Version classiqueVersion mobile

From Goethe to Gundolf

 | 
Roger Paulin

Books

17. Julius hare’s German books in trinity College library, Cambridge1

Texte intégral

  • 1 This chapter was originally published in Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9 (1 (...)

Fig. 27 Bust of Julius Hare by Thomas Woolner (1861). The Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. Photo by James Kirwan. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College.

Fig. 27 Bust of Julius Hare by Thomas Woolner (1861). The Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. Photo by James Kirwan. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College.
  • 2 Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), viii.

1I begin this chapter with a personal reminiscence. In the spring of 1973, Trinity College, Cambridge, anxious to find a lecturer in German, took the (for Trinity, at least) unusual step of advertising for suitable candidates and interviewing them, myself included. With time on my hands before the interview, I decided to examine the German holdings in the College library. Somewhat awed by my surroundings, I proceeded to scrutinize the catalogue entries. Beginning with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, I noted the Ausgabe letzter Hand, not a bad start, but became increasingly surprised to find items like Kunst und Altertum and various biographical works or collections of letters, such as Johann Peter Eckermann, Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer or even Bettina von Arnim’s preposterous Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde/Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child — all in first edition. Encouraged by this unexpected find, I proceeded to look up Ludwig Tieck, on whose biography I was then working. Again, a massive entry, with about one third of his works — in first edition. No collection in Britain outside the British Library seemed likely to possess such holdings. I tried other German Romantics — the Schlegel brothers, Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, E.T.A. Hoffmann — with similar results. I was informed that most of the books formed part of the ‘Hare collection’. There was no time for more details; my interview was imminent. Whether the hope some day of being allowed to use the said Hare collection gave me utterance during the proceedings that followed, I cannot say. I was appointed, I did use the books extensively, and have recorded my debt elsewhere.2 It is only now, however, that I come to substantiate it in a more systematic form.

2The name of Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855) is not unknown to students of English intellectual history of the 1820s, to classical scholars, to historians of the early Victorian church, and to readers of his nephew Augustus J. C. Hare’s highly interesting and respectful Memorials of a Quiet Life and his distinctly iconoclastic The Story of My Life. N. Merrill Distad’s biography of Hare, Guessing at Truth (1979),3 adapts the title of Hare’s best-known work, written together with his brother Augustus, Guesses at Truth (1827). There is a singular appropriateness in this use of title; for Guesses at Truth, a miscellany of essays and aphorisms, Coleridgean in sweep yet acknowledging a ‘self-controul’4 that, Hare claimed, the older man lacked, is a work which displays the very considerable range of intellectual competence on which Hare could draw.

3In one of his many disrespectful asides concerning his stern and forbidding uncle, Julius, Augustus J. C. Hare claimed that Hare had paid homage to ‘five popes’:5 William Wordsworth, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Karl Josias von Bunsen, Frederick Maurice and Henry Edward Manning. If this were true, the list displayed a considerable eclecticism, indeed it might be difficult to reconcile these five several pontifical claims. The task is less problematic than it may seem: Maurice, Hare’s brother-in-law, represents the claims of the Broad Church to which Hare adhered, he never concealing the pain which the Tractarian movement and, most acutely, Manning’s defection caused him; Wordsworth (one could also say Samuel Taylor Coleridge) stands for the high moral and intellectual claims of the English Romantics, best displayed in Wordsworth’s reflective poetry; with Bunsen and Niebuhr, we come closer to our real object of concern: Germany.

4The circle around Baron Bunsen in Rome and London represented a world of political conservatism, religious tolerance, and theological liberalism both for the young Hare and for the later archdeacon of Lewes. It is fair to say that Bunsen, who combined scholarship and piety with all the advantages of the grand monde, mediated to Hare in person what a much greater and more influential figure could only pass on through the printed word: Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher had been the particular province of Hare’s friend and Trinity contemporary, Connop Thirlwall, his first translator into English. With Thirlwall, Hare had translated Niebuhr’s History of Rome. That translation, its first two volumes appearing in 1828–32, was a token of Hare’s commitment to the new German school of classical scholarship, indeed it has been claimed that Hare’s German leanings may well have been the reason for his having been passed over for the Regius Chair of Greek in Cambridge in 1825.6

  • 3 According to Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, 3 vols (London: Smith Elder, 1884), I, (...)
  • 4 Olliers Literary Miscellany, 4.
  • 5 Letter to Edmund Venables, September 6, 1844, quoted in Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, III, 250.

5Hare’s love of Germany and its literature and culture was fostered at an early age. He had been with his parents when they spent some time in Weimar at Duke Carl August’s court in 1804–05; it was the year of Friedrich Schiller’s death; they had met Goethe.3 If Julius Hare, on his return to England, had needed encouragement in the study of languages and philology, he had only to reflect that his mother’s sister had been married to none other than Sir William Jones. Yet the Germans had a place second to none in Hare’s intellectual affections. Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle made similar claims; but their own creative powers meant that they drew on things German as and when it suited. Hare, on the other hand, was indebted to German ‘Wissenschaft’ as a scholarly principle. It is interesting to note him writing in 1820 of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel as having raised the art of criticism ‘to the dignity of a scientific art’.4 We perceive Hare’s difficulties with the German word ‘wissenschaftlich’, which his friend and contemporary William Whewell was also to render as ‘scientific’. Behind it all is, however, the sense that German scholarly and critical method had carried the day. Yet underlying this insight is the awareness that the Germans have never merely ‘guessed at truth’, but have proceeded from philosophical universals; they have, in Hare’s own words, ‘made nearer approaches to speculative truth than any other nation’.5

  • 6 John Sterling, ‘Characteristics of German Genius’, in Essays and Tales, ed. by Julius Charles Hare, (...)
  • 7 Ibid., 384.
  • 8 Ibid., 406.
  • 9 Ibid., 409.
  • 10 The Edinburgh Review (Oct. 1836), xcii, 334.
  • 11 Sterling, ‘Characteristics of German Genius’, 417.

6John Sterling, Hare’s close friend, briefly his curate at Hurstmonceux, expressed better than most this sense of the Germans’ genius as it appeared to their British disciples. In the essay, Characteristics of German Genius of 1842, Sterling saw them in terms of ‘elevation and fulness’,6 as the nation that most approached the Greeks in their ‘universal importance’.7 Their very plurality, the absence of a capital city that arbitrated over fashion and taste, the stimulus of their universities as compared with Oxford and Cambridge, their ‘reflection’,8 ‘Earnestness of heart9 as a Protestant culture — all these could be cited in their favour. This is, one might say, Carlyle without the fulsomeness. But the Edinburgh Review in 1836 had not shrunk from a comparison of modern German literature with the age of Shakespeare.10 Sterling and his Cambridge friends are, however, concerned to extend the claims of German universality beyond the confines of mere belles-lettres, to encompass the ‘three great forms assumed by the genius of the Germans, — in History, Philosophy, and Poetry’.11 The list of German notabilities produced by Sterling, while registering the additional point that all were born Protestant, deserves attention:

Leibnitz Hegel
Frederick II Schleiermacher
Lessing Eichhorn
Winkelmann Johannes Müller
Klopfstock Jean Paul Richter
Herder 2 Stolbergs
Hamann 2 Schlegels
Wieland 2 Humboldts
F.H. Jacobi Novalis
Goethe Tieck
Schiller F.A. Wolf
Kant Voss
Fichte Niebuhr
Schelling Savigny.

