IN the 1880s and 1890s Newman wrote on a broad range of subjects in the freethought press including religion and society, science and scientific method, literary criticism and music. With the exception of music, the freethinkers regarded these topics as the most pressing of the time. Newman's essays on religion and society, as well as science and scientific method, were infused with the parlance of positivism and evolutionary theory. These connections were also made in his literary criticism, though Newman's emphasis was to analyse plot, narrative and character. His musical criticism, showing a strong interest in Wagner, aesthetics and opera, brought Newman high praise. However, his talent as a literary critic was called into question, and this resulted in an ugly and dramatic confrontation with his employer and mentor John M. Robertson.

Newman got his break as a writer in September 1889 in the National Reformer, the leading intellectual freethought journal of its time. He had met the journal's editor, Charles Bradlaugh, the month before. Newman proceeded to write about twenty pieces for the National Reformer (and related periodicals) over the next four years.

Essays for the National Reformer, 1889–1894

The National Reformer was first published on 14 April 1860. It focused on politics and government ‘which it discussed in the sober terms of a respectable review’. John M. Robertson became one of its assistant editors in 1884 and, on the death of Bradlaugh in January 1891, was elevated to editor. He took Newman under his wing and provided him with opportunities for publication.

During his term, Robertson did much to turn the National Reformer into a high-end journal rivalling such publications as the Westminster Review but, with increased competition and declining subscriptions, it ceased trading in 1893. Originally pitched to a working-class readership, by the time of its demise the National Reformer had become a heady and intellectual publication that claimed to attract the ‘pick’ and ‘elite’ of the working classes.

The National Reformer gave Newman a platform on which he could push the freethought agenda, though most of his writings were preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, a study of some of these early essays reveals that Newman was exceptionally well read and had developed a capacity for a direct and sometimes combative turn of phrase, which was a hallmark of much of his later work.

In the life of Frederick Delius, 1907 was a momentous year. It has been called his annus mirabilis on account of the explosion of interest his music enjoyed in England. Also seen in the light of his connections to Norway, it was for the composer a transitional period, but for very different reasons. Norwegian friends such as Halfdan Jebe and Christian Sinding were moving out of his life and now Edvard Grieg, the artist whose music represented for Delius the irresistible pull of Norway, was gone. For the development of his career in the foreseeable future, only Germany and England mattered. With his success in England, the process that had been going on since Folkeraadet of redefining his relationship to Norwegian society was at an end. Hereafter, Delius would look to Norway for neither a professional network nor an audience.

This notwithstanding, Norway's place at the core of his creative life would become more secure than ever, through the persistent importance to him of Norwegian nature, and of the Norwegian folk character that thrived between the mountains. Indeed, in 1908–?the year after the English breakthrough – we see him driven by a compulsion to show his new English friends exactly where he found much of the inspiration for his works, where his creative spirit was renewed: in the light of Norway's summer nights, and in the loneliness of Jotunheimen's mountain plateaus.

Delius devoted the first half of 1908 to composition and to trips to England and Germany to hear his works, including the premiere of A Mass of Life in Munich. It was probably while in London in March that Delius spent some time with the renowned Norwegian cabaret singer Bokken Lasson. At the end of April she sent him tickets for her upcoming London concert and hoped that ‘you have not quite forgotten me’.2 By then, Delius was back in Grez and could not make use of them.

REFLECTING on her experience hosting Allied troops in Cape Town during the war, Lucy Bean described a whirlwind of social activities and romance:

Bean was one of the founders of the South African Women's Auxiliary Service (SAWAS), which organised more than 60,000 volunteers to host visiting Allied troops. Her account captures the heightened atmosphere of wartime Cape Town and its often-overlooked strategic role in the Allied war effort. Like many other Anglo-South Africans, however, Bean's reminiscence of this time before the isolations of apartheid is nostalgic, glossing over the social conflicts caused by the arrival of so many Allied troops during the war.

