THE STARS THAT HAVE SET IN THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. III. GOETHE.

THERE have been false prophets in literature as well as in religion; and both have appeared for a season in all the honors of undeserved celebrity. We cannot always judge of the rank of a chief by the number of his followers; for if the final approbation of the many be just, their immediate favor or dispraise is far from being always so. It requires time to winnow the chaff from the grain of public applause; the idol of one generation is often the contempt of the next; and the history of letters exhibits no lack of Lyllys and Aretines.

By contemporaries, perhaps, the supremacy of a great mind may be best estimated by the command it is seen to exercise over such as are themselves highly endowed; even as the power of the wave is shown by the size of the rocks it has moved. An accident may captivate the humor of the many; but he who is admitted to be the first among the rarer few, must have no doubtful claim to this distinction.

As an evidence of this nature, we have only to look at the despotic sway which Goethe held during his lifetime over minds of a superior order, and the cordiality of their respect for him who was at once the Alpha and the Omega of German poetry, and whose name was a Shibboleth of German critics. He must, indeed, be considered as the mightiest of all the sons of song of whom Germany has ever boasted; nor would any one, in these later times, have attacked his well-deserved fame, if some of his blind admirers had not had the temerity to proclaim him also the best of men, and even to compare him, with presumptuous adulation scarcely credible, to our Saviour himself. The rising generation was not inclined to bow before their idol with that blind veneration which his worshippers enjoined as a duty; and its chief men began to examine whether Goethe had thoroughly fulfilled his duty to his father-land. The result of this inquiry was not altogether satisfactory; and they found, or at least imagined they had found, that in some things he had failed; they considered and spoke of Goethe in three different characters—as poet, as minister of state, and as a man. With this distinction we shall not concern ourselves, having only to treat of him as a poet. We therefore proceed to a rapid historical survey of those events only which are illustrative of, or illustrated by his works.

When we look towards Germany, an indescribable load of sadness possesses our heart; for behold this great country, from a land of faith and love, has become, in its turn, the empire of doubt and passion. It were a long and miserable history, to trace the progress of doubt among a people whom religion has so entirely satiated, that they will away with no more, and with whom mysticism has ended at the same point as skepticism among the French. It were only to show the efforts of that people to arrest its own fall, and to float yet a while longer upon wandering creeds ere it sank never to rise again. The same conflicts which her Luther underwent during his watchings-the cryings out-the weepings the sighings-the groanings-these same has Germany endured upon her lonely pillow-behind her curtains-in that long waking-time of glory, which began with Frederick and finished with Goethe. For it is not in an hour that she has reached the spot where France stands. She has offered her adoration to all things; and in this downfall of heaven upon earth, everything has given way under her hand, and sunk with her. When the realm of letters reeled, she took refuge in intellect; and when intellect, utterly ruined by mysticism, in its turn gave way at the point where her faith failed, she betook herself to the worship of philosophy. That was the time of Fichte and Schelling; and then, this empire being undermined, fell into the Nihilism of Hegel, and it was necessary to make another god.

There was once a time when patriotism served religion; when men prayed in battle, and faith was tempered in blood; when the Te Deum of Leipsic arose fearlessly in its cathedral, from the midst of smoke and confusion: and this faith, the most easy to maintain, has, in its turn, passed away with the smoke of the bivouacs. There remained, at least, the worship of Art. Her shrine had always been preserved. But Goethe, whom she adored, himself destroyed it. Thus Germany has descended into doubt with the same honest earnestness which she had shown in ascending into faith. It has not been as with others, by the irremediable and sudden fall of a day, but by an infinity of steps and circuits, regulated beforehand. We see her descend progressively into nonentity, and scientifically into doubt. Her cathedrals are worn out-not by the praying and the kneeling of men; she has encircled them with the symbols of mysticism, as the flowers of winter are bound round the forehead of the dead. Thus, by another way, she has reached the point where the world was awaiting her; and at this moment, under different languages and different names, the whole of Europe can boast that it lives under the same shelter, that is to say, in the same void; and henceforward behold

the three great queens of the modern world, France, Germany, and England-all seated on the earth, like Shakspeare's Richardall three having fallen by different steps from the same throne of religion to the same nonentity-from the same faith into the same doubting all three exchanging glances, half-stupified, without their accustomed God-of destinies so different, so similar in misery, and ready to mock each other even unto death at this common disappointment in the Infinite.

In France and in England incredulity has sent its cry abroad by means of Voltaire and Byron. It is a study to examine how it has seized upon German literature, and made it its resting-place and its abode. Poetry has undergone the same disguisings which minds have assumed to themselves, and it has been only after many attempts, and scruples without number, that the word has been pronounced. From thence there has been nothing known of that sudden convulsion, which, in other places, has forced out such astonishing outcries. The loads of creeds have been gently untied; and there was kept in reserve a healing for every wound. There was a consolation provided for every sacrifice; the heart was not broken at once, but gently despoiled, stripped, and lulled to sleep. Innumerable were the disagreements and hallucinations of sect, which concealed its destitution. Poetry, on the other hand, was not a luxury to be dispensed with. She passed for the religion which she had replaced, and she imitated, to the point of deceiving the world, its air and its austerities. The church had fallen, but the hymns had been preserved. Novalis sung in the night, and how could one believe that to be a ruin which was inhabited by a voice still so melodious and young? It is thus, that by always replacing faith by poetry, the figure by its picture, and God by its shadow, Germany has been able, without any violence, to lull her past, like a babe, to sleep on the lap, and to shroud it in death without its awakening. The whole question is to determine whether, when she shall begin to perceive that what she adores is but the dust of what she once worshipped, she will utter a cry of distress, or whether she will not familiarize herself with nonentity, even more cordially than France has done.