7 Add the dramatist Zacharias Werner, a convert to Catholicism, and discount one or two other conversions (and correct ‘Leibniz’, ‘Winckelmann’ and ‘Klopstock’) and you have a very impressive list indeed of poets, philosophers, historians and philologists. It is, interestingly enough, a list that continues the direction given nearly two generations earlier by Madame de Staël in De l’Allemagne/On Germany.

  • 12 Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, I, 429.
  • 13 Ibid., II, 186.

8We need to understand this sense of German achievement — as seen through English eyes — if we are to appreciate Julius Hare, the book collector. For in translating not only Niebuhr’s History of Rome but also a work each by Tieck and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Hare was showing at the outset of his scholarly and literary career that German poetry and scholarship went hand in hand as evidence of that ‘reflection’ and universality. Goethe, whom Hare in 1832 on hearing of his death called the ‘mightiest spirit that this earth has seen, since Shakespeare left it’,12 would illustrate in one person that range of genius. The German Romantics, the brothers Schlegel or Tieck in their turn concentrated one’s line of vision on a higher fraternity of supernal genius that transcends national and chronological barriers, those ‘archpoets’ that embody the highest of human endeavour. It was fitting therefore that Augustus J. C. Hare should commemorate his uncle by quoting a letter containing the wide sweep of ‘Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Raphael, Phidias’.13 For Hare’s books do in fact take in the range of classical antiquity, the Romance languages (especially Italian), German and English literature, the fine arts, and all kinds of antiquarian and historical scholarship.

9 How did Hare come by his books? Already in 1825, Henry Crabb Robinson, diarist and gossip, noted in the course of a visit to Cambridge and Hare:

  • 14 Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde. Brücke zwischen England und Deutschland im Zeital (...)

I had great pleasure in looking over his library of German books — the best collection of modern German books I have ever seen in England.14

  • 15 Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life, I, 109.

10If Hare’s rooms in Trinity were ample enough for his collection, then his archidiaconal quarters at Hurstmonceux seem to have been hardly adequate for the ever-increasing number of volumes. His nephew, remembering the house more for chastisements and ‘endless sermons’,15 did concede that the library at Hurstmonceux was a place to be held in one’s memory:

  • 16 Ibid., 80f.

Inside it was lined with books from top to bottom: not only the living rooms, but the passages and every available space in the bedrooms were walled with bookcases from floor to ceiling, containing more than 14,000 works. Most of these were German, but there were many very beautiful books upon art in all languages..16

11A. P. Stanley’s memoir of Hare is more deferential, culminating, perhaps not merely by chance, in an image of organic growth that would have pleased Coleridge, emanating from the intellectual and spiritual world of Johann Gottfried Herder and the German Romantics. We note too the Baconian image of the tree of knowledge:

  • 17 A. P. Stanley, ‘Archdeacon Hare’, The Quarterly Review 97 (June-Sept. 1855), 1–128 (8f.).

It was not merely a house with a good library — the whole house was a library. The vast nucleus which he brought with him from Cambridge grew year by year, till not only study, and drawing-room, and dining room, but passage, and antechamber, and bedrooms were overrun with the ever-advancing and crowded bookshelves. At the time of his death it had reached the number of more than 12,000 volumes; and it must be further remembered that these volumes were of no ordinary kind. Of all libraries which it has been our lot to traverse, we never saw any equal to this in the combined excellence of quantity and quality; none in which there were so few worthless, so many valuable works. Its original basis was classical and philological; but of later years the historical, philosophical, and theological elements outgrew all the rest. The peculiarity which distinguished the collection probably from any other, private or public, in the kingdom, was the preponderance of German literature. No work, no pamphlet of any note in the teeming catalogues of German booksellers escaped his notice; and with his knowledge of the subjects and of the probable elucidation which they would receive from this or that quarter, they formed themselves in natural and harmonious groups round what already existed, so as to give to the library both the appearance and reality, not of a mere accumulation of parts, but of an organic and self-multiplying whole. And what perhaps was yet more remarkable was the manner in which the centre of this whole was himself. Without a catalogue, without assistance, he knew where every book was to be found, for what it was valuable, what relation it bore to the rest. The library was like a magnificent tree which he had himself planted, of which he had nurtured the growth, which spread its branches far and wide over his dwelling, and in the shade of which he delighted, even if he was prevented for the moment from gathering its fruits or pruning its luxuriant foliage.17

  • 18 Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life, I, 484.

12Hare may have incorporated into his own collection, the libraries of German books handed down from his father and brother. He clearly had no intention, however, of merely guarding an inheritance. As collections of German books go, Hare’s was larger than Alexander von Humboldt’s and began to approach Tieck’s or Johann Joachim Eschenburg’s. As with so many German collectors, it is likely that Hare’s attitude to his books was not one of mere connoisseurship but was tempered with more practical considerations. His nephew claimed that the books were intended as a ‘provision’,18 that is, an investment, for his wife Esther; his collection of pictures similarly. We may be grateful that Esther Hare saw fit to present the best part of the library to Trinity, while remarking that her generosity may well have exceeded her sense of the prudential. For the Hares and Maurices were, in nineteenth-century terms, not wealthy families.

13The books themselves are in most cases individually bound in leather, often with tooled decoration. Very few of the German books have original bindings, reflecting the habit of the time to have volumes, often issued in paper, made up to individual specifications. The Hare collection, as originally housed in free-standing cases in the main concourse of the Wren Library, must have presented a fine array of Victorian bindings. Today, confined to a bookstore, its external merits are less easily discerned. It remains a consolation, however, that users of the Wren Library approaching it from its side access, after passing between the busts of Thirlwall, Whewell and Alfred Tennyson and before coming to the uncharacteristically décolleté James Frazer, may pay their respects before Thomas Woolner’s prominently displayed enigmatic bust of Hare.

  • 19 Cf. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford (...)
  • 20 [A. W. and J. C. Hare], Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers (London, New York: Macmillan, 1880), 55, 5 (...)

