The German Genius

wrote a number of essays on German authors—Herder and Lessing in particular—between 1790 and 1820. In Britain, as it turned out, more influential than Madame de Staël’s book were John Black’s translations of Schlegel’s writings on dramatic art and literature, in which he adapted Kant and Schiller’s aesthetics to a critique of Shakespeare. Both Wordsworth and William Hazlitt found Schlegel’s “Shakespearean insights” instructive. Blackwood’s Magazine , begun in 1817, contained a regular section, “Horae Germanicae” from 1819 on, “in which new German works were the subject of knowledgeable attention.”
    None of the above names, however, had anything like the impact of four writers who between them did succeed in making the contemporary developments in Germany much more widely known across the Channel and, to some extent, in America: Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, George Henry Lewes, and George Eliot. 8
    It is not too much to say, Rosemary Ashton tells us in her study of the impact of German thought on nineteenth-century Britain, that it was Coleridge alone who, in the period between 1800 and 1820, induced his fellow Victorians—people like Eliot, Lewes, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Arnold, Richard Holt Hutton, and the philosopher James Hutchison Stirling—to come to terms with the new German developments and ideas. Though France, particularly the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, had a profound impact on political notions in Victorian Britain, it was Germany—its philosophy, history, and aesthetics—which, she says, had the most enduring effects on English thinking.
    Overall, Coleridge’s English contemporaries were puzzled by this seeming obsession with Germany and teased him about it, but later generations took a very different view. In 1866, Walter Pater praised Coleridge for helping to identify the philosophical and literary movement in Germany as an “irresistible…metaphysical synthesis.” 9
    Attracted particularly by Schiller’s Die Räuber , Coleridge took up German and in 1798 crossed the Channel for a visit to Germany, where he discovered Kant. He confided to Crabb Robinson in 1812 that there was “more to Kant than any other philosopher.” He was taken particularly with Kant’s third critique, which considered aesthetics as a science. This led Coleridge to the ideas of the Romantics, especially the Schlegels and Schelling. Coleridge’s chief impact, therefore, was on the reception of German philosophy, rather than literature, in Britain. 10
    Carlyle had much more influence regarding German literature. Known everywhere, not always flatteringly, as the Vox Germanica of London, Carlyle exhibited a Germanic thoroughness and a Germanic interest in history: he spent fourteen years writing a biography of Friedrich the Great. (Hitler had the German translation read to him during his last days in the bunker.) To begin with, like Coleridge, he was drawn to German philosophy as a counter to British skepticism and materialism, and it was his enthusiastic endorsement of Kant and Fichte in a series of articles he published in the Edinburgh Review that excited his generation. These essays were soon republished in American magazines, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others absorbed the new “German philosophy,” which took root in New England as Transcendentalism. 11
    Carlyle’s role can be identified much more directly because so many people spoke or wrote about the effect on them of his “very German” novel, Sartor Resartus (1833–34). “Hardly a young person survived the 1830s without being struck by Sartor and by it inspired to read—even if only in Carlyle’s English translation— Wilhelm Meister .” Carlyle was tireless in his attempt to convince his readers of the value of reading German literature, especially Goethe, and was successful to the extent that he could write in 1838 that “readers of German have increased a hundredfold.” Thanks to him, G. H. Lewes took up German and traveled to Germany in 1838, aware that an understanding of German literature was virtually obligatory for a budding author and critic. Once in Germany he discovered a systematic aesthetic in Hegel. Lewes returned to Britain full of the philosopher, but he also drew attention to Goethe’s inquiries into botany and optics, which had gone unnoticed in Britain until then. (Lewes wrote the first complete Life of Goethe in any language.) 12
    Lewes traveled to Germany more