ecclesiastical government, it may be praised in its present state as a mild, decent, and tranquil system, exempt from the dangers of a minority, the sallies of youth, the expenses of luxury, and the calamities of war.'*

Rome, during the long interlude which fills up the later seventeenth century and all the eighteenth, had, on the surface, changed from a city of blood and romance to an open-air drawing-room, frequented by artists and by noblemen making the grand tour. The Villa Medici brings back those days with its garden-walks and fine over-arching trees, a company of foreign students or pilgrims to the picture galleries moving about in its halls. Baracconi speaks of the world which used to meet there a gay and indolent people, delicately occupied in gracing the comic stage; he regrets, says Mr. Crawford, the gilded chairs, the huge built-up wigs, the small-sword of the "cavalier' servente," and the abbe's silk mantle, the semiplatonic friendships, the jests borrowed from Goldoni... the exchange of compliments and madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train.' It was Venice in Rome, or Rome à la Pompadour, not the terrible tragic city which had seen within itself all the sorrows of the ages and the nations. But when Gibbon praised its tranquillity, the hour of revolution was mounting to the Capitol. Perhaps in Madame de Staël's 'Corinne' we get the liveliest picture of a dilettante Petrarchan society, which was in love with decadent art, and which practised a style no less florid than frivolous, though sometimes quickened by sallies of passion. However, the drop scene was already loosened; as it rattled down, the leisured eighteenth century made its exit to the sound of Bonaparte's artillery.

From the new Empire, from the Code Napoléon, from the awakening of national sentiment, from the rule of Prince Eugene at Milan, the Papal Government now took its deadly hurt. The Ghibelline idea revived, but in a form which had nothing Teuton or Transalpine. Bishops in Germany laid down their sceptres; the modern State swallowed up their lands and cities; the Pope alone survived as a temporal prince. How long? was the question. Attacked but not overthrown, his power lasted down to 1848 in presence of the old Republican dreams, which saw in Rome a separate and sovereign community. Had no alternative to those dreams appeared, he might be reigning still. But the philosopher and statesman, Gioberti, had, in his Risorgimento,' raised the cry, famous on many battle-fields, of 'Savoya'; he pointed to the heroic house, not

6

* Ibid., 259, 262.

† Crawford, i, 265.

perhaps Italian, yet always patriotic, which had defended the Alps and drawn its sword against the Austrians with unconquerable chivalry. The ideal that had floated before Rienzi's imagination was fixed in a definite and taking shape, modern or constitutional, but all the more attractive to men who were sick of the past, who detested the Middle Ages, and who were indignant at the thought of Italy as having been too long a museum, a picture-gallery, and an operatic stage. Freedom, which the Romans aspired after, was surely identical with progress, the aim of Italians in Lombardy, Piedmont, and the Duchies, if not in Naples or Sicily. The adventure was begun; a page of extraordinary boldness in design and colouring was added to the ancient chronicles. Guelf and Ghibelline, it might be said after 1870, had yielded at last to the Genius of Rome.

Public tragedies and sword-play without end traverse the Middle Ages of Rome, leaving everywhere a blood-stained footstep. But from Clement VII, after the Constable de Bourbon took the city in 1527, we follow through its palaces and streets the tragedies of households: Vittoria Accoramboni and the Orsini, Cardinal Caraffa and his accomplices, Alessandro and Piero Mattei, Beatrice Cenci, and so many others, whose story is the wildest tissue of jealousy, revenge, avarice, murder-of crime associated with fine manners and the highest dignities. Such tales were the scandal of English travellers, the quarry of the English playwright under Elizabeth and James. They stirred the curiosity of Montaigne; they provoked in Voltaire the pessimism which exhales from Candide.' One might imagine a breath of old Rome, a moral malaria, coming up out of the ruins of those grim palaces where the Cæsars tortured their victims, or from the amphitheatres which degraded sport into a thirst for human suffering beheld at ease. Forum, Palatine, Capitol are the Roman Bible, open at its most suggestive but forbidding pages. It is a Pagan city which holds within it, captive yet not subdued, the Christian spirit—a contrast so amazing that neither Tacitus nor Machiavelli could do justice to the philosophy which would exhaust its significance. The 'imperial Latin intellect' has been ever joined with a violence which affects us as though it were superhuman. And to complete the paradox, this Rome has been the world's law-giver.

Stern, colossal, unspeakably sad in her aspects to men of the North, she has still a charm that draws them, not now in the train of a Charles the Great or a Barbarossa, but with undiminished strength and sweetness. If this charm could be

