my story to the delight and astonishment of my hearers, and Wolfgang saw with glowing eyes the fulfilment of his own conceptions, and listened with enthusiastic applause." What a charming glimpse of mother and son! The grandmother here spoken of lived in the same house, and when lessons were finished, away the children hurried to her room, to play. The dear old lady, proud as a grandmother," spoiled " them, of course, and gave them many an eatable, which they would get only in her room. But of all her gifts nothing was comparable to the puppet-show with which she surprised them on the Christmas Eve of 1753, and which Goethe says "created a new world in the house." The reader of "Wilhelm Meister" will remember with what solemn importance the significