ducing a right æsthetic effect through a heathen material, if you have only a heathen idea to express. The real problem is to take a deeper experience than this, an experience which, though not put in a directly moral or religious form, depends upon modern ideas of life, and to embody that adequately in the shape of an old legend. It will be easy to show by a few examples from modern verse that this can be done. Loyalty to Goethe would forbid our leaving him at once, even if he were not the greatest master in this field. We may pass by the fragment of an Achilleis, though a discussion as to the cause of its failure would throw light on our subject. We had better pass by the Roman Elegies, poems far enough removed from the lyrical exuberance of Ganymed, poems which are in the fullest sense expressions of character. Tho gulf which separates these marvellous works of art from our common ways of thought and feeling is too wide to escape notice, and they will never be popular. We will say nothing of Goethe's most ambitious work in this style, the Iphigenie. Lewes, in his life of Goethe, and Mr. Arnold, in the preface to Merope, have long ago pointed out how essentially modern the spirit of the play is, and how its classical form is yet in complete harmony with this spirit. From the group of poems which has already furnished one example, let us take another, a lyric pitched in a very different key, the Prometheus. In this poem, one phase of the most radical experience possible, one among the many feelings which centre in man's relation to the spiritual powers of life, takes a lyrical shape. No work of Goethe's possesses greater biographical interest. We can understand its origin in the course of his life and growth. It is the grandest memorial of a time, when out of the turmoil of passion and the stress of circumstances the feeling became overmastering in him, that the guiding powers he had ap pealed to were little more than names, that the real powers were quite other : "Hat nicht mich zum Manne geschmiedet Die allmächtige Zeit Und das ewige Schicksal, Meine Herrn und deine?" and that, in spite of time and fate, nothing outside his own spirit had help for him or could harm him. How could such a passion have been expressed directly and in the person of the poet? It must have taken the shape of an invective against beliefs towards which Goethe felt no hostility, and of the central meaning of which he could never have spoken in the words of the Prometheus, however insignificant their historical wrappage may have seemed to him. This is the problem which gives the poem an æsthetic interest as great as its biographical. As his feeling in the presence of nature had naturally embodied itself in the story of Ganymed, so it was again. Out of the circle of Titanic myths that commotion of mind, which in Goethe's best days seems to have melted spontaneously into outlines at once perfectly clear and intensely passionate, attracted to itself the story of Prometheus, and found in it a natural medium of utterance. The Greek Prometheus could not possibly have said what Goethe's does; but no incongruity is felt, and we are not admiring a tour de force. With the first words "Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus, Mit Wolkendunst," we know where we are, and through the lips of a hero of Greek mythology a mood thoroughly modern and yet perfectly in character speaks to us in the accents of nature. We have only 1 I would ask the reader to compare with the Prometheus a very genuine piece of poetry on a similar subject, the chorus in Atalanta in Calydon, beginning "Who hath given man speech?" In spite of the power of this extraordinary invective, we are not satisfied. It is not merely that the passion has to storm itself out at excessive length, but the chorus The to turn over the pages of the Gedichte to find instance after instance of the same thing. Throughout his life, Goethe retained the capacity of using foreign material, whether in the way of subject or of form, in this spontaneous manner. source might be Greek or Roman, Persian or Chinese, it makes no difference. And if the passion which produced the early personal lyrics had somewhat cooled by the time he wrote the Westöstliche Divan, there is, if anything, an advance in this species of art. No other modern poet has been able to appropriate so completely that peculiar mixture of frank sensuous pleasure in wine with a mystical imaginativeness which is so characteristic of some Eastern poetry, and which seems to us at first so strange. And there are a few poems, highest among them all the verses called Einlass, which will stand by the Ganymed or the Prometheus for their force and their perfection of form. But we need not go so far afield for instances. In Goethe's greatest work we have an example of the free treatment of an old legend, and its transfusion with new life. The legend which formed the material of the first part of Faust contains at first sight hardly anything of the tragic significance of the poem. It was a story in many of its details trivial and vulgar, which grew up on a slender historical basis under the influence of different, successive, and even conflicting, popular ideas.1 The divination of a mysterious life of nature which might possibly be fathomed by alchemy and astrology seemed to open a boundless empire of knowledge and power; but the enthusiasm and awe were met by the conviction of a professes to be Greek and we cannot help remembering that it is not Greek; further what is expressed is not something "purely human," but an antitheological animus which is non-poetic in exactly the same way as the reflections in the Epic of Hades are, however great their inferiority in other respects may be. 1 Comp. Goethe's Faust. Von Kuno Fischer. diabolic agency at work in this unlawful search; and the two feelings blended in a strange union. The new ardour of discovery and passion to understand, joins with a tumult of unbridled desire, freed at once from ignorance and theology, and flinging itself on a world which promised infinite enjoyment as the reward of knowledge; and the condemnation of godless presumption falls upon either impulse alike. Ecstasy in the recovered sense of beauty centres about the Greek deities; but at another moment they seem to have risen from their graves only to be the ministers