BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

literature.” 86 Nevertheless, a typical review of German literature at the close of the eighteenth
century expressed, at best, a polite condescension:
The German works which have faintly aspired to the name of genius have not yet been
tried by the voice of time; and such are the remaining marks of barbarism and prolixity (the
latter a most unclassical defect), that it will probably be long before Germany shall produce
a classical author, admitted like those of England, France, Spain, and Italy, into universal
fame. In short, we admire the Germans merely as disciples, but cannot venerate them as
masters; nor can candour abstain from a smile, when a German critic pronounces the
dictates of his own imperfect taste upon the works of more enlightened nations. 87
Such lofty contempt for things German anticipated similar attitudes found in later articles on
national character and other subjects far removed from literature.
Because the admirers of German letters seem to have been much less outspoken than the
critics, caution must be exercised in judging the reception of German literature solely on the
basis of the reviews. If Crabb Robinson seems like a lone voice, however, it may reflect the fact
that some of the major writers of his generation influenced by German literature—Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Scott, Southey and Lamb—defy definition as a Germanophilic “school.” They may
have admired Germany, as did many of their contemporaries, in reaction to France and
Jacobinism, but their German influences often proved to be superficial and their Germanophilia
only lukewarm. 88 Coleridge’s interest in German philosophy, especially Kantian, led him to live
86 From “German Literature. By a gentleman resident in one of the most popular of the
German universities,” The Monthly Register and Encyclopedic Magazine 1 (1802): 397, quoted
in Morgan, British Magazines, 55. Robinson, lived in Weimar, knew Goethe, Schiller and
Wieland, and joined the group of English literary Germanophiles following Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Lamb, Liegh Hunt and De Quincey. See Mander, German Cousins, 31-32.
87 From a review of Wilhelm Render’s Tour Through Germany (London: Longman, 1801)
in the Critical Review (December 1801), quoted in Stokoe, German Influences, 44.
88 Mander, Our German Cousins, 126. Stokoe, German Influences, 86-87, 114, discusses
both the rather specialized interests of Scott and Wordsworth’s, “insularity,” or distance from
175