14The books, although in many cases hardly, if ever, used since their incorporation into Trinity’s collection, were not intended by Hare as mere scholarly decoration. Pencil marginalia, especially in periodicals, give ample evidence of extensive and discriminating use. These marginalia, on the other hand, are restricted largely to lists of contributors to periodicals, and cross-references, always in pencil. Many of these I have found useful — and always accurate. Hare the scholar-bibliophile did not deface his books: we understand perhaps his refusal to lend volumes to Coleridge,19 who ‘used’ his books differently. Yet Coleridge’s range of German reading — from Martin Luther to Schleiermacher, in all kinds of disciplines and speculative indisciplines — is very similar to Hare’s. Guesses at Truth, while in no sense really comparable with Biographia literaria, does make abundantly clear that Hare’s appreciation of German literature and scholarship went hand in hand with the particular emphases of his own collection. ‘The very first novel I have happened to take up since writing the above, Arnim’s Dolores… ’, ‘Thus too Solger, writing about his dialogues to Tieck… ’, ‘Niebuhr applied this… ’, ‘ingeniously remarkt by Francis Horn… ’,20 are phrases culled from just a few pages of the work, giving some small indication of Hare’s acquaintance with German belles-lettres and critical scholarship.

  • 21 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, IV, 1019.

15All of Hare’s contemporaries acknowledged that German was the main foundation of his collection. There is however rich material for the student of Italian (the sixteenth-century editions of Giordano Bruno, for instance, that he was unwilling to lend to Coleridge);21 and the historian of the early Victorian church will find the tract material of the period very fully represented. Despite confining ourselves to German, we are not withholding the real substance.

  • 22 NB: Many of the German titles in this chapter are too esoteric to satisfyingly translate into Engli (...)

16A foretaste of what Hare’s books contain may be gained merely by taking one single made-up volume of ‘PAMPHLETS’, containing twelve miscellaneous German items. Number 1, Eduard Eversmann’s Reise von Orenburg nach Buchara (Berlin, 1823),22 a work of Central Asian ethnography, with appended Afghan word-list, is listed in five other libraries in COPAC. Following it, as Number 2, is the German Romantic magazine Zeitung für Einsiedler (including Tröst Einsamkeit) (Heidelberg, 1808), Achim von Arnim’s contribution to the curious, the bizarre and the national, in German poetry. It is the finest copy I have ever seen, with engravings of original freshness, far outstripping the reprint which many libraries hold. Numbers 3 to 6 are lectures by the Jena speculative scientist, Lorenz Oken, all given there between 1808 and 1809. The British Library’s copy of the polemically anti-Newtonian Erste Ideen zur Theorie des Lichts […] (Jena, 1808) has annotations by Coleridge. Of the other three, Hare’s copy of Ueber das Universum als Fortsetzung des Sinnensystems (Jena, 1808) is the sole entry in COPAC. There are copies in Paris and Harvard, but seemingly nowhere in Germany. Grundzeichnung des natürlichen Systems der Erze (Jena, 1809) is COPAC’s but not WorldCat’s only copy. Ueber den Werth der Naturgeschichte (also Jena 1809) is not even listed in COPAC, while Weimar has Goethe’s copy. Number 7, Adam Müller’s Von der Idee des Staates und ihren Verhältnissen zu den populären Staatstheorien, a lecture on political economy (Dresden, 1808), is the separately issued first part of his Die Elemente der Staatskunst (of which the only other copy in COPAC is in the British Library) and is the sole entry in COPAC. Number 8, Joseph Görres’s Teutschlands künftige Verfassung (n.p., 1814) is the reprint of an article in his Rheinischer Merkur, and as such not listed in COPAC. It may well be unique. Neither 7 nor 8 is listed in WorldCat. Number 9, Bernhard Joseph Docen’s Ueber die Ursachen der Fortdauer der lateinischen Sprache (Munich, 1815), an academy lecture, has three hits in COPAC. Two further Munich academy lectures, numbers 10 and 11, by Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst unter den Griechen (Munich, 1816, 1819, 1829) are represented in COPAC in part by the London Library and the Cambridge Faculty of Classics, omitting to say that Hare’s is the full set (Harvard University seems to have the only other). The twelfth item, a work of archaeology and comparative mythology, Peter von Köppen’s Die dreygestaltete Hekate und ihre Rolle in den Mysterien (Vienna, 1823), is in Birmingham and Cambridge, but COPAC does not list Trinity’s copy.

17The sheer range of these ‘PAMPHLETS’, not merely their occasional rarity, gives an accurate impression of Hare’s sweep of interest: religion, archaeology, science, classical philology, as well as all manifestations of literature. One volume may thus serve as an introduction to the whole collection. Pride of place must nevertheless go to Hare’s collection of Luther, a made-up set of first printings of all the German-language pamphlets and sermons from 1518 to 1545, described in detail by Adams. This collection immediately places Trinity in the forefront among Cambridge Luther holdings, well supplemented, among others, by the Aldis Wright bequests. Luther is central to Hare’s own position on German theology and thought, a position easily accommodated to the more modern thinking of Schleiermacher and one to be defended against the radical views of a David Friedrich Strauss. Backed up as they are by an eighteenth-century set of Luther’s works (Sämtliche Schriften/ Complete Works, Halle 1739–50) from the centre of German pietism, the Luther holdings, we must assume, are a scholar-theologian’s working collection.

  • 23 Ibid.

18There are among Hare’s German books no other items from this early period in original editions, Hare clearly seeing no merit in the accumulation of early theological works as such. His theological collection does in the main take in what are the salient developments in German religious thought as seen through the eyes of Coleridge’s generation. There is, after Luther, a leap in time to the first complete set of Jacob Böhme’s works (Amsterdam, 1682), doubtless the ‘Behmen’ that he also refused to lend to less-than-reliable Coleridge23 (we note, in passing, the Spinoza Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1674, which has eight hits in COPAC but which does not list Hare’s copy). The eighteenth century is represented by the father of German pietism, Jakob Spener, and the chiliast Johann Albrecht Bengel. It is only when we come to the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth that we see Hare’s declared interest in German theology taking in the broadest of spectrums. The Romantic trinity of Luther, Böhme and Schleiermacher gives way to a seeming heterodoxy of nineteenth-century theological opinion: the evangelical devotional sermons of Claus Harms or the sternly Protestant conservatism of Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg on the one hand, and the up-to-date biblical criticism of Johann August Ernesti, Ferdinand Christian Baur, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, Hermann Olshausen, Heinrich Wilhelm Josias Thiersch and August Tholuck, on the other. In the centre stands the commanding figure of Schleiermacher, represented by the first complete edition (Sämmtliche Werke/Collected Works, Berlin, 1838–64) and various separate items, also a number of contemporary studies or pamphlets on him. Of special interest is the first edition of the Vertraute Briefe über Fr. Schlegels Lucinde (Lübeck, 1800, five hits in COPAC excluding Hare), illustrating a side of Schleiermacher that might not necessarily appeal to the severely decorous Hare. He, however, not only possessed this work of Schleiermacher’s, but also the cause of it, Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde (1799), a work of some erotic daring (and some tedium) that sets out the German Romantics’ views on the equality of the sexes in matters both of the body and the spirit (COPAC lists British Library and Hare; the first edition is generally rare). Schleiermacher’s defence of this novel, coming from the chaplain of the Berlin Charité hospital, was to say the least controversial. It illustrates the largeness and the broadness of the Romantic sense of religion, a force which pervades all areas of life and culture.