of Satan, to madden the minds of doctor and priest with visions, and to entice them to the forfeiture of their souls. All these, and other elements, such as the Protestant hatred of priests, and the common man's love of rude practical joking, seem to have united in the story which gradually collected round the person of Doctor Faust. And naturally much of what is fine or interesting in these ideas is lost in the popular tale, or obscured by a mass of tasteless stories of conjuring pranks and mountebank adventures. Yet it was this chaotic product of the general imagination, which, passing through a mind tried in personal suffering and tragic conflicts, was fused into the intensest, the most elemental, the most purely human poem written since Shakespeare. The most perfect, we cannot say; the stubborn material has left some dross behind; there is something too much of mere broomstick and caldron witchcraft; it is doubtful whether the delayed completion of the poem has not resulted in an inconsistent conception of the main character; it is certain that by one of those lapses of artistic instinct which seems to have now and again befallen Goethe, a whole scene has been introduced which has next to no value in itself, and much less than none in the tragedy; and finally, the first part of Faust, the only part which was ever much cared for, is a fragment. But when all this has 66 been admitted-and who thinks of all this in reading Faust -it remains the fact that there is no poem since Hamlet which has produced so profound an impression on men's minds. And this could never have been the case if Goethe had not treated his legendary material as he has. What he has to express is not of to-day or of three hundred years ago; it is human, and goes into the heart of passions, which have made and marred lives out of number, so that the words of Faust or Mephistopheles come to men's lips as though they were their own. Thus it is nothing to Goethe how the story arose or what constraint he puts upon it, if he can but make it the body of his thought. And the words of the old puppet-play have sung in his head so long, through years that have seen so much suffered and done, that this he can and must achieve. The memory of Gretchen, his first boy's love; his remorse before and after the parting from Frederike; the half-earnest half-idle hopes which led him to the study of alchemy; the disgust at empty sciences, and the weariness of his baffled striving after knowledge; the hurried grasp after the infinite, and the impossibility, burnt into his very soul, of finding it in enjoyment all this was a store of experience which seemed at last to melt into the old legend, and become incorporated in its figures. But only because these figures are utterly changed, and new ones have been imagined. Not only the legend itself, but the mythology of the Old Testament and of mediæval religion, has become the "living garment" of his imagination, moving as it moves. It does not cross his mind that the story has any rights against him, or that he is making too free with the Book of Job; it is his own life which is to make them live. He does not need to tell us what Faust and Mephistopheles mean; for it is his own soul, and ours, that speaks and acts in them. In most of these poems the charac teristic of Goethe's mode of treatment is that he completely absorbs a mythological or legendary material into his imagination, and reproduces it directly in a form at once personal and human. It is this directness, this touch of a personal emotion so purified from individual circumstance that it appeals to all men, that gives Faust a lyrical character in spite of its dramatic force. In the same way the subjects of Ganymed and Prometheus take the shape of the pure lyric; Goethe is not writing a poem about Ganymede, he has for the moment become Ganymede. And I have taken examples of this mode of treatment first of all, because in it that unity of meaning and form is naturally most complete, the loss of which leads to allegory and poor poetry. In itself, however, it is not superior to other ways of dealing with these subjects even in a lyrical manner. In the ballad, for example, which gives free play to the epic element in lyrical verse, the mytho logical personages are treated to a greater or less extent as the subjects of the poem. Historical propriety may be preserved to a degree unnecessary in songs; and yet the myth may be so handled that we are able to identify ourselves completely with its meaning, and need no interpretation to make it plain. The reader will remember Der Gott und die Bayadere and Paria, Goethe's great ballads on Indian legends. If there is any poem in modern literature which can stand by the first part of Faust it is the Bride of Corinth; and in this ballad the legend is told with the most naked simplicity, and yet with an energy so intense that the difference of ages is lost in a moment. Schiller's tendency to reflective thinking, and genius for declamatory verse, led him in the earlier part of his career to a style really less artistic: the feeling which inspires the most beautiful of his pure lyrics, such as Die Ideale, Das Ideal und das Leben, or Die Götter Griechenland's, is too conscious to take a nar rative form; and it is interesting to compare the last and, in some respects, greatest of these poems with the Bride of Corinth, in which an idea fundamentally the same has led to a totally different result. But Schiller's instinct kept him to the simply lyrical form in which his imagination was able to express itself with all its glow, and he never took a mythological subject as a text for rhetoric. When, later in his life and partly through Goethe's influence, the poet and philosopher were reconciled in him, he produced ballads on Greek subjects in the simplest narrative style, and a few poems in a slightly different manner which rank among his best works. In his Kassandra, for example, he has expressed a permanent and intense human emotion without in any degree destroying the outline of the legend, or suggesting any incongruity. Cassandra's terrible cry to Apollo "Meine Blindheit gib mir wieder these words are strictly appropriate in the mouth of the speaker, and yet they are the utterance of a feeling which in its essential nature is not dependent on the special circumstances assumed