In 1827, Thomas Carlyle, already the translator of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, was invited by Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, to 'Germanise the public'. Jeffrey issued the invitation cautiously, even negatively, asking Carlyle to temper his enthusiasm for 'your German divinities' - an enthusiasm he could scarcely understand, let alone share. Indeed, two years earlier Jeffrey had reviewed Carlyle's Meister translation, censoring the work as 'eminently absurd, puerile, incongruous, vulgar and affected'. Carlyle fulfilled the task set him by his amused, semi-reluctant editor with the influential essay 'The State of German Literature'. As a result of this and other articles on German literature, Carlyle became the most celebrated Germanist of his age. It was Carlyle, as G.H. Lewes acknowledged in his Life of Goethe (1855), 'who first taught England to appreciate Goethe'.

LRB 19 March 1981 | PDF Download