Elective Affinities

ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

J
OHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749. He studied at Leipzig, where he showed an interest in the occult, and in Strasbourg, where Herder introduced him to Shakespeare’s works and to folk poetry. He produced some essays and lyrical verse, and at twenty-four wrote
Götz von Berlichingen
, a play which brought him national fame and established him in the current
Sturm und Drang
movement.
Werther
, a tragic romance, was an even greater success. Goethe began work on
Faust
, and
Egmont
, another tragedy, before being invited to join the government at Weimar. His interest in the classical world led him to leave suddenly for Italy in 1786, and the
Italian Journey
recounts his travels there.
Iphigenie auf Tauris
and
Torquato Tasso
, classical dramas, were begun at this time. Returning to Weimar, Goethe started the second part of
Faust
, encouraged by Schiller. During this late period he finished the series of
Wilhelm Meister
books and wrote many other works, including
The Oriental Divan
and
Elective Affinities.
He also directed the State Theatre and worked on numerous scientific theories in evolutionary botany. Goethe was married in 1806. He finished
Faust
before he died in 1832.

R. J. HOLLINGDALE
translated eleven of Nietzsche’s books and published two books about him; he also translated works by, among others, Schopenhauer, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Lichtenberg and Theodor Fontane, many of these for Penguin Classics. He was the honorary president of the British Nietzsche Society. R. J. Hollingdale died on 28 September 2001. In its obituary the
Guardian
paid tribute to his ‘inspired gift for German translation’.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Elective Affinities

Translated with an Introduction by
R. J. HOLLINGDALE

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First published 1809
This translation first published 1971
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2005
19

Translation and introduction copyright © R. J. Hollingdale, 1971
Chronology and Further Reading copyright © David Deissner, 2005
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 9781101491041

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

Part One

Part Two

CHRONOLOGY

FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

1

G
OETHE
had lived with Christiane Vulpius for more than eighteen years and had had five children by her before, on 19 October 1806, he married her in the sacristy of the Hofkirche at Weimar. He was fifty-seven, she was forty-one. To Weimar society marriage was a contract not a ‘sacrament’, and divorce was a normal element of civilized life; but, like any society which still has the will to survive in it, Weimar society preserved and valued the social forms, and Goethe’s irregular household was an embarrassment. But he put an end to the irregularity only under external pressure. On 14 October the battle of Jena was fought and lost and was followed by the entry of the French army into Weimar: plundering and other inconveniences occurred, Goethe’s house was invaded, and it appears that the author of
Faust
was saved from a manhandling only by the valiant interposition of his Gretchen, who drove the soldiers away. The following day Napoleon arrived in the town and regularized military occupation commenced. In these circumstances, and also no doubt inspired to renewed affection by Christiane’s brave behaviour, Goethe at last decided he must give her the security of regular wifehood, and he put his decision into effect at once. There is no reason to think – on the contrary, there is every reason to doubt – that he would have taken any such step had he not been driven to it almost literally at the point of a bayonet.

But now that he was a married man, he discovered that he had all along harboured very stern moral principles with regard to the marriage tie, and he became an emphatic critic of the laxity displayed by the society in which he lived. Franz Volkmar Reinhard, who met him during the summer
‘cure’ at Karlsbad in 1807, records that he was taken aback at the vehemence of Goethe’s utterances on the sanctity and in-dissolubility of marriage – and Reinhard was head court chaplain at Dresden. There is, of course, no logical inconsistency involved in holding marriage in high regard and at the same time ‘living in sin’, but the two things do not lie very comfortably together and feeling rebels at their juxtaposition. Until his journey to Italy of 1786–8, Goethe avoided not only marriage but any binding relationship with women, and it was not from any strictness of principle but because until this epoch there had been a good deal of Georgie Porgie in that great man. Within a month of his return to Weimar, however, he had taken Christiane into his home and was openly living with her, in imitation, one may think, not only of the artists and bohemians with whom he had mixed while in Italy, but also of the Roman poets whose style he now began to adopt as his own: one understands Goethe’s ‘classicism’ better when one realizes that it meant not only writing like ‘Amor’s triumvirate’ Propertius, Catullus and Tibullus but also living like them; that ‘classicism’ meant to Goethe, not coldness and rigidity and suppression of emotion, but exactly the reverse. Emotionally he was far more relaxed and happy than he had been, and he was quite content to live
as if
married without actually being so, which suggests that he had no very strong feelings at all on the subject of marriage, that he was ‘pagan’ in that matter. When he was finally propelled into matrimony, it is clear that the acquisition of this novel status had a far more powerful effect on him than he had thought possible; and the first effect seems to have been to make him critical of the easy wedding and divorcing and wedding again sanctioned by custom among the petty aristocracy and bourgeoisie among which he moved.

