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ships. Mr. Lewes reports a rather affected piece of Carlylese, delivered by the Latter-day 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 true enough of Goethe, no doubt; but we 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 self-possessed presence of mind and great genius alone saved him; that he did in consequence go sometimes up to the brink of spooneyishness in early days, and even across the verge of 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 the very brief sketch we must give of the poet's life, we shall, of course, so far as possible, select our illustrations from passages or incidents passed over in Mr. Lewes's volumes, wherever they seem to be equally characteristic.

Johann gang 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, fidgety, and rather austere superintendence. She "spoiled" her children on principle, and made no pretension to conduct 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 mouths, without ever looking for any reason why they laughed or cried."* Her

* Letter to her granddaughter,-Düntzer's Frauenbilder, p. 544.

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 her every where 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 peculiarity Goethe inherited. Courageous to the utmost degree in all physical danger, he could never bear to encounter mental pain which he could any how avoid. 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 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, 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 awful task of fathoming the meaning and the depth of suffering. He avoided all contact with keen pain. He could not bear, al

* Düntzer's Frauenbilder, p. 583.

though 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 message 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 exhausting 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 despotic 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 they seem to have regarded it as a "mercy" when "Providence removed him." There are, however, one or two incidents in the Autobiography which convey an impression that his affection for his children was as real and deep as even that of his wife. He was a formal man, with strong ideas of straightlaced education, passionately orderly (he thought a good book nothing without a good binding), and never so much excited as by a necessary deviation from the "pre-established harmony" of household rules. He could not submit to the inevitable. He was the kind of man who is so attached to his rules, that if he cannot shatter the obstacles of circumstance, he thinks it next best to let the obstacles of circumstance shatter him. He had none of his son's calm presence of mind. But whatever perseverance of temper Goethe had, he probably gained from his father. He could not bear to do any thing superficially. He was as thorough (gründlich, as the Germans say,) in preparing Wolfgang for the coronation of the emperor by an exhaustive investigation into the authorities for every ceremony to be observed, as in teaching him the civil law. Einleitung, Quellen, &c. were all raked carefully up; for was not the coronation a part of

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the Entwickelung der Geschichte? He had the formal about every thing, considering rhyme the essence of poetry believing that pictures, like wine, improved in value by keeping. He taught his children himself, and completely alienated his daughter by his dry and exacting manner. But he was at least in earnest with his task. He began to learn both English and drawing at the same time with his children, that his own participation in their efforts might spur them on. He copied all his children's drawing-copies "with an English lead-pencil upon the finest Dutch paper; and not only observed the greatest clearness of outline, but most accurately imitated the hatching of the copies with a light hand. He drew the whole collection, number by number, while we children jumped from one head to another just as we pleased." This is very characteristic of his son's genius in later years, at least in the microscopic detail. After the first outburst of the poet's youthful passion, the lad took a sudden passion for rude fragmentary drawings from nature, on all sorts of odd gray scraps of paper. And of this time he tells us," the pedagogism of my father, on this point too, was greatly to be admired. He kindly asked for my attempts, and drew lines round every imperfect sketch. . . . The irregular leaves he cut straight, and thus made the beginning of a collection in which he wished at some future time to rejoice in the progress of his son.". There seems to us real tenderness here. He was a proud man, who had drawn back into himself at the first repulse from civic politics; and was hardly reconciled to his son's adhesion to the Weimar court, because he dreaded lest some ducal caprice should bring mortification to his family pride.

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The poet was born, as he himself records, with that sedate kind of humour in which alone he excelled, with a "propitious horoscope." There was clear anticipation in it of the special worship of young ladies, and of a general sceptre over earth and air. The sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and was culminating for the day." Jupiter and Venus were friendly; (little Pallas, latent for another half-century, must surely have lent a helping ray;) Mercury was not adverse; Mars and Saturn indifferent; "the moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her opposition, all the more as she had reached her planetary hour; she therefore resisted my birth, which could not be accomplished till this hour was passed."

Frankfort was a busy old-fashioned town, with old walls and new walls, full of lingering traditions and gray customs still surviving, which served as an antique poetic frame for its changing pictures of motley German life. Goethe remembered his childish exploring expeditions about the old walls, moats, towers, and posterns, with great delight. Directly behind his father's house

was a large area of gardens, to which the family had no access, stretching away to the walls of the city. The boy used often to gaze on this forbidden Eden in evening hours from a room in the second story called the garden-room. Even after the lapse of sixty years, the many-coloured picture of these gardens-the solitary figures of careful neighbours stooping to tend their flowers, the groups of skittle-players, and the bands of merry children,— all blended together in the warm sunset-the floating sounds of many voices, of the rolling balls, and the dropping ninepins---would again beset his imagination, bringing with them many a "tale of visionary hours."

Mr. Lewes remarks that the child's character frequently presents far more distinctly the ground-plan of the matured man's than the youth's, since the proportions of the whole are often completely disguised by the temporary caprices of newly-expanded passions and newly-gained freedom. This is, at all events, extremely true of Goethe, and is generally true of all casts of character where the permanent influence of a manly conscience does not start forth into life along with the new powers and new freedom it is to control. The awful sense of responsibility and moral freedom, once awakened, does not again subside, and where searching moral convictions have once taken hold on the character, the subsidence of youthful impetuousness does not give back again the characteristic features of childhood but in Goethe this element was always faint, and the difference between the child's mind and the man's was only a difference in maturity of powers; when the spring-tide of youth fell back, his inward life was as it had been, only that all was stronger and riper. He was a reflective, old-fashioned, calmly-imaginative child, always fascinated by a mystery, but never, properly speaking, awed by it. It kindled his imagination; it never subdued him. He was full of wonder, and quite without veneration. In the "altar to the Lord" which the child secretly built on a music-stand of his father's at seven years of age, and on which he burnt incense in the shape of a pastil, until he found that it was at the risk of injuring his altar, he was innocently playing with a subject which to almost any other child would have been too sacred for imaginative amusement. He was evidently charmed with the picturesqueness of the patriarchal sacrifices, and thought with delight of the blue smoke rising up to heaven beneath the first beam of the rising sun: of the religious feeling, the desire to give up any thing of his own out of love to God, he had not of course any idea;-that in a child of seven no one would expect. But what is characteristic is, the absence of any restraining awe, in thus mingling the thought of God with his play at an age when he had already begun to think whether

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