The Ruskinsʼ Attitudes toward Germany

The attitude toward German culture reflected in Ruskinʼs early travel writing is divided between Romantic attraction to German legends and landscape and haughty condescension to its people. In the Account of a Tour on the Continent, German romance colors the poetry, while invective against German vulgarity flashes out in the essays, such as “It is said that French will carry you over all Europe” [“Ehrenbreitstein”], “The traditions of the Rhine have long been celebrated” [“The Rhine”], and possibly “Oh the morn looked bright on hill and dale” [“The Black Forest”].

The Ruskins first visited Germany during the Tour of 1833. Leading up to that journey, John James Ruskin purchased books about the region in 1831 and 1832, which are unidentified; a work by Friedrich Schiller in 1832; and a German dictionary and a grammar, respectively in 1832 and 1833. Following their return from the tour, he acquired a “P. Rhine” in 1834, which was probably The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer‐Lytton (1803–73), published in that year (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 230 n. 2, 260 n. 2, 286 n. 1). In visual culture, Germany and the Rhine provided prominent subjects in engravings, lithographs, and watercolors by the Ruskinsʼ favorite artists, Samuel Prout, J. M. W. Turner, and others.

Despite this interest, Ruskinʼs parents had always regarded German culture with ambivalence. In his youth, at age sixteen in Edinburgh, John James had acted a part in an amateur staging of Castle Spectre (1797) by Matthew Gregory (“Monk”) Lewis (1775–1818), the most lionized and yet most reviled British imitator of the German terrible sublime. As Ruskin family lore had it according to Praeterita, John Jamesʼs performance stirred his future fiancée, Margaret, with admirmation of the handsome figure he cut onstage in his romantic costume, despite her religious antipathy to “theatricals” (Ruskin, Works, 38). In the course of their long engagement, however, John James came round to Margaretʼs contempt for the Gothic sublime. In a letter of 4 March 1813 (part of which is missing), John James satirizes Walter Scottʼs Rokeby, in which “bloodthirsty” characters “always threaten & announce more than they perform”, whereas the sentimental boy Wilfrid “is very tender hearted, mild, shy, innocent, amorous, & sickly, very studious moreover”, prone to “sitting up all night hearing the wind howl & looking at the moon”, instead of “going like other folks to bed” (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 60). The description of Wilfrid is prophetic of the teenage John twenty years later; at the time, however, the epithet “sickly” was grimly applied to German drama by British critics, who warned that the importation of these plays would expose the British public to political subversion and moral depravity.

Starting in the 1790s and extending through the Napoleonic Era, British fears of invasion by the French extended to anxieties about “contamination” by German romance, which was imported in the form of translations of tragedies and melodramas by Schiller, Kotzebue, and Goethe, and of translations and adaptations of Romantic ballads such as “Lenore” by G. A. Bürger. As Peter Mortensen has argued, British authors attracted to the German sublime in drama and the ballad had to reckon with a British xenophobic reaction, while at the same time capitalizing on the fashion for German literary supernaturalism (British Romanticism and Continental Influences, 26–27, 46). Walter Scott was caught in this dilemma early in his career as a poet, when Lewis invited him to contribute his translations of German ballads to the collection, Tales of Wonder (1800). Scott did not, however, take the risk of appearing among scandalous and allegedly “Jacobinical” company merely for the sake of success in the literary market; like some other British poets, such as Robert Southey, Scott was drawn to German poetry in the belief that it shared a common heritage with Scottish poetry, and that the fashion for the German sublime could aid in the renewal of British poetry, which he considered moribund. For Ruskin, this ideological orientation to the past seems a significant, if indirect connection with German Romantic literary culture than is apparent in the superficial prejudice against “German brains” that he gathered from his father.