19It is therefore not surprising that Hare’s library is strong on what might generally be called ‘religion’ or philosophy of religion. That would extend from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, David Friedrich Strauss, to comparative religion and mythology proper. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu is there in its first edition (Tübingen, 1835), as are various other of Strauss’s works and studies on him; an indication that Hare, while not endorsing the position of George Henry Lewes and George Eliot, was fully aware of the appeal of this kind of critical theology. For the same reason, we find at least one early work by Ludwig Feuerbach (Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, Ansbach, 1837). It is typical of Hare’s thoroughness that, where significant or controversial figures were involved, he assembled memoirs, pamphlets and ephemera, as say in connection with Strauss’s Leben Jesu or after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s and Goethe’s deaths. I have it on good authority that the pamphlet collection on Hegel is extraordinary. Hegelians might also note the presence of an almost complete set of the rare Jahrbücher für Theologie und christliche Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main, 1834–36) which is important for the reception of Hegel.

20Similarly, Schelling, the most influential Romantic philosopher, is present in a wide range of works. We note the first edition of his System der Naturphilosophie (Jena, 1799), and early editions of Philosophie und Religion/Philosophy and Religion (Tübingen, 1804) and Weltseele (third edition, Hamburg, 1809). We recollect that Coleridge annotated his copy of Philosophie und Religion. The various stages of Schelling’s career, from Jena to the secretaryship of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences to the chair at the University of Berlin, from philosophical avant-garde to academic establishment, are recorded faithfully in Hare’s collection of over forty-five volumes. Similar espousals of orthodoxy, Catholic or Protestant, after beginnings in less established spheres, were to be found in other representatives of German religious life of the period. The issue in 1820–25 of the Gesammelte Werke of the brothers Friedrich Leopold and Christian von Stolberg, in the fine edition by Friedrich Perthes in Hamburg, marked the progress of these two noblemen from the Storm and Stress (and association with Goethe) to a dynamic Neoclassicism and to an eventual, and spectacular, conversion to Rome in 1800. Friedrich Stolberg’s name is inseparable from the welter of Romantic conversions to Catholicism after that date. Hare’s set of the Perthes Stolberg is the finest I have seen; but we should not overlook his Geschichte der Religion Jesu Christi (Vienna, 1817–25), an example of Stolberg’s later apologetic work.

21The Romantic sense of an ‘Allseele’, a divine force inspiriting all the manifestations of nature and leading even beyond the world of observed phenomena into the secret and dark and mystical, is well documented in Hare’s books. One of the first volumes one meets on his shelves is Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers (Heidelberg, 1810: the British Library has the only other copy in COPAC), a good example of such scientific speculation; one finds too the ‘classic’ of this persuasion, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden, 1808; three hits in COPAC, which omits Hare), based on the lectures on animal magnetism that so influenced Heinrich von Kleist and appealed to Coleridge. Another author read by Coleridge, Heinrich Jung-Stilling, who moved from his epoch-making pietistic autobiography via spectrology to more conventional Protestant piety, is well represented in a number of later works. A set of Lorenz Oken’s Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte (Leipzig, 1815–16), with its mixture of religious and scientific teleology, is there as might be expected; I have already mentioned the other, rare, items by him.

22In this context, too, one should mention the large and representative collection of the works of Henrich Steffens, a Norwegian who wrote in German, beginning in Schelling’s nature philosophy and moving through a wide spectrum of writing in the period after 1815. Coleridge clearly thought Steffens relatively significant, for the British Library holds three copies of works by him with marginalia; one of these is Die gegenwärtige Zeit (Berlin, 1817), also in Hare’s collection and possibly another item not subject to loan — and annotation! Hare contains three rarer items: Drei Vorlesungen über Herrn D. Gall’s Organenlehre (Halle, 1805) is the only copy listed in COPAC (not in WorldCat), as is Widerlegung der gegen ihn von Schulz erhobenen öffentlichen Anklage (Breslau, 1823; rare outside the UK), whereas Johann Christian Reil (Halle, 1815) is shared with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Several of his fictional works are held in first, single editions. Hare’s collection complements the holdings in Cambridge University Library and together they must represent the most comprehensive collection of Steffens’s works in the country. His highly informative autobiography, Was ich erlebte (Breslau, 1840–44), is a fitting accompaniment to the scientific or apologetic works in Hare’s collection.

23Joseph Görres (later ‘von’) is a similar case from the opposite corner of Germany. Görres’ radical Rhenish conservatism emerges in works like Teutschland und die Revolution (Coblentz, 18l9), held here, as in Cambridge University Library’s Acton collection, in the first edition. His progress from speculation to orthodoxy is recorded, for instance, by the early Aphorismen über Organonomie (Coblenz, 1803; two hits in COPAC besides Hare) and the late Die christliche Mystik (Regensburg, 1836), while his Rheinischer Merkur (Coblentz, 1813–14), from which the rare pamphlet Teutschlands künftige Verfassung is reprinted, represents a response to the political needs of the times.

24Of special interest is Görres’ important early work, Die teutschen Volksbücher (Heidelberg, 1807), which, together with Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (present in the second edition 1808–19), initiates the wave of scholarly and poetic interest by the German Romantics in the folk culture of the past. Another of Görres’s most important works is to be found in a nest of Romantic studies on comparative mythology. As if anticipating Frazer by a century, Hare assembled the key works on this subject, one which was to fascinate equally the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Görres’s Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (Heidelberg, 1810) owes in its turn much to the efforts of the Heidelberg classicist Friedrich Creuzer, whose Symbolik (here in the second, enlarged edition, Leipzig, 1819–23) lays the foundation of the subject. We must however not forget the lesser-known Johann Arnold Kanne, important for his Mythologie der Griechen (Leipzig, 1805; COPAC has four hits), System der indischen Mythe (Leipzig, 1813; otherwise held by the British Library and Trinity College Dublin) and Erste Urkunden der Geschichte, oder Allgemeine Mythologie (Bayreuth, 1815; British Library, London Library, National Library of Scotland besides Hare). No less than ten works by Kanne or associated with him held in Hare are listed in COPAC as sole copies or do not even figure at all, and are generally rare. These are mainly polemical reviews, but two of them are extremely rare novels, Gianetta (Bayreuth, 1809; Hare’s copy not listed in WorldCat, where there are eight hits, including Rice University) and Romane aus der Christenwelt aller Zeiten (Nuremberg, 1817; WorldCat has eight German holdings, plus University of Pisa and Rice University). We see interest in mythology spreading out in all directions among the Romantics: Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel espouse the study of Sanskrit after their sojourns in Napoleonic Paris. In Hare’s collection, Friedrich’s Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (Heidelberg, 1808) is supplemented by August Wilhelm’s edition of the Râmâyana (London, 1823), their friend Tieck having perhaps first given scope to the subject in Romantic circles by allowing the orientalist Friedrich Majer to publish in his short-lived periodical, Poetisches Journal (Jena, 1800, held otherwise by British Library, University College London and Birmingham University). Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie of 1835 turns its interest northwards and takes its place among the comprehensive set of the Grimms’ works brought together by Hare. These titles are however only samples from a total range of books on mythology which extends from Karl Philipp Moritz’s Götterlehre (edition Berlin, 1804) to Sir George Grey’s Poems, Traditions, and Chaunts of the Maories (Wellington, 1853) (see below).

