dants of these pre-Aryan aborigines of the British Isles belong to a type found also in the Basque country; and I am inclined tɔ think that in pre-Aryan times a neolithic race, which may be termed Ibero-Pictish, occupied Western Europe from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Pentland Firth and the Danish Islands of the Baltic.

The range of that race might perhaps be more exactly defined by reference to a map* showing the relative positions of the most remarkable megalithic erections of the West, sometimes called druidic. For anything known to the contrary, these structures may be regarded as monuments of the unaccountable energy of the Ibero-Pictish race, whose existence I have ventured to suggest.

JOHN RHYS.

G

ART. VII-GOETHE'S FAUST AND MODERN

THOUGHT.†

OETHE ohne Ende.' There is no end of Goethe studies,

is the half apologetic commencement of nearly every new book, brochure, or pamphlet on Goethe's Faust which has appeared in recent times. The expression points at once to the endless multiplicity of works on the Faust now after a hundred years since its first appearance as a fragment. The fact furnishes its own explanation, which is the inexhaustible fund of profound and varied thoughts, which at all times, and amid the changing moods of the cultivated mind in this 19th century in particular, ever afford fresh matter for criticism and reflection.

* Such as the map appended by Fergusson to his Rude Stone Monuments (London, 1872) and 'designed to illustrate the distribution of Dolmens, and probable lines of the migrations of the Dolmen builders,' or that inserted in Krause's Tuisko-Land (Glogau, 1891), and described by him as the 'Verbreitungslinien der megalithischen Denkmale in der alten Welt.'

+ This paper is substantially the reproduction of a lecture delivered before a private audience at the request of Lady Lothian, at Blickling Hall, Norfolk.

In this country the works on Goethe's Faust have not been so numerous as to require such an apology. Shakespeare without end, was the expression of Goethe from which the above has taken its rise. But Goethe is not studied as carefully here as Shakespeare was then in Germany, which gave rise to the phrase, and papers, therefore, like the present, taking note of all the more important Faust criticisms which have recently appeared in that country, will not be considered superfluous, least of all by the countrymen of Carlyle, who revered Goethe with true hero worship, mingled with personal attachment. Carlyle's pronouncement on the Faust, as a work matured in the mysterious depths of a vast and wonderful mind; and bodied forth with that truth and curious felicity of composition, in which this man is generally admitted to have no rival,' and a work, where in pale light, the primeval shapes of chaos-as it were, the foundations of being itself-seem to loom forth, dim and huge, in the vague immensity around us; and the life and nature of man, with its brief interests, its misery and sin, its mad passion and poor frivolity, struts and frets its hour, encompassed and overlooked by that stupendous All, of which it forms an indissoluble, though so mean a fraction,' have not been as yet reversed, but confirmed rather by the studies of two generations since those words were written in the second. number of the Foreign Review in 1828.

In this paper it will be our main purpose to consider the claims of the Faust, not so much as a German classic, but as a dramatic representation of nineteenth century thought, and as a world poem, facing the problem of life and offering a modern solution of it.

The first thought that strikes us in connection with this idea is Goethe's wonderful many-sidedness, which also is the characteristic trait of our own age. Its humanistic and scientific agnosticism, its divine discontent and stoical acquiescence, its naturalistic pantheism, its striving after some allcomprehensive theory of Monism to explain the universe, its ethical hedonism, and most of all, its pessimism, combined with desperate attempts at joyous performance of duty under difficulty, resolute to be optimistic, spite of appearances, in the

ruder facts of existence, its determination to engage in altruistic philanthropies, and thus find consolation for disappointment in its baffled attempts to come to understand nature and solve the earlier problem of life and mind-its apotheosis of activity Die That ist alles'-to which men run, foiled by B. speculation, even our modern socialistic tendencies, which are part of the same stream of thought, may be seen reflected from the pages of the Faust :—

The gospel that Goethe preached in his wondrous drama,' writes Mr. H. de B. Gibbins, in the cultured journal of Socialism in England, now defunct, is the gospel of our century, the keynote of our age, the pillar of certainty amid all our modern vagueness and weariness, and distrust of former creeds. It is the gospel of social endeavour.'

Again, Goethe, 'the last Hellene,' is above all things the prophet of culture, and the Faust, his great masterpiece, is but a poetical description of the process of self-culture.

