CHAPTER VII.

GOETHE

THAT which was wanting to Klopstock was a creative imag nation: he gave utterance to great thoughts and noble sentiments in beautiful verse; but he was not what might be called an artist. His inventions are weak; and the colors in which he invests them have scarcely even that plenitude of strength that we delight to meet with in poetry, and in all other arts which are expected to give to fiction the energy and originality of nature. Klopstock loses himself in the ideal. Goethe never gives up the earth, even in attaining the most sublime conceptions, his mind possesses vigor not weakened by sensibility. Goethe might be regarded as the representative of all German literature; not that there are no writers superior to him in different kinds of composition, but that he unites in himself alone all thatdistinguishes German genius; and no one besides is so remarkable for a peculiar species of imagination which neither Italians, English, nor French have ever attained.

Goethe having displayed his talents in composition of various kinds, the examination of his works will find the greatest part of the following chapters; but a personal knowledge of the man who possesses such an influence over the literature of his country will, it appears to me, assist us the better to understand that literature.1

1 "The Duchess Amalia was enchanted with her [Madame de Staël], and tae duke wrote to Goethe, who was at Jena, begging him to come over, and be seen by her; which Goethe very positively declined. He said, if she wished very much to see him, and would come to Jena, she should be very heartily welcomed; a comfortable lodging and a bourgeois table would be offered her, and every day they could have some hours together when his business was over; but he could not undertake to go to court, and into

Goethe possesses superior talents for conversation; and whatever we may say, superior talents ought to enable a man to talk. We may, however, produce some examples of silent men of genius timidity, misfortune, disdain, or ennui, are often the cause of it; but, in general, extent of ideas and warmth of soul naturally inspire the necessity of communicating our feelings to others; and those men who will not be judged by what they say, may not deserve that we should interest ourselves in what they think. When Goethe is induced to talk, he admirable; his eloquence is enriched with thought; his pleasantry is, at the same time, full of grace and of philosophy; his imagination is impressed by external objects, as was that of the ancient artists; nevertheless his reason possesses but too much the maturity of our own times. Nothing disturbs the strength of his mind, and even the defects of his character, ill-humor, embarrassments, constraint, pass like clouds round the foot of that mountain on the summit of which his genius is placed.

What is related of the conversation of Diderot may give some idea of that of Goethe; but, if we may judge by the writings of Diderot, the distance between these two men must be infinite. Diderot is the slave of his genius; Goethe ever

society; he did not feel himself strong enough. In the beginning of 1804. however, he came to Weimar, and there he made her acquaintance, that is to say, he received her in his own house, at first tête-à-tête, and afterwards in small circles of friends.

Except when she managed to animate him by her paradoxes, or wit, he was cold and formal to her, even more so than to other remarkable people; and he has told us the reason. Rousseau had been drawn into a correspondence with two women, who addressed themselves to him as admirers; he had shown himself in this correspondence by no means to his advantage, now (1803) that the letters appeared in print. Goethe had read or heard of this correspondence, and Madame de Staël had frankly told him she intended to print his conversation.

"This was enough to make him ill at ease in her society; and although she said he was un homme d'un esprit prodigieux en conversation . quand on le sait faire parler il est admirable,' she never saw the real, but a factitious Goethe. By dint of provocation-and champagne-she managed to make him talk brilliantly; she never got him to talk to her seri ously. On the 29th of February, she left Weimar, to the great relief bot of Goethe and Schiller."-(Lewes, Life of Goethe, vol ii. p. 274.)

holds the powers of his mind in subjection: Diderot is affected, from the constant endeavor to produce effect; but in Goethe we perceive disdain of success, and that to a degree that is singularly pleasing, even when we have most reason to find fault with his negligence. Diderot finds it necessary to supply by philanthropy his want of religious sentiments: Goethe is inclined to be more bitter than sweet; but, above all, he is natural; and, in fact, without this quality, what is there in one man that should have power to interest another?

