saw this thoroughly, when the herd of Ger- ter is Jerusalem and Gothe at once; he man critics were praising Gothe's supposed wears the costume, he undergoes the suffer"objectivity" and "realism." "The speci-ings, he talks in many instances the very ality" (says he, speaking of the "Swiss Travels," "which here, as in almost all his works, distinguishes him from Homer and Shakspeare, is that the I.' the Ille Ego,' glimmers through everywhere, although without ostentation and with consummate delicacy." Gothe himself was at the bottom, no less aware of it. It was (no doubt,) a real perception of this leading peculiarity of his own genius, though he often affected to disguise it from himself and others, which made him sometimes recognize that the bulk of his writings were in truth addressed to particular classes only. "My works," he said to Ackermann, never can be popular: they are not written for the multitude, but only for individual men whose pursuits and aims are like my own."

66

A curious exemplification of this leading peculiarity will be found in the history of the composition of the "Sorrows of Werter," about which many stories have been told; but the latest and most authentic seems to be given by Herr Dünzer in a separate chapter of one of the works before us. After Gothe's disappointment of the heart in the matter of his fair Alsatian, Friederike, he fell into one of those states of tender melancholy, in which a youth of twenty-three generally resorts to the society of the first fair sympathizer whom he can find, purely for friendly consolation. Such a comforter he soon found in a somewhat bourgeoise young lady, whose paternal appellation now appears to have been Miss Charlotte Buff. To her he confided his sorrows, and from her he exacted sympathy and advice, at such unwarrantable length, that poor Charlotte, who had no objection to a bit of romance, provided it ended in the orthodox form of a proposal, grew tired and entered into a mater-of-fact engagement with a very matterof fact friend of both parties, Christian KestThe discovery of this treason made Gothe quite certain that he was actually in love with the lady to whom he had never chosen to communicate his feelings, and threw him into all the despair of rejected and betrayed attachment. Just at this crisis of his history happened the tragic adventure of young Jerusalem-him of the buff waistcoat and yellow breeches-whose fatal passion is recounted in the "Dichtung und Wahrheit." The two events combined-his own disappointment and Jerusalem's-engendered the "Sorrows of Werter." Wer

ner.

language (borrowed from his posthumous papers) of that too fascinating foreign-office clerk; but he is throughout what Gothe would have been, had he been Jerusalem; the imaginary transposition of the poet into the perplexities and distresses of his acquaintance. And thus a work which, let critics speak of it as they may, has excited the fancy and controlled the hearts of numbers of mankind, is spun out of the brain of a poet from materials which consist simply of his own heart and imagination, placed in circumstances of idealised truth; for "Jerusalem" seems, after all, to have been only a young attaché of considerable solemnity and self-respect-his flame, the real Charlotte, according to the testimony of the Prince de Ligne, was not worth knowing; and her double, Charlotte Kestner, née Buff, must have been little better, judging from the cold manner in which Gothe speaks of her, whom he occasionally met in after life.*

But if the real tendency of Göthe's genius was thus thoroughly subjective or egotisti cal, so much the less was he a dramatist in the peculiar sense of the word. Portraiture of character, independent of self, he has really little enough. This the reader can best appreciate by reflecting how few of the

*See Dünzer, p. 89, &c. It seems that Herr Kestner was not particularly pleased with the part of the philosophic husband, assigned to him in "Werter," and that Göthe was forced to retouch the character considerably in the second edition, without succeeding in thoroughly pacifying him; but Göthe was by this time deep in his new passion for the fashionable Frankfort belle, Miss Schönman, and Werter" had become weariness and vexation pleasure in mystifying his admirers, that Göthe emerged from the gloom of "Werter" into the graceful pleasantry of his various poems to "Lili :" such as those exquisite lines in which he complains of her tyranny in drawing him from the dreamy voluptuousness of a poet's study into her favorite evening parties:

to him. It must have been with some malicious

Secondary figures in Gothe's plays or novels he can realize to himself, or regard with the smallest interest. The only exception of which we are aware proves the rule in the strongest possible manner. He is said to be particularly successful in the delineation of a certain class of female characters, in which he has met with many imitators; beings whose attraction lies in their simple and trustful dependence on man as a superior,Mignon, Clara, Margaret. But the true charm of these imaginary beings lies less in themselves than in their relation to us-in the feelings of protection and supremacy to which they appeal-in the flattery they administer to masculine vanity and self-glorification.

The breeze was perceptible enough to Byron's muse, no doubt; but how could it possibly be felt by a man carried through the air, at full gallop, on horseback? Similar errors, in relation to things of more importance than pictorial effect the development of thought or passion-will constantly be found in writers of the highest order of what is commonly called dramatic power. The poet is substituted for his subject. We should be surprised at meeting with such instances in Gothe. Not only are they contrary to his careful touch, but he transforms himself, for the time, far too completely into the person whom he introduces-whether as an agent or a mere observer-to forget that imaginary existence which is become, for the time his own.

