vainest, sickening and terrible'; then down | true, and tender, whose sudden and unagain with a swoop, fate-driven, to the thought-of touch staggers him for a modeeper phantasmagoria below, where all ment in his wild career. Here one gleam the sky and lights are changed, and woe has succeeded bliss, and the brief human dream of thoughtless love and delight has ended in death and murder and madness. Dreams all? with only that gigantic grasp of sorrow, pain unendurable, to distinguish the dream which is clothed in flesh and blood from that which is mere air and spirit. of human reality, clear as the daylight, simple and penetrating as Nature herself, alights momentarily upon the wanderer, but is obscured by the wild clouds that swallow him once again, the wild search to which he is driven by the fever within him and the fever without, his weird companion and his hungering, despairing soul. ` This, to our thinking, is the very heart and soul What does it all mean? It means that of the wonderful drama. The story emin all the earth and all the air there is bodies the tragedy of Gretchen, but to nothing that can satisfy the wandering, Faust it is but an incident in his awful yearning, passionate soul, which is a stran- history, an incident summing up, indeed, ger in this world and a sojourner like its its inevitable and unchangeable character, fathers. Let this being throw every re- its struggle of life and death between the straint aside; let him try knowledge true and the false, between the actual and at any cost; pleasure at any cost; let the unseen, and its desperate attempt to him adventure himself on the most aw-snatch some supreme flower of satisfaction ful of penalties in wild pursuit of some-out of that universal chaos-if not of the thing to satisfy him, scorning safety, com- soul, then of the senses anything, anyfort, virtue, everything that might be thing! which will make him say to the supposed to stand between him and enjoy- passing moment, " Linger, thou art so ment and, lo! his fate is no better than fair!" If we could imagine the mournful that of the dullest slave: he has but a writer of Ecclesiastes be he Solomon, be darker climax of misery, a deeper depth of he some other heart-stricken sage - roused pain, in proportion to the violence of his up into a sudden tragic passion of desire, struggle. Who will show him any good? making one last frantic effort to find someHe seeks it in lofty ways, and in vile; in thing which has not already been; somethe flesh, in the spirit, in some wild inter- thing out of the sickening routine of mediate region where fantastic delusions everyday disappointment, there are no othreign, and all is as wildly false as the dis-er garments in which we could clothe him appointment is bitterly true. Never was a • more tremendous moral worked out for our instruction; but the object of the poet is not moral. He cares as little for morality as he does for probability, or the unities of art, or any other conventional thing. When Faust sets forth upon his wild journey, it is even with no belief in the possibility of that satisfaction for which he scornfully risks his soul, indifferent to the danger. In all he does and wishes there is the constant presence of this scornful despair, this want of all faith and real expectation. We feel that he accepts the devil's bargain, and sets out with him infinitely more for the excitement's sake, and to escape from the gnawing sense of his personal failure, than with any real belief that Mephistopheles can help him. His arbitrary and arrogant demand of the demon's services to procure him Margaret on the spot, as he might have demanded a flower, betrays this halfsavage, half-contemptuous scorn of hopelessness. For Faust at that moment has no thought of Margaret in the deeper way of love, which surprises him afterwards when his soul is brought in contact with the fresh and frank girlish being, so simple, than those of this eager but unhoping spirit, the scornful, passionate, despairing Faust, who is as contemptuous of the risk of his soul as he is of the signing in blood of the conventional compact. And here it must be added that, if any gentle reader retains a lingering wish to be able to approve of Faust, or to find some moral excellence struggling through his darkness, that fond imagination had better at once be dismissed from the mind. No thought of morality is in the whole; on the contrary, its bonds are voluntarily and consciously laid aside in order that the last experiment may be tried without any obstacle; and this even the most didactic mind will recognize as a kind of necessity. Faust, accordingly, is not a being to excite any moral sympathy; he is not a good mau captive to error, or led away by temptations of the devil-or even struggling against the forces of evil which are massed and grouped around him. On the contrary, he goes out to