« She admires the English, among whom she could not endure to live2 »

In her correspondences and works, which featured England and Germany, Germaine de Staël displayed complex and contradictory feelings towards the two countries that she respected, if not admired. On the one hand, she praised the English political system (though she was hazy on the differences between England and Scotland and the United Kingdom), free speech, tolerance and literary achievements3. On the other hand, she commended the German « republic of letters » and its philosophy and literature that made up for the « inconveniences » of the German fractured political landscape and provincialism : « Les Allemands ont su se créer une république des lettres animée et indépendante4 ».

Before de Staël visited Weimar in 1803, she had already developed a transnational interest in her writings where the cultural-literary and the socio-political overlapped. In À quels signes peut-on reconnaître quelle est l’opinion de la majorité de la nation ? (1791) and De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796), she explored – at slightly different yet important junctures of French politics – the relationship between government and nation, between state and the people, and the possibility of a good government to respect and negotiate the passions of the people5. Her De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800) argued for correlation between literary and cultural production of nations and their socio-political and historical contexts, that is, again, the relationship between government and cultural nation. Both interests were interlinked and referenced European political and philosophical ideas, highlighting the (European) interdependence of literature and philosophy6. Her De l’Allemagne which she compiled whilst in Weimar, was more than a tapping into existing German debates by Jacob Friedrich Bielfeld’s, Progrès des Allemands dans les sciences, les belles-lettres et les arts, particulièrement dans la poésie, l’éloquence et le théâtre (1752) or Frederick II’s De la littérature allemande ; des défauts qu’on peut lui reprocher ; quelles en sont les causes ; et par quels moyens on peut les corriger (1780). De l’Allemagne rejects the formal and, according to de Staël, conventional literary canon of Southern Europe in favour of the « Northern » (Germany, England, and Scandinavia) free and original creativity. Furthermore, and this was a clear rebuke of the centralisation efforts by Napoleon, she encourages the rise of German identity as a cultural nation (in the sense of Herder) in the face of geo-political particularism and held it up as a model for France7.

When de Staël visited Weimar in 1803-1804, she referenced English/Scottish politics, history and culture during her conversations and debates on German philosophy with the Weimar literati such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). The notorious but extremely well connected cultural broker, critic and journalist Karl August Böttiger (1760-1835) recorded these conversations with great interest. His account underscored de Staël’s self-fashioning into a pan-European dialogic cultural mediator in order to assemble a « grand historical painting8 ». That role, as Koschorke indicates, was limited by de Stael’s « self-fashioning loops » which blurred the canvas somewhat and questions, at least for de Staël, the idea of cultural mediation as a critical concept9. In the case of de Staël, the juxtaposition and comparison between Germany and England (and always France) was not mediation as conceptualised by Adam Müller, nor the « aesthetic cosmopolitanism » of Jean Paul but a personal, subjective cultural mediation, based on cultural reception, that is, predominately conversation, then reading and translating10. In Weimar, that reception was shepherded by Karl August Böttiger who appreciated de Staël’s provocative debates in his memoirs as they fed into Böttiger’s own critical view on the cultural dominance of Goethe and Schiller11.

De Staël visited England and Germany on several occasions during her lifetime. She travelled to England three times ; firstly, in 1776 as a child, and then in 1793, when she followed Louis Marie Jacques Amalric, comte de Narbonne-Lara (1755-1813) into exile. Their stay at Juniper Hall near Mickleham, in Surrey, was well documented by Frances Burney (1752-1840) who initially welcomed de Staël enthusiastically but then proceeded to have an unconformable friendship with her12. Nevertheless, de Staël graciously summed up her experiences :

Le respect, l’enthousiasme, dont mon âme est remplie en contemplant l’ensemble des vertus morales et politiques qui constituent l’Angleterre ; – l’admiration d’un tel spectacle, le repos céleste qu’il me fesoit goûter ; ces sentiments, si doux et si nécessaires après la tourmente de trois ans de révolution, s’unissent dans mon souvenir au délicieux séjour, aux respectables amis, près desquels je les ai éprouvés13.

