the enthusiasm of youth, claiming Goethe as its own; to this generation it has been given to reinstate him as the intellectual head of his people. To sketch the rise of this epoch-this rebirth of the old Romanticism under the guise of individualism -lies beyond the province of the present article. We would only point out that the new ideas filtered into Germany with the literature which had sprung up in Scandinavia from the ashes of Hegelianism, and that these ideas met on German soil with another and stronger current, the current of literary naturalism that had set in a little earlier from France. These currents united to form the basis on which the latest literary revival in Germany has arisen. The veteran novelist, Friedrich Spielhagen, was, we think, the first to compare the literature of the last ten years in Germany with the 'Sturm und Drang' of the eighteenth century; but the leaders of the revival had already felt, if not expressed, this affinity, and it created at once a bond of sympathy between them and Goethe. The young Goethe, the Goethe of Goetz' and 'Werther,' became the patron saint of the new literary movement. The 'ewige Wiederkehr,' to use Nietzsche's expression, had brought round again another of these periods of fermentation and convulsion in which the German spirit seems to renew its youth.

6

As the turbulence gradually subsided, other points of sympathy and congeniality with Goethe were discovered besides those of his youth. Now, at last, in the philosophy of selfassertion, in the insistence on the rights of the individual to the fullest development of which he is capable-this philosophy of which Nietzsche became the spokesman-Goethe's optimism and individualism received full and jubilant recognition. To Nietzsche himself Goethe was this veritably great man, for whose sake one is bound to love Germany.' Above all, it was Goethe's magnificent personality, his egotism, his ideals of self-culture, his dreams of a world-literature, which appealed most strongly to modern Germany. It would be difficult to over-estimate the boon which Goethe has been to the present generation of German writers and artists; he has been a kind of guiding star to them in their often blind enough gropings after a philosophic and artistic creed: an ever-present example of the higher intellectual life. No century can show so many examples as ours of men of genius to whom are applicable the words in which Goethe summed up the character of one of the most promising of his predecessors-Christian Günther: 'He never contrived to tame himself, and so his life ran to waste, like his poetry.' Goethe, by his wise self-control, by his 'Lebens ernstes Führen,' escaped this fate, and his life stands

out as a great example of how it is to be escaped. At thirty he wrote to Lavater the memorable words :

The desire to raise as high as possible the pyramid of my existence, of which the base is given and laid for me, predominates over all else and hardly allows itself to be forgotten for a moment. I must not lose time; I am no longer in my first youth; my destiny may break me in the middle, and the Tower of Babel will be left blunt and unfinished. At least it shall be said that it was boldly planned. If I live, my strength, God willing, will hold out to the top.'

In one respect Goethe was highly favoured by fortune. If he is one of the greatest among men of letters, this is largely because he lived to put the last stone on the summit of the pyramid of his existence.' It has often been said that Goethe's life was the grandest of his works, and this is, if we are not mistaken, the thought that is uppermost in the minds of our German contemporaries.

The fact that Goethe is acknowledged as a leader in the present literary movement in Germany has given the latter a stability and weight which one misses in the contemporary movements of other literatures. Germany has escaped the cynicism and Epicureanism which have done so much to degrade the latest literature in France; it has escaped the refined and unnatural morbidezza which in Italy threatens to choke the growth of a healthy and genuinely national literature. At the same time, we cannot say that the Deutsche Reich' in any way traces its origin or growth to Goethe; the minister of a petty provincial state did not occupy himself with Reichsgedanken, other than of an intellectual Reich' embracing the whole world. But this much, at least, must be admitted, that if, along with the realisation of German political dreams, and alongside of the enormous material prosperity of the last twenty years in Germany, a healthy intellectual atmosphere has still been possible-if poetry has not been choked between a coercive militarism on the one side and a materialistic industrialism on the other-Goethe, and the influence which he continues to exert, must have some of the credit for it. The new and newest German literature, with its Sudermanns and Hauptmanns, has hardly yet achieved enough to allow us to speak of it in superlative terms, and, so far, it has added nothing to the masterpieces of the world's literature; but it is, at least, the healthiest of all the new or renewed literatures of Europe at the close of the century, and it has grown healthy in the shadow of Goethe,

It would seem, further, as if the literary revival of the last ten years had in turn reacted upon the study of Goethe, as if it were helping the latter to throw off the stigma of pedantic triviality which has lain upon it so long. The purely philological study of Goethe's works has exhausted itself, giving place to a personal study of the poet himself. The whole method of approaching Goethe seems, under the influence of Taine and Brandes, to have undergone a change. German literary criticism now takes a wider sweep, and no longer closes its eyes to the fact that genuine penetration more than compensates for the exhaustive accuracy which used to be its end and aim. For years Germany was content to remark with complacent acquiescence that the best biography of her greatest poet had been written by an Englishman; now there are at least two excellent short biographies by German writers, which are worthy to take the place so long monopolised in Germany by Lewes's work.

