Coleridge and 'Faust'
Sir, – In his letter regarding the growing controversy over whether Coleridge
translated Goethe’s Faust in 1821, Paul Cheshire asks what can be known of
the German bookseller Johann Heinrich Bohte (who told Goethe that Coleridge
was translating his masterwork) that might help us establish whether he is a
“reliable” witness to the unfolding events (Letters, April 11). As Bohte’s
testimony to Goethe is crucial to the case made by the editors of Faustus
from the German of Goethe by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cheshire is right in
wanting to interrogate the bookseller’s credibility. As it happens, Bohte
was at the very heart of literary traffic between England and Germany in the
first quarter of the nineteenth century, and by 1818 his trade had eclipsed
his nearest rival, Thomas Boosey (the eventual publisher of the anonymous
translation in question here).
By 1819, Bohte’s bookshop at 4 York Street, Covent Garden, held the largest
inventory of new German titles anywhere in England and that same year his
stature was royally validated with an appointment as Foreign Bookseller to
George III. (Romanticists may recognize the shop’s address, incidentally, as
Thomas De Quincey’s lodgings in the second half of 1821, in the months
leading up to the publication, in book form, of Confessions of an English
Opium Eater.) After Bohte’s death in 1824, the esteem in which he was held
by the literary world was articulated by the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel,
who considered “the premature death of that estimable man a profound loss to
literary Germany as well as to England”. Impressively enterprising, to
support his sales and keep himself informed of new literary projects, Bohte
established a German Reading Room in London, which attracted the vociferous
admiration of the antiquarians it served. “He was intelligent and
indefatigable in his profession”, the German scholar John Hawkins once
remarked; “there is no other German bookseller here who enjoys much credit.”
The probability that Bohte would have been aware of such a major literary
development in London as Coleridge undertaking a translation of Faust –
which after all would compete for sales with his own commission of a
translation from George Soane – must be very high.
And the likelihood grows when one considers what we know of the relationship
between Bohte and Coleridge themselves during these years. The letters from
Coleridge to Bohte that survive suggest an acquaintance and affection that
went beyond that between mere proprietor and customer. Coleridge frequently
apprised Bohte of his literary engagements, invited him to events, and Bohte
relied on this rapport to keep the poet well stocked with works relevant to
his projects. Given the texture of their correspondence, it is not
unreasonable to suppose that Bohte knew of Coleridge’s project because
Coleridge told him. Indeed, everything that we know of Bohte’s eminence in
the literary world during the years in question – his “indefatigable”
integrity, and attentiveness to his clients – suggests that his testimony to
Goethe that Coleridge was hard at work on a translation of Faust should be
regarded not as gossip, but gospel.
KELLY GROVIER
Department of English, University of
Aberystwyth.
Poor Brown
Sir, – I do not think the following statement by the Prime Minister
meaningless: “Coming from Kirkcaldy as Adam Smith did, I have come to
understand that his Wealth of Nations was underpinned by his Theory of Moral
Sentiments” (NB, April 11). The two books were intended to complement each
other, being halves of a view more easily seen by those growing up in a
small, partly self-supporting commercial town whose bosses were still
members of a local commmunity. And I wish my friend J. C. would stop mocking
Brown for using the same words when talking about the same thing. Authors
and journalists are expected to say the same thing again and again in
different ways, but Brown has other things to do, and may be too thrifty to
hire a speech writer.
This is not a letter in support of poor Brown’s policies, which show total
disrespect for moral sentiments. Like his three predecessors (two of them
English) he is a servant of global armament industries, so a supporter of
interminable warfare. I suspect that the brokers and bankers running Britain
like Scots to do their dirty work when averting their eyes from it
themselves.
ALASDAIR GRAY
2 Marchmont Terrace, Glasgow.
‘Arden . . . ’
Sir, – In his interesting article on Thomas Kyd, Brian Vickers (April 11)
appears to suggest that the first scholar to propose Kyd as the author of
Arden of Faversham was Charles Crawford. In fact, the attribution had been
suggested previously by F. G. Fleay in his Biographical Chronicle of the
English Drama (1891), and Crawford acknowledged Fleay’s priority at the
beginning of his 1903 article.
Fleay’s theory was mentioned in Ronald Bayne’s 1897 edition of Arden, and this
was probably where Crawford learnt of it, since he used Bayne’s edition both
in his article and in his Concordance to Kyd (1906–10), the main object of
which was to enable others to test his conclusion that Arden was written by
Kyd.