The essence of her praise addressed the English moral and political virtues, love of liberty and reason, enhanced and protected by Enlightened (Northern) Protestantism – a trope that reoccurs in her later evaluation of England and echoes some points in Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques or Lettres anglaises (1734).

The third sojourn in England was between 1813 and 1814 where de Staël mixed in much more prominent society at Holland House with guests such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), Lord Byron (1788-1824), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-1843) and James Mackintosh (1765-1832). Whilst she recounted her travels across Europe in her Dix années d’exil (posth. 1818), her travels to England in June 1813 and her visit there until May 1814 are missing from this account, though documented by her contemporaries14. Thus Gunnell concludes, « [l]’histoire de l’année qu’elle passa en Angleterre est l’histoire de ses conversations15 ». These conversations were to be the basis for a complementary study to De l’Allemagne on the literature and philosophy of England which she already, if briefly, referenced in writing in Réflexions sur la paix adressées à M. Pitt et aux Français (1795) and in De la littérature. Jasinski suggests that it was in the end her Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française (1818) which fulfilled this role16. When de Staël left England, this time perhaps without regrets, she expressed her admiration again : « J’admire ce pays : à quelques égards je m’y plais ; mais il faut en être pour le préférer à tous les autres. Nos habitudes continentales valent moins, mais nous conviennent mieux17. »

When going to Germany in 1803, de Staël in fact went to what was a conglomerate of many small territories enclosed in the Holy Roman Empire – this political landscape of the German nation changed considerably between her first visit in 1789 and her last in 1812 on her way to London. At the time, Weimar was reigned by Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar and of Saxe-Eisenach (1757-1828) who continued the work of his mother, Anna Amalia (1739-1807) to keep Weimar as the centre for classical culture. De Staël chose Weimar to extend her enforced exile in Germany and to visit the « capitale littéraire » of Germany18. In a letter to her father, Jacques Necker, she wrote :

Il faut que je donne un prétexte à mon expédition d’Allemagne, et les hommes de lettres de Weimar en sont un suffisant. Enfin, je me déciderai là. À chaque station j’espère toujours qu’elle sera la dernière¹⁹.

De Staël had clearly been aware of the cultural significance of the small town : « On appelait Weimar l’Athènes de l’Allemagne, et c’était en effet le seul lieu dans lequel l’intérêt des beaux-arts fût pour ainsi dire national, et servît de lien fraternel entre les rangs divers20. » Weimar was in turn, also aware of de Staël through her occasional writings such as Essai sur les fictions (1795), translated by Goethe in the same year, and De l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations (1796) which was translated into German in 179721. Her novel Delphine (1802) was banned in Saxony and, as it is always the case with censorship, attracted even more attention from the Weimar intellectuals. Thus, de Staël arrived in Weimar as a prominent figure.