meet them. He inspects them with an eager scrutiny, and makes a distinct mental effort to find in them, if not some good, yet some pleasure, - a fact which naturally increases tenfold the reality of his disgust and sickening mockery as no human imagination over perception of the everlasting meanness before dreamt of. And there is an infinite and pettiness of that wild riot which is so subtle power in the way in which this befull of seeming abandon, but yet so slavish ing, in the very height of his unmitigated, in its fantastical restraints. The only mo- unimpressionable intellectualism, is yet ment at which the man is hushed out of bound by the most fantastic cantrips of his wild fever is when the touch of love diablerie which fascinates the spectator. has arrested him-when compunction He who could jeer when he came out of seizes him when his wild course is the presence of God, is yet held fast by stopped for the moment, and a thought of the pentagram on the floor as if he were the ruin he may bring upon the creature some sorcerer's familiar; and has to be he loves daunts him in the delirious fear- thrice bidden to enter, and to go through lessness which up to this moment has been various other contemptible formalas with a his condition. The scene in the cave, for mixture of absolute rigmarole in his superwhich Mr. Lewes curiously enough declares natural cleverness which betrays a mockhe can find no reason, seems to us the one ery still more profound than the mockery point where the storm-driven spirit touches of the devil-the saturnine laugh within earth, before all the powers of hell tighten a laugh of the man who can create and upon him that grasp which he scorns and despise the very demon who leads him to loathes, but can not any longer shake off. perdition. We do not know of anything Love and Nature have momentarily turned that can be put beside this extraordinary him back into a man. "Shall I not feel creation of genius. Shakespeare was at her pangs her ruin?" he cries. "Must once too human and too divine-too proI drag her and her peace into the dust? foundly moral in his nature to have been It is the sudden soft murmur of the brook capable of it. He never could have amid the horrors of the mariner's dream - brought himself to sneer at the Sneerer, the sudden break of light in the sky, show- and to hold up to everlasting mockery ing still in the midst of the tempest a pos- only, the worst and strangest and most sibility of calm. Short-lived possibility - pitiful impersonation of evil which ever impracticable hope! for fate is not to be occurred to genius. Other poets have elecheated, nor the demon, nor those wild vated the Devil into a splendid embodiimpulses which give both fate and demon ment of despair- they have hated him, their power. contemned, even in a tender turn of the great poet's nature have pitied, the hopeless One; but only Goethe has made him at once powerful and ridiculous, victorious and paltry the grotesque slave of an angle, as well as the remorseless master of the perishing soul. The character of Mephistopheles is perhaps the most wonderful creation in all fiction. He is not a man in the guise of a demon, like Milton's magnificent Satan, but a true devil, without one mitigating feature, one compunction, one feeling, good or bad. From the time that he appears in It is in Margaret, however, that the mind the presence of the Lord, in a scene which of the reader, baffled and bewildered by we must say is not so shocking to our feel- all these mysteries, finds rest and refreshings of reverence as it seems to have been ment and food for his sympathies. She is in many cases, until the last word of the placed so beautifully on the canvas, and drama, which he snatches at to destroy if surrounded with such a bewitching atmospossible the one hope of the dying girl and phere of song-and her presence is, boher miserable destroyer, the completeness sides, such an intense relief from the gloom of his heartless, soulless, devilish nature is and tumult of the other scenes that it never disturbed by any inopportune break- is almost impossible for us to allow that ing in of humanity. The mocking unbelief her character is the least truly conceived, which chuckles in the very presence of and the least perfect in execution. This is divinity over its own changeless, emotion- so far natural that the use of woman in less estimate of things human, is a more poetry is chiefly conventional, or rather original conception than that of the typical, and that so long as she represents haughty, remorseful demons who still re- a certain ideal of beauty, love, and innomember their high estate, and in the very cence, individualism is not required for height of their pride are conscious of hav- her. She is the light in the picture, a thing ing fallen. Mephistopheles, however, who much more straightforward and free from still