BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

metaphysics.” 29 Both Madame de Staël, who only “blew away the mists”, and Thomas Carlyle,
“the great apostle of the Teutonic gospel,” won praise for acquainting the British with the merits
of German literature, but runaway enthusiasm for German culture only provoked disparagement:
. . . we will not exchange our classic Edinburgh or our titanic London for any elegant
cabinet city of a Carlsruhe, spread out in courtly elegance like a lady’s fan, on the
foreground stiffly adorned with long Lombardy poplars, while behind some dark sombre
Schartzwald [sic], instinct with robbers and hobgoblins, frowns. The Goethe-maniac and
Kantian apostles of Germanism, may phrase as mystically as they will; we will not
exchange our British soil, where on we walk erect, for any sublime ballooning, devil
knows wither, in the crescent boat of German metaphysics. We will not admit Goethe
into partnership with Shakespeare. 30
In Charles Julius Weber, author of a four-volume “self-portrait”of his own native
Germany, Blackwood’s had found “a brain well stored with curious scraps of book learning, such
as every German must have,” and a “fluent breadth of wit . . . so far as a German can be witty.”
Weber described, “methodically, as a German will,” a Germany that opened up a rich panoply of
stereotypes. He compared cheerful South Germany with the “dreary,” “phlegmatic” and
melancholy North whose inhabitants, like their “stepmother Nature” are “serious, monotonous,
unfriendly, unwieldy, colder, more watery, more sandy . . . not cheerful, merry, and
communicative, like the sons of the southern hills—without wine, without harp and song.”
Weber’s comments on German national character, which the Blackwood’s reviewer found
“particularly edifying,” painted the disarming image of a kind-hearted, earnest people who
enjoyed an increased longevity due to purer morals (shades of Tacitus) and described the typical
German as “earthy” and “not so nimble, merry and witty as the Frenchman . . . not so proud,
whimsical and dry as the Briton; not so lazy, bigoted, and miserly as the Italian: but a plain
29 “Germany,” Blackwood’s, 119-20.
30 Ibid., 122-23.
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