[1] Weld was the author of several anti-slavery books which had considerable influence at the time. Among them are The Bible against Slavery (1837), American Slavery as It Is (1839), a collection of extracts from Southern papers, and Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the U.S. (1841).
GRIMM, FRIEDRICH MELCHIOR, Baron von (1723-1807), French author, the son of a German pastor, was born at Ratisbon on the 26th of December 1723. He studied at the University of Leipzig, where he came under the influence of Gottsched and of J. A. Ernesti, to whom he was largely indebted for his critical appreciation of classical literature. When nineteen he produced a tragedy, Banise, which met with some success. After two years of study he returned to Ratisbon, where he was attached to the household of Count Schönberg. In 1748 he accompanied August Heinrich, Count Friesen, to Paris as secretary, and he is said by Rousseau to have acted for some time as reader to Frederick, the young hereditary prince of Saxe-Gotha. His acquaintance with Rousseau, through a mutual sympathy in regard to musical matters, soon ripened into intimate friendship, and led to a close association with the encyclopaedists. He rapidly obtained a thorough knowledge of the French language, and acquired so perfectly the tone and sentiments of the society in which he moved that all marks of his foreign origin and training seemed effaced. A witty pamphlet entitled Le Petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda (1753), written by him in defence of Italian as against French opera, established his literary reputation. It is possible that the origin of the pamphlet is partly to be accounted for by his vehement passion[1] for Mlle Fel, the prima donna of the Italian company. In 1753 Grimm, following the example of the abbé Raynal, began a literary correspondence with various German sovereigns. Raynal’s letters, Nouvelles littéraires, ceased early in 1755. With the aid of friends, especially of Diderot and Mme d’Épinay, during his temporary absences from France, Grimm himself carried on the correspondence, which consisted of two letters a month, until 1773, and eventually counted among his subscribers Catherine II. of Russia, Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland, and many princes of the smaller German States. It was probably in 1754 that Grimm was introduced by Rousseau to Madame d’Épinay, with whom he soon formed a liaison which led to an irreconcilable rupture between him and Rousseau. Rousseau was induced by his resentment to give in his Confessions a wholly mendacious portrait of Grimm’s character. In 1755, after the death of Count Friesen, who was a nephew of Marshal Saxe and an officer in the French army, Grimm became secrétaire des commandements to the duke of Orleans, and in this capacity he accompanied Marshal d’Estrées on the campaign of Westphalia in 1756-57. He was named envoy of the town of Frankfort at the court of France in 1759, but was deprived of his office for criticizing the comte de Broglie in a despatch intercepted by Louis XV. He was made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire in 1775. His introduction to Catherine II. of Russia took place at St Petersburg in 1773, when he was in the suite of Wilhelmine of Hesse-Darmstadt on the occasion of her marriage to the czarevitch Paul. He became minister of Saxe-Gotha at the court of France in 1776, but in 1777 he again left Paris on a visit to St Petersburg, where he remained for nearly a year in daily intercourse with Catherine. He acted as Paris agent for the empress in the purchase of works of art, and executed many confidential commissions for her. In 1783 and the following years he lost his two most intimate friends, Mme d’Épinay and Diderot. In 1792 he emigrated, and in the next year settled in Gotha, where his poverty was relieved by Catherine, who in 1796 appointed him minister of Russia at Hamburg. On the death of the empress Catherine he took refuge with Mme d’Épinay’s granddaughter, Émilie de Belsunce, comtesse de Bueil. Grimm had always interested himself in her, and had procured her dowry from the empress Catherine. She now received him with the utmost kindness. He died at Gotha on the 19th of December 1807.
The correspondence of Grimm was strictly confidential, and was not divulged during his lifetime. It embraces nearly the whole period from 1750 to 1790, but the later volumes, 1773 to 1790, were chiefly the work of his secretary, Jakob Heinrich Meister. At first he contented himself with enumerating the chief current views in literature and art and indicating very slightly the contents of the principal new books, but gradually his criticisms became more extended and trenchant, and he touched on nearly every subject—political, literary, artistic, social and religious—which interested the Parisian society of the time. His notices of contemporaries are somewhat severe, and he exhibits the foibles and selfishness of the society in which he moved; but he was unbiassed in his literary judgments, and time has only served to confirm his criticisms. In style and manner of expression he is thoroughly French. He is generally somewhat cold in his appreciation, but his literary taste is delicate and subtle; and it was the opinion of Sainte-Beuve that the quality of his thought in his best moments will compare not unfavourably even with that of Voltaire. His religious and philosophical opinions were entirely negative.
Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique ..., depuis 1753 jusqu’en 1769, was edited, with many excisions, by J. B. A. Suard and published at Paris in 1812, in 6 vols. 8vo; deuxième partie, de 1771 à 1782, in 1812 in 5 vols. 8vo; and troisième partie, pendant une partie des années 1775 et 1776, et pendant les années 1782 à 1790 inclusivement, in 1813 in 5 vols. 8vo. A supplementary volume appeared in 1814; the whole correspondence was collected and published by M. Jules Taschereau, with the assistance of A. Chaudé, in a Nouvelle Edition, revue et mise dans un meilleur ordre, avec des notes et des éclaircissements, et où se trouvent rétablies pour la première fois les phrases supprimées par la censure impériale (Paris, 1829, 15 vols. 8vo); and the Correspondance inédite, et recueil de lettres, poésies, morceaux, et fragments retranchés par la censure impériale en 1812 et 1813 was published in 1829. The standard edition is that of M. Tourneux (16 vols., 1877-1882). Grimm’s Mémoire historique sur l’origine et les suites de mon attachement pour l’impératrice Catherine II jusqu’au décès de sa majesté impériale, and Catherine’s correspondence with Grimm (1774-1796) were published by J. Grot in 1880, in the Collection of the Russian Imperial Historical Society. She treats him very familiarly, and calls him Héraclite, Georges Dandin, &c. At the time of the Revolution she begged him to destroy her letters, but he refused, and after his death they were returned to St Petersburg. Grimm’s side of the correspondence, however, is only partially preserved. He signs himself “Pleureur.” Some of Grimm’s letters, besides the official correspondence, are included in the edition of M. Tourneux; others are contained in the Erinnerungen einer Urgrossmutter of K. von Bechtolsheim, edited (Berlin, 1902) by Count C. Oberndorff. See also Mme d’Épinay’s Mémoires; Rousseau’s Confessions; the notices contained in the editions quoted; E. Scherer, Melchior Grimm (1887); Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. vii. For further works bearing on the subject, see K. A. Georges, Friedrich Melchior Grimm (Hanover and Leipzig, 1904).