now and then likes to see Der Alte, complication than the darkness. We fear and finds it good of so great a Lord to be that in saying this we will shock many civil to the Devil, is such an inconceivable readers to whom Margaret is the true atmixture of cold-blooded impudence and traction of "Faust." Yet, nevertheless, we Is in my bosom aching! I weep! I weep! I weep! She is the victim whom man and the have been less immense; and the tragedy of Margaret brings the drama into a region accessible to those who have neither insight nor patience enough to follow that unending tragedy of "Faust," which may, for aught we know, be going on still in ever new and new experiment, new clutches at those apples of Sodom which turn to ashes in the mouth. do not doubt that they will, to a certain extent at least, agree with us when they have looked a little closer into her. She is intended, it is evident, to be extremely young younger even than the ordinarily imagined age of girlish perfection and perfectly simple, though rapidly developed devil, the struggling mind and the malign under the magic of Faust's presence, ad- spirit, require to give emphasis to their miration, and love. But perhaps, more conflict with all the powers of heaven and from the fault of the age than the poet, all the laws of earth. Without this examthis gentle creature is made so purely su- ple of their reckless progress over the very perficial as to yield at once to her lover neck of humanity, indifferent how and without even a thought of the pollution where their crushing footsteps fall, the iminvolved and that after she has been dis-pression made upon the audience would coursing him in the garden scene with that wonderful mixture of gravity, piety, and bewildered girlish simplicity about his religion. To be sure, this may be said to be the effect of the spiritual power of Mephistopheles; but it is by no means one of the least powerful points in the story that Mephistopheles has no power whatever on Margaret. He steals the jewels for her, We need not add that the "Faust" and manages for Faust a visit to her empty chamber but he does no more. He can tragedy does go on to another weird scene, not take the lover there when Margaret is into which we shall not attempt to follow within. He can neither force her innocent the poet. The worshippers of Goethe will soul into sin, nor even throw her into a be led by their cultus into these obscure questionable position. Her downfall has shades of mystic poesy; but to us it is imto be left to herself; but this very down- possible to go with them, neither would fall is at variance with her character. She the reader thank us for endeavouring to who has but a moment before been full of open to him a bewildering region where sweet and anxious though confused thought even Mr. Carlyle's enthusiasm could induce about her lover's faith who has shown few to follow. One of the many proofs such quick and true spiritual perception as that universal and sovereign poetry must regards Mephistopheles - and who a little confine itself within the limits of common after sings to the Mother of Sorrows a human perception and feeling, lies in the hymn so full of the lof iest pathosfact that the great fable of "Faust" resents with the careless readiness of a wan- solves itself, in reality, with by far the ton to the first proposal of evil. This is a greater majority of readers, into the story mistake which would have been fatal had of Margaret. In her-in her simplicity the drama been one founded upon the or- and naturalness, and in the heartrending dinary principles of art. As it is, how-pathos of her woe the human interest ever, the wild rush of the phantoms, who centres. It is immaterial to the most of are always ready to flood the scene, and us whether the philosopher ever finds or hurry it on from one chapter to another, prevents us from dwelling upon the incredible rapidity of the action at this the central point of the story. Never was figure more pathetic than that of poor Margaret afterwards, though, indeed, her aspect up to the crowning anguish of the prison scene is that of an innocent martyr rather than of a Magdalen. "My heart is sore, my peace is gone," she sings in her early despondency before evil has come nigh her. But it is with a deeper tragic anguish that her song is full when she addresses the Mother of Tears "Wheresoe'er I go, What woe. what woe! what woe con not the mouthful of content for which he "Wilhelm Meister" is in every way less comprehensible, less definable work than the great poem which has made Goethe's name for ever illustrious. The best and soundest critics, and those who ter' is the mature product of the first genius of our times, and must, one would think, be different in various respects from the immature products of geniuses who are far from the first, and whose works spring from the brain in as many