The German Genius

herself of the criticism that, despite its eminence, Weimar was provincial, that neither Wieland, nor Schiller, nor Goethe ever read a newspaper.
    Nonetheless, Weimar grew on her and, as her German improved, her reading widened. “Goethe, Schiller and Wieland have more ingenuity, more depth in literature and philosophy than anyone I have ever met,” she wrote to her cousin. “Their conversation is all ideas…Schiller and Goethe are attempting all kinds of innovations in the theatre.” 3
    Compared with Weimar, Berlin was a disappointment. She was admitted to the court and introduced to all the aristocracy, but she did not feel settled there, perceiving that it was neither suited to her literary interests nor given over to social life, in which it was far inferior to Paris. Only after several weeks did she meet someone who, as she told her father in a letter, “had more knowledge of literature than almost anyone she had ever met.” August Wilhelm Schlegel “spoke French like a Frenchman and English like an Englishman and while he was only thirty-six, he had read everything in the world.” 4 Among the others she met was Fichte, to whom she boldly declared that his philosophy was “beyond her” and challenged him to explain it to her “in a quarter of an hour.” Fichte gallantly made the attempt, but she interrupted him after just ten minutes, conceding that she did now grasp what he was driving at—and illustrated her new understanding with an analogy, a travel story in which someone achieved an improbable feat through the exercise of the will. Fichte was furious at what he saw as a trivialization of his self-important views.
    De l’Allemagne had a difficult birth. In an attempt to rehabilitate herself with Napoleon, de Staël sent him a proof. Reading it, the emperor chose to believe that it was “anti-French” and instructed General Savary, the new minister of police, to seize the book and expel its author. Ten thousand copies were pulped, though one was smuggled to Vienna, enabling it to be published eventually in 1813, when it won widespread acclaim.
    De l’Allemagne , like Corinne and de Staël’s other books, subverted all that Napoleon stood for. Besides the book’s detailed discussion of German poetry, prose, and drama, and Kantian and other philosophies, the central concern was with freedom—inner freedom as well as political freedom. It showed that people who were subjugated politically could not be subjugated intellectually and implied that Kant was the starting point of resistance to oppressors. It was in this book that Madame de Staël coined the word “Romanticism” to describe the new form of poetry she found in Germany: a poetry that celebrated the individual human spirit. 5 Her discovery and her translations of the German “greats” had an immediate impact on her French and other European contemporaries (such as the British), who until then were largely ignorant of German culture. The French at that time dismissed German culture as vulgar, but she argued instead that, even if that were true, original thinking (which is what the Germans had) counted for more than good taste. Her hope was that De l’Allemagne would serve to rekindle French literature, which was in her view moribund under Napoleon’s censorship.
    She was not blind to Germany’s faults, finding there a general uncongenial atmosphere of “stoves, beer and tobacco,” and the aristocracy dull. She was aware that people in general were xenophobic, that there was “more imagination than wit” and a surprising contrast between their intellectual daring and submissiveness to authority. 6
    “H ORAE G ERMANICAE”
     
    One of the fellow travelers that Madame de Staël met in Germany was the Englishman Henry Crabb Robinson. Trained as a lawyer but also a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Crabb Robinson belonged to the Norwich circle of “intellectuals and dissenters” that included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey among its fellow members. He traveled to Germany in 1802–03 to study philosophy, Kant in particular, and sent back articles on German subjects to the Monthly Register . 7 But Crabb Robinson was by no means the only Briton to start taking an interest in Germany. William Taylor of Norwich, also a member of the circle around Southey and Wordsworth, described himself as the “first Anglo-Germanist.” He became known for his translation of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and