SEUME AND THE ENGLISH
61
since the age of eighteen, and despite his unfortunate early experi-
ence with them, he apparently felt little resentment to the indi-
vidual Briton.
The more surprising is the fact that he, as far as we almost
definitely know, never set foot on English soil. In his autobiog-
raphy, to be sure, he writes on his return to Europe after the con-
clusion of the American War of Independence: “We lay anchored
off Deal in the Downs for a short period of time, and some of us
were permitted to go on land; this, therefore, was the whole of
my stay in old England, and hardly worth mentioning” (W, I, 96).
The wording is so vague that one can assume that he was not one
of the favored few. Again, in 1805, shortly before setting out on
his northern tour, he writes to Hartknoch, his publisher, “Since
things aren’t quite peaceful in England right now, I shall walk to
St. Petersburg.”12 These statements, at least, indicate his interest
in a visit to England which, however, never came to pass.
As for the Revolutionary War, from which his acquaintance
with the English dates, Seume, the convinced democrat, never had
a good word for it. In the Spaziergang he refers ironically to his
experiences in the American war with the words, “. . .where I had
the honor of helping the king lose the thirteen provinces” (W, I,
236). In Mein Sommer 1805 (Leipzig, 1806), discussing the fi-
nancial basis of the British state, he writes similarly : “This active
and passive commercial spirit is less damaging only foi* individual
Britons ; but nevertheless to their discredit ; and their armies have
had a taste of the consequences from the hands of Washington.
[In English :] ‘To buy and to sell is the soul of their wisdom’ ” (W,
III, Il).13 Again, in discussing the policy of Catherine II with re-
gard to the banishment of political malcontents to provinces this
side of the Ural Mountains, he writes that one could “indeed fear
with sufficient reason, that upon some change in the government
the provinces will play the role of the American British colonists”
(W, V, 226). The fact, too, that just before the signing of the
Treaty of Versailles he was ready and willing to escape from the
English to the American lines, indicates where his sympathies lay.
Referring to his republican sentiments, he writes in the Introduc-
tion to the Spaziergang : “One may think it strange, that a man,
who twice took the field against liberty, should talk in this fashion.
The solution of this puzzle is not difficult. Destiny has pushed me
along . . .” (W, I, 157). It is the aim of the following remarks to
observe more closely part of the workings of this destiny on Seume
during his Hessian service at home and abroad.