Her visit was documented amongst others, in the correspondences of Schiller, Goethe, Duke Carl August of Weimar and the Englishman Henry Crabb Robinson – each oscillating between admiration, respect and, at times, annoyance for the illustrious visitor. The other, more infamous, chronicler of her visit, Karl August Böttiger22, and the focus of my study, came to Weimar in 1791 as Director of the Wilhelm-Ernst-Gymnasium, where prominent philosophers and scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), Johann Heinrich Voß (1751-1826), Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer (1774-1845) and Johann Karl August Musäus (1735-1787) taught. Through this social network, he became very quickly part of the Weimar literary circle, started to publish philological and archaeological writings and edited the periodicals Journal des Luxus und der Moden (until 1803), London und Paris (until 1805), and Wieland’s Neuen Teutschen Merkur23 (1790-1810). Böttiger’s notorious journalistic impressions of Weimar were published in the posthumous and satirical Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen in Schilderungen aus Karl Aug. Böttiger’s handschriftlichem Nachlasse (1838) where he did not hold back from gossip and irreverence. Sangmeister suggests that he published about 10000 small articles in German and other periodicals reviewing literature and theatre performances ; in short, commenting on the Classical German scene24. His contemporary Garlieb Merkel concluded that Böttiger acted as one of the most important cultural broker at the time who brought « eine grössere Masse von Kenntnissen und Gedanken in Umlauf gebracht, als vielleicht irgend ein anderer Deutscher Schriftsteller25 ». Initially, Böttiger wanted to publish his reminiscences of his time in Weimar between the years 1791 and 1804 as Reliquien oder Weimarische Nächte but the publisher Friedrich Perthes in Gotha declined given that such publication would « Mehrere geradezu beleidigen26 ». His son Carl Wilhelm, in the end, published a two-volume edition in 1838, Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen in Schilderungen aus Karl Aug. Böttiger’s handschriftlichem Nachlasse, which did nothing else but confirm Böttiger as an irreverent « Alleweltsschwätzer und Sicophant27 ».

When de Staël arrived in Weimar, Böttiger had, like the others, already been familiar with her work, particularly as he reviewed the German translation of De l’influence des passions in the Neuen Teutschen Merkur in 1796. Debating German philosophy by Kant, Schelling and Fichte, and enjoying the debates with Goethe and Böttiger, de Staël collected impressions, understanding and insight28. In these conversations, England, France and Germany served as playful juxtapositions and contrasts particularly as one crucial mediator was Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867). The exchanges illuminate de Staël’s intellectual journey during the few months in Weimar when she was collecting notes for her manuscript of De l’Allemagne and show her fashioning herself as cultural mediator not only between France and Germany but also between England and Germany. However, Böttiger’s journals also confirm that de Staël’s cultural mediation was personal and subjective, restricted by a priori conceptions and over-reliant on conversation and second-hand mediation as primary source : « Elle ferma donc les yeux et ouvrit la bouche et les oreilles29 ».

On 13 December 1803, Charlotte Serviere (1773-1862), the daughter of a perfumer and wine merchant in Frankfurt, wrote to her acquaintance Henry Crabb Robinson to announce the arrival of de Staël in Weimar :

Sie werden sehr leicht ihre Bekanntschaft machen können, denn sie liebt die Gesellschaft der Männer und hauptsächlich Ihre Nation. Sie spricht sehr gut englisch. Sie ist nach Weimar gegangen um über die deutsche Philosophie zu schreiben (von der sie wahrscheinlich wenig weiß) und über ihren Einfluß auf die deutsche Nation. Suchen Sie etwas von dem Eindrucke zu erfahren, den sie in W. macht und der Rolle die sie da spielt und schreiben Sie mir es getreulich wieder30.

According to Böttiger, Mme de Staël was not much enamoured with Frankfurt. She stayed for three weeks during which her daughter Albertine fell ill. She was not fond of the salonnière Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807) but appreciated the company of the host Sophie Elisabeth von Schwarzkopf (1774-1806) who during de Staël visit also welcomed « zwei Engländer Busby und Osborn31 » whose conversation she particularly enjoyed.

Böttiger met de Staël first possibly in January 1804 and was pleasantly surprised by her : « Hat man sich nur erst eine halbe Stunde ihr gegenüber oder neben ihr auf dem Sopha befunden ; so ist man von ihrem Geiste unwiderstehlich ergriffen32 […] ». De Staël spoke no German so Böttiger introduced her to young Robinson who had come to Germany in 1800, and who had been a student at the University of Jena since 1801 – Serviere was pleased33. On 14 January 1804, Böttiger wrote to Robinson :

Die Frau von Staël, von deren Lippen Geist und Honigrede strömt wünscht Ihre Bekanntschaft, mein teuerster Herr und Freund ! Sie sehnt sich nach einer philosophischen Unterredung mit Ihnen und beschäftigt sich jetzt mit den Cahiers über Schellings Aesthetik, die ich, dank Ihrer Güte, besitze. Sie hat sogar einiges davon mit bewundernswürdiger Kunst ins Französische übersetzt34.