6

We will dwell for a moment on the most important of these. As a scientist he was the precursor of the evolution theory. The story is told by Soret, how, on calling at Goethe's house on the day when the news reached Weimar of the French Revolution in 1830, the latter cried out: What do you think of this great event?' Soret naturally supposed it was the political event that he referred to, and replied accordingly, but Goethe said: 'We do not, as its seems, understand one another,' and explained that the event he referred to was the quarrel of Cuvier and S. Hilaire, ending in the latter's triumph in the Academy, i.e., the triumph of the evolution theory as then understood. This and the fact that an account of this controversy by Goethe is his last work, show how deeply interested to the end he was in the scientific question of the day. We need not remind readers of this Review that the author of the Faust could lay claim to the title of scientific discoverer in histology, that he could enter the lists with specialists in optics and meteorology, and that his speculations on the morphology of plants form a no insignificant chapter in the history of science. It puts the Faust on a level with the poem of Lucretius De Rerum Natura. It rises above it, for it is the merit of Goethe to have restored spirituality to our modern concep

tions of the Kosmos, which is one of the most important stages in the progress of modern scientific thought. This mystical view of nature throws light on the connection of two important passages, too, in the first part of Faust, which, as they stand, are not easily reconciled. In the first of them the spirit of the earth, i.e., the spirit of nature, repels Faust, who invokes him and claims affinity.

'Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst,

Nicht mir!',

'Thou'rt like the spirit which thou comprehendest,

Not me.'

Yet in the scene 'Dreary Day' there occurs the passage:

'Mighty, glorious spirit, who hast vouchsaved to me thine apparition, who knowest my heart and my soul, why fetter me to the felon-comrade who feeds on mischief and gluts himself with ruin,'

whilst the answer to this question is given in a former passage in the scene, Forest and Cavern,' which begins—

Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me, gav'st me all
For which I prayed,'

and after some very fine lines occur the words—

'Thou gav'st the comrade, whom I now no more
Can do without.'

From which it would seem that with Goethe's view of nature and her healing power, the spirit of nature had used Mephistopheles as an elementary spirit, instrumental throughout in the gradual elevation of the hero morally, that in short, according to the original plan of conducting the hero through various stages of self-development under the guiding power of the soul of the universe, we are here given to understand, in the character and functions of Mephisto, the truth that 'There is a soul of goodness in things evil,' that all the forces of the universe make for the regeneration and completion of man. And what is all this but a form of natural religion, a theism in its modern form?

In Ethics Goethe was a follower of Spinoza, whom he terms

'theissimum,' and it is strange, though by no means uncommon, to see the ethic of Goethe's work called into question, yet in the very fore front of the first part of Faust we have the doctrine of self-abnegation so popular in theory, perhaps because so distant from practice in this nineteenth century, 'Entbehren sollst du.'

This corresponds with the phrase in W. Meister to express the outcome of ethical aesthetical education, 'Alles ruft uns, dass wir zu entsagen sollen.' Realist as he was in this respect, it is most quite true what Karl Grün says of Goethe: 'Goethe was the ideal idealist the earth has ever borne; an aesthetic idealist.' True he fell short of his own ideal, as does the Faust, but ideal ethics, as the result of self-culture in all its branches, is his aim as it is that of the modern man of culture. Hence the hero who represents it, Faust, like his author, must pass through the refiner's fire of sin and suffering, the various experiences he encounters in the performance of active functions in Vanity Fair, and in the contemplative acts of vision of the classical ideal, including its combination with the romantic, and the sad experiences, too, in his philanthropic activities, to come out at last from the crucible, taught by the base facts of life, and noble fancies and vanishing truths, able in some measure at last—

'Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen resolut zu leben.'

'To live resolutely in the whole, the good, the beautiful.'

But is this all, or the end of all perfection, and is the force of religion among the factors of man's moral education disregarded in the Faust? The close of the second part excludes this idea, for the finale is an act of grace, and this stamps it as 'a religious and philosophical poem,' to use the phrase of one of the most recent and most competent critics, Kuno Fischer; nor would it be difficult, if space did permit, to shew from two recently published books, one by Otto Harnack, on Goethe in the epoch of his complete development, and the other by Th. Vogel, containing a selection of passages, systematically arranged from Goethe's writings to define his position in relation to religion and religious questions, that the religious element formed a very important part of the mind of Goethe. And so,