Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary (review)

292 Book Reviews cultural exchange within Europe and beyond; in terms of the methodology adopted by the participants, however, it was business as usual. University of California, San Diego Todd Kontje Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie, eds., Goethe and the English-Speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. 285 pp. In his introduction to this wide-ranging collection, Nicholas Boyle sounds a note of discomfort—or "unease," as he caUs it—in the "special relationship" (1) between Goethe and the EngUsh-speaking people. The ambiguities that mark the poet's attitude to Byron, Shakespeare and others are presented Ui terms of a kind of oscillation between "attraction" and "distance" (1); and the English response to Goethe is found to be sftnUarly double-edged. Boyle accounts for this with reference to some of the historical reasons afteady elaborated in his introduction to an earUer volume (cf. 17 η. 18): the negative association of Goethe, Ui the EngUsh mind, with the German era of "revolutionary historical change" as weU as its reUgious twin, the "Age of Doubt" (14); and the German "misappropriation " of the poet "into the role of preceptor of a nation which he never imagined " (15). It is Boyle's hope that the essays Ui the current volume wUl reveal Goethe in his true role, as writing for a world-literary reading pubUc in an ostensibly more receptive, "post-imperial" age (16). The book is then divided into two parts: the first, comprising eight essays, focuses on some of the EngUsh-speaking influences on Goethe's poetic output. In a number of cases, the ambivalent note struck by Boyle is maintained. Peter Michelsen, for example, considers anew the function of Shakespeare for Wilhelm Meister's spiritual development Ui the Lehrjahre, persuasively undermining the common critical consensus that the concern with the theatre Ui the novel was intended to betray "a long series of errors" (22). H. B. Nisbet tussles with the poet's two-pronged attack on the scientific as weU as personal ethics of Newton. With reference to the "extraordinary tergiversations" (41) that characterize the section on "Newtons PersönUchkeit" in the Geschichte der Farbenlehre , Nisbet exposes Goethe's "uneasy conscience" (40), the sense that his distaste for the scientist's disciplinary ethics had taken him too far in his condemnation of Newton the man. Howard GaskUl has words of condemnation as weU for the critical endeavour to "minimise" (49) the influence of Macpherson's Ossian on Goethe. According to GaskiU, Goethe's active acquaintance with Ossian spanned almost a decade; and the impression left by "[s]uch protracted contact" (52) was surely profound. This claim is Ulustrated Ui several ways. Noting , for example, the inspiration that Goethe found Ui Macpherson's EngUsh—as distinct from the German translation of Ossian—GaskiU rediscovers certain of the Scot's neologisms in a variety of Goethean texts. GaskiU's own enthusiasm for Macpherson's text seems tempered, however, by the view that "not to treat Ossian as something of a joke" would be "misguided" (47). His final quotation from Werther's letter of 12 October, which finds "den . . . grauen Barden, der . . . nach dem heben Sterne des Abends hinblickt. . . und nach der kalten Erde . . . niedersieht" [GaskUl's itaUcs], suggests that Goethe himself may have shared this view: Ossian, as GaskUl reminds us, was blind. Roger Stephenson presents the case for "Weimar Classicism's Debt to the Scottish Enlightenment" (61). This consists first and foremost Ui the role played by common sense Ui the classical works of Goethe and SchiUer. The distinction, especiaUy as argued by Thomas Reid, between "common sense as a faculty and Goethe Yearbook 293 common sense as a set of fundamental regulative principles" (61), together with Reid's counter to Humean scepticism concerning the contribution of both perception and sensation to the acquisition of knowledge, is seen as foundational to the "formulation of a [German] classical aesthetic" (62). Matthew BeU, by contrast, detects the positive impact of Hume (and others), Ui the role played by the hero's " [ϕ ] endular [a] theism" (71) in Faust I. BeU beUeves the osculation between despair and hopeful expectation in die opening scenes of the drama...