[1] Rousseau’s account of this affair (Confessions, 2nd part, 8th book) must be received with caution.
GRIMM, JACOB LUDWIG CARL (1785-1863), German philologist and mythologist, was born on the 4th of January 1785 at Hanau, in Hesse-Cassel. His father, who was a lawyer, died while he was a child, and the mother was left with very small means; but her sister, who was lady of the chamber to the landgravine of Hesse, helped to support and educate her numerous family. Jacob, with his younger brother Wilhelm (born on the 24th of February 1786), was sent in 1798 to the public school at Cassel. In 1802 he proceeded to the university of Marburg, where he studied law, a profession for which he had been destined by his father. His brother joined him at Marburg a year later, having just recovered from a long and severe illness, and likewise began the study of law. Up to this time Jacob Grimm had been actuated only by a general thirst for knowledge and his energies had not found any aim beyond the practical one of making himself a position in life. The first definite impulse came from the lectures of Savigny, the celebrated investigator of Roman law, who, as Grimm himself says (in the preface to the Deutsche Grammatik), first taught him to realize what it meant to study any science. Savigny’s lectures also awakened in him that love for historical and antiquarian investigation which forms the basis of all his work. Then followed personal acquaintance, and it was in Savigny’s well-provided library that Grimm first turned over the leaves of Bodmer’s edition of the Old German minnesingers and other early texts, and felt an eager desire to penetrate further into the obscurities and half-revealed mysteries of their language. In the beginning of 1805 he received an invitation from Savigny, who had removed to Paris, to help him in his literary work. Grimm passed a very happy time in Paris, strengthening his taste for the literatures of the middle ages by his studies in the Paris libraries. Towards the close of the year he returned to Cassel, where his mother and Wilhelm had settled, the latter having finished his studies. The next year he obtained a situation in the war office with the very small salary of 100 thalers. One of his grievances was that he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform and pigtail. But he had full leisure for the prosecution of his studies. In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he was appointed superintendent of the private library of Jerome Buonaparte, king of Westphalia, into which Hesse-Cassel had been incorporated by Napoleon. Jerome appointed him an auditor to the state council, while he retained his other post. His salary was increased in a short interval from 2000 to 4000 francs, and his official duties were hardly more than nominal. After the expulsion of Jerome and the reinstalment of an elector, Grimm was appointed in 1813 secretary of legation, to accompany the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army. In 1814 he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of the books carried off by the French, and in 1814-1815 he attended the congress of Vienna as secretary of legation. On his return he was again sent to Paris on the same errand as before. Meanwhile Wilhelm had received an appointment in the Cassel library, and in 1816 Jacob was made second librarian under Völkel. On the death of Völkel in 1828 the brothers expected to be advanced to the first and second librarianships respectively, and were much dissatisfied when the first place was given to Rommel, keeper of the archives. So they removed next year to Göttingen, where Jacob received the appointment of professor and librarian, Wilhelm that of under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and diplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented on the Germania of Tacitus. At this period he is described as small and lively in figure, with a harsh voice, speaking a broad Hessian dialect. His powerful memory enabled him to dispense with the manuscript which most German professors rely on, and he spoke extempore, referring only occasionally to a few names and dates written on a slip of paper. He himself regretted that he had begun the work of teaching so late in life; and as a lecturer he was not successful: he had no idea of digesting his facts and suiting them to the comprehension of his hearers; and even the brilliant, terse and eloquent passages which abound in his writings lost much of their effect when jerked out in the midst of a long array of dry facts. In 1837, being one of the seven professors who signed a protest against the king of Hanover’s abrogation of the constitution established some years before, he was dismissed from his professorship, and banished from the kingdom of Hanover. He returned to Cassel together with his brother, who had also signed the protest, and remained there till, in 1840, they accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia to remove to Berlin, where they both received professorships, and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Not being under any obligation to lecture, Jacob seldom did so, but together with his brother worked at the great dictionary. During their stay at Cassel Jacob regularly attended the meetings of the academy, where he read papers on the most varied subjects. The best known of these are those on Lachmann, Schiller, and his brother Wilhelm (who died in 1859), on old age, and on the origin of language. He also described his impressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing his more general observations with linguistic details, as is the case in all his works.
Grimm died in 1863, working up to the last. He was never ill, and worked on all day, without haste and without pause. He was not at all impatient of interruption, but seemed rather to be refreshed by it, returning to his work without effort. He wrote for the press with great rapidity, and hardly ever made corrections. He never revised what he had written, remarking with a certain wonder of his brother, “Wilhelm reads his manuscripts over again before sending them to press!” His temperament was uniformly cheerful, and he was easily amused. Outside his own special work he had a marked taste for botany. The spirit which animated his work is best described by himself at the end of his autobiography. “Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments.”