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The Irony of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea: Its Form and Function

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Frank G. Ryder  and
Benjamin Bennett
Frank G. Ryder
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Benjamin Bennett
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Abstract

Part of Goethe’s intention in Hermann und Dorothea is to awaken in the reader a disturbing sense of discrepancy between form and content. Systematic, statistically controlled analysis of the poem’s meter, along with a treatment of specific Homeric allusions in the text, leads to this conclusion, also supported by less rigorous but no less valid interpretive arguments. This discrepancy, moreover, is left unresolved, creating a feeling of pervasive irony, but not in the sense of satire or mockery. The reader is encouraged to adopt a superior critical perspective toward the bourgeois values in the poem, but, in that this perspective itself becomes an object of irony, he is also invited to affirm such values. Although this contradiction, like the tension between form and content, is never resolved, it can be understood as expressing an idea of the historical need for bourgeois stability, however banal, in the period depicted.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 3 , May 1975 , pp. 433 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 Republic i, 337a.

2 See Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (New York: Harper, 1966), p. 265.

3 Theaetetus 150b-d.

4 Kierkegaard, pp. 63, 271. The idea is borrowed from Hegel.

5 Kierkegaard, p. 339. Interestingly, this section of Kierkegaard's work, on “the truth of irony,” includes an extended reference to Goethe (p. 337). Further citations of Kierkegaard are by page number in parentheses.

6 Seidlin, “Uber Hermann und Dorothea,” in Lebendige Form: Festschrift für Heinrich E. K. Henel, ed. Jeffrey Sammons and Ernst Schürer (Munich: Fink, 1970), pp; 101–20. Further references are by page number in parentheses. Samuel, “Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 31 (1960–61), 82–104.

7 Hermann und Dorothea, “Kalliope,” in Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, 143 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887–1920), L; henceforth abbreviated WA. This edition gives the best contemporary text, lists all variants, and makes no ad hoc alterations. All references to Goethe's works are to this edition unless otherwise indicated. References to Hermann und Dorothea are by canto and line number.

8 See Goethe's letters of 19 April, 22 April, 12 Aug., 23 Dec. (all 1797), and Schiller's of 20 Oct. 1797, 14 March 1798. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. H. G. Gräf and A. Leitzmann, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Insel, 1955), I, 318–20, 321–24, 373–76, 423–25, 452–55; ii, 70–71.

9 “Erste Epistel,” WA, I, 299.

10 In our discussion of meter we shall abbreviate: HuD (Hermann und Dorothea), RF(Reineke Fuchs), RE (Römische Elegien), A (Achilleis), AuD (“Alexis and Dora”), and Eu (“Euphrosyne”).

The distinctive features basic to the present analysis are set out in Karl Magnuson and Frank Ryder, “The Study of English Prosody: An Alternative Proposal,” College English, 31 (1970), 789–820, esp. n. 21 ; and “Second Thoughts on English Prosody,” College English, 32 (1971), 198–216. The familiar studies of Goethe's hexameter (Heusler, Koster, Feise, et al.) are either insufficiently complete or linguistically not rigorous enough to afford sharp discrimination, although each (esp. Heusler) contains useful insights. L. L. Albertsen, in “Weshalb schrieben die Klassizisten tonbeugende Hexameter?” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift, Neue Folge, 14 (1964), 360–70, offers an interesting explanation of 18th-century “Tonbeugungen” (imitation of disparity between ictus and stress in Latin verse) but neither defines rigorously nor differentiates by types, and suggests no reasons for appearance in some texts, absence in others.

11 This complementary distribution—not the mere presence of unorthodox lines in one work, but presence in one and absence (or virtual absence) in others—is the crux of our evidentiary argument. “Irregularities” similar to some of those in HuD can be found, e.g., in the works of Schiller, but they tend to appear homogeneously, in all periods. In a word, Schiller is less of a strict constructionist to begin with. An example: Only in HuD (or more precisely in HuD and RF) does Goethe use dactylic sequences, such as “ungtrecht bleiben” and “Apfebaum sitzt,” with part or all of a content word morpheme in the second short (types 5 and 7 below). They appear in every major period of Schiller's verse, e.g., “Der Eroberer”: “Das zum Weltge-richt winket,” 1. 27; “An die Sonne”: “… deines Ange-sichts Abglanz,” 1. 21; “Würde der Frauen”: “Brechen die Frauen des Aagtnblicks Blume,” 1. 30. See Schillers Sämtliche Werke, Säkular-Ausgabe, 16 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1904), ii, 6, 42; i, 26.