Though often seen as peripheral to the war effort, the Union of South Africa became a transportation hub, a centre for military training and the staging ground for the invasion of Vichy-held Madagascar. The war brought millions of Allied servicemen to South Africa, along with thousands of refugees, prisoners-of-war and civilians. With the Mediterranean route largely closed to the Allies owing to the threat of the Italian fleet, German U-boats and land-based Axis bombers, the port cities of South Africa saw a tremendous increase in shipping for three years from 1940 until the invasion of Italy in 1943. More than 400 troop convoys carrying six million Allied servicemen en route to destinations including North Africa, India and the Pacific and close to 50,000 Allied ships passed through South Africa during the war. South African ports also served as repair stations for Allied ships, especially after the loss of Singapore, repairing more than 13,000 vessels.

ACCORDING to Jacques Le Goff, the use of the word purgatorium, ‘purgatory’, as a noun appeared somewhere between 1160 and 1180, giving rise to the idea of purgatory as an actual place. Although some have challenged this contention, Le Goff's premise, particularly in connection to the spatial arrangement of the medieval afterlife, is an important basis for any examination of purgatorial strategy. Le Goff suggests that European culture underwent a shift from seeing the world as a series of binary structures to tripartite ones. Theologically, ‘people began to speak of the medium (mediocriter) good or medium wicked’, instead of the wholly good or wholly wicked, thus creating a category of people who needed both the cleansing of purgatorial fires and the intercession of others to escape such, and elaborate bookkeeping metaphors to keep track. Still, theologians did not officially define the doctrine of purgatory until the thirteenth century. Defined clearly or not, however, medieval people were generally taught that purgatory was a period in which the soul passed from death to salvation, and a place where sins were expunged by every kind of physical torment before final redemption. As such, it was both a temporal state and a physical state. Indeed, while officially the suffering endured in purgatory stems from the separation of the soul from God, the difficulty in comprehending the ineffable led to descriptions of purifying flames and other torments. And, because purgatory was inevitable, preparation for intercession, especially through reciprocal obligation such as friendship, grew in importance.

Allusions to purgatory begin cropping up in early Middle English literature, even before being formally named as such. For instance, Cate Gunn notes that ‘Vices and Virtues, a Middle English dialogue between the soul and Reason … written at the turn of the thirteenth century … does not contain any mention of purgatory, but it does refer to purgatorial cleansing and the possibility that the suffrages of the living can aid the dead.’ However, the first known reference in English to purgatory as a noun meaning ‘a place or condition of temporal punishment for the spiritual cleansing after death of souls destined for heaven’, occurs in the thirteenth-century anchoritic guidance text, Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 402).

In the opening chapter of Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities, 1809) Charlotte positions Eduard in her newly finished “Mooshütte” or summer- house in such a way “daß er durch Türe und Fenster die verschiedenen Bilder, welche die Landschaft gleichsam im Rahmen zeigten, auf einen Blick übersehen konnte” (“so that through windows and door he could oversee at a glance the different views, in which the landscape appeared like a sequence of framed pictures”). In expressing his admiration for the instantaneous overview, Eduard nevertheless includes the detractor: “Nur eines habe ich zu erinnern … die Hütte scheint mir etwas zu eng” (“my only criticism … would be that one is … a little cramped here”). With his discomfort, Eduard also expresses an awareness of himself and his own position in relation to these framed landscape views. His feeling of being hemmed in is a visceral, bodily response, marking a departure from a manner of viewing which had only recently disconnected the act of seeing from the self, the physical body, and one's location in the world.

Many readers of Goethe's novel have commented on how its activity is largely comprised of shaping spaces, both directly, and indirectly through conversations and reflections on these projects. Whether through landscaping and re-landscaping the castle grounds, planning and positioning new buildings for the most panoramic views, comparing the merits of the new style of English garden with its attendant lack of borders and boundaries against the strict geometry of the older generation, surveying and mapping the premises, or capturing the many sights with the aid of the camera obscura, the characters are extensively engaged in the creation, visualization, and manipulation of space. In this essay I propose to look in the other direction: not at the activity of landscaping or the objects it creates, but at the way landscape viewing in the novel frequently turns the focus back to the subject, positioning her or him in relation to the scene. In line with the significance of maintaining, establishing, and occasionally breaking relationships in the text and title of the novel, this relationship between viewer and scene is often more clearly defined and filled out than the scenes themselves. In the example above, the series of views Eduard takes in from the Mooshütte remain completely blank, and readers only see a series of empty frames.