See how she sets about it! The root of the matter is, that the two religions, Protestantism and Catholicism, mutually aid each other's destruction. They interchange their doubts, their belief, their churches, their cradles, their graves. Under the same roof they were born, they live, they pray, they die-they have the same cross-the same shroud. And when their hatred is, by chance, kindled, they say to human reason, before they contend

with it, the gladiator's words to the emperor-"They who are about to die, salute thee!"

This character of conciliation in death has never appeared more strikingly than in Goethe. Here was a man who comprised within himself all the doubts of modern man, and who allowed none of them to appear. He attacked nothing-he defended nothing he treated all belief, and every enthusiasm, as the mummies which Aristotle received from Asia and classed in his Academy. He too, in his church, so classed all forms of worship, and put the dead face to face with each other. The infinity of doubt was concealed in him, beneath the infinity of faith. He is, apparently, totally different from Voltaire—in reality the same. He shuts out nothing-not he !-he admits phantoms-ay, even the least; and this universality of belief is, at the same time, the universality of skepticism: assent without limit is positive denial.

Voltaire was the analysis, he the synthesis of nonentity it is the point where their thoughts meet; and it was, in truth, worth the trouble, that these two names, and the two nations whom they represented, should make war so long, to understand each other so well at this place! For Goethe has not only taught Germany to know herself; he opened her ears to the howlings of the present. He cast her all alone upon the highway of modern revolution. He revealed to her his doubt, of which she yet wished to doubt. He divulged the secret of her wavering faith, which she would have still so well concealed from others in her mystical retreat. Like the wicked spirit, he cried aloud in the church to this kneeling Margaret, "Rememberest thou thyself, Margaret, when thou believest what thy lips murmur, and what thy heart desires? When thy Luther had not yet deceived thee, and thou, young, fair as thy hope, and a child of Christ, didst pray morning and evening in the cathedral of thy Cologne ?"

It is this which he has said, in a thousand forms, in prose as well as in verse, and which the world has heard. From this day, Germany has joined the great company of the skeptical nations. She has come forth in her pure cœnaculum, and, in her turn, is in the midst of the conflict of the age. Many voices, doubtless, have been raised against the great poet-many have been the efforts which she has made to retrace her steps, but it has been all in vain; she must advance, no matter towards what precipice; she has stepped beyond the bounds of her belief—she cannot enter them again; the modern spirit has seized her; he hath dragged her whither we are all driving each other. He is the black horseman who has carried away his Leonora. In spite of earth or heaven, triumph or ruin, life or death, she must now,

A

without even once turning her head, perforce accompany the cold spirit of the age towards the place whither we are all preceding her.

Goethe has revealed to Germany the doubt which she wished to conceal from herself; but this revelation bore, for a long time, only a personal meaning. She was resolved to see in it the state of the interior of one mind, and not the confession of a people. She accused the poet-she absolved herself. It required much time, and rude convulsions before she could make the avowal, that the man in this case was the entire nation. The critical school of the Schlegels knew marvellously well how to disguise the evil and conceal its surface. To speak properly, they threw Germany into a magnetic sleep, during which, invasions, and revolutions, and the clattering of Napoleon's spurs were passing around her, without calling forth a sigh. During this trance of fifteen years, all the efforts which this country made was to detach herself for the present, and to turn away her head from her bleeding wounds; she saw through and proved every period, save the one in which she was living. This was, but under an original appearance, a movement something similar to that of France at the time of the restoration. Latent public life, to all appearance dead-a long suffering and mystical literature-poesy taking the veil and cutting off her own tresses-a complete renunciation of all that had belonged to the world—a peculiar manner of showing the end of her recollections, and ceasing where they became bitter-regrets-mystery-nothing of hope, nor of noisy popularity, and on the whole, a mode also of establishing a freedom in glory, and of passing triumphantly under the Caudine Forks.

Goethe began his authorship with 'Goetz von Berlichingen,' and presently acquired a very honorable name in the literary world; the drama had scarcely appeared, when it was greeted with most unusual, but well-deserved applause. Even the old pilgrims of Parnassus considered the author as a youth—eccentric-but promising. He had opened an entirely new path, and crowds of imitators made haste to follow him, and to glean in the same fields where the favorite of the muses had reaped immortal laurels.

Never before had a German writer ventured to give a true and faithful picture of the time in which Goethe's hero lived, and to show, by shaking off the trammels of formality, how forcibly an author can chain the world's attention, when he knows, and dares to represent things as they really exist, at the same time not violating the true genius of poetry. Fortune stood his friend on VOL. X., No. XLVIII.-74