Mrs. Adams in Winter by Michael O'Brien

Author:Michael O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374215811
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Leipzig to Eisenach

(From Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting the Great Post Roads, Physical and Political Divisions of Europe [London: A. Arrowsmith, 1810]. The Arrowsmith map indicates no direct road from Erfurt to Eisenach, though such a road did exist in 1815)

It was customary for American and other visitors to call upon the last survivor of classical Weimar, for Goethe was politely hospitable and liked to talk, and this was one of the seasons (winter and spring) when he was in residence. In earlier years, the illuminati of Weimar had been so much vexed by travelers that the poet Christoph Wieland once received Nikolai Karamzin with great coldness and felt it necessary to explain himself. “It has become a fashion in Germany to travel with no other view than that of publishing ones travels,” he said. “These travelers, whose number is not small, go from one town to another, and endeavour to introduce themselves to celebrated persons, only with the intention of afterwards printing what they hear from them.” This was not a game played by Mrs. Adams and it was generally true that women played the game less often. Further, her acquaintanceship with German intellectual culture was intermittent. When in Prussia, her husband had acquired a reading knowledge of German, collected a good working library of German literature, and even translated Wieland’s Oberon, Friedrich von Gentz’s Origins and Principles of the American Revolution, and several of Christian Gellert’s fables. Among the two hundred German titles John Quincy Adams owned, works by the luminaries of Weimar (Goethe, Schiller, Herder) were conspicuous. But for lack of funds, Mrs. Adams had taken no German lessons when earlier in Berlin, nor did she seem to read translations of German works, for there are very few references to German authors in her letters, diaries, and miscellaneous writings. (A Gothic poem of hers in the late 1830s mentions Goethe and Schiller, but glancingly.) To be sure, she did reluctantly attend the German theater, so she had some acquaintance with various plays by Klop-stock, Kotzebue, and the rest. Nonetheless, for a woman who read widely in English and French literature, she was mostly indifferent to the German, beyond the indirect influence upon her of its partiality for ghosts, hobgoblins, and guilt.73

More relevant to how she might have behaved in Weimar is that, though she cared for books, she seems to have cared little for meeting authors. In 1804, for example, she read Madame de Staël’s Delphine with fastidious disapproval—”the language is most beautiful but the morals appear to me detestable”—but when the Swiss lady passed through Saint Petersburg in 1812, her husband went to call but Mrs. Adams did not. Any number of authors crossed her path— Thomas Moore, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall—but she seldom responded to them as authors. Later in life, she ran the nearest thing to a salon that Washington possessed, but it was a social and not an intellectual salon, however much she was willing to talk about her reading with whoever was interested.

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