Word: eckermann
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Conversations with Eckermann" is a Boswellian work in which the true personality of Goethe is presented by means of an assiduous recording of his conversations and actions on the part of the humble Eckermann. As in Boswell Eckermann consciously plays the fool at times in order to set off the admirable qualities of his subject. However he rarely intrudes his own personality into the work and the reader is left with a feeling of intimate acquaintance with the man Goethe. The republication of a long inaccessible volume on a man of such a rich and varied character as that...
...Testament he says: "One might hesitate to liken it to any modern work of the first credibility, such as Boswell's Johnson or Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe, but it is certainly quite as sound as Parson Weems' Life of Washington or Uncle Tom's Cabin." His concluding remarks are a typical piece of Menckenian irony: he describes a hanging he once reported, at which the Baptist prisoner loudly recited the 23d Psalm while the sheriff and the hangman were busied with the final preparations; the fall of the drop cut short the prisoner...