We will only add, in order to dispose of an objection to our view which might be In thus endeavoring to delineate some of taken, that it is by no means inconsistent the strongest literary characteristics of this with what has been already said, to recog- great writer, we are conscious of having nize Gothe's great excellence in one peculi- made a long digression from our immediate arly dramatic point-that accuracy of keep- purpose, which was to regard him as a social ing which represents everything as seen and philosopher, and with reference to his moral felt by the party introduced, not as seen and influence on the European mind. But, in felt by the describer. It is, in fact, not dif- truth, the one subject bears materially and ficult to see the real connexion between this directly on the other. If we have labored, quality and that strong personality which we perhaps at unnecessary length, to show that have already attributed to him. It was pre- an intense and refined egotism was among the cisely because Gothe projected so much of principal elements of Gothe's literary genius, himself into the characters and scenes of his it was in order to illustrate his philosophic writings, that he made the events described character; with the view of showing how develope themselves from the point of view his very excellencies, considered from the of his own dramatis persona, never as they point of view of literary art, fitted him for would be perceived bya third party observing the distinction of being the ablest and most from without. This is a point on which great successful of modern teachers in the school objective talent-great power of picturesque of Epicurus. Nor were the peculiarities of description, for instance is apt to lead its his temper and habits different from what possessor astray, unless balanced by pre-his writings would lead the reader to anticidominant egotism. A criticism of Gothe's pate. His whole history shows how abundon a passage of Walter Scott, though it re-antly he practised what he preached how lates in terms only to a matter of pictorial effect, will illustrate our general meaning also. It relates to the scene in "Ivanhoe," where the Jew of York enters Cedric's hall. The costume of the Jew is minutely described, and, among the rest, the dress of his legs and feet. Now this, says Gothe, is wrong; for you are to suppose yourself in the position of Cedric and his guests; they are sitting at a table, with lights; and by persons so placed the details of the lower limbs of one who enters the room are not remarked, and, in fact, are hardly distinguishable. A similar instance of forgetfulness, more glaring because the narrative is thrown into the first person, occurs in "Mazeppa."

The sky was cold, and dull, and gray,
And a low breeze crept moaning by."

Self was the single divinity worshipped by him, with a refined and chastened worship, no doubt, during his long eighty years of life and activity.

"Gothe," says Menzel, with much the same meaning as ours, "adhered, in his writings, to nature; to the nearest nature; to his own. His own nature stood in exactest harmony with that which had become the reigning character of the modern world. He was the clearest mirror of modern life in his own life, as well as in his poetry. He needed only to delineate himself in order to delineate the modern world, its turn of sentiment, its inclinations, its worth, and its worthlessness. The talent of outward life, the arts of convenience, ease and refinement, daintiness of enjoyment, were his talis

man in reality, and, again, appeared to him the worthiest object of poetry; inasmuch as he only mirrored the advantages which his own life and person represented."

which Catherine now and then imperially condescended, which poor Maria Antoinette tasted with timid and stealthy delight, but in which the potentates of Weimar might revel without fear of strangling or decapitation;-hunting parties, gipsey excursions, serenades, pic-nics, theatricals, from January to December. There was just the show of State-business for him as the Grand Duke's intimate privy councillor, which might serve either as a diversion from courtly dissipation, or an excuse for it. There was all that refinement of the social circle which Gothe prized so highly; a little, perhaps, in the spirit of a parvenu, but also with a poet's admiration for external elegance and beauty; which he carried to a strange extent, according to his disciple, Vernhagen von Ense, who remarks that in later life Gothe's principal associates were all tall and handsome men, like himself, and that he had a decided antipathy to plain people. There was, above all, full leisure for the development of his growing genius, and his surpassing mental activity: while his bodily and mental health alike profited by the opportunity.

