50
RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
in buying his freedom for eighty thalers late in 1787 or the begin-
ning of 1788.
He returned to Leipzig, received his M.A. in philology in 1792,
went to Warsaw as a tutor and became secretary to General Count
Igelstrom, the governor of Russian-occupied Poland, with the rank
of lieutenant in the Russian service. He was captured by the Poles
who staged their unsuccessful rebellion under Kosciusko in 1794
and released after Suvarov took Warsaw. From 1797 until the
autumn of 1801 he stayed in Grimma, working as a proofreader
for Georg Joachim Goschen (1752-1828) on the new Klopstock
and Wieland editions. In 1801 he left for Sicily on foot, publishing
the famous travelogue in 1803 which made him famous. In 1805
he set out on another tour, mostly on foot, to Russia and back
through Scandinavia, giving an account of it in 1806, which only
served to enhance his reputation. In 1810 he died in Teplitz, Bohe-
mia.
Seume, the democrat, the foe of privileges of any group within
the state (W, IV, 160 ff.), looked at the English with mixed feel-
ings. He realized that as far as social and political institutions
were concerned, they were greatly superior to the rest of Europe.
But as far as his ideal of a democratic republic was concerned, they
failed to reach it. In addition, as a German citizen and patriot who
defined his era as the shame of his people (W, IV, 223), he would
at one time admire and at another hate England. One is thus faced
with a duality of attitude in Seume’s approach to England which it
would be well to remember.
The portrait of Seume, done by his friend Veit Hans Schnorr
(1764-1841), which faces the title page of the Hartknoch edition
of his works (W, I, i), indicates how impressive his face was:
thin, with searching eyes under bushy brows, and a long slender
nose. That he had a striking face is not only attested by a remark
of Herder to Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867),9 but also by
Goethe.10 Even more revealing is the sentence in the Spaziergang
where Seume writes with apparent enjoyment that often he was
taken for an Englishman on his trip : “I could protest as much as I
wanted in Southern Italy and in Sicily and insist on my German-
ness, I was still Signor Inglese and Eccellenza: and the bill was
made out accordingly” (W, II, 137). Similarly, in what is prob-
ably one of his last letters (to Tiedge, Leipzig, May 16, 1810) he
described himself as the “knight of the τvoful [sic] countenance.’’11
But Seume did not only look like an Englishman, he had been in
touch with Englishmen, more so than many of his compatriots,