Goethe, Schleiermacher, Milton

"And when Friedrich [Schlegel] lent him his presentation copy of Schleiermacher's Discourses he read the first two or three with eager admiration of their breadth of culture, but 'the more negligent the style became, and the more Christian the religion, the more this effect changed into its opposite, and finally the whole thing ended in wholesome and cheerful antipathy'. During the summer [1799] he had read Milton's Paradise Lost in the Weimar Park, perhaps seeking guidance for his own attempt in Faust to turn Christian theology to poetic effect, but, though he conceived a considerable respect for Milton, the subject of his epic, for all its advantages of an easy appeal to the faithful, remained in his view 'worm-eaten and hollow within'....If Milton could not help him, Schleiermacher certainly could not either."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 643.

moonshine on the Ilm, 1799

"For a week the author of 'To the Moon' rose in the middle of the night and from the silent meadows of the Ilm observed that 'so significant object' through a seven-foot telescope made by a local craftsman. 'There was a time when people wanted the emotion of the moon, now they want the sight of it', he later said to Schiller, who acutely remarked on the uncanny tangibility in the telescope of an image that otherwise seemed purely and unapproachably visual. The mystery of Nature only receded, however, it did not vanish."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 641.

Goethe felt "wakened from a dream"

"But this belief in the journal [Propylaea] as the organ of men of taste throughout the German-speaking world was deeply shaken by the news which Cotta sent Goethe at the end of June [1799]: sales in the first year were no more than 450 an issue, barely enough to cover Goethe's fee, and Cotta had so far lost nearly 2,000 dollars on the venture. Goethe, desperately disappointed, felt 'wakened from a dream'."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 634.

distraction in Frankfurt am Main, 1797

Frankfurt am Main, 9 August 1797
Goethe to Schiller
 "...the public in a great city*...lives in a constant whirl of getting and spending, and what we call mood ["Stimmung"] can be neither produced not communicated. All entertainments, even the theatre, are there only to provide distraction and the great inclination of the reading public for magazines and novels arises because the former always, and the latter usually furnish a distraction from distraction.... I even think I have noticed a kind of distaste for poetical productions, at least in so far as they are poetical, which on these grounds seems quite natural. Poetry requires, indeed commands concentration, it isolates a person against their will...".

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 543.

* Frankfurt in 1800 had ca. 35,000 inhabitants.
   

Goethe and societal leaders

"Niemand als wer sich ganz verläugnet ist werth zu herrschen, und kan herrschen."
(13 May 1780, Tagebücher)

-- War in Goethe's Writings, Edward T. Larkin, 1992, p. 18.

couch potatoes in late 1700s German-speaking Europe

"Die Mensch is über das Dasein der Pflanze hinausgeschritten und sind nur 'niedrige Menschen, die gern in den Zustand der Pflanze zurückkehren möchten. Sie haben natürlich auch das Schicksal der Pflanzen; alle edlern Triebe, die Muskeln-, Empfindungs-, Geistes- und Willenskraft ermattet; sie leben ein Pflanzenleben und sterben frühzeitigen Pflanzentodes'."

-- citation from Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 1784-91 (4 Teile), in Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 36.
 

the 'Bildung' of a Butterfly

"Das Ideal dieses Bildungsgedankens ist die Koexistenz einer möglichst grossen Anzahl in ihrer eigentümlichen Totalität gebildeter Menschen. Das ist der Zweck menschlichen Lebens. Es ist kein vergeblicher, denn die einmal gebildete Gestalt geht nicht verloren, auch nicht im Tode. Die Grundkraft, aus der die ganze Bildung entspringt, ist eine unsterbliche, sie setzt daher ihr Werk in alle Unendlichkeit fort. Das Dasein nach dem Tode ist eine Fortsetzung des in der Welt begonnenen Lebens, im Grunde ist es ein höherer Ebene stattfindendes Leben der Bildung. Gleichnis dafür ist da Leben der Raupe, die sich in todähnlichen Schlaf einspinnt, und in schönerer Form als Schmetterling erwacht."

-- Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 28-29.

the deepest historical transition?

"Die menschliche Bildung erscheint nun nicht mehr als eine durch die Gnadenwirkung Gottes von oben bewirkte Umgestaltung der Seele in Ebenbildlichkeit mit Gott, sondern als eine Gestaltwerdung der Menschlichen Kraft von innen heraus."

-- Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert, 1934, Ernst Ludwig Stahl, p. 9.
    

the real Goethe?

"In social terms, we could say he was confident there was in him an independent Goethe living like his father on his independent capital, but this bourgeois self was not identifiable with any of its manifestations as courtier and salaried official of an absolute ruler -- or as spokesman of the sentimental and highly philosophical culture which took place, among the subervient German middle classes, of the realistic, novel-centered literature then growing in shopkeeping England."

-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 310.