12 Such “inversion” violates the most general rule of the Magnuson-Ryder metrics, a rule that says in effect that if a metrical long is occupied by a weak syllable (here a monosyllabic function word), balance must be restored by another weak syllable in the following short, as it is in the first 2 words of HuD (et passim). The rule is actually violated by 6 other lines in HuD; but none has phrase boundary to emphasize the irregularity, and balance is restored in the next syllable, which is prosodically strong, e.g., “Sehr gut nimmt das Kütschchen sich aus” (i.17). Others: i.161; iii.37; v.23; vi.241; viii.14. RE has one sequence of this sort: “Hier stand unser …” (1. 307; xv.9). A has 2: “Dir liegt nimmer …” (1. 309) and “Hier liegt keineswegs” (1. 503). In AuD Goethe actually introduced one in revision, changing “Mir war dein Haupt auf die Schulter gesunken” (1. 93) to “Mir sank tiber die Schulter dein Haupt.” Apparently, the sequence without phrase boundary bothered neither Goethe nor Schlegel. The related sequence in category 2 violates not only the Magnu-son-Ryder rule but also the stress-maximum rule of the Halle-Keyser theory. See Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser, English Stress (New York: Harper, 1971), p. 169.

13 Shakespeare inverts liberally in line-initial, e.g., Sonnet 42: “Loving offenders thus I will excuse ye.” (He also inverts in the interior of the line, after pause.) Even line-initial inversion is rare in 18th-century German, hence Schönaich's parody of Lessing: “Freiheit, wer sollte so skandieren ?” Line-initial inversion rests, as Otto Jespersen saw long ago, on the fact that there is really no preceding syllable to compare the irregularity with, thus nothing to produce an irreversible loss of metrical equilibrium. The sole comparable position is the post-caesural one.

One class of seeming inversion must be noted: the appearance of compounds with stress pattern ‘ ‘ “ in metrical short-long-short. Actually, this is the only sequence in which they appear in English and German, a fact long ignored or contradicted in the scholarly literature; see College English, 31 (1970), 798, 819–20. Examples are legion, exceptions practically nonexistent (at least before the avant-garde metrists such as Rilke). Thus the following - - sequences are regular and typical, for all works of Goethe, for all other poets of the time, and for all word classes involved: ”Und um die, halbseiden, im Sommer …“ (HuD ii.212); ”Gleich versetzte darauf einstimmende Reden Achilleus“ (A, 1. 527); ”Aber ganz abscheulich ist's, auf dem Wege der Liebe“ (RE, 1. 373; xviii.5); ”Aile, wie wir hier sind, hat er Stiefkinder geheissen“ (RF iii.102).

In dactyls the situation is less clear, and the apparent uniqueness to HuD of the following line type may be significant: “Doch das will ich Euch sagen und noch mir ausdrücklich erbitten” (v.177).

14 The end of 1. 214 in Canto iv seems to require the scansion “im traurigén Hin- und Hérziehn”—any other would erase the obligatory dactyl in the 5th foot—and may constitute a similar (and certainly aggravated) case.

15 A related type, with stress-bearing function word rather than content word—e.g., “diese Nacht durch sich aufhält” (ii.57) or “faßtest … bei der Hand an, und sagtest” (ii.139)—occurs only in HuD but the diagnosis is complicated by the fact that the same kinds of words appear freely in the 2nd short in all our poems, e.g., RE, 1. 365; xvii.5 (“Denn er bellte mir einst mein Mädchen an, da sie sich heimlich”) or A, 1. 235 (“sprichst … das Leben ab, thöricht”).

16 Also i.155; ii.58; iii.26; iii.90; iv.75; iv.139; iv.189; vi.134; vi.267; ix.257.

17 What the 2-hemistich effect does to a hexameter line is clearly audible (after the briefest practice) in such lines as this, from a poem long ascribed to Klopstock (“Elegie”): “Ach! vergib mir's, Verklärter! Wenn der öftere Seufzer.” Klopstock knew better—and so (among scholars) did Heusler.

18 See, e.g., the apparatus of WA, L, or Erich Trunz's remarks in Goethe, Werke, 13 vols. (Hamburg: Wegner, 1966), i, 543–50. Hereafter cited as Hamburger Ausgabe. Had we operated with the MS—or as near as one can get to the MS—the number of exceptional lines in HuD would only have been greater.

19 See the Hamburger Ausgabe, ii, 672, and WA, l, 395. The 7-foot line is often the only metrical offense cited by critics. Trunz even glosses it over, saying that to modern ears it sounds natural. If it does, and if it did so to Goethe, why was it the only one to find its way into print ?

20 This whole passage contains only 2 metrical transgressions, both (among nonpositional violations) at the less acute end of the spectrum (categories 7 and 8): “Augtnblick weihen” in 1. 257 and “Vngliick bereit” in 1. 282. The latter is the sole irregularity in the 28 lines of the young man's speech, which is in turn followed by 36 lines of “pure” hexameter, concluding the poem. (The -mal of “tausendmal” in 1. 291 is no exception, being felt here and elsewhere as a function word morpheme.)

21 Erich Auerbach, in the Schiller chapter of Mimesis, presents 2 extremes, unreconciled. He sees Goethe's presentation of reality as resting “on a solid basis of bourgeois class-consciousness” (trans. Willard Trask, New York: Doubleday, 1957, p. 395), while at the same time he understands that Goethe is seeking a “way out of his bourgeois class” (p. 397). An understanding of the irony in Hermann und Dorothea, however, provides the bridge without which Goethe must appear inconsistent or simply irresponsible.