25From mythology and its occasionally heady speculations we move to history proper, one of John Sterling’s ‘three great forms assumed by the genius of the Germans’. A fine complete set of the works of the Swiss historian Johannes von Müller (Tübingen, 1810) and the first collected edition of the patriot and antiquarian Justus Möser (Berlin, 1798) set the tone. The collection of Niebuhr, as might be expected, is hardly inferior to the British Library’s. Where Friedrich von Raumer and Leopold von Ranke are concerned, it would be hard for Hare to compete with the superb assemblage of Cambridge University Library’s Acton Collection; Hare does however hold Ranke’s Ueber die Verschwörung gegen Venedig (Berlin, 1831), not in the British Library, but in the Acton Collection (Cambridge) and Oxford Taylorian; while Raumer’s Adam Smithian Das Brittische Besteuerungs-System (Berlin 1810) is in the British Library, London Library and, not surprisingly, the London School of Economics. Johann Gustav Droysen, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph Schlosser and other German historians are well represented. It is appropriate that a collection rich in Hegel, both by him and about him, should include, as in a rhyming couplet, Friedrich Schlegel, one of Hegel’s most outspoken opponents, with his Philosophie der Geschichte (Vienna, 1829).

26To examine Hare’s books is above all things to become acquainted with German literature and poetry from 1800 to 1850. The German scholar has much to learn from a leisurely shelf-inspection, for they have here the stuff of German literary culture in a way that few institutions, even those richer and larger, may display it. It will do only to point to the main strengths and rarities. The rest can be summarized more or less as follows. Hare did not collect eighteenth-century literature systematically or in early editions. Klopstock, Herder, Johann Heinrich Voss, Johann Joachim Winckelmann even Moritz August von Thümmel, are represented in standard collected editions mainly from the early nineteenth century. For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, however, we have the important biography and remains issued by his brother, K. G. Lessing (Berlin, 1793–95). Even Goethe is not well represented in original editions, but then there are his periodicals, Propyläen (Tübingen, 1798–1800, otherwise only in the British Library) and Kunst und Alterthum (1818–27; also in the British Library). As if to make up for this narrowing of interest to Goethe’s aesthetic and scientific writings (there is, as well, Zur Morphologie of 1817, also in the British Library), Hare assembled well over twenty-five significant items of Goetheana from the period 1832–37, including, as already mentioned, Bettina von Arnim, Carl Friedrich Zelter and Eckermann, but also the earlier Friedrich Karl Julius Schütz on Goethe und Pustkuchen (Halle 1823; also in Cambridge University Library but not in the British Library) and significant works on Goethe reception, like Karl Gutzkow’s Über Goethe im Wendepunkte zweier Jahrhunderte (Berlin, 1836), Heinrich Döring’s life of Goethe (Weimar, 1833), and the much rarer Karl Reck, Goethe und seine Widersacher (Weimar, 1837, British Library and Oxford Taylorian) that so annoyed the surviving Romantics.

  • 24 Documentation on this in Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. by Paul Kluck (...)

27The trio, Jean Paul, Friedrich Hölderlin and Kleist, not properly assigned to Romanticism, is under the circumstances very fairly represented. The forlorn Gedichte (Stuttgart, 1843) are evidence of a Hölderlin yet to be discovered by his fellow-countrymen. Tieck’s edition of Kleist’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1826), pays tribute to ‘unhappy genius’ in the muted generosity of its foreword; while two further editorial undertakings of Tieck’s, Gesammelte Schriften, Von J. M. R. Lenz (Berlin, 1828) and Mahler Müllers Werke (Heidelberg, 1811) commemorate other, in Tieck’s eyes, imperfect talents. The edition of Novalis produced by Friedrich Schlegel and Tieck, here represented by the fourth edition (Berlin, 1826) and containing the influential and hagiographical biography prepared by Tieck for the 1815 edition, brings us by chance to a great curiosity. In 1926, the great scholar-editor Josef Körner announced the discovery in the Austrian National Library in Vienna of a surviving slip of paper produced in 1827 at Friedrich Schlegel’s behest, disclaiming responsibility for the publication of Novalis’s still controversial Die Christenheit oder Europa.24 Unbeknown to scholarship, Julius Hare had had the foresight to have this disclaimer tipped into his own copy of Novalis’s works. By collecting August Wilhelm Schlegel’s and Tieck’s Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1802 (Tübingen, 1802), Hare had already secured the first printing of Novalis’s Geistliche Lieder.

28Jean Paul, as befits the most-read German novelist of his time and one much admired in the English-speaking world (while defying proper translation), has twenty-two works. Only the British Library and the Brotherton collection in Leeds have comparable holdings; indeed, a leading Jean Paul scholar has told me that Trinity’s set of first editions is one of the finest in any public collection. The first edition of his Gothic novel Titan (Berlin, 1800–03) is not rare, but only Leeds has another copy of the Clavis Fichteana, originally conceived as an appendix to it (Erfurt, 1800). There are a further nine first editions of Jean Paul. The political pamphlet Dämmerung für Deutschland (Tübingen, 1809) is COPAC’s sole listing in this form. A curiosity is Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke (Bamberg, 1819; also in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland), with its preface by Jean Paul, duly catalogued in Trinity for generations under the older author. Thus too, the first edition of Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (Berlin, 1815; otherwise, British Library only) used to masquerade under ‘Medardus’, the self-effacing author having put the story’s hero on to the title page. Die Serapionsbrüder (Berlin, 1819), Kater Murr (Berlin, 1820) and Meister Floh (Frankfurt, 1822) are in Hare’s shelf-list at least acknowledged as being Hoffmann’s, and all three are first editions.

  • 25 A check against the catalogue of an exhibition of a hundred ‘very rare’ first editions of German Ro (...)

29The Hoffmann holdings demonstrate that it is with the German Romantics proper that Hare’s German books enter into their own.25 The discerning eye of the collector is everywhere evident. Beginning with periodicals, one of the Romantics’ key fields of disseminatory endeavour, while regretting the surprising absence of the Schlegel brothers’ Athenaeum, we make do with Friedrich Schlegel’s Europa (Frankfurt, 1803) and Concordia (Vienna, 1823, Acton Collection and British Library); Tieck’s Poetisches Journal was already noted above, but not the extremely rare Kynosarges of his brother-in-law, August Ferdinand Bernhardi (Berlin, 1802), not otherwise in COPAC and seemingly nowhere else in printed form. Adam Müller’s and Heinrich von Kleist’s beautiful Phöbus (Dresden, 1808; COPAC also lists Cambridge University Library, the British Library and Manchester) is complete but for Ferdinand Hartmann’s cover engraving of the sun god over the spires of Dresden, doubtless lost in binding. Scholarly periodicals from the years after 1815, some still with Romantic associations, include the Jahrbücher für Phiiosophie und Pädagogik (Leipzig, 1826–30), Hermes (Leipzig, 1819–31), Jahrbücher der Literatur (Vienna, 1818–31), Jahrbücher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik (Stuttgart, 1827–37) and Friedrich Carl von Savigny’s Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin, 1815–45).

