careful eye this is not even true of Shakespeare, though Shakespeare leaves no immediate stamp of himself, and critical inference alone can discern him in his works; but far less is it true of Goethe. A rarified self no doubt it is-a highly distilled gaseous essence; but everywhere, penetrating all he writes, there is the ethereal atmosphere which travelled about with Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Mr. Lewes's volumes give us a very able and interesting biography,—a book, indeed, of permanent value; the incidents illustrating character, though not quite exhausting his materials, are disposed with skill, and the artistic criticism, while thoroughly appreciating Goethe's transcendent poetical genius, is independent, sensible, and English. From his moral criticism of Goethe, and sometimes, though not so frequently, from the poetical, I very widely dissent, and hope to give the grounds of my dissent. Something more too might have been done in the way of defining his individual position both as a poet and as a man. But it is impossible to deny Mr. Lewes high merit for the candour of his biography. Where Goethe has been most censured, he gives all the facts without reserve; and he does not go into any helpless captivity to the poet and artist. He gives his readers the elements for forming their own moral judgments, and he has shaken off from his feet the ponderous rubbish of the German scholiasts. Herr Düntzer and his colleagues are skilfully used in Mr. Lewes's book; but they are also skilfully ignored. Mr. Lewes has not submitted himself to Carlyle's somewhat undiscriminating, strained, and lashedup furor of adoration for every word that the German sage let drop. There is, by the way, nothing more remarkably illustrative of Goethe's "dæmonic" influence than Carlyle's worship of him. Except in his permanent unfailing selfpossession, Goethe lacked almost all the personal qualities which usually fascinate that great writer's eye. And ac

cordingly there runs through Carlyle's essays on Goethe a tone of arduous admiration,—a helpless desire to fix on some characteristic which he could infinitely admire,—betraying that he was in subjection to the "eyes behind the book," not to the thing which is said in it. There was nothing of the rugged thrusting power of Johnson, of the imperious practical faith of Cromwell, of the picturesque passion of Danton, of the kingly fanaticism of Mahomet; nothing, in short, of the intensity of nature which Carlyle always needs behind the sagacity he worships. Mr. Lewes reports a rather affected piece of Carlylese, delivered by the Latterday oracle in Piccadilly upon one of the injurious attacks that had been directed against Goethe. Carlyle stopped suddenly, and with his peculiar look and emphasis said, "Yes, it is the wild cry of amazement on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not a spooney too! Here is a godlike intellect, and yet you see he is not an idiot! not in the least a spooney!" This was hardly true of Goethe; and we strongly suspect that Mr. Carlyle was resisting a secret feeling that there was a limpness and want of concentration in Goethe's whole nature intellectual and moral, from the results of which his imperturbable presence of mind and great genius barely saved him; that he did in consequence go sometimes beyond the brink of spooneyishness in early days, and across the verge of very unreal "high art" in later life. These are just the defects to which Mr. Carlyle is most sensitive. It is true Goethe never was in danger of permanently sinking into either abyss; for his head was always cool, and his third eye, at least, always vigilant. But it may perhaps account for the \ unusual failure of our great essayist in delineating Goethe, that the poet's wonderful writings were less the real object of his admiration than the strange fascination of the character behind. In my very brief sketch of the poet's life, I shall, so far as possible, select my illustrations from

