book: his object has been to bring order and clearness into his own convictions.

'It has seemed to us,' he says, 'that the moment has come when we must re-read the chief works of Goethe with the aid of the principal documents which elucidate them, re-read them in a spirit of criticism, that is to say, with as much freedom as possible from the judgments that have already been passed upon them. We must understand their significance for their author and for ourselves; we must estimate their importance for the literature which followed them... If the expression were not presumptuous, we should say that we propose to re-open the case of the great Goethe, withoutneed it be said ?-imagining that our judgment will be final, but merely endeavouring to bring it into harmony with the spirit that inspires his works.'

To be frank, however, M. Rod's book, in spite of its promising programme, shows rather the limitations of the French mind with regard to the esprit allemand than the limitations of Goethe. Much that M. Rod here puts forward is not new; still more is merely beating the air. To begin with, M. Rod will find few to agree with his method of criticism when he applies to Goethe's work the criteria of modern realism. He dwells, for example, with disapproval upon the discrepancies between Goethe's 'Goetz von Berlichingen' and the historical Goetz; he cavils at 'Werther' because it is not more autobiographical than it is; he dismisses 'Tasso' because it does not give a truthful picture of the real Tasso and the real Ferrara in short, he reviews Goethe's masterpieces 'comme s'ils venaient de paraître hier.' Such a method is obviously just neither to Goethe nor to M. Rod's public. What would M. Rod himself say to a critic who ventured to discuss Corneille, or Chateaubriand, or even George Sand, in this spirit? Nor has he approached Goethe with that freedom from bias which is essential to all such revisions. Au cours de ces études,' he says, 'je me suis quelquefois irrité contre cet homme dont la supériorité eut tant de faiblesses.' This, in a word, seems to us the weak side of the book: behind its arguments there is too often a feeling of irritation.

Such examples indicate to some extent the attitude of foreign criticism towards Goethe at the present time, and they are corroborated by the comparative rarity with which Goethe is nowadays quoted or appealed to as an authority in France or England. Outside Germany, the world is plainly settling down to an opinion of the poet which is considerably more sober than that of the earlier decades of this century. Not only Carlyle and Lewes, but Matthew Arnold and Edmond Scherer

represent a standpoint with regard to Goethe which, for better or worse, we have left behind us. In other words, he seems for us already to have passed into the classical retirement of those poets and thinkers whose message has no longer any immediate bearing on modern life. In Germany, on the other hand, a directly opposite movement has set in within recent years. Not that the detractor is absent even there; indeed, by far the most formidable attack upon Goethe's fair name and position is contained in a German work-which M. Rod has evidently honoured with a close study-the 'Life' of Goethe by A. Baumgartner. This careful and genuinely original book, in which a member of the Society of Jesus takes the part of counsel for the prosecution, has not only beneficially stimulated the study of Goethe, but has appreciably freed German criticism of him from indiscriminate eulogy.

The present attitude of the Germans as a nation towards Goethe is an element in the evolution of the new Empire which no observant student can afford to overlook. At no time in the history of Germany, not even in the wild years of fermentation, when, with such lordly generosity, Goethe flung out masterpieces like 'Goetz' and Werther' into 'the seed field of time,' has the poet been held in such high esteem by his people as he is to-day; at no time has he been hailed as their greatest literary genius with such accord as on the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, the 28th of August last. This is a fact which demands a little closer attention; it is worth while to enquire what ground the Germans have for thus becoming, in the maturity of their political life, such enthusiastic 'Goetheaner.' Is it merely the vanity of a prosperous nation which seeks an intellectual leader and a spiritual head, and, in default of a Dante or a Shakespeare, has deified Goethe? Or, if other and more solid reasons exist, are they of a sufficiently cosmopolitan nature to justify us in confronting with them the indifference towards Goethe which other nations show?

This is one of the questions to the consideration of which we propose to devote the following pages. Without desiring to add one more to the attempts at re-estimating or rehabilitating Goethe, we shall be content if, in some degree, we can clear the way for such a rehabilitation, by showing what claim Goethe still has upon us. With the imposing celebrations which Frankfurt organised in honour of the anniversary fresh in our memory, we shall attempt to estimate what share Goethe has had in the intellectual life of the century that is now about to close.

A national literature may be studied under various aspects, and by various methods; but, rightly considered, it is some

thing more than a collection of works of greater or less worth; it is also the continuous expression of a nation's artistic temperament, and its history is a process of organic evolution. From this evolutional standpoint-which need not, as a recent French critic would have us believe, in any way condemn other points of view-certain features in literature, hitherto

but little regarded, acquire a new importance. We are obliged to consider what might be called the dynamic element, the motive force, in a work of literature-to estimate a book or poem, not only per se, but also with regard to the influence it has exerted upon the literature of the next age. It is plain that under this aspect many a writer of the past appears in a new light. Richardson, for instance, is 'dynamically' a more important personage in European literature than Fielding, Rousseau than Voltaire, Herder than Lessing; the 'Sentimental Journey' is, from this point of view, a more important book than Tom Jones,' Lessing's 'Emilia Galotti' than his Minna von Barnhelm.' 6 comparatively obscure writers, like the eighteenth-century dramatist Lillo, are found to assume quite imposing proportions when regarded as forces in the literary evolution of the generation which came after them. It is Goethe's dynamic influence upon the nineteenth century that we intend to keep principally in view in the present article.