30It is Tieck, to whom Novalis wrote that he ‘partakes of every thing I do‘, who seems almost omnipresent in this collection. The Tieck scholar based in either Cambridge or London will find over ninety percent of this enormous oeuvre spread between Trinity, the University Library and the British Library. While the British Library, the fortunate recipient of Tieck’s own association copies, may thank Antonio Panizzi for its particular collection, Cambridge is largely in Hare’s debt. The only major item not in the British Library is Tieck’s almanac Novellenkranz (Berlin, 1831–32, 1834), whereas the British Library has an almost complete set of Urania, of which Hare has the run 1831–35, but few institutions can have finer copies of his other works. The very early Tieck is largely unrepresented, perhaps already unobtainable. We begin with that first outpouring of aesthetic enthusiasm, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Berlin, 1797); and the second (and revised) edition of its sequel, Phantasien über die Kunst (Berlin, 1814). The rare early novel William Lovell is there in its second, much-revised, edition of 1813–14, the only copy in COPAC and one of nine in WorldCat, possibly more, but with none in the USA. His most influential novel, owing much to his dead friend Wackenroder, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Berlin, 1798) is present in the original version, the one to be found under the pillow of every Nazarene artist in Rome and hence also the one excoriated by Goethe. The magnificent Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter, with engravings by Philipp Otto Runge (Berlin, 1803; COPAC lists British Library, London Library Glasgow and Oxford Taylorian), still has a freshness that no reprint can match.

31This is the place to explore other areas so much akin to Tieck’s Minnelieder. Hare and his generation could quite freely speak of ‘the Germans’ as a cultural entity, but without a national core or focus; indeed, Hare lived through the first failed attempt to achieve a German nation, in 1848. Defeats at Napoleon’s hands had earlier galvanized a sense of national identity; the rediscovery of the literary heritage of the Middle Ages could also perform that task in educated and intellectual circles. Thus, August Wilhelm Schlegel, writing in 1812, deemed the Nibelungenlied/The Song of the Nibelungs to be a school of national awareness for the nation’s youth. Tieck had had his part in that process; the first honour goes however to Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen. Hagen’s modernized version of the medieval epic, first published in 1807, is not in Hare’s collection, but a number of similar works by him or by scholarantiquarians of similar persuasion are. Appropriately, we find Eschenburg’s Denkmäler altdeutscher Dichtkunst (Bremen, 1799) representing an older generation that included Lessing and Herder. From the Romantic generation we have, among others, such titles as Johann Gustav Büsching’s Das Lied der Nibelungen (Altenburg, 1815) and Karl Rosenkranz’s later study of it (Halle, 1829), Ludwig Uhland’s Walther von der Vogelweide (Stuttgart 1820) and Büsching’s edition of Hans Sachs (Nuremberg, 1816–24), Hagen’s, Büsching’s and Docen’s Museum für Altdeutsche Literatur und Kunst (Berlin 1809), Hagen’s Der Helden Buch (Berlin, 1811) and Tieck’s Frauendienst (Tübingen, 1812), all relatively rare. The Romantic interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is represented by Tieck’s Deutsches Theater (Berlin, 1817), rare enough in this edition, and Wilhelm Müller’s much less known Bibliothek deutscher Dichter des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1822–31; British Library and an incomplete copy at Oxford Taylorian).

  • 26 Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, III, 232.

32Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not approve of the modernized and, for them, amateurized editions produced by the likes of Hagen or Büsching. It is almost to be expected that Hare, himself a classical philologist of note, should collect up to twenty-three of the Grimms’ works. They include however a beautifully crisp copy of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen of 1819 (not listed in COPAC at all), those famous fairytales standing out as exceptions among the stringent scholarship of so many of the Grimms’ titles, so close as they are to a large section of grammatical and philological works by names ranging from Karl Lachmann to Wilhelm von Humboldt to Franz Bopp. It does not come altogether as a surprise to read of Hare in 1838 proposing to bring Jacob Grimm over to Cambridge26 after he had been dismissed from Göttingen by Queen Victoria’ s brutish and philistine uncle, King Ernest Augustus of Hanover. In the event, Frederick William IV of Prussia pre-empted any such considerations in 1840.

33Neither August Wilhelm nor Friedrich Schlegel would have been content to regard himself merely as scholar or philologist, although their Sanskrit studies have already been alluded to. Neither would on the other hand have considered himself out of place in the company of classical scholars like Karl August Böttiger, Thiersch, Gustav Parthey, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Karl Otfried Müller or Creuzer (all present in Hare). Thus it is interesting to find August Wilhelm’s first published work, of precocious latinity, De geographia Homerica (Hanover 1788; quite rare, but Trinity College, Cambridge, has two copies), as the beginning of an offering of twenty titles extending from Charakteristiken und Kritiken (with his brother Friedrich, Königsberg, 1801; held otherwise by the British Library, Birmingham University and the Warburg Institute) to the highly important translations of Calderón (Berlin, 1809; British Library, Oxford Taylorian and the Warburg Institute) and of Shakespeare, here admittedly in the edition revised by Tieck (Berlin, 1825–33), which caused Schlegel such heartache. With Tieck’s Alt-Englisches Theater (Berlin, 1811) and Shakspeare’s Vorschule (Leipzig, 1823–29), German Romantic studies in Shakespeare are well represented.

34Friedrich Schlegel’s complete works issued in Vienna (1822–25) are in Trinity College, Cambridge, but not in Hare. The sixteen items of Hare’s holdings range from late works such as Philosophie des Lebens (Vienna, 1828) to relative curiosities from his earlier period like the editions from the Old French, Geschichte der Jungfrau von Orleans (Berlin, 1802; otherwise only in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland) and Geschichte der Margaretha von Valois (Leipzig, 1803; only copy in COPAC). The Schlegel brothers’ protege (e) s are also present: Friedrich’s wife Dorothea, with a rare copy of her novel Florentin (Lübeck, 1801; also British Library), Tieck’s sister Sophie von Knorring, with her extremely rare Flore und Blanscheflur, prefaced by August Wilhelm (Berlin 1822; COPAC only lists the British Library’s copy), and his great hope, Wilhelm von Schütz, whose works are also rare and only held by the British Library, Lacrimas (Berlin, 1803), Niobe (Berlin, 1807) and Der Graf und die Gräfin von Gleichen (Berlin, 1807); Der Garten der Liebe (Berlin, 1811) seems only to be in Berlin, Weimar, Göttingen and Erfurt (WorldCat), while Dramatische Wälder (Leipzig, 1821, not the British Library) is more widespread. A curiosity is his much later Catholic apologetic periodical Anticelsus (Mainz and Speyer, 1842–45, also in the British Library).