resolved into its elements perhaps it would come to an end. It is not history alone; for of the countless travellers who visit the city in these hurrying days but few are acquainted with its classic reminiscences, fewer still with the confused and dismal records of its Middle Age. Nor is it religion alone, since it was felt by Goethe, and even conquered Hawthorne, whose 'Transformation' often serves as a guide-book to pilgrims from the States. It is something very great and high-the sense of history, religion, art, romance, all in one-an old world yet visible in its monuments, an escape into dreamland from the sordid present. Above all it is the vague instinctive feeling of innumerable generations summed up in Rome, their ambitions for this world, their aspirations towards the nextand all this extant in churches, streets, palaces, gardens, triumphal arches, mountains of crude brick, tombs, pillars, gateways, walls, at every turning, and in a second city under ground-that first overpowers and then by imperceptible degrees fascinates the stranger now, as it did the ambassadors of Pyrrhus some twenty-two centuries ago. If the past abides in the present, and, as philosophers tell us, is its necessary condition, then Rome, above all other cities, deserves to be called the Eternal. For in its monuments and its institutions has been realised the story of mankind. Take it away and history would possess no centre, the nations no memories in common. It is Greek, Latin, Etruscan, Hebrew, German, Gaul, in its origin or associations; Italian also, in a certain large sense, but still more European the World-City. Its governing ideas of Republic, Empire, Papacy, have by no means run their course. Regarded politically, it is the most modern of capitals, as for Christendom and civilisation it has long been the most ancient; and, having survived countless revolutions, it is at once the tomb of antiquity and the living teacher of age after age.

ART. III.-1. Goethes Werke. Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Eighty-four vols. (incomplete). Weimar: Böhlen, 1887-99.

2. Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Werke. Von A. Baumgartner. Second edition. Three vols. Freiburg: Herder, 1885-86. 3. Goethe. Von Richard M. Meyer. Second edition.

vols. Berlin: Hofmann, 1898.

Three

4. Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Werke. Von Albert Bielschowsky. Second edition. Vol. I. Munich: Beck, 1899. 5. Gedanken über Goethe. Von Victor Hehn. Second edition. Berlin: Bornträger, 1888.

6. Goethe Reviewed after Sixty Years. By J. R. Seeley. London: Seeley and Co., 1894.

7. New Studies in Literature. By Edward Dowden. London: Kegan Paul, 1895.

8. Essai sur Goethe. Par Édouard Rod. Paris: Perrin, 1898. 9. Goethe und die Romantik. Briefe mit Erläuterungen. Herausgegeben von C. Schüddekopf und O. Walzel. Vol. I. Weimar Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1898.

NONE

ONE among the great writers of the world's literature has his time been the object of a deeper reverence, a more passionate worship than Goethe; yet none, on the other hand, has been so often doubted, so often repudiated, even held up to scorn. His compatriots have lately celebrated, with much pomp and fervour, the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth; but in the world outside Germany the occasion has passed comparatively unnoticed. It is, indeed, one of the peculiar characteristics of Goethe's genius that later generations seem continually to have felt the necessity of revising their judgments of it. We hardly find a similar attitude towards any other of the world's greatest men. Such poets as Dante and Shakespeare have, it is true, had their periods of depreciation or indifference, but that was because the critical theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries refused to acknowledge that genius might be, in Schiller's phrase, 'naive' as well as 'sentimental.' Once, however, such an æsthetic principle was admitted, the hierarchy of literature established itself in accordance with it; for, it is, after all, theories rather than individual tastes which decide such matters. Some of us moderns may turn from Homer or Dante to other poets who appeal more to us personally, who have a more immediate message for us, but we do not think of questioning their greatness. With Goethe, however, it seems otherwise; theoretical objections to a high

estimate of his genius there are none, and yet, again and again throughout the century, thinking men have felt the necessity of putting to themselves the questions, Was Goethe really so great? Is he still great? And, if so, wherein consists his peculiar greatness?' A glance cast over the vast library of literature which, in the course of the last sixty years, has sprung up round Goethe's work and personality will show example after example of such re-estimations. Similarly, in the life of every individual who has once fallen under Goethe's spell there comes a day when he says to himself, 'Is Goethe really all to me that I have believed him to be, or am I taking his greatness on trust?'

Amongst ourselves, for instance, the late Sir John Seeley felt 'that the time is come to revise altogether the estimate of Goethe which we have received from the last generation,' and the volume of suggestive essays collected under the title 'Goethe Reviewed after Sixty Years' may be taken as his own contribution to such a revision. Sir John Seeley made no claim to be a specialist in the subject: while his admiration for Goethe is great and frankly expressed, he regards Goethe as a philosopher rather than a poet, as the creator of a theory of life rather than as a supreme literary artist; but the book is a good example of the attitude of the cultured Englishman of our time towards Germany's greatest poet. To take another case, it is not very long since Professor Dowden alarmed the faithful by assuming the role of 'Devil's Advocate' against Goethe. His article, The Case against Goethe,' was another example of the questioning attitude of the present generation. Professor Dowden approached the subject from an unusual side; he hoped to stimulate a revision of current opinions by placing himself in the position of an adversary. Let us,' he said, 'promote the faith with the aggressive zeal of scepticism, and Goethe will acknowledge us as friends from whom he need not desire to be saved.'

The most notable attempt, however, at what might be called, in Nietzsche's phrase, an Umwertung der Goethe'schen Werte, is M. Édouard Rod's Essai sur Goethe.' M. Rod is a distinguished member of the little band of French cosmopolites who, in the pages of the 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' have fought so effectually against the intellectual exclusiveness of their nation; moreover, his years of academic apprenticeship in the University of Geneva brought him into more intimate touch with les littératures du Nord' than is usual among French critics. M. Rod's study of Goethe has evidently sprung from motives similar to those which prompted Sir John Seeley's