Menzel's splenetic tone and coarse inflation of style have detracted from the real value of his criticisms; but the justice of this sentence will scarcely admit of dispute. Not that Gothe was a selfish man in the vulgar sense. His disposition was, in the main, amiable and tolerant, and widely different in these respects from that of his French predecessors, with whom we have associated him. He was averse from giving pain, as well as peculiarly averse from encountering it himself. But all this was consistent in him, as it is in many others, with habits of mental self-indulgence carried even to the extreme. From his youth upward, he loved to live in an atmosphere of his own, and found himself most at his ease in the company of those whose position, in respect of age, talents, or sex, induced them to look up to him as a superior. He remarks, in his own memoirs, on the peculiarity which led him to surround himself with younger dependents, often to his ultimate inconvenience, as they became burdens to him, like Mignon to Wilhelm. Nor was this unconnected with a manner of affected importance and superiority which, notwithstanding his popularity. always placed a kind of barrier between him and men of his own age and social position. Kestner remarked of him when only twentyfour: 66 Gothe is a genius; yet he has in his disposition a good deal which may make him a disagreeable man. But among children and women he is always well received." Farther acquaintance with life, and a strong determination to succeed in the world, modified to a considerable extent these peculiarities of his youth; and he was never so popular or so successful, personally, as during the years which intervened between his establishment at Weimar and his Italian jour-partly also (we suppose we must add, since ney (1775-1787.) Those were happy years. Few poets have ever enjoyed so much of life, There was all the excitement of winning his way into the favor, the confidence, the intimate friendship, of the young Grand Duke and Duchess. There was the easy rivalry with the other literary heroes of the time, whom he could beat at their own weapons as an author, while in all the qualities which ensure social success he was incomparably their superior. There was the endless round of court life, as practised by the free and easy sovereigns of that day who had thrown aside German etiquette;—the life to

But this enjoyment palled upon him from its very excess, and also from the want of what Byron called, "something craggy to break upon;"-some one powerful and engrossing occupation of the mind. For his literary pursuits were up to this time singularly broken and inconsequent. When the world of Weimar was conquered—when his own position was fairly attained, and there was no longer any object to be gained by exerting himself to please others, the tendency to insulation came back upon him with redoubled force. The restraints of Weimar life, the ties of society and office, became intolerable. It was in order to get rid of them at once and definitely, that he planned and executed his Italian journey, in that strange manner which he has himself related so well;

the publication of his correspondence with Frau von Stein) to break through the trammels of one of those tender friendships, of antediluvian prolixity, in which the literati of the last century were apt to involve themselves. This journey was in many respeets, the turning point of his life. For him, as for most men, the river Lethe flowed on the other side of the Alps. He forgot his former sense and being on the farther shore. During his eighteen months in Italy, he satisfied one great want of his existence, by the acquisition of a permanent object; for it was then he conceived, or at least matured, those

nected with much that we have said above

peculiar views of natural philosophy which | occupied him so much and so happily during that in almost all Göthe's works that pethe remainder of his days. But how far his culiar view of the relations between the genius gained in its higher qualities by the sexes, under which man is the courted party, change which it then underwent is a question and woman the submissive worshipper, is on which critics are widely at issue. Mean- brought out in the principal characters. time, however this may be, it is certain that Whether in the odd vicissitudes of the world, the habits which he acquired tended in no the element introduced by chivalry into degree to efface the moral weaknesses of his these relations has expanded itself, and later character. Freed from the restraints imposed refinement is likely to bring us back from on him by the usages of the Weimar literary adoring Gloriana and Angelica, to being republic, and left much to himself, or to the adored by Chryseis and Briseis, we will not company of one or two artists and travelers, undertake to foretell; though the popularity he relapsed into habits of self-contemplation of such writers as Göthe and Byron would and self-worship, until they became uncon- certainly seem to point that way. that way. His querable. Even one of his greatest admi-"Faust," "Egmont," "Edward," in the rers, Chancellor von Müller (the author of Wahlverwandtschaften, "Wilhelm Meister," Gothe in seiner praktischen Wirksamkeit') are all either condescending divinities, or is forced to confess that he came back from mere male coquettes; and his most attractItaly a man altered for the worse; colder, ive female characters seem all to belong to less expansive, more self-important. Nor poor Helena's sect:did he ever get rid of these defects, and return to the more attractive self of his earlier days, notwithstanding the beneficial results produced on his nature for a time, as already said, by contact with that of Schiller: a nature assuredly far more generous and unworldly than Gothe's own, although the lat-in ter has chosen to say, with that singular affectation. or paradoxical turn, which so often disconcerts his readers :-"Schiller had far more knowledge of the world and tact than I had!"

On the later years of Göthe's life we confess that, for our own parts, we dwell with little pleasure. We do not complain of his biographers, when they naturally dilate on the glories of his venerable old age, his exalted position as the living oracle of German intelligence, the honor, love, obedience, and troops of friends that waited on him to the last. All this is externally true; and yet to us, his friends, with a few grand exceptions, seem chiefly to have belonged to the class of flatterers, Boswells, and correspondents of leading literary journals;" his oracular dignity to have degenerated into a trick of mysteriousness, involving the most trivial commonplaces in solemn affectation of importance; and the chief pleasure of his life to have lain in the conduct of semi-sentimental correspondences with women for whom he cared not an iota, but whom it was his delight to lead on, by flattering mutually their vanity and his own, until the consummation was reached of involving them in something like a romantic passion for the great unapproachable.