Mitte Februar 1774 schreibt Goethe an Sophie von La Roche: “Nach Düsseldorf kann und mag ich nicht, Sie wissen dass mirs mit gewissen Bekandtschafften geht wie mit gewissen Ländern, ich könnte hundertjahre Reisender seyn ohne Beruf dahin zu fühlen.” Düsseldorf ist bekanntlich der Wohnsitz des ehemaligen Kaufmanns, Hofkammerrats und “homme de lettres” Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi und zeitweilig auch der seines Bruders Johann Georg Jacobi, die Goethe als repräsentative Vertreter der Empfindsamkeit wahrnimmt und die er in der verloren gegangenen Farce “Das Unglück der Jacobis” (1772) verspottet hatte. Die öffentliche Darstellung der Gefühle, wie sie im publizierten Briefwechsel von Johann Georg Jacobi und Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim zum Ausdruck kommt, findet Goethe “prätenziös” und auch in den von Merck herausgegebenen Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen, an denen Goethe mitarbeitet, werden die empfindsamen Kreise um Gleim kritisch behandelt. Trotzdem kommt es im Sommer 1774 während Goethes zweiter Rheinreise zu einer Annäherung der beiden Gegenpole, die in eine langjährige Freundschaft münden wird. Aufgrund der Vermittlung von Frauen im Umkreis Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis, zu denen Goethe in Frankfurt Kontakt hatte, wie Sophie von La Roche, Johanna Fahlmer und Betty Jacobi ändert Goethe seine Haltung, und so findet am 22. Juli 1774 in Elberfeld bzw. Düsseldorf eine erste Begegnung zwischen Goethe und Jacobi statt, die für beide in vielerlei Hinsicht folgenreich werden sollte. Im Folgenden möchte ich mich auf die Anfangsjahre 1774 bis 1780 der über 40-jährigen freundschaftlichen und doch zugleich spannungsreichen Beziehung konzentrieren. Es soll gezeigt werden, wie zwischen Goethe und Jacobi eine enge freundschaftliche Verbindung aufgenommen wird und welche Rolle neue mündliche und schriftliche Kommunikationsformen (Geselligkeit und Briefkultur) dabei spielen. Dabei wird sich erweisen, dass Goethe und Jacobi aktiv an der Empfindsamkeitskultur der Zeit teilnehmen, die ihnen aber auch problematisch wird, und dass daraus Anregungen zu produktiver, literarischer Gestaltung entstehen.

Beginnen möchte ich zunächst mit der Skizzierung des geselligen Kreises im Hause Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in Düsseldorf, das man mit Ulrike Weckel als “offenes Haus” bezeichnen kann. Dieser zwischen privater und öffentli cher Sphäre angesiedelte Ort wurde zu einem intellektuellen Anziehungspunkt für viele literarisch–kulturell Interessierte, Schriftsteller und Gelehrte in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts.

Der Kontext

Die provokante Frage “War Goethe ein Mohammedaner?” stellte Manfred Osten im Jahre 2002 in der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung. Er schaltete sich damit in eine Debatte ein, die durch die Ereignisse des 11. September 2001 ausgelöst worden war. Dass diese Frage in Zeiten, in denen unter dem Eindruck zunehmender Migration und Fremdenfeindlichkeit erbittert darüber gestritten wird, ob der Islam zu Deutschland gehöre, eine neue Aktualität gewonnen hat, zeigt ein Essay von Martin Walser aus dem Jahre 2016, in dem dieser die Lektüre von Ostens Aufsatz empfiehlt. Osten, der als Goethekenner und -liebhaber einen guten Ruf hat, weist in seinem Artikel auf Goethes Hymnus Mahomets Gesang (1772/73) und vor allem auf den West-östlichen Divan (1819) hin. Er betont nicht nur die “Modernität” von Goethes Islam- Verständnis, sondern auch den Mut, mit dem sich der Dichter gegen islamfeindliche Tendenzen in seiner Zeit gestellt habe: “Goethe setzte sich mit dem ‘West-östlichen Divan,’ seiner Reverenz an den Orient, bewusst dem Verdacht aus, selbst ein ‘Muselmann’ zu sein” (Osten, “Islam”). In diesem Zusammenhang erinnert Osten an das Standardwerk der in den USA lebenden Germanistin Katharina Mommsen über Goethe und die arabische Welt (1988), dessen “kulturpolitische Bedeutung” (Osten, “Islam”) weitgehend unbemerkt geblieben sei: “Nach den Ereignissen des 11. September 2001 scheint es geboten, auf dieses bahnbrechende Werk erneut hinzuweisen” (Osten, “Islam”).