De Staël appreciated the lecture notes and set out to translate them immediately with Benjamin Constant who had joined de Staël at that point. Meanwhile, Robinson contacted de Staël directly, and offered her three of his Goethe translations for her perusal :

If you wonder at my assurance, Madam, you will also admire my zeal, which at the risk of exposing myself, leads me to present you with a few poetical translations from the great poet of whom I might say as Ben Johnson said of Shakespeare, I honour him on this side Idolatry. I should not have dared to do this had I not remarked your partiality for the English language. This circumstance alone can render my copies tolerable, for though you may not be versed enough in the German to feel all the inimitable beauties of the original, you are too acute a critic in the English, not to perceive the deformities of my Imitations35.

On 26^th of January, Böttiger invited Robinson to de Staël for further enlightenment into German idealism : « Hofft Frau von Staël vergebenst auf einige Ansichten der Schellingschen Naturphilosophie durch Ihr erleuchtendes Medium36 ? »

In a letter to his brother, Robinson understood de Staël’s self-fashioning quickly :

I was invited to her in order to be interrogated on the new philosophy, and saw clearly enough that I was used. I did not suffer myself to be deceived by her compliments or discontented by her railleries but had the pure pleasure of seeing thro’ & understanding the comedy she was playing. […] Mad. de Stahl [sic] is one of those persons who with a most acute understanding and elegant wit has nothing else. She has not the least sense for poetry and is absolutely incapable of thinking a philosophical thought. Her philosophy is only a mass of observations connected together by a loose logic and poetry is for her [...] only rhetoric in verses ; she cannot preserve anything in poetry more than fine passages37 !!

Higgonet had shown in detail how Robinson’s exposition of Schlegel has shaped de Staël’s understanding of Schlegel, particularly, which lecture notes she found useful for her own project so much so that « she reworked them for her own purposes, condensing, reorganising, translating, and evaluating38 ». De Staël was enthusiastic to have found such a willing and generous mediator and praised him in front of Karl August : « J’ai voulu connaître la philosophie allemande ; j’ai frappé à la porte de tout le monde ; Robinson seul me l’a ouverte39. » Böttiger saw this slightly differently. In a note, he remarked that « Robinson steckte im Wasser, während sie in der Luft schwebte. Keines konnte in das Element des andern gelangen. […] Ich verschaffte ihr Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling. von Frieß40 ».

This difference, according to Böttiger, decreased during the course of the visit with intense debates between de Staël, Robinson, but also Wieland, Goethe, Anna Amalia and Carl August. De Staël grew so confident in her understanding of Schelling that on 20^th February, she lectured the Duke on Schelling’s aesthetics41. On this occasion, the Duke and de Staël were guests at the Jägerhaus of the dilettanti art collector and merchant Charles Gore (1729-1807) who had been a fixture at the Court of Weimar since 1791. On 24^th and 25^th of February 1804, Böttiger reports that de Staël brought up the virtues of the English at the table and caused « 3 bis 4 mal bei der Herzogin ventilirten Streit42 ». This was, according to Böttiger, de Staël’s flaw :

Sie liebt die Klugheit u. Aufklärung auf Unkosten aller übrigen Völker. Nur in Norddeutschland sei eine ähnliche Masse von Aufklärung u. doch auch nur in den obern Ständen. In England sei jeder Karrenschieber und Coal-heaver so aufgeklärt43 […].

Everyone including Constant and Böttiger were outraged :

Der Herzog widerlegte sie politisch, Constant moralisch, Wieland sagte, alles was die Engländer gutes hätten, komm aus ihrer Constitution, die uns so sehr fehlt, ich machte den Mangel großer Dichter u. Schriftsteller und das isolirte, einseitige, mit Vorurtheilen angefüllte des Volks geltend44.