It is, indeed, an altogether new spirit of criticism that breathes through books like Dr. R. M. Meyer's and Dr. A. Bielschowsky's biographies of Goethe. Both are in the best sense scholarly books, and yet, at the same time, they are free from that heaviness which is generally associated with scholarly work in Germany; they are attractively and even artistically written. It is difficult to decide which of them deserves the palm as the best 'Life' of Goethe of moderate size that has yet appeared; on the whole, we incline to Dr. Bielschowsky's, of which, however, the concluding volume has still to appear. This is a hearty, sympathetic book, full of consideration for the reader who wishes to be led by the hand, and to be taught to love and understand Goethe; as a popular biography it is the better of the two. Dr. Meyer, on the other hand, is a more brilliant writer; his criticism is fresh, vital, and modern. We may not always be in agreement with it, but it is always stimulating. An objection to the work as a whole is the tendency-pardonable, perhaps, in a small book which aims at being more than a résumé of larger works-to assume familiarity in the reader with the more obvious facts and the current opinions of Goethe's life and work, and to turn with preference to aspects of the subject which appeal particularly to the critic himself. The fact that Dr. Meyer's work contributes something fresh to the stock of ideas about Goethe naturally gives it a claim to originality which small books do not often enjoy; and if it be objected that his method is apt to lead to the neglect of essentials, it may be answered that the study of Goethe has advanced in Germany to such a point that

a

considerable knowledge may be assumed to exist among all who pretend to any degree of culture.

If such, then, is the position which Goethe at present occupies in the estimation of his own nation, he might still have some meaning for us also. The day of Carlyle's 'Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe!' is, of course, long past: we cannot go back to it. But it was not without its advantages that we first learned to see Goethe through Carlyle's romantic spectacles. As a matter of fact, the Goethe who has influenced English thought, the Goethe whom we still know best in England, is less the whole, universal Goethe, the calm optimist, the old Heathen,' than Carlyle's romantic hero. To Carlyle Goethe was in all essentials a romantic writer, a thinker and poet inspired with the doctrines of Fichte, a moralist to whom Everlasting Noes,' renunciations, higher duties, had been as vital matters as they were to Carlyle himself. But, as with all the romantic critics, Carlyle's reverential appreciation of Goethe brought him closer to the real man than the cooler estimates of a more objective critic like Lewes. The true glimpses into Goethe's character and genius, which are to be found throughout Carlyle's essays on Goethe, more than make up for his sins of exaggeration and omission. To Carlyle, however, it is impossible to go back. We must turn to Goethe himself, and the key to his work is his life. Much of his poetry may in itself seem dull or old-fashioned to us nowadays, much may be without inherent charm ; but few are able to escape the spell of that wonderful, many-coloured life, without question the most wonderful in the annals of literary men. To appreciate fully Goethe the poet, we must first study Goethe the man. As he himself once said to Eckermann, he is no poet for the mass; his works are written for individual men who have set up similar aims before them and are making their way along similar paths'; to study him may not make us better citizens or better patriots, but it will give us, to use an expression of his own, a certain inward freedom'; and, after all, 'inward freedom is one of the most precious things that can be communicated by one mind to another.

ART. IV.-1. Ocean Steamships. By various writers. London: John Murray, 1892.

2. The Atlantic Ferry. By A. J. Maginnis. London: Whittaker and Co., 1892.

3. The Cunard Company's Jubilee, 1890. Cunard Company.

Liverpool: The

4. Orient Line Guide. Edited by W. J. Loftie. Fifth edition. London: Sampson Low, 1896.

5. The Guide to South Africa. Edited annually by A. S. Brown and G. G. Brown for the Castle Mail Packet Company. London: Sampson Low, 1899-1900.

6. The Shipping World' Year Book. Edited by E. R. Jones. London: 1899.

7. Our Naval Reserve. By J. Rhodes. Liverpool: Liverpool Printing and Stationery Company, 1892.

8. The Launch of the Oceanic. Liverpool: White Star Company, 1899.

And other works.

AMONG

MONG the mechanical developments of this century, there is none of which Great Britain has more reason to be proud than that of her great steamships. The superiority of this country to the rest of the world in steam-tonnage is even more remarkable than her commercial greatness; the importance of this superiority in time of war, and the comparative ease with which it enables us to move large bodies of troops to distant points, has been strikingly demonstrated within the last few months; and yet this enormous advance is of very recent origin. The commencement of the story—a story as interesting as that of railway development, though less generally known-dates from the early part of the nineteenth century; but the real growth began in the forties and fifties, and is therefore well within the memory of many elderly people living to-day.

The history of this growth is narrated, in piecemeal fashion, in various works, some of which we have mentioned at the head of this article. Two of these are well known. The Atlantic Ferry,' -a third edition of which is in the press-is written by a gentleman who is intimately associated with the practice of marine engineering. Ocean Steamships' is an interesting collection of articles written by old salts and specialists. In the preparation of this article we are also glad to acknowledge the valuable aid which has been afforded by the courtesy of the numerous steamship companies at home and abroad. Our difficulty has been how to deal with the voluminous material