ADAM C. GREEN
Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
Poor Stainer
Sir, – It is good to see John Stainer being rehabilitated (see Glyn Paflin’s
review of Jeremy Dibble’s biography, April 18). Asked his opinion of
Stainer’s Crucifixion, Beecham (always one for a cheap laugh) declared
himself “all in favour”. Poor Stainer has had a harsh press: discussing
Oxford’s preference for Stainer over Parry as the next Professor of Music,
your reviewer also quotes Stanford’s jibe that, in similar circumstances,
Spohr would have been preferred over Beethoven. But surely that would have
been a Good Thing? Otherwise, Spohr might have written nine (more)
symphonies – eat your heart out, Ludwig, there are ten out there already,
gathering dust somewhere – and Beethoven ended up teaching undergraduates,
or (worse) supervising musicologists’ theses.
PIERS BURTON-PAGE
1 Binden Cottages, North Lane, Buriton, Hampshire.
In defence of Elgar
Sir, – How odd that you designated the pair of ripostes to my recent comments
on Hugh Wood’s Elgarian meditations as a “defence of Elgar” (Letters, April
18), when all that they amounted to was a defence of Wood. Writing on his
own behalf, Mr Wood sees an inconsistency between my scoffing at his work
and his praise of mine, but I don’t see why we can’t both be right. He wants
to laugh off my strictures as “random, all-purpose, indiscriminate abuse”,
but anyone who takes the trouble to look will find specific correlates in
his review for all the vices I listed. Peter Williams accuses me of sour
grapes, but this comes with dubious grace from someone still licking his
wounds after a stint in the American academy.
There is a serious point to be made. Wood and Williams are irked by American
musicology because they still think of musicology as a service discipline.
For Wood it exists to enhance the reputation of composers like him. For
Williams it exists to help performers like him perform correctly. Whenever
musicology does anything that fails to serve these purposes, or whenever it
asserts an independent (even critical) perspective, they see it as an
upstart to be swatted down. Too late, I’m afraid.
RICHARD F. TARUSKIN
815 Galvin Drive, El Cerrito, California 94530.
Iron curtains
Sir, – Charles King is careful not to provide readers with any indication of
the argument of my book Iron Curtain: From stage to Cold War, preferring
instead to see it off with a display of haughty, know-it-all contempt (April
18).
Vernon Lee, who pulled the “iron curtain” from the theatre and converted it
into a political metaphor on Christmas Eve 1914, was not some witless old
dame as King implies. She was a singular and well-known liberal
internationalist who had previously campaigned with Lujo Brentano and others
to prevent escalation of the arms race between Britain and Germany. The
term, which she applied to the war that had since broken out between those
two imperial states, expressed ideas that Lee shared with other members of
the Union for Democratic Control, the leading anti-war campaign in Britain,
which had sister organizations in many countries (including the USA).
The metaphor would be applied to the Allied blockade of Bolshevik Russia by
members of the same circle in 1920 and again in 1927, by which time it had
come to refer to the barrier between opposed ideologies as well as states.
There is, as I show, a joined-up history here – and certainly not just the
banal jumble of etymological accidents alleged by King. It is described in
its detail not because I can’t tell a tree from a twig, but because the iron
curtain worked through a continuous theatricalization of perceptions and not
just as a static political generality.
To recover this earlier history is not to deny the reality of the Cold War
that followed Churchill’s famous Fulton oration of 1946. It is, however, to
insist on the longer course of one of the twentieth century’s most
influential political symbols. It is also to find grounds for wondering
about the widespread assumption that the iron curtain finally disappeared
with the Berlin Wall in 1989.
For Vernon Lee and other early twentieth-century internationalists, the iron
curtain was not so much a frontier as a “psychological deadlock”, installed
in the minds of the opposed peoples by state-driven propaganda bent on
polarizing the world into zones conceived as uniformly good or evil. We may
disagree with many aspects of this long-forgotten analysis, yet the fact of
its existence might also prompt us to ask exactly how much of the “iron
curtain” really disappeared when the frontiers opened in Europe. In a time
of embedded journalism, the “clash of civilizations” and George Bush’s
“Mission Accomplished” performance, that question, however rudely pulled
from the oubliettes of history, seems worth more than a disdainful sneer –
even from a turf-minded expert at the School of Foreign Service at
Georgetown University.
PATRICK WRIGHT
Institute for Cultural Analysis,
Nottingham Trent University,
Nottingham.
Iphigenia
Sir, – In his generous review of Queen of the Wits (April 11), Michael Caines
chides me for placing Elizabeth Chudleigh’s near-naked appearance as
Iphigenia at a private masquerade ball at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket. But
it was there, and not at Ranelagh as he avers. The point is that as the
scandalous tale circulated in poems and prints it was transposed to
Ranelagh, a public venue, thus maximizing its shock value. Claire Gervat’s
splendid Elizabeth: The scandalous life of the Duchess of Kingston has the
full story.
NORMA CLARKE
Department of English, Kingston University, Kingston
