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330 Book Reviews literature became as it were interchangeable (169L), although Goethe's private artistic standards were actually more liberal than many stressed in Die Propyläen. In demonstrating how greatly Goethe's classical aesthetic was indebted to late Enlightenment ideas, Van SeIm confirms that Goethe was — as, become a classicist, he insisted everyone without exception is — a collective being. Collective beings can, however, be highly individuated also, and the perceptive reader will notice that even at his most conventional Goethe never takes positions identical with those held by others and so will be able to reconcile the general validity of Van Selm's conclusions with his interest, both before and after Die Propyläen, in coior and in pictures primarily "painterly" (not linear) in character. Van Selm's bibliography lacks, I believe, only two titles that might have been important for her topic: R. Michea'sXe Voyage enltalie de Goethe (1945) and Heinrich Meyer's Geschichte der Kunst (1974). Her argument might have been strengthened by adducing Goethe's numismatic studies, for which line drawings were always important, but perhaps only with some loss of expositional clarity. A few textual misreadings besides those already noted are more irritating than significant: e.g., the Schleiermacher of p. 19f. should not be called "den Philosophen," since Merck's addressee was the Darmstadt art collector (for whom the "Doubletten" of Svanefelt are surely duplicate printings, not "Zeichnungen, die er [i.e., Merck] nach Werken Svanefelds [sic] angefertigt hatte"). Misprints are few and, like "Kotzbue," p. 42, cause no difficulty; an exception for the non-Latinist would be satutarem, p. 55, where salutarem is required. Only one of the dozens of quotations I checked for any reason whatever was inaccurate: a "wurde," p. 110, 1. 4, is not in Goethe's Italian diary, given as source. University of California, Santa Barbara Stuart Atkins Burwick, Frederick, The Damnation of Newton: Goethe's Color Theory and Romantic Perception. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986. Burwick, Frederick, The Haunted Eye: Perception and the Grotesque in English and German Romanticism. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1987 (Reihe Siegen, 70). These two studies seem to have emerged from the same ferment of ideas, and they complement each other nicely. The first is concerned with Goethe in its first three chapters, the second study refers to him oniy in passing, taking his 'Von Arabesken" (1789) as a foil for Fiorillo's pathbreaking Ueber die Groteske (1791), so the first will claim most of our attention here. But when one reads the two studies together, it becomes apparent that Goethe is important to Burwick's own way of looking and seeing things and that his presence in the second study is greater than overt references alone would suggest. Goethe Yearbook 331 Chapter one, "Goethe's Farbenlehre: The Newtonian Controversy," is the only one that supports the book's title, and even then, not fully. Already in the Preface Burwick paraphrases Achim von Arnim's review of Dichtung und Wahrheit to the effect that "der heftige Streit gegen Newton" had been prompted iargely by Goethe's inability to understand the methods of physical optics, owing in turn largely to his prejudice against mathematics. Burwick does not try to redeem or justify Goethe's opposition to Newton, but rather explains it as a misunderstanding. Goethe was concerned with something different from Newton's object in the physicai optics, and, although it took him a long time, he seems eventually to have realized this himself. Trying to reproduce Newton's crucial prism experiment, Goethe stumbled on an entirely new one. Instead of using a darkened room with only a pinhole to admit light which then immediately passed through the prism to be projected onto the opposite wall, 'broken down' into the spectrum of colors, Goethe held the prism before his eye in a room illuminated by an open window and looked for the spectrum (in vain) on the wall opposite him. When he recollected his 1791 experiment in the 1810 "Confession des Verfassers" Goethe "was fully conscious of how radically his method differed from Newton's," Burwick believes, even if he had not been originally. What matters is that he realized he had seen a phenomenon...

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