proves that this was far from being the case.

Oxford, in the mid-century, was becoming more and more Germanized. It could hardly have been otherwise, given German predominance in so many historical fields and Oxford’s need to modernize. There was a ‘Germanist’ school of historians, represented by Edward Augustus Freeman (1823—92), Fellow of Trinity College from 1845, who, tetchy and xenophobic though he was, believed the Germanic invasions to have been the making of England in a figurative as well as a literal sense. At Cambridge there was the rather more distinguished John Mitchell Kemble (1807—57), who had studied at Göttingen under Jacob Grimm, whose friend he became. Kemble, whose History of the Saxons in England (1848) was translated into German in 1853, was an Anglo-Saxon scholar as well as a historian. At Oxford, the new continental philology embraced by Kemble was represented by the great German orientalist and philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900). Son of the poet Wilhelm Müller, he settled in Oxford in 1848 and was Professor of Modern European Languages from 1854 to 1868, when he was appointed to a specially founded Chair of Comparative Philology. A leader of the earliest school of scientific mythologists, he was best known for his monumental fifty-volume edition of Sacred Books of the East. He was a quasi-mythical figure; indeed, Henri Gaidoz, editor of Mélusine, in a once well-known satire (Mélusine, 2 (1878), 73) used the methods of comparative mythology to prove to his own satisfaction that Max Müller never existed, but was, like Oxford itself, a mythofact. What in retrospect seems so extraordinary is not just the fact that clerical backwoodsmen came up to Oxford in droves, in 1860, to block Max Müller’s appointment to the Chair of Sanskrit, but their reason for doing so: that, being a German, he was suspected of ‘Germanism’, that is, of being a rationalist. It is as though being a cleric automatically made one an ass. What had so alarmed the orthodox sheep was the report, which happened to be true, that Max Müller was a friend of Christian Karl Josias, Freiherr von Bunsen, who was in turn a protégé of Niebuhr. Given the ‘impulse which the genius of Niebuhr had given to historical criticism’,² one can only conclude that Oxford, in 1860, still had some way to go in modernizing itself. Pater was fortunate not to be tarred with the ‘Germanist’ brush in 1864.

German influence, in mid-century Oxford, was particularly strong in the humanities (aesthetics and art history, classics, history, modern languages, oriental studies, philosophy and theology), but also in sciences such as chemistry and geology. By ‘influence’ I mean the fact that German scholarship was setting new standards in these areas, exposing myths and giving subjects a modern, scientific basis. It loomed particularly large in the subjects involved in contemporary Oxford’s most renowned degree course, (Classical) Greats. Ancient history as an academic discipline had been established by Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776—1831) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759—1823), whose work decisively changed the study of Livy and Homer. The tact that, in 1860, Niebuhr’s name was anathema to many of the clerics who dominated the teaching at Oxford, and that even in 1880 one had to go to Germany to study Classical Archaeology,³ shows how conservative Oxford remained. Wolf’s work on Homer and Niebuhr’s on Livy were paralleled in contemporary German liberal theology, which was the bane of many Oxford theologians and clerics of whatever hue.

To the outside world Oxford in the 1840s means the Anglo-Catholic Oxford (or Tractarian) Movement, which from 1833 to 1845 and beyond sought to revive the Catholic theology of the Church of England. To some extent it is reminiscent of contemporary German ‘Nazarene’ art, which Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800—82) admired, and which sought to revive the Christian spirit and art forms of the late middle ages/early Renaissance. The catalyst for a rebirth of English historical painting, it also left its mark on church decoration and book illustration. The Tractarians often praised German Nazarene art, whose spirit they shared. Christina Rossetti was influenced by the Oxford Movement, her brother Dante Gabriel by the Nazarenes.

A little nineteenth-century theological controversy goes a long way in the present context, so let it simply be said that

What Tractarians and Evangelicals alike feared was an invasion by the Germans, to whom nothing was sacred. When Wolf had exploded Homer as a myth and Niebuhr had exploded Livy as a mythologist, what might not others do to the works of the Bible? What, indeeed, had they not already done? No patriotic general, foreseeing the effects of an invasion of the land by German infantry, could have been more vigilant than Pusey was against an invasion of the mind by German theology. And Pusey […] really knew German theology.⁴

At this time, one needs to remember, Oxford dons were liable to find themselves charged with heresy, as Pusey himself was (from 1843 to 1846 he was suspended from office as university preacher for heresy), and as Jowett was. In 1862 Pusey (Regius Professor of Hebrew) charged Jowett (Regius Professor of Greek), before the Vice-Chancellor’s court, with spreading heretical opinions in his teaching.

Behind this extraordinary controversy lies that dreaded phenomenon, ‘Germanism’. Pusey, who went to Germany in 1825 for ‘the critical and scientific part of Divinity’,⁵ found it altogether too critical and scientific for his liking, and returned with a profound distrust of German rationalism. Jowett, on the other hand, whose pupil Pater was, was in Germany in 1844 and was a Germanist: ‘That he had read Lessing and Schleiermacher, and had studied Hegel, could not but be known to the younger men, and less than this was enough to compromise a clerical reputation in the early fifties’ (Abbott and Campbell, Benjamin Jowett, 210). One need look no further than Jowett for the inspiration behind Pater’s study of Hegel in 1862—4. No wonder, then, that Pater, in the mid-1860s, appeared not only an ‘advanced’, but also a suspect figure to some of his clerical colleagues.

Associated with the Oxford Movement from its inception in 1833, and its leader from 1841, Pusey had studied oriental languages and biblical criticism at Göttingen, Berlin and Bonn in 1825–7, and was therefore well aware of the danger, as he saw it, posed by German rationalism in general and German liberal theology in particular both to the Church of England and to Oxford clericalism. Hugh James Rose, lecturing at Cambridge as Pusey set out for Germany, had called the attention of English churchmen to ‘the state of religious thought and speculation in Germany, and to the mischiefs likely to react on English theology from the rationalising temper and methods which had supplanted the old Lut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Germanism
• 3 Oscar Wilde and Germany: Germany and Oscar Wilde
• 4 William Meinhold and the English Novel
• 5 A Pre-Raphaelite Cult Classic
• 6 The Reception of Keats in Germany
• 7 The Pre-Raphaelite Poets and Germany
• 8 George Moore and Schopenhauer
• 9 Masked Men: Nietzsche, Pater and Wilde
• Bibliography
• Index