The Lemon Groves
Italian Journey, 1786-1788. By Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Translated by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. (Collins. 6 gns.) 'ONLY in Rome can one educate oneself for Rome.' Goethe went to Italy because he had to; he was driven. 'Now at last,' he wrote from the Veneto, 'I can confess to a secret malady. . . . For many years I did not dare look into a Latin author or at anything which evoked the image of Italy. If this happened by chance, I suffered agonies. . . My passionate desire to see these objects with my own eyes had grown to such a point that, if I had not taken the decision I am now acting upon, I should have gone to pieces.' The decision was Goethe's bolt from Weimar at the age of thirty-seven-1 slipped out of Carlsbad at three in the morn- ing. . .' His goal was Rome. 'Drawn by an irresistible need, I made up my mind to under- take this long, solitary journey to the hub of the world.' To those of us who also have felt the exercise of that potent name, that perhaps greatest of all spells, the first part of Italian Journey, the headlong flight across the Brenner Pass, the need, the passion, the waiting and straining for Italy, the Mediterranean, 'Classic soil,' the portrait of an artist and a man at the threshold of a stupendous experience, must be forever stirring and alive, a distillation of travel and great longings. Even to himself, Goethe hardly dared admit where he was going; he slept in his clothes, changed horses after midnight, hurried out of Florence after three hours; and all the way, it was not till he had passed the Porta del Popolo that he was certain it was true, that he was in Rome.
No praise can be too high for W. H. Auden's and Elizabeth Mayer's translation, editing and presentation. Eighteenth-century German is not the raciest of idioms; the strong, swift English prose not only reads admirably, but seems ad- mirably suited to Goethe, and with this new version—the spirit of the original with much that was flat, repetitious or portentous now sloughed off—the essentially modern book has at last been made accessible to the modern reader. (Not en- tirely accessible yet, for there remains the price and bulk and weight. This six-guinea edition is a charming thing to have, or give; it is beauti- fully printed and the sixty-odd illustrations, some forty of them colour plates, are delicious pieces of Italiana. But Italian Journey is very much a book to carry, handle, scribble in, so one hopes that there will be soon a slim and cheap edition.) Goethe himself would have been pleased to have the illustrations; all through the journey he was tormented by the knowledge that he could not take it with him. In his youth in Frankfurt he had never seen a single piece of sculpture and for the good reason that there was none to see. In Italy in 1786, no one carried a camera, there were no postcards. Goethe did what he could, he bought prints and casts, he went to a drawing-class, he sketched what he could. His luggage grew; his peace of mind was assailed by conflict: freedom of movement against possession. Both were essential for the aim of his journey. In Naples he found a young German landscape painter whose 'draughtsman- ship was admirable,' and who lived in a garret. 'We made the following bargain: from now on we shall live and travel together and all he will be expected to do is draw. Al! his drawings are to become my property.' It worked. Six weeks later, from the seashore below Taormina, Goethe was able to write:
I cannot praise Kniep [the young painter] enough or the good fortune which sent him to me. He has relieved me of a burden which would have been intolerable and set me free to follow my own bent. He has just left to sketch all that we saw yesterday.
Italian Journey is an unequal work, consist- ing as it does chiefly of diarial letters (as a rule without disclosing the identity of the recipient) and some descriptive recollections, edited and first published thirty years after Goethe's re- turn. At the time, these letters were handed about and read, as no doubt they were intended to be, by a wide circle at home. Unlike Byron, Goethe strove to placate and edify his absent friends, an endeavour which makes for reticence and incompleteness. He is good at describing people and incidents and the mechanics of travel, but there are not many people in Italian Journey and practically no food and drink at all. He is often banal when describing works of art, and much more kindling about crowds and landscapes, and I am particularly fond of the affectionate attentions he bestows on plants, lati- tudes and meteorology, and for most of the time whatever he writes about is swept along by the vitality, the curiosity, enthusiasm, the sheer capacity of the man. He was a poet and an in- tellectual and a man of feeling, and if he knew the prize he also knew the cost of things, and he was very very lucid. Here are a few quo- tations from Italian Journey which may go some way to show that Goethe cannot have been the pompous, humourless idol of the doctor's theses. Packing up before leaving for Naples:
The thought is borne in on me, more forcibly than ever, that we make too many provisions for life. Tischbcin and I, for example, are about to turn our backs on so many wonderful things, including our well-stocked private museum. We are now having three Junos stand- ing side by side for comparison, but we are leaving them behind as though we had none.
At Naples:
The more I see of the world, the less hope I have that humanity as a whole will ever become wise and happy. . . . I see as little hope for us [in our world] as for the Sicilian in his.
At Venice, after he had walked about the remoter quarters of the city and watched the way of life, the morals and manners • of the inhabitants. . . . Good heavens! what a poor good creature man is after all.
And on having to leave Italy in 1788:
In every parting there is a latent germ of madness, and one must beware not to tend it and let it ripen in one's mind.
SYBILLE BEDFORD
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