Even

In the course of his long life Goethe applied himself to such varied forms of activity, and passed through so many phases, that we are confronted with not one but many Goethes. There is the poet, the man of science, the critic; there is again one Goethe who wrote Werther,' another who wrote 'Tasso,' and yet another who wrote the 'Westöstliche Divan' and the Wahlverwandtschaften.' No single definition could possibly be wide enough to embrace all these different personalities, and to reduce our conception of the man to that same unity which the name of Dante or Shakespeare calls up in our minds. Goethe began life in Frankfurt and Leipzig in the unadulterated eighteenth-century spirit of the Frederician Age; he even wrote a 'Schäferspiel,' and he turned out love songs and anacreontics as yet untainted by the 'Sturm und Drang,' which, a little later, swept across Germany from France. Goethe not only came into touch with the Leipzig of Gottsched, Gellert, and Lessing, but, in his earliest student days, actually lived heart and soul in it. The literary world which Frederic the Great, in his famous tract on German literature, held up to the pity of Europe, was also Goethe's. This is worth emphasising, for nothing brings more vividly before us the enormous span

of

the poet's life than to recall that the same Goethe who stood face to face with Napoleon, the Goethe of the era of steam and modern science, the Goethe who lived through the July Revolution, began life before the Seven Years' War, and incurred Frederic the Great's displeasure for his 'imitation détestable de ces mauvaises pièces angloises,'' Goetz von Berlichingen.'

To every man of genius it is granted once and once only to be in the movement,' and to Goethe this crucial period came between 1770 and 1775. It was the great age of 'Deutschland emergierend,' as Goethe himself called it. From the time when the young Strassburg law student, drinking inspiration at Herder's feet, burst into raptures over the Gothic spirituality of the Strassburg minster, eulogised Rousseau, and stood before Shakespeare like one born blind, on whom a miracle has in a single moment conferred the gift of sight'-from this time until the end of 1775, when he exchanged Frankfurt for Weimar Goethe was the acknowledged leader of the 'Geniezeit,' the most famous man of letters of his day. As the creator of 'Goetz von Berlichingen,' Werther,' 'Clavigo,' and the dreamer of even loftier dreams, Goethe was the intellectual monarch of Germany, as it was never again in his lifetime given to him to be. Of this period our re-estimators have little that is favourable to say. M. Rod, judging 'Goetz' and 'Werther' as if they had just appeared, finds them sadly wanting; our English critics have busied themselves but little with them. Nor can it be denied that the creations of Goethe's 'Sturm und Drang' are far away from us now; the mediæval bustle of Goetz,' which in its day opened up to Scott a new world, is no longer to modern taste; Werther's Weltschmerz' we have long outgrown, just as we have outgrown the similar phase in Byron's work. But when the worst about Werthers Leiden has been said, there remains in it a spaciousness, a freshness as when the earth was young, a Homeric simplicity, which can never altogether cease to please. There is upon this gentle sentimental hero something of the 'melancholy of eternity,' which gives him a place he can never lose in the gallery of the imagination. Werthers Leiden' has still, in our opinion, the power to fascinate, when its model, La Nouvelle Héloïse,' and many a more famous novel of the eighteenth century, have long ago passed into the limbo of unread classics. Prometheus,' the most soaring creation of Goethe's imagination in these years, can also still touch a sympathetic chord; in some respects, indeed, we are more in sympathy with this 'heilig glühend

·

.

Herz' than were the readers of a hundred years ago. And how modern, too, can be Clavigo's mentor, Don Carlos! There is many a passage in Clavigo,' in glorification of the 'Uebermensch,' which might have come from the pen of some youthful disciple of Nietzsche. Yet, these are, after all, only the prophetic glimpses which are the proofs of genius. In general it may be said that what is left us of Goethe's 'Sturm und Drang' is little more than the impression of a magnificent youth; the dynamic force of the works he wrote in this period, enormous as that force was in its day, was spent before the nineteenth century began. No one knew this better than Goethe himself; he rapidly outgrew his youth, and, after a brief but epoch-making reign in German literature, voluntarily withdrew into the comparative obscurity of Weimar. In all his long life it was never again given to him to occupy the position which he held in these few years at Frankfurt.

Nevertheless, it was in the next period of Goethe's life, the period that extended from his arrival in Weimar, at the close of 1775, to the culmination of his friendship with Schiller-that is to say, roughly speaking, the last quarter of the centurythat Goethe reached the zenith of his poetic career. During these years he produced all his poetic masterpieces; in them he fulfilled his poetische Sendung.' Opinions differ, and will differ always, as to which work of Goethe's is his most perfect creation. That his most universal work is 'Faust' all are agreed; but 'Faust' is no artistic whole in the same sense as either Iphigenie' or 'Hermann und Dorothea.' Both ' Both Iphigenie' and 'Hermann' were written in these years; so, too, was Tasso'; and we are apt to forget that to this period belong also the most perfect of the lyrics. Even Faust'-not the youthful 'Urfaust' of the 'Geniezeit,' the discovery of which is the last great triumph of 'Goethe-Forschung,' but the 'Faust' that stands out as the greatest poem of modern Europe -was, for the most part, written in this period of maturity. Lastly, Goethe's weightiest prose work, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,' began to appear in 1794., These works, one and all, were too far in advance of their age to find the immediate and enthusiastic acclamation which Goetz' and Werther' had enjoyed in their day; there was now no question of Goethe leading his age, unless the word leader can be taken in the sense of pioneer. But there was another and no less important mission which, especially in the period of his friendship with Schiller, he fulfilled towards his time; he stood up like a giant before the flying froth of the century, and hurled behind him the excited fools and evil rascals who would share in his

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