Elective Affinities contains an inset Novelle, ‘The Wayward Young Neighbours’, which exhibits the characteristics of the form on a small scale, and the reader will notice the typical Novelle atmosphere: the absence of names, the strict economy of means, the unnaturalistic action, and so on, and also the fact that the story is narrated, that it is concerned with an event the narrator has heard about and not invented, and that it has implications of which he is unaware.

Now the point of expounding all this is to show that Elective Affinities not only began life as a Novelle, but remained one, that it differs from the classic Novelle only in respect of length. And the point of emphasizing that fact is to warn the reader in advance what kind of narrative to expect, so that when he finds it does not proceed as a novel usually proceeds he will not experience any discomfort or suppose the work to be an unsuccessful attempt at a form which is in fact not being attempted at all.

The narrative style is characterized by a strict economy; the characters are functions of the plot, and their characteristics are those demanded by the furtherance of the plot; they are given only forenames (Eduard, Ottilie, Charlotte), or titles (the Captain, the Count, the Baroness), or professional names (the schoolmaster, the architect, the gardener), or in one case an ironic surname (Mittler); the setting is not naturalistic and the scenes in which the action takes place (the mansion, the village, the moss-hut, the pavilion, the park, etc.) also possess a symbolic function; the action itself is not naturalistic, it contains elements not susceptible to rational explanation, and it proceeds in a more orderly and symmetrical way than one would expect in a novel. Most important of all, it is narrated, not directly by the author, but by a narrator who is also an invented character, although he never appears. It may well be that Goethe chose to tell his story in the form of an expanded Novelle precisely in order that the reader should assume the existence of a narrator who is repeating something he has learned of but does not necessarily fully understand – a technique which makes possible the mystery and ambiguity underlying the action and permits the employment of an ironical tone without committing the author himself to an ironical view of that action.

3

The term Wahlverwandtschaft was a technical term of eighteenth-century chemistry, the German translation of a coinage of the Swedish chemist Torbern Olof Bergmann (1735–84) in the title of his book De attractionibus electivis (1775), first put into German by Heinrich Tabor in 1785. The English form, elective affinity, is closer to the original Latin than the German form and, although not self-explanatory, probably cannot be improved upon. Its meaning is described in the fourth chapter of Part One of Elective Affinities and need not be repeated here. What should be emphasized here, though, is its extraordinariness as the title of a novel. It is as if a contemporary novelist should call his book The Principle of Verifiability or E Equals MC Squared. The emotional and romantic connotations which the term subsequently acquired derived from the novel to which it was attached: at the time of the novel’s publication, Wahlverwandtschaft was a term used solely in chemistry.

Goethe was conscious of the risk involved in prefixing such a title to the book, and in an advertisement published in Cotta’s Morgenblatt on 4 September 1809 he sought to explain that ‘this strange title’, which ‘it seems was suggested to the author by his continuing work in the field of physics’, was a ‘metaphor in chemistry’ whose ‘spiritual origin’ the novel would demonstrate. But this statement was altogether inadequate and was subsequently forgotten or frankly disbelieved: the almost universal view being that the book was intended to demonstrate the chemical origin of love. Such a thesis would, of course, be an immoral one, and Elective Affinities was generally charged with being an immoral book. Goethe was no stranger to such charges, but he was especially annoyed that they should be levelled at this particular work, for which he had an exceptional affection, and he angrily rejected every suggestion there was anything whatever in it that could be called reprehensible. Eventually he lost all patience with a stream of criticism that must to us today seem incredibly insensitive and pettifogging, and when his old friend Knebel started making moral objections to the novel he exploded: ‘But I didn’t write it for you, I wrote it for little girls!’ – which I take to be an assertion that the book is altogether wholesome and romantic and that only a moralizing old man could find anything in it to object to.

4

The story’s origin was clearly, as already suggested, the conflict between Goethe’s idea of marriage, the currently accepted idea of it, and the passions with which neither idea seems able to cope. But when he expanded it to its present size, Goethe also took the opportunity to embody in it a criticism of more of current society than its marriage customs, so that Elective Affinities is often referred to as primarily the earliest German social novel. The ironic tone already bestowed upon the narrator proved very useful in this regard, enabling the author to paint a very unflattering portrait of his contemporaries without having to resort to explicit denunciation.

The society we meet in the novel is that of the German countryside at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Three-quarters of all Germans lived on and by the land, and towns were still small and far apart. In this milieu there were three social classes: the nobility, who owned the land and occupied the leading positions in the army and the civil service; the ‘people’, who were still for the most part peasants; and between these two extremes the ‘middle class’, i.e. the professions. The two latter classes were mainly engaged in working for the first. There was almost no social discontent: everyone knew his place and kept to it.

When the members of the landed nobility were not engaged in military or governmental activities they were idle, and it is in this state of idleness that the aristocrats of Elective Affinities are usually found. How they fill up their time is the subject of much of the narrative. Their activities vary very widely, but they are all characterized by the expenditure of a large amount of energy for what are at best inadequate results. The narrator leaves us in no doubt about what he thinks of Luciane and her crowd, and his sarcasm is particularly biting when he comes to describe their one attempt at artistic creativity: that this should be the reproduction of famous paintings as tableaux vivants speaks for the footling nature of their cultural interests. But it is a question whether he is very much more sympathetic towards the indubitably more useful occupations of the leading characters. What comes through, I think, is that, even when engaged in landscape gardening, the design and construction of a new building, or the improvement of the village, they are for the most part playing amateurishly at these things without any real objective except the consumption of time and the avoidance of boredom. The influence on these occupations of the periodical celebration of birthdays, and the very considerable additional effort and expenditure devoted to these celebrations, would give the game away if it had not been given away already.

The worst effect of this comfortable idleness in which they exist is, however, that which it exercises on their emotional lives: the emotional turmoil into which Eduard and Charlotte are thrown by the introduction into their home of two fresh faces is, according to contemporary testimony, in no sense a figment of the novelist’s imagination but, on the contrary, almost the normal thing. It is not only their hands and minds that are under-occupied, their nerves and vital spirits are so too, and any occasion for bringing them into activity is likely to be seized upon. It is at this point, where idleness undermines marriage, that Goethe’s social criticism and his romantic plot join forces.

December 1969

R.J.H.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

EDUARD was the name of a wealthy baron in the prime of life and he had been spending the best hour of an April afternoon in his orchard nursery grafting new shoots he had just obtained on to the young trees. He had just finished and he was putting the tools back in their case and looking with satisfaction at the work he had done when the gardener came up. He was very pleased to see how interested and busy the master was.

‘Have you seen my wife about?’ Eduard asked him, about to move off.

‘She is over in the new park,’ the gardener said.