35The vast oeuvre of Brentano is present in but six samples; they include his edition of Der Goldfaden (Heidelberg 1809) and his Die Gründung Prags (Pest, 1815; COPAC, British Library and London Library). Associated with Brentano and published under his direction, are the works of the stigmatized (and now beatified) nun, Anna Katharina Emmerick. A leading Brentano scholar has told me that Trinity College, Cambridge’s holdings, three volumes bound as one by Hare, are unique in bringing together Emmerick’s Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi (Sulzbach, 1833) and its continuation, Das letzte Abendmahl unsers Herrn Jesu Christi (Sulzbach, 1834), along with the apologetic riposte to Steffens’s attack on Emmerick, Johann Heinrich Pabst’s Ein Wort über die Ekstase (Cologne, 1834). The last two are the only copies in COPAC, whereas the Pabst is otherwise only held by the Diocesan Library in Cologne.

  • 27 Cf. Arnim-Bibliographie, ed. by Otto Mallon (Berlin 1925, reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 79.

36Brentano’s close friend and collaborator, Achim von Arnim, is altogether better represented with ten titles, including first editions of standard works like Gräfin Dolores (Berlin, 1810; COPAC, British Library and London Library), Halle und Jerusalem (Heidelberg, 1811; British Library, London Library and National Library of Scotland; COPAC has not registered Newnham College’s copy), Der Wintergarten (Berlin, 1809; COPAC, British Library and Manchester Central Library), Isabella von Aegypten (Berlin 1812, British Library, London Library, Leeds and Belfast) and Landhausleben (Leipzig, 1826, otherwise in London Library only). A rarity is the first version of the unfinished novel, Die Kronenwächter, published as Berthold’s erstes und zweites Leben (Berlin, 1817; otherwise British Library and Manchester Central Library), and a curiosity is the drama, Der gestürzte Emporkömmling (Ulm, 1824), attributed by Kayser’s Bücher-Lexicon to Arnim, but in reality by an unidentified, anonymous author.27 It is the only copy in COPAC, and WorldCat lists only Berlin (Staatsbibliothek) and Stuttgart (Württembergische Landesbibliothek).

37Madame de Staël, in De l’Allemagne/On Germany, had drawn special attention to the Romantic dramatist Zacharias Werner. It is fair to say that Werner’s reputation in the first decades of the nineteenth century shone as brightly as Hoffmann’s or Brentano’s, certainly Kleist’s. Hare’s collection seems to reflect that esteem, with the result that Trinity has most likely the finest collection of first or early editions of Werner in the country, including three items not in the British Library, Wanda (Tübingen, 1810; other copies in Cambridge University Library, Oxford Taylorian, London Library, Glasgow and Bristol), Cunegunde (Leipzig, 1815; copies in Cambridge University Library, London Library and Bristol) and Nachgelassene Predigten (Vienna, 1836; other copy in Bristol).

38Some modern scholars of Romanticism might — wrongly — regard large holdings of Zacharias Werner as a doubtful asset. Three minor Romantics are however probably more extensively represented than any of their contemporaries: Ernst Moritz Arndt, Fouqué and the Dane (and honorary German) Adam Oehlenschläger. There are personal reasons perhaps for this concentration. According to Crabb Robinson, Arndt was a friend of Hare’s; more likely, he met Arndt in Bonn during his visit to August Wilhelm Schlegel in 1832. Ever a controversial figure, Arndt is covered here at all stages of his career in no fewer than twenty-five works, a good half of these dating from the time of the Wars of Liberation (notably Lieder für Teutsche, n.p., 1813; the British Library also holds this). Eight titles by Arndt are unique to COPAC, and two, E. M. Arndt’s Urtheil über Friedrich den Grossen (Berlin, 1818) and Prinz Victor von Neuwied (Deutschland [=Frankfurt], 1821), have only three and six hits respectively in WorldCat, none outside Germany and not including Hare.

  • 28 Olliers Literary Miscellany, 54–61 (Fouqué) and 90–153 (Oehlenschläger).

39Hare’s own copy of Olliers Literary Miscellany (London, 1820; the British Library has the only other set) gives us in part the answer to Fouqué and Oehlenschläger. For there we have Hare’s own translation of Fouqué’s The Siege of Ancona. A Romantic Idyll, and a major article on Oehlenschläger.28 Tieck, who was dismissive of Oehlenschläger’s drama Correggio (Stuttgart, 1816), is in this collection eclipsed in terms of numbers of works by the Danish writer — a total of over thirty, in both languages. Even Hare’s stated admiration for Fouqué’s Der Zauberring and Sintram can hardly account for the astounding forty-three items by this author, without any doubt the largest set of early editions in the country and possibly anywhere. They range from the earliest, published under the pseudonym of Pellegrin (Zwei Schauspiele, Berlin, 1805), to the late novel, Abfall und Buße (Berlin, 1844). COPAC lists a total of twenty items that are only in Hare. Alexander von Blomberg’s Hinterlassene poetische Schriften (Berlin, 1820), for which Fouqué’s facile pen produced the prologue, the 287-page drama Konrad in Deutschland, leaving Blomberg with a few slender pages of literary remains, is the sole entry in COPAC, with a mere handful in WorldCat. Fouqué is gradually staging a comeback; anyone working on him in this country would be well advised to consult this collection.

40Hare did not confine himself to literary works of a Romantic persuasion but purchased a fair variety of those popularly read in the period 1815–40. A miscellany of titles will indicate this: the assiduous Bavarian courtier and indifferent dramatist Eduard von Schenk (Schauspiele, Stuttgart, 1829–35; British Library, University College Library and National Trust) and the collected works of his royal master, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Gedichte, Munich, 1829). Another royal item is the Dante translation by Prince (later King) John of Saxony (under the pseudonym Philalethes) (Dresden and Leipzig, 1839–40; British Library, University College Library and Manchester), in the rare and handsome first edition, the draft of which had been scrutinized by Tieck, Carl Gustav Carus and Wolf von Baudissin. Literary figures once household names but subject to ephemeral fame are the prose writer Carl Wilhelm Salice Contessa (Schriften, Berlin 1826; otherwise, Queen’s College, Oxford, and University College London) and the dramatists Ernst von Raupach (Dramatische Werke, Hamburg, 1829) and Ernst von Houwald (Die Seeräuber, Leipzig, 1831, sole hit in COPAC) who between them initiated a craze for, respectively, historical dramas on medieval themes and fate dramas. The founding father of the popular fate drama, Adolph Müllner (Vermischte Schriften, Stuttgart, 1824; sole hit in COPAC) joins this company of what are now rarities. Hare was however also aware of other talents, this time in the field of prose. A scarce copy of Carl Friedrich von Rumohr’s Novellen (Munich, 1833; sole hit in COPAC), setting a significant fashion for the Italianate in prose fiction, and a collection of early prose by Willibald Alexis, also now hard to find, are evidence of this. The ever-popular Wilhelm Müller is represented not only by his agreeable verse, but by the exotic Rom, Römer und Römerinnen (Berlin, 1820; British Library, Oxford Taylorian and Leeds University Library). We find on Hare’s shelves also examples from this period of the plain curious. Rumohr, well displayed as an art historian and prose writer, features also as a gastronome in his Geist der Kochkunst (Stuttgart, 1832, under the pseudonym J. König; the only other COPAC copy is in Aberdeen University Library); whereas Gottfried Immanuel Wenzel’s Entdeckungen über die Sprache der Thiere (Vienna, 1800; sole print copy in COPAC) examines the contribution to musicology of dogs and cats. It would, however, be wrong to seize at random on bizarre or seemingly nugatory items in Hare’s collection. For they are indeed in the minority. Next to theology, philosophy and belles-lettres, the critical and aesthetic literature of the period is the most significant item, bearing out Hare’s observation that the Germans had made this discipline into a ‘science’. Thus we find a good sample of names like Karl Rosenkranz, Franz Horn, Robert Prutz, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (notably his Denkwürdigkeiten und Vermischte Schriften, Mannheim, 1837), Tieck’s friend Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (also much admired by Coleridge), Adam Müller, Wolfgang Menzel and Arnold Ruge.