In the winter of 1807–8, however, a complication appeared in the person of a young lady with the lovely name of Minna Herzlieb. Minna was the foster-daughter of the printer and
publisher Karl Friedrich Frommann, at whose home in Jena Goethe had first met her in 1803; then she had been only a girl, but now she had reached the ripe old age of eighteen, and Goethe began to feel towards her an emotion which, while again not involving any logical inconsistency with a high regard for marriage, does not lie very comfortably beside it. He fell in love with Minna Herzlieb: the first of the affairs of his later life with women far younger than he which, because of the difference in ages, could come to nothing in the prosaic world and were for that reason sublimated into poetry. Its first product was the cycle of seventeen sonnets written as a duel with Minna’s other admirer, the Romantic poet Zacharias Werner, who was nineteen years younger than Goethe and, having just dissolved his third marriage, once more a single man. The weapons were of Werner’s choosing: he was a specialist in Italian sonnets, while to Goethe it was a strange form. But to challenge Goethe to a contest of verse-writing was a foolhardy and foredoomed undertaking, for he was and remains the heavyweight champion of the world in that sport. Schiller, who had to work hard at his poetry, has left on record his amazement at the ease with which Goethe could reel off poems in any and every form without any kind of effort or preparation: he could, if he wished, speak poems as other men speak slabs of prose, and the ability was clearly innate, in the way composing music was innate in Mozart. His sonnets to Fräulein Herzlieb are, as one could have expected, perfect imitations of the Italian model: very smooth-flowing rhythm, effortless rhyming, each poem the vehicle of one mildly ingenious idea. But they are not serious work, and were quite inadequate as a vehicle for his passion for Minna.

Of far greater weight is the drama
Pandora
which, although unfinished, must be counted among the most remarkable of his achievements: that it is comparatively unknown is due entirely to the existence of the second part of
Faust
, completed
a quarter of a century later, in which the poetical innovations of
Pandora
are employed with even greater virtuosity and at much greater length. Goethe made no secret of the fact that this glittering imitation of Greek tragedy owed its substance to his passion for a girl forty years his junior and that such a passion could find no expression except a sublimated one in the form of art. But this vehicle too was insufficient to carry all that was now weighing on his mind and heart; it was in particular altogether silent on the subject of the conflict, of which he was at just this time acutely aware, between his idea of marriage and his experience of the waywardness of passion; and so, simultaneously with
Pandora
, he began a story whose immediate theme is precisely this conflict and to which he gave the odd and, when correctly understood, provocative title
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
– Elective Affinities.

The first time the story is mentioned is in his diary entry for 11 April 1808, where the title occurs along with plans for stories to be inserted into the loosely constructed novel
Wilhelm Meister’s Travels
to illustrate its sub-title
The Renouncers
(
Die Entsagenden
): the entry records that on that day he was engaged in plotting the stories for the novel, especially
Elective Affinities
and
The Man of Fifty
. The latter story has certain affinities with
Elective Affinities
: the man of fifty is in love with his niece but gives her up when he discovers she is in love with his son.
Elective Affinities
, as a short story, was begun on 29 May 1808 and finished at the end of July. But in April 1809 Goethe decided to expand it, employing the existing story as an outline upon which to work. He devoted the spring and summer to its composition, and on 28 July he sent the opening chapters to the printer so that he would be compelled to proceed with the rest at a brisk pace. The work was completed on 4 October and published by Cotta in two volumes the same autumn.

2

I have called the original form of
Elective Affinities
a story: the German is
Novelle
, for which there is no exact English equivalent. It means first of all a fictional narrative longer than a story (
Erzählung
, French
conte
) but shorter than a novel (
Roman
, the same word in French), but as a rule too short to be called a short novel. A long story is, I suppose, the English expression. But the classic German
Novelle
possesses distinguishing characteristics other than its length which make it a distinct species of narrative. These characteristics are: strict economy, deliberate avoidance of the breadth and relaxed tempo of the
Roman
; emphasis on plot, so that the characters of the story are subordinate to it and their characteristics are functions of it; as a consequence, they are given only forenames or titles or the names of their professions or an ironic surname, but not naturalistic names; the milieu is not naturalistic, natural scenes possess a function beyond their function as the setting of the action; the action itself is not naturalistic, it proceeds in a more orderly fashion than everyday life or everyday life in a novel, there is a symmetry of action foreign to reality and often the outcome is prefigured, so that there is a sense of inevitability about it; finally, there is always an explicit or implied narrator, the story is supposed to be something the narrator has experienced or heard about and not something he has invented, his function is to reproduce an actual event as a conscious work of art, so that his manner will display a higher degree of artistry and artificiality than is normally found in a novel. These ‘rules’ were, of course, extracted from the practice of German writers and not invented in advance: but by the late eighteenth century German literature had become a very self-conscious affair, and
Novellen
were then deliberately framed so as to accord with the ‘rules’, the object being, as with all ‘formalism’,
to impose shape and order upon the flux of experience. The outcome was a type of fictional narrative as immediately identifiable as a strict fugue or an Italian operatic aria: although the reader or listener (for the
Novelle
clearly originates in the
spoken
story) will not know in advance the details of what is coming he will know the kind of artistic experience to expect. Perhaps the best-known
Novelle
is Goethe’s story called simply
Novelle
and intended, as its title (or rather lack of title) indicates, as a model of the form.
Elective Affinities
contains an inset
Novelle
, ‘The Wayward Young Neighbours’, which exhibits the characteristics of the form on a small scale, and the reader will notice the typical
Novelle
atmosphere: the absence of names, the strict economy of means, the unnaturalistic action, and so on, and also the fact that the story is narrated, that it is concerned with an event the narrator has heard about and not invented, and that it has implications of which he is unaware.