The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (Pantheon Books) - Jacob Grimm [365]
The remarkable fact is that the Grimm brothers never developed their idea; they began with it full blown, as young students hardly out of law school. Jacob, browsing in the library of their favorite professor, the jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny, had chanced on a selection of the German Minnesingers, and almost immediately their life careers had stood before them. Two friends, Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim, who in 1805 had published, in the Romantic manner, the first volume of a collection of folk song, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, gave the brothers valuable encouragement. Jacob and Wilhelm assisted with the later volumes of the Wunderhorn, and began collecting from their friends. But at the same time, they were seeking out, deciphering, and beginning to edit, manuscripts from the Middle Ages. The book of fairy tales represented only a fraction of their immediate project. It would be, as it were, the popular exhibition hall of an ethnological museum: in the offices upstairs research would be going forward, which the larger public would hardly wish, or know how, to follow.
The program proceeded against odds. In 1806 the armies of Napoleon overran Kassel. “Those days,” wrote Wilhelm, “of the collapse of all hitherto existing establishments will remain forever before my eyes.… The ardor with which the studies in Old German were pursued helped overcome the spiritual depression.… Undoubtedly the world situation and the necessity to draw into the peacefulness of scholarship contributed to the reawakening of the long forgotten literature; but not only did we seek something of consolation in the past, our hope, naturally, was that this course of ours should contribute somewhat to the return of a better day.” While “foreign persons, foreign manners, and a foreign, loudly spoken language” promenaded the thoroughfares, “and poor people staggered along the streets, being led away to death,” the brothers stuck to their work tables, to resurrect the present through the past.
Jacob in 1805 had visited the libraries of Paris; his ability to speak French now helped him to a small clerkship in the War Office. Two of his brothers were in the field with the hussars. Just after his mother’s death, in 1808, he was appointed auditor to the state council and superintendent of the private library of Jerome Buonoparte, the puppet king of Westphalia. Thus he was freed from economic worry, but had considerable to do. Volume one of the Nursery and Household Tales appeared the winter of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow (1812); two years later, in the midst of the work on volume two, Jacob was suddenly dispatched to Paris to demand restitution of his city’s library, which had been carried away by the French. Then in 1816, after attending the congress of Vienna as secretary of legation, he was again dispatched, to reclaim another treasure of books. He found the predicament not a little awkward. The librarian, Langlès, seeing him studying manuscripts in the Bibliothèque, protested with indignation: “Nous ne devons plus souffrir ce Monsieur Grimm, qui vient tous les jours travailler ici et qui nous enlève pourtant nos manuscrits.”
Wilhelm was never as vigorous and positive as Jacob, but the more gay and gentle. During the years of the collection he suffered from a severe heart disorder, which for days riveted him to his room. The two were together all their lives. As children they had slept in the same bed and worked at the same table; as students they had had two beds and tables in the same room. Even after Wilhelm’s marriage to Dortchen Wild, in 1825, Uncle Jacob shared the house, “and in such harmony and community that one might almost imagine the children were common property.” * Thus it is difficult to say, with respect to their work, where Jacob ended and Wilhelm began.
The engraved portraits of the brothers reveal two very good looking