41It may therefore be appropriate to end this — necessarily sketchy — introduction to Hare’s German collection by presenting the text of a letter tipped in to one of his books. A copy of Sir George Grey’s Poems, Traditions, and Chaunts of the Maories (Wellington, 1853) bears a dedication to ‘The Venerable Archdeacon Hare with Sir George Greys regards Septr. 1854’. Apart from his services as colonial governor and administrator, notably in South Australia and New Zealand, Grey is chiefly remembered as one of the first scholars of Polynesian mythology, the preface to his own work of the same name (1854–55) being still a standard text for the nineteenth century’s understanding of ‘primitive’ cultures. The names of Bopp and Bunsen in Grey’s letter make clear the extent to which English-language endeavour in the field of grammar and comparative religion was interwoven with the kind of German scholarship whose eloquent advocate Julius Hare remained all his active life. The letter reads:

42Windmill Hill

43Septr 22nd 1854

44My dear Sir

45I feel very much obliged to you for your kind present of Bopps [sic] comparative grammar which I shall value highly as coming from you; it will be very useful to me, as I made a present of my copy of it, the English translation, to the Chief Justice of New Zealand when I left that Colony. The fifth part of the Grammar has been published, and I can peruse it this evening in London.

46I take the liberty of begging your acceptance of the copy of a work, upon the traditional poetry of the New Zealanders which I have recently published — It will be at least a curiosity in your library, which some of your friends may like to have access ·to, and I think that the preface will interest you — will take out a copy of Bunsens [sic] work which you mention in your note.

47Believe me

48Truly yours

49G Grey.

Postscript 2020

50Revisiting my article of 1987, I realise that Julius Hare was probably the main serious collector in Britain of books on German literature, thought and history between the years 1820 and 1840. The only really comparable collection, that in the British Library, was assembled mainly after 1840 under Antonio Panizzi. Other holdings, such as those in the Brotherton Library in Leeds, the John Rylands Library (now University Library) in Manchester, the Acton collection in Cambridge University Library, the Fiedler collection in the Taylorian Institution in Oxford, or the Priebsch collection, formerly in the old Institute of Germanic Studies and now in the Senate House Library, University of London, are of much more recent provenance. Hare’s achievement lies not only in the breadth of his book collecting, but also in its enduring rarity.

Notes

1 This chapter was originally published in Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 9 (1987), 174–93. Since I wrote this essay, the situation in Cambridge regarding rare German holdings mainly from the Romantic period has changed considerably. The Renouf Collection in Newnham College has been catalogued and made available for scholars. Largely consisting of material relevant to Clemens Brentano and his family, and far less extensive than Hare’s collection, it nevertheless has important overlaps with Hare and also some significant extensions. In addition, the Crewe Collection of rare books and manuscripts, in Trinity College since 2016, contains a small but important number of German items. Whereas in my original version of 1987 I checked titles against the British Library Catalogue and the National Union Catalog, I have now been able to update information on Hare’s collection from COPAC (which has since been replaced by Jisc Library Hub Discover) and WorldCat. I have, however, on occasions noted that neither online source has complete coverage of Hare’s titles. My information on comparative holdings in the UK and elsewhere does not include electronic resources and is restricted to actual original printed copies (not reprints).

2 Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), viii.

3 According to Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, 3 vols (London: Smith Elder, 1884), I, 191.

4 Olliers Literary Miscellany, 4.

5 Letter to Edmund Venables, September 6, 1844, quoted in Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, III, 250.

6 John Sterling, ‘Characteristics of German Genius’, in Essays and Tales, ed. by Julius Charles Hare, 2 vols (London: Parker, 1848), II, 383.

7 Ibid., 384.

8 Ibid., 406.

9 Ibid., 409.

10 The Edinburgh Review (Oct. 1836), xcii, 334.

11 Sterling, ‘Characteristics of German Genius’, 417.

12 Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, I, 429.

13 Ibid., II, 186.

14 Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde. Brücke zwischen England und Deutschland im Zeitalter der Romantik, ed. by Hertha Marquardt and Kurt Schreinert, Palaestra, 237, 249 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1964, 1967), II, 102. On Hare’s dealings with the London bookseller John Henry Bohte, see Graham Jefcoate, An Ocean of Literature: John Henry Bohte and the Anglo-German Book Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms, 2020), esp. 129f.

15 Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life, I, 109.

16 Ibid., 80f.

17 A. P. Stanley, ‘Archdeacon Hare’, The Quarterly Review 97 (June-Sept. 1855), 1–128 (8f.).

18 Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life, I, 484.

19 Cf. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71), IV, 1019.

20 [A. W. and J. C. Hare], Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers (London, New York: Macmillan, 1880), 55, 59, 61, 72.

21 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, IV, 1019.

22 NB: Many of the German titles in this chapter are too esoteric to satisfyingly translate into English, and therefore no translation has been supplied.

23 Ibid.

24 Documentation on this in Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel et al., 6 vols in 7 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960–2006), III, 502.

25 A check against the catalogue of an exhibition of a hundred ‘very rare’ first editions of German Romantic books established that Hare has a quarter of the titles listed. Cf. Deutsche Romantiker. Kostbare Bücher in Erstausgaben. Sammlung aus dem Antiquariat Gunnar A. Koldewey, Düsseldorf (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1979).

26 Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, III, 232.

27 Cf. Arnim-Bibliographie, ed. by Otto Mallon (Berlin 1925, reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 79.

28 Olliers Literary Miscellany, 54–61 (Fouqué) and 90–153 (Oehlenschläger).

Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 27 Bust of Julius Hare by Thomas Woolner (1861). The Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. Photo by James Kirwan. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College.
URL http://books.openedition.org/obp/docannexe/image/24395/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 21k

Acheter

Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search