1

passages or incidents passed over in Mr. Lewes's volumes, wherever they seem to be equally characteristic.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at noon on the 28th August, 1749, in Frankfort-on-the-Maine, seems to have inherited his genial, sensitive, sensuous, and joyous temperament from his mother; and from his father, the pride, self-dependence, and magnificent formality, the nervous orderliness, perseverance, and the microscopic minuteness of eye, by which, at least after the first rush of youth was gone by, he was always distinguished. His mother was but eighteen when he was born. She was a lively girl, full of German sentiment, with warm impulses, by no means much troubled with a conscience, exceedingly afraid of her husband, who was near twenty years her senior, and seemingly both willing and skilful in the invention of occasional white lies adapted to screen her children from his minute, fidgetty, and rather austere superintendence. She "spoiled" her children on principle, and made no pretence of conducting a systematic training which she abhorred. She said of herself in afteryears, that she could "educate no child, was quite unfit for it, gave them every wish so long as they laughed and were good, and whipped them if they cried or made wry faces, without ever looking for any reason why they laughed or cried." Her belief in Providence was warm with German sentiment, and not a little tinged with superstition. She rejoiced greatly when her son published the "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul," which she loved as a memorial of a lost pietistic friend. Her religion was one of emotion rather than of moral reverence. She was generous and extravagant, and, after her husband's death, seems to have spent capital as well as income. She was passionately fond of the theatre; a taste which she transmitted to her son. Her hearty simplicity of nature made * Letter to her granddaughter-Düntzer's "Frauenbilder," p. 544.

her universally loved. Her servants loved and stayed with her to the last. She seems to have had at least as much humour as her son, which, for Germans, was not inconsiderable, and not much more sense of awe. She gave the most detailed orders for her own funeral, and even specified the kind of wine and the size of the cracknels with which the mourners were to be regaled; ordering the servants not to put too few raisins into the cakes, as she never could endure that in her life, and it would certainly chafe her in her grave. Having been invited to go to a party on the day on which she died, she sent for answer that "Madame Goethe could not come, as she was engaged just then in dying.' Yet her sensitiveness was so great, that she always made it a condition with her servants that they should never repeat to her painful news that they had picked up accidentally, as she wished to hear nothing sad without absolute necessity. And during her son's dangerous illness at Weimar, in 1805, no one ventured to speak to her of it till it was past, though she affirmed that she had been conscious all the time of his danger without the heart to mention it.

This latter peculiarity Goethe inherited. Courageous to the utmost degree in danger, he could never bear to encounter mental pain which he could anyhow escape. He invented soft paraphrases to avoid speaking of the death of those he had loved, and indeed of all death. Writing to Zelter of his own son's death, he says, "the staying-away (Aeussenbleiben) of my son has weighed dreadfully upon me in many ways." And his feeling was so well-known, that his old friend and mistress, the Frau von Stein, who died before him, directed that her funeral should not pass his door, lest it should impress him too painfully. No one dared to tell him of Schiller's death; and so it was also at the death of his wife's sister,

* Düntzer's "Frauenbilder," p. 583.

and in other cases. Indeed, his constant unwillingness manfully to face the secret of his own anguish, was a principal source of a shade of unreality in a generally very real character. He habitually evaded the task of fathoming the meaning and the depth of suffering. He avoided all contact with keen pain. He could not bear, although in the neighbourhood, to visit his brother-in-law at a time when his sister's child was dying. It was not weakness, -it was his principle of action; and the effect remains in his works. He writes like a man who had not only experienced but explored every reality of human life except that of anguish and remorse. The iron that enters into the soul had found him too; but instead of fronting it as he fronted all other realities of life, and pondering its teaching to the last letter, he drew back from it with what speed he might. This experience even his Faust wants. Remorse, grief, agony, Goethe gently waived; and, by averting his thoughts, softened them gradually without mastering their lesson. Hence his passion never reaches the deepest deep of human life. It can glow and melt, but is never a consuming fire. His Werther, Tasso, Ottilie, and Clärchen suffer keenly, but never meet the knife-edge. There is nothing in his poems like the courageous reality of suffering which vibrates through some of Shelley's lyrics and his "Cenci." The fascination of pain he can paint, but not the conquest of the will over its deeper aspect of terror. The temperament he inherited from his mother. But to him was granted a conspicuously potent will, which should have enabled him to sound this depth also.

From his father it is far more difficult to say what qualities of mind Goethe inherited. The old man had always worried his family; and it became fashionable among the poet's friends, who were enthusiastic about his mother, to ignore or depreciate the old counsellor, and