the one man in Europe who might have helped him most in his work on
the history of religion, died in Weimar on 18 December 1803, just four
days after Constant’s arrival. Nevertheless throughout his stay of two and
a half months Constant worked for many hours each day on his unfinished
book on religion. On 5 January 1804 the couple were introduced to the
Court and met Schiller. Either then or shortly after they also met Wieland,
and Madame de Staël was able to report to her father: ‘Wieland told
Benjamin that I was the person whose genius in both writing and speaking
had impressed him most in his whole life.’^55 There were visits to the
theatre, suppers, balls, conversations with historians and philosophers,
French play readings at Court, there were even open lectures to attend:
Constant’s spirits rose and he became generally good-humoured. He too
was much appreciated—in the end considerably more so than Germaine
whose overbearing questioning of literary figures could be exhausting.
Through Karl August Böttiger (1760–1835), director of the Weimar
Gymnasium, the couple were introduced to Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–
1867), an English lawyer who was a friend of both Schiller and Goethe,
and an expert on Goethe’s thought.
We are exceptionally well informed on the later part of Constant’s stay in Weimar
because on 22 January 1804 he began a series of diaries or journaux intimes which were
to run for the next three years.^56 They contain frequent references to chapters of his book
on religion now being completed or revised in Weimar, ideas found in his reading of
Herder that had helped him in discussing the relationship between religion and ethics—
now the real subject matter of his book: they also contain this important observation on
German attitudes to religion, written on 4 February 1804: ‘In Germany the Protestant
religion becomes each day more a matter of feeling than an institution: no forms, no
symbols, nothing obligatory, almost no ceremonies, only gentleness in its ideas and a
morality based on feeling.’^57 This perception would become a central one in De la
religion many years later, where Protestantism is presented as the highest point of
perfection so far reached by mankind, both in its morality and in its lack of priestly
authority or coercion.
In the midst of his patient labours on obscure musty tomes devoted to such recondite
subject matter as fetishism in Greenland, Egyptian animal worship and Zoroastrianism,
Constant also found time to record in his journal the gradual change in his attitude to
Goethe. The first mention in the diary, ‘Seen Goethe’, is dated 23 January,^58 although
they may have met earlier than this. They had dinner together on 27 January, when
Constant commented ‘Difficulty of having any conversation with him. What a pity he has
been swept away by the mystical philosophy of Germany’.^59 After this unpromising start
they had an ‘interesting conversation’ on 15 February about Homer and the Greek
classical painter Polygnotus on whom Goethe was working,^60 and the following day:
‘Quite remarkable supper with Goethe. He is a man full of wit, outbursts of high spirits,
profundity, new ideas. But he is the least good-natured man I know.’^61 Shortly before
leaving Weimar he spent the evening of 28 February with Goethe and Schiller and had
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