Hinter der Frage Ostens scheint unausgesprochen die politische Debatte über das Verhältnis zwischen dem ‘Orient’ und dem ‘Okzident’ auf, die Edward Said mit seiner Studie Orientalism (1978) angestoßen hat und deren Rückwirkungen sich bis heute in den verschiedensten Wissenschaftsdisziplinen beobachten lassen. Saids Behauptung “The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” hat dabei vor allem den postcolonial und gender studies weltweit Auftrieb gegeben. Sie ist jedoch nicht unwidersprochen geblieben und hat unter dem Eindruck des 11. September zur Ausbildung eines Konzeptes von Okzidentalismus geführt, in dem Saids Hegemonie-These produktiv gewendet wurde, um das Verhältnis von ‘Ost’ und ‘West’ als einen wechselseitigen Prozess von stereotypen Zuschreibungen, Verkennungen und Überschätzungen zu charakterisieren. In diesem Zusammenhang hat auch Goethes Divan erneute Aufmerksamkeit gefunden.

NEITHER fame nor fortune would come Newman's way if he published solely in the freethought press. The demise, reinvention and ultimate failure of the National Reformer, followed in quick succession by the shortlived Free Review, indicated a limited readership for freethought journals, and Dobell's loss-making ventures on books such as Gluck and the Opera were not sustainable. To survive as a writer, Newman had to find a more stable and mainstream avenue of publication.

Newman's foray into the mainstream press occurred in 1895 (the same year in which Gluck and the Opera was published) with an essay on Flaubert in the December issue of the Fortnightly Review, a liberal periodical of arts and letters. Although Newman wrote for multiple publications throughout his career, 1900 to 1920 was a particularly gruelling period because he juggled an extremely heavy workload. In 1905, for example, he issued a collection of his previously published essays, Musical Studies, and between 1904 and 1920 wrote seven books and issued a further collection of his own essays. Journals and newspapers for which he wrote included, but were not limited to, the Speaker (1901–1906), Weekly Critical Review (1903–1904), Manchester Guardian (1905–1906), Birmingham Daily Post (1906–1919), Musical Times (1910–1923), New Witness (1915–1918) and the London Observer (1918–1920). By anyone's standard, Newman was extremely busy. A consequence of all this industry, however, is that Newman covered the same material in many articles in order to buy time, though he rarely recycled an article in full.

The topics on which Newman wrote varied, as did his tone and style of writing, depending upon the publication and audience for which his work was pitched. For example, in the Speaker, a liberal weekly founded in London in 1890 (changing its name to the Nation in 1907), Newman wrote in a formal tone unaffected by the belligerence and wit evident in some of his work in the provincial press. The same is true for Newman's articles in the Weekly Critical Review, a French–English arts journal published in Paris in 1903–4 as a literary expression of the entente cordiale that sought scholarly essays from leading French and English critics.

IN The Development of Family and Marriage in Europe, Jack Goody argued convincingly that no purely patrilineal descent groups have existed in Europe in the post-Roman period. While the inheritance system favoured males, it was bilateral in essence. Allocating a dowry or dower or direct inheritance rights to property were a means of transmitting patrimonial property to women. Land has been of great importance for ordinary farmers in the past. The line, however, has not, as among the aristocracy, been viewed as descent through males only, from a more or less mythical ancestor. The essential kinship group was the immediate family, including parents, children, siblings and their offspring, and/or relations that had taken up residence and contributed to the work of the family group.