It is a true remark of Menzel's-and con

"Thus, Indian-like,
Religious in mine error, I adore
The Sun that looks upon his worshipper,
But knows of him no more."

Nay, the curious reader may even remark, connection with this subject, on the fondness of his heroines, particularly in "Wilhelm Meister," for assuming male attire-a topic on which Varnhagen von Ense has a luculent dissertation, showing that it is connected with some of the deepest historical meanings of the eighteenth century, the Reformation, and the Revolution; but which may also be, in part, an expression of the same prevailing view of the female nature as imitative and dependent. And we may pursue the same pervading thread of imagination in the most dramatic specimens of Gothe's ballad poetry, such as the " Bride of Corinth," and the of Corinth," and the "God and the Bayadere."

Such, in some of the more important points of his character, was the man for whom Destiny had reserved so marked a place, in an age when the fiercest passions and wildest enthusiasm were at work in the European world, recasting its social institutions, and remodeling the temper of its inhabitants. "The greatest man," saith the fair blue-stocking of the Wahlverwandtschaften, Ottilia, in her Diary, are always connected with their age through some one weakness." If this can be predicted of Gothe, his weakness rather lay in an intense desire to shrink from its violent emotionsto combat in himself all tendency to share in its passions-to let the storm pass by, and

millions; let the evil days pass by; use whatever of æsthetic and social enjoyment the conqueror has left you. Even the oppressions which the gallant German spirit of his intimate friend, the Grand Duke of Weimer, had to endure from Napoleon, called forth from him scarcely a feeble spark of indignation. In his Tag und Jahres Hefte," his skeleton memoirs of his life dur

avoid meddling with those who attempted to direct it. And this it is, more than any other quality, which has rendered him, not unjustly, unpopular with a great part of the living generation. It is felt that he owed a corresponding debt to the country which worshipped him, and that he died without discharging it. It was not through mere accident, or the force of mere scholastic causes, that the sect of the Epicureans prevailed ating all this period, there is a studied abstiRome during the last agitated century of its Republic, while Stoicism became the reigning intellectual fashion under the empire. For refined and cultivated minds, when looking for shelter from the evils of the times in a world of their own, naturally try to make that world as unlike as possible to the external one. They seek refuge in philosophic self-indulgence from the furious passions, the exaggerated sentiments of an age of civil turmoil; while, on the same principle of contrast, they court, at least imagination, the excitements of ascetic virtue, amidst the corrupt stagnation of despotism. To preserve the tranquility of Epicurus in the busy political times on which he had fallen, was Gothe's constant and patient endeavor. The French Revolution came to disturb the dreams of art and imaginative science, in which his Italian sojourn had lapped him. He had no sympathy with its principles, and hated its agents. But to call out another enthusiasm to oppose it was utterly alien from his feelings. His trumpet sounded, indeed, a note of defiance -but a very faint one-in Herman and Dorothea. But what is the moral of the poem, as summed up in the energetic lines which close it? Seek steadfastness during days of political trial in self-reliance, and take good care of your property :—

nence from all allusion to political events; an affectedly exclusive attention to the trivial vicissitudes of the stage and criticism at Weimar. He never concealed his admiration for the tyrant himself, whom he professed to venerate as one of the "Dämonische Männer,”—the Genii of the earth, and encouraged a kind of worship of Napoleon in his own family;-Napoleon, who had done him the honor of suggesting some corrections in a forthcoming edition of Werinter!"How could I have taken up arms without hate?" was his defence of himself to Eckermann, " and I never hated the French. How could I, to whom nothing is of importance except cultivation and barbarism, hate one of the most cultivated nations in the world, and one to which I owe so large a portion of my own development." It is really a relief to reflect on the Nemesis which followed-on the sense of weariness and self-abasement with which the poet must have come forward in 1815, as the old hacklaureate of Germany, to dedicate odes of courtly patriotism to the Allied Sovereigns, and compliment the nation on the "waking of Epimenides."

Such Gothe remained during the less violent but more deeply-seated disturbances of political society in his later years. We are not among those who quarrel with him for not having been a democrat or a GermanUnionist, from 1815 to 1830,-reproaches have lost some of their force, at least with which, however popular some years ago, thinking men, in the year 1850. Nor do we think it necessary to assume the indignation with which German liberalism regarded his conduct in the matter of the prosecution of Oken, the editor of the Isis, and his opposition to the freedom of the press. In this, as on the occasion of Fichte's expulsion from Weimer in 1798, Gothe, probably, did no more than his official duty, although he certainly seems to have done it with no reluctance. His real offence consisted, not in adopting this or that class of opinions, but in repressing all political faith whatever; in encouraging, as far as in him lay, men of