For Scott, this ideological tie to Lewis and the German sublime is revealed in the series of biographical prefaces he added to his major poems in 1830, starting with the “Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad” prefacing the fourth volume of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. By this time, German literature had shed its stigma for British readers, and Scott was able to disassociate his youthful pursuit from French political freethinking. His study of German language and poetics brought an “unexpected discovery of an old friend in a foreign land”, which promised an “emancipation from the rules so servilely adhered to by the French school, . . . particularly by their dramatic poets”; and while this affiliation brought “some disadvantages” in the form of German “extravagance and bombast”, Scott and his associates in Edinburgh anticipated that the “prevailing taste in . . . [Germany] might be easily employed as a formidable auxiliary to renewing the spirit of our own, upon the same system as when medical persons attempt, by the transfusion of blood, to pass into the veins of an aged and exhausted patient, the vivacity of the circulation and liveliness of sensation which distinguish a young subject”. Scottʼs access to this new blood was fortuitously encouraged by his acquaintance with “Monk” Lewis, whose “education abroad” had afforded “an opportunity of indulging his inclination for the extraordinary and supernatural, by wandering through the whole enchanted land of German faëry and diablerie, not forgetting the paths of her enthusiastic tragedy and romantic poetry”. Lewisʼs influence could help add “a new string to the British harp”, as he was already a popularly “successful imitator of the Germans, both in his attachment to the ancient ballad, and in the tone of superstition which they [the German poets] willingly mingle with it”; and he was a “martinet, if I may so term him, in the accuracy of rhymes and of numbers” and his “command over the melody of verse” (Scott, “Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad”, ed. Thomson, n.p.).

Other participants in this movement included Robert Southey, whose ballads in an ancient style were admired by the Norwich School of poets, which included the most successful English translator of Bürgerʼs “Lenore”, William Taylor (1765–1836). David Chandler has illuminated how this context brings into focus Southeyʼs rivalry with S. T. Coleridge over the ballad revival, which has been perceived as merely personal in its motivation on Southeyʼs part. In his approach to literary revival, Southeyʼs “recipe for a modern supernatural ballad”, Chandler explains, “was to take a genuinely old story concerned with a supernatural event and to write it as if with complete faith in its credibility, ‘in the spirit of the elder poets’”. It was in defense of this approach that Southey scorned Coleridgeʼs “The Ancient Mariner” as “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity”. Chandler concludes that “what Southey with professional rivalry dismissed as a ‘Dutch attempt’, and [Charles] Lamb more generously defended as an ‘English attempt’ at ‘German sublimity’, is a poem [‘The Ancient Mariner’] particularly apt for critics who read the past as continuous with the present and believe in the power of tradition. On the other hand, Southeyʼs ‘answer’, an attempt at genuine ‘German sublimity’ [his ballad, ‘The Old Woman of Berkeley’], is a poem for critics who see the past as discontinuous with the present, but recoverable in part through an effort of difficult, but rewarding, sympathetic identification” (Chandler, “Southeyʼs ‘German Sublimity’ and Coleridgeʼs ‘Dutch Attempt’”, pars. 12, 15).

Despite Ruskinʼs abiding dismissiveness of German “metaphysics”, this contest of ideas presents an intriguing background against which to compare his mature thinking about tradition and revivalism. In his youth, however, such ideas lay beyond the simpler conflicts in his attitudes about the German culture he encountered abroad. He had always been strongly drawn to the Gothic elements in Byronʼs Manfred and Scottʼs Monastery and the poems. Nonetheless, he parroted his fatherʼs contempt for German tourists encountered during the Tour of 1833, whom John James caricatured as a “Nation” supposed to be “fond of the sublime & beautiful & terrific” and “proverbially Lovers of the horrible”, but whom he regarded as “a very coarse & yet very sentimental people”. If Germans seek sublime horror, he wrote in his diary, it must be “the horrors of Indigestion” that they most feel “as they are great Gormandizers”. If they are a sentimental people, their “Sentiment is not at all of a soft or tender or refining nature”, for “they are not polite [but] sometimes extremely rude” (Diary of John James Ruskin, 1833–46, 25). These remarks about the contradictory and self‐thwarting nature of a debased love of the sublime and unsentimental sentiment are consistent with John Jamesʼs ridicule of German Romantic aesthetics that can be found in his letters twenty years earlier.

Diary of John James Ruskin, 1833–46, © The Ruskin, Lancaster University.