weeks as Goethe's cost him years." This is a dangerous kind of certainty. The second part of "Wilhelm Meister" are most deeply acquainted with the gen- a temper which permits the most diverse ius of Goethe, speak with a concealed be- characters to display themselves, each wilderment which is not less, though it is" having justice done" to him, each living more amusing, than that of the casual "freely in his own element, in his proper reader. Mr. Lewes himself is driven to form." This is the same quality which Mr. beseech us to relinquish any attempt to Lewes defends from the charge of immordiscover the idea of the work, and to ality, by defining it as "a complete absence stand fast by history," which would be of all moral verdict on the part of the auvery reasonable if it were simply a history thor." But both critics take refuge finally of Meister which we were contemplating. in that personal plea which seldom betok"The first six books - beyond all compar- ens much strength of argument. Goethe ison the best and most important were did it, therefore it must be great. "Meiswritten," says Mr. Lewes, "before the journey to Italy: they were written during the active theatrical period when Goethe was manager, poet, and actor. The contents of these books point very clearly to his intention of representing in them the whole nature, aims, and art of the comedian; and in a letter to Merck he expressly states that it is his intention to portray the actor's life. Whether at the his Wanderjahre or Travels, as it is same time he meant the actor's life to be called in the English version - is still symbolical, cannot be positively deter- more profoundly bewildering. The promined. That may or may not have been cessions of misty figures that wind in enda secondary intention. The primary in- less obscurity through it, defy at once the tention is very clear." This statement we intellect and the memory-and the mysshould receive, we repeat, as perfectly sat- terious education which goes on in the isfactory, had the novel been anything but "pedagogic Province" under the superthe "Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister." intendence of "the Chief of the Three,' The life of the comedian is indeed perfect- reaches to a height of mysticism quite bely clear, and full of genius. Though the yond our reach. Such knowledge is too incidents are scanty, and though the tale high for us. Yet there are lovely pictures goes on in that leisurely way which prom- in this wildest and strangest little volume; ises eternal duration, there is quite enough and a kind of ineffable unmeaningness, as in it to justify its existence, were we not of a purpose which has quite overshot its mystified at the beginning by an intima-mark, attracts us somehow to the quaint, tion of some hidden thread of meaning beautiful picture of the Holy Family in which no intellect yet has been clear the first four or five chapters. We have enough to seize. "The work is one of the not the remotest idea what it means, and most invaluable productions," Goethe says would much rather not have it explained to Eckermann; I myself can scarcely be to us; but it is like a picture of Van Eyck, said to have the key to it." It was the or some other early Teutonic master. work of nearly twenty years of his life, a group of beings half celestial, half peaswas given to the world with vast solemni- ant, like nothing earthly, yet full of the ty, and has been accepted ever since its sweetness of the homely soil. We have publication as an admirable parable of the no reason whatever to give for this caprice highest class if we only could divine of admiration; and it may be, for aught what it meant. We confess frankly that we know, rather a disgrace to us than the meaning which is so very hard to dis- otherwise; but we confess that in all cover seems to us scarcely worth the trou- "Meister" this curious fantastic picture is the only one which has taken deep hold of our thoughts, or in the least touched our heart. ble. never יז 66 - The Goethe-idolater who reads it over and over will doubtless be rewarded for his pains; but the man who is not a worshipper, to begin with, will probably However, to return to the one irrefragareturn to this perplexing book. ble base of argument: Goethe wrote this m Carlyle we can glean not much book, and therefore it must have had a urther the way of absolute enlighten- great deal of meaning in it. He lingered ment than an enthusiastic commendation over it, in some curious twist of his great of the "temper of mind"- that is, the intellect, more than he did over any other universal calm, impartiality, and largeness work. "Faust" was a trifle in comparison of apprehension displayed in the work with what "Meister" cost him. That this VOL. XXVIII. 