Goethe possesses no longer that resistless ardor which ininspired him in the composition of Werther; but the warmth of his imagination is still sufficient to animate every thing. It might be said, that he is himself unconnected with life, and that he describes it merely as a painter. He attaches more value, at present, to the pictures he presents to us, than to the emotions he experiences; time has rendered him a spectator. While he still bore a part in the active scenes of the passions, while he suffered, in his own person, from the perturbations of the heart, his writings produced a more lively impression.

As we do not always best appreciate our own talents, Goethe maintains at present, that an author should be calm even when he is writing a passionate work; and that an artist should equally be cool, in order the more powerfully to act on the imagination of his readers. Perhaps in early life, he would not have entertained this opinion; perhaps he was then enslaved by his genius, rather than its master; perhaps he then felt that the sublime and heavenly sentiment being of transient duration in the heart of man, the poet is inferior to the inspiration which animates him, and cannot enter into judgment on t, without losing it at once.

At first we are astonished to find coldness, and even something like stiffness, in the author of Werther; but when we can prevail on him to be perfectly at his ease, the liveliness of hist imagination makes the restraint which we first felt entirely disappear. He is a man of universal mind, and impartial because universal; for there is no indifference in his impartiality : his is a double existence, a double degree of strength, a double

light, which on all subjects enlightens at once both sides of the question. When it is necessary to think, nothing arrests his course; neither the age in which he lives, nor the habits he has formed, nor his relations with social life: his eagle glance falls decidedly on the object he observes. If his career had been a political one, if his soul had developed itself by actions, his character would have been more strongly marked, more firm, more patriotic; but his mind would not have taken so wide a range over every different mode of perception; passion or interests would then have traced out to him a positive path. Goethe delights in his writings, as well as in his conversation, to break the thread which he himself has spun, to destroy the emotions he excites, to throw down the image he nas forced us to admire. When, in his fictions, he inspires us with interest for any particular character, he soon shows the inconsistences which are calculated to detach us from it. He disposes of the poetic world, like a conqueror of the real earth; and thinks himself strong enough to introduce, as nature sometimes does, the genius of destruction into his own works. If he were not an estimable character, we should be afraid of this species of superioity which elevates itself above all things; which degrades and then again raises up; which affects us, and then laughs at our emotion; which affirms and doubts by turns, and always with the same success.

I have said that Goethe possessed in himself alone all the principal features of German genius; they are all indeed found in him to an eminent degree: a great depth of ideas, that grace which springs from imagination—a grace far more original than that which is formed by the spirit of society: in short, a sensibility sometimes bordering on the fantastic, but for that very reason the more calculated to interest readers, who seek in books something that may give variety to their monotonous existence, and in poetry, impressions. which may supply the want of real events. If Goethe were a Frenchman, he would be made to talk from morning till night all the authors, who were contemporary with Dide rot, went to derive ideas from his conversation, and afforded

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him, at the same time, an habitual enjoyment from the ad miration he inspired. The Germans know not how to make use of their talents in conversation, and so few people, even among the most distinguished, have the habit of interrogating and answering, that society is scarcely at all esteemed among them; but the influence of Goethe is not the less extraordinary. There are a great many people in Ger many who would think genius discoverable even in the direction of a letter, if it were written by him. The admirers of Goethe form a sort of fraternity, in which the rallying words serve to discover the adepts to each other. When foreigners also profess to admire him, they are rejected with disdain, if certain restrictions leave room to suppose that they have allowed themselves to examine works which nevertheless gain much by examination. No man can kindle such fanaticism without possessing great faculties, whether good or bad; for there is nothing but power, of whatever kind it may be, which men sufficiently dread to be excited by it to a degree of love O enthusiastic.

CHAPTER VIII.

SCHILLER.

SCHILLER was a man of uncommon genius and of perfect sincerity; these two qualities ought to be inseparable at least in a literary character. Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth. Falsebood is still more disgusting in writing than in conduct. Actons even of the most deceitful kind still remain actions, and we know what we have to depend on, either in judging or hating them; but writings are only a vain mass of idle words, when they do not proceed from sincere conviction.

There is not a nobler course than that of literature, when it is pursued as Schiller pursued it. It is true, that in Germany