The consequence of such an approach was that, in the absence of a son, land could be inherited by a daughter. If the family had both sons and daughters, the daughters and younger sons would be provided with dowries that could be removed to wherever the child took up residence at marriage. The property available for a woman at widowhood, therefore, depended on how much she was given or inherited initially and what risks to such property arose from her marriage. In addition, her economic status was naturally affected by how much of her husband's property she could lay claim to.

The economic position of women was affected, on the one hand, by conceptions of the patrimony, the family property, and, on the other hand, by notions of male hegemony within marriage. While most fathers firmly believed in male authority over women, many were suspicious of other men meddling with their family property. The inheritance was there for the daughter and grandsons, who were of the same blood, not for the son-in-law, who had a different family background.

Family, Property, Husband and Wife

The question of how far property was to be united in marriage was an issue that already concerned the ancient Romans. By the early imperial period the dowry of the wife was no longer transferred to her husband's family.

In the year following Folkeraadet, Delius's career stagnated. He nurtured a dream of finding the key that would open the musical life of London, in particular an opera house that would stage Koanga. For the time being he lacked the resources that a prolonged promotional campaign in London would cost him. A new opera project based on the short story ‘Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe’ by Gottfried Keller had ground to a halt because Keary, his librettist for Koanga, could not work up any enthusiasm for it. In a period with little direction or continuity in his career, and still encouraged by the publicity Folkeraadet had brought to his name, it is unsurprising that Delius should have sought new theatre commissions.

In the spring of 1898, the book of Helge Rode's new theatrical piece, Dansen gaar (The Dance Goes On), was published in Copenhagen. It was a study of the struggle for genuine love and art and of the obstacles placed by daily life in the way of these ideals. The drama is played out around the figure of Aage Volmer, a painter, and Klara, the daughter of an industrialist, who secretly get engaged, despite Klara's father having negotiated for her a union with a nouveau riche aristocrat. Volmer's speeches about love and art seem to float on a cloud of aestheticism, distanced from the world. Shortly after its publication, two of Helge Rode's closest friends found much in it that spoke directly to their sensibilities: Edvard Munch and Fritz Delius. Indeed, Rode had mirrored a metaphysical ideal that was a common denominator in the creative lives of all three friends – poet, painter and composer. Volmer tells Klara:

When Aage Volmer describes the work he intends to paint, he depicts love as a state of ecstasy binding the lovers both to nature and to death:

One of the many hats donned by Goethe's Faust is that of Biblical translator and exegete. After his repudiation of scholarly learning, the chorus's strains of the ‘süßen Himmelslieder’ [sweet heavenly voices] halt his suicide attempt and reawaken his childhood Christian faith. Irritated by the growling poodle after his Easter walk, he turns to the opening verses of St John's Gospel in the first ‘Studierzimmer’ [study] scene and attempts to translate the ‘sacred original’ into German:

The result is a Sturm und Drang creative reworking and reinterpretation: ‘Im Anfang war die Tat!’ [In the beginning was the deed!] (l. 1237). This inadvertently exorcises the demon, effects Mephistopheles’ appearance – and abruptly concludes Faust's sole ‘scholarly labour’ and foray into translation.

One of the most translated works in world literature, Goethe's Faust, and especially Faust I, has spawned countless adaptations into different genres and media. An early hybrid and intermedial art form, opera is one of adaptation's earliest beneficiaries, and Gounod's Faust one of the most popular in the operatic repertoire. Mephisto's mocking of Faust moments after meeting Gretchen: ‘Ihr sprecht schon fast wie ein Franzos’ [‘you are almost talking like a Frenchman’] (l. 2645) was thus to prove prophetic.

Goethe's Faust as Intertext and in Translation

If culture is, as George Steiner proposes, ‘the translation and rewording of previous meaning’, and the text, in the words of Roland Barthes, a ‘tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’, then Goethe's Faust is an exemplar. Itself an adaptation of the Faust legend from the older chapbooks, it reworks other material, spinning a web of allusions and intertextual relations.