1304 LIVING AGE. is but another instance of the manifold, Goethe, who had taken the bloom off so mistakes of genius, and of the special per- many young existences, had in his old age versity of this genius, we might venture to groan under the bond, unlegalized, buto say, were the poet any one but Goethe, strong as habit and his own weakness who has the special privilege of possessing made it, to a coarse and intemperate comt still a body-guard ready to repel any at- panion, whom he could neither mend nor tack. But that the demi-god had this per- get free from. He married her finally, versity is evident enough. When we read which was well, but did not alter the charthat in Rome his whole mind was occupied acter of his sufferings, in which, recollectwith study of the structure of plants-ing the experiences of his past life, the an investigation which surely would have vindictive reader will feel a certain satisbeen more appropriate to the Gartenhaus faction as of poetic justice. Certainly, unat Weimar and that during the French less the rules of morals and of feeling are campaign in which he accompanied his abrogated by a man's greatness, which we Duke, he was absorbed in a theory of do not hold to be the case, Goethe richly colours the reader cannot but feel that deserved to have a fat and intemperate either a wilful abstraction of his great fac- termagant saddled upon him in the latter ulties from the more important matters part of his life. under his eye, or an almost childish waywardness of imagination, must have been the cause of such strange aberration. A small man who had been seized by such fantastic philosophies would either have concealed them sedulously, or would have been characterized, senza complimenti, as a fool. But it was part of the great Goethe's instinct to follow his own intuitions wherever they led him, without shame or self-explanation. That life ended most tranquilly, among such honours as have fallen to few men. He lived so long that his fame went to the ends of the earth, and brought him universal worship. From all the different points of the compass idolaters came to bow before his shrine; and these not common idolaters. In intellectual Germany he ruled supreme, though he was not a political or patriotic German, and took but little interest in the uational cause. His We need not dwell upon such produc- indifference, indeed, to public events must tions as the "Elective Affinities," the have reached the length of affectation, as Wahlverwandtschaften - the monument of we find him in August 1830 commenting a last love, which seized him when he was upon "the eruption of the volcano" in sixty, and at length married, for a pretty Paris, meaning not the Revolution, news girl in her teens, who was sent back to of which had just arrived, but a discusschool by way of putting an end to the sion in the Academy between Cuvier and uncomfortable romance. This story re- Geoffrey St. Hilaire-surely a ridiculous lates how a husband and wife fell in love piece of pretence, which it is impossible with their two visitors, and all the deli- to account for otherwise than by the percate conflict of sentiment that ensued as versity already referred to, or such a petty to whether the four lovers were to be determination to be superior as it is painmade happy or not. Mr. Lewes ingen- ful to connect with the memory of a great iously assures us that, "taking life as it is, man. His way to the grave was as pleasant, not as it ought to be, this situation may as gradual, as softly carpeted with mosses be considered as terribly true, and, and flowers, as ever beguiled human although tragic, by no means immoral " footstep onward. Weimar became famous an opinion, however, so little agreed in by through the world by his means. It was the English public at least that the" Wahl- no longer known as a little ducal Residenz, verwandtschaften" is the only important or the capital of a tiny province, but as one of Goethe's works which remains un- the temple in which was adored the greattranslated. We have said that by this est poet of his age. There, surrounded time Goethe was at last married, an event by his friends and children, he died. His which did not occur till nearly twenty companions were mostly gone before him. years after the beginning of his connection Duke and duchess and brother poet had with Christiane Vulpius, the mother of his been swept away into the unseen, and anchildren, who only then became his wife. other generation had taken their place; The incident is not so pleasant that we but it was a generation which, from their should dwell upon it; but it is curious as earliest breath, had been trained to adore illustrating the often-illustrated theory of Goethe. He was eighty-two when the the weight of bondage which men avow-end came. He died an ideal death, with edly dreading the yoke of marriage bring as small an amount of suffering as was inupon themselves by other connections. evitable, and with no consciousness of the |