On other occasions, Böttiger reports conversations that filtered into de Staël’s De l’Allemagne ; the advantages and disadvantages of the German, French and English language. For instance, on 25^th of January, de Staël talked about her struggles with learning German, particularly because the prose style « sei unbegreiflich schwer durch die Einschachtelungen und Einschiebungen so vieler Zwischensätze45 ». Later, she marvelled that German was indeed related to English given its clumsiness in expression46. Nevertheless, de Staël pronounced that she wanted to translate everything « was in deutscher Prosa gesprochen und geschrieben werde, ohne Verluste zu übersetzen47 », but to stay away, as Robinson suggested from the start, from poetry. Wieland, Böttiger accounts, interjected at that point with a witty reference to Klopstock who had analysed the differences between the European languages in his fragment essay, Grammatische Gespräche (1794) where he attempted to show that German is the most precise and pure language48. We have no reported comment on the part of de Staël on that occasion.

De Staël toyed with national stereotypes. Juxtaposing the « plaisanterie » of the French with German « pédanterie » of language, she concluded : « [c]’est la manie des Allemands de tout dire49 ». Her brief chapter on Weimar in De l’Allemagne underscores the apparently typical German sincerity that was to be found also in literature :

Herder venait de mourir quand je suis arrivée à Weimar ; mais Wieland, Goethe et Schiller y étaient encore. Je peindrai chacun de ces hommes séparément dans la section suivante ; je les peindrai surtout par leurs ouvrages, car leurs livres ressemblent parfaitement à leur caractère et à leur entretien. Cet accord très rare est une preuve de sincérité : quand on a pour premier but en écrivant de faire effet sur les autres, on ne se montre jamais à eux tel qu’on est réellement ; mais quand on écrit pour satisfaire à l’inspiration intérieure dont l’âme est saisie, on fait connaître par ses écrits, même sans le vouloir, jusqu’aux moindres nuances de sa manière d’être et de penser⁵⁰.

This earnestness, according to de Staël, was authentic and reflected in the conversations and sociability she encountered in Weimar. Ultimately, she did not truly warm to the German disposition and declared the English way of being as the desired middle ground : « L’esprit anglais tient le milieu entre l’esprit allemand et l’esprit français, c’est un moyen de communication entre les deux. Je vous [Robinson] comprends mieux qu’aucun Allemand51 ».

Böttiger’s account of de Staël’s visit to Weimar is illuminating, not only in the detailed description of de Staël’s encounter with the famous Weimar elite but in the recording of her conversations with her German hosts and English visitors to Weimar. His account of her visit underscores de Staël’s partiality for the English conversation and language, the « British directness » which juxtaposed the French « plaisanterie » and the German « pédanterie52 ». Thus, Böttiger reports a conversation with an unnamed visitor about Edward Gibbon’s work where de Staël suddenly switched from English to French to gossip about her mother’s brief engagement to Gibbons53. On another occasion, it was the Englishman who was the only honest one : one evening, when de Staël’s read a translation of Goethe’s Die Braut von Korinth (1797), she missed a crucial point which only Robinson dared to point out to her and de Staël exclaimed : « You have all praised me. Robinson alone corrected me ; thank you Robinson54 ». It was this assumed « British directness » which de Staël tried to cultivate in herself.

In his Literarische Zustände und Zeitgenossen in Schilderungen aus Karl Aug. Böttiger’s handschriftlichem Nachlasse, Böttiger accentuated Mme de Staël’s role as provocative, direct, yet often uninformed and biased cultural mediator – a role which he assumed himself, seeking to rattle the predominance of Goethe and Schiller in Weimar. Mme de Staël’s cultural ambivalences, misinformation and stereotypes served him well in his own journalistic endeavours55.