in the poem, but, in a greater or less degree of intensity, may have been the experience of men in other times. And wherever this is the case, these words will seem, in spite of their historical propriety, the spontaneous outcome of a permanent human passion. Let me turn for some further illustration to the poet who is most familiar to English readers of the present day. Those of Mr. Tennyson's works which deal with mythical or legendary subjects are, for the most part, written in the manner last described. The myth or legend is usually the subject of the poem. When we read the complaint of Oenone or the choric song of the Lotos-eaters, we have the persons of the legend before our minds. Not that we fail to identify ourselves with them, or that their words have no meaning or value to us apart from the circumstances in which they are uttered; but the original story has not been so completely absorbed into a modern emotion as to become the vehicle for its direct expression. In this respect these poems rather resemble some of Mr. Browning's greatest works-such as Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, or Cleonthan Goethe's Ganymed or Prometheus. And Mr. Tennyson has not confined himself to Greek subjects, any more than the view I am trying to enforce is intended to apply to classical mythology alone. Thus we have a St. Simeon Stylites as well as a Lucretius. The former, in the shape of a monologue in blank verse, paints with great vividness a state of mind definitely attributed to a certain person living at a certain time. Everything is in keeping; we have no reflections offered to us from our own point of view; and probably most of us are not aware of any temptation to rival St. Simeon. Yet though Mr. Tennyson's treatment is as far as possible removed from symbolism, what is presented to us is a mental state which in its foundation is independent of this special form, and which might under other conditions result in acts utterly different indeed in appearance, but identical in spirit, and perhaps standing in a closer relation to ourselves. Thus through all the dramatic details, and in harmony with them, something speaks to us in the universal language of men. It is the same with the later and nobler poem. And in both, this central spirit throws its light on every detail, and renders the poem a real unity, a real work of art; so that, for example, those grotesque visions of the medieval infernal world which distracted St. Simeon as 66 he read, and the dreams which, to use Shelley's words, "poisoned sleep and "polluted the day" for Lucretius, these, "Abaddon and Asmodeus" or satyr and faun," are not types or symbols or allegories, nor yet unintelligible curiosities, but in each case the right and natural and only fitting expression of something which nevertheless exists to-day, as well as a thousand or two thousand years ago. These are not the particular visions which would trouble men nowadays; but what does that signify? We identify ourselves with them, just as we appropriate the sense and beauty of a myth. And if we cannot do so, then either they are not fit subjects for modern verse, or (which is more likely) we cannot read the verse aright; just as any Greek or Indian myth remains to us something merely external and historical, until in imagination we can make it a natural expression for our own souls. That in doing so we make it something different from what it was to its creators, is true; but there are, I think, only two cases in which we need regret this. We must regret it if we are examining a myth in the interest of some historical science; and we shall also regret it if we believe the myth to be a fact, and attach a religious value to the supposed fact. But otherwise it would not perhaps be difficult to support the view that the change which the mythical material undergoes in being revivified, is not a distortion but, in the strict sense of the word, a development. Even if this were not the caseand a discussion of the point would lead us too far from our immediate subject-it would remain true that what we need for the purpose of imagination, if for no other purpose, is the power of detaching our minds from the special form in which our own experience clothes itself, and of finding this experience in the shapes which other times have given it. This is what we do when we read ancient poetry, or when we read such modern poems as Ganymed or Lucretius. It is this want of flexibility, this bondage to our mental atmosphere, our fixed ideas and words and customs, that prevents our appropriating foreign forms which "half reveal and half conceal" an inner spirit identical with our own, and that makes it necessary to add to these forms themselves an interpretation given in the terms of our own reflection. It is the same phlegmatic habit of mind which deadens our sense of the life and greatness of this very mental atmosphere of our own, the nature that surrounds us, our faiths and institutions; so that the greatest of human achievements, the state, becomes to us a mere matter of course, if nothing worse, and our religion sinks into an external routine and a worship of mere symbols. And yet It it is this very same stupidity which makes us cry out against the changing of an inadequate symbol or the development of an institution, and thus at once empties the letter of that spirit which alone gives it value, and yet, when the letter is touched, protests that the spirit is one thing with it and can live in no other form. is against this lethargy that all enthusiasms, of knowledge or action or production, philosophy or religion or art, alike contend. It is the root of all philistinism and vulgarity. That we are freed from it is the joy of real seeing and hearing and of every act of knowledge, the quickening of life and insight that crowns all struggle and passion. From it spring selfishness and vice for it is stupidity that limits sympathy, and the old saying remains true, that if, when we pursue a false end, we could but realise what we are doing, we should cease to pursue it. Imagination, like all the higher qualities of mind, depends on this flexibility and power of detachment and imagination is our greatest instrument in the extension of experience, if not of positive knowledge. It is true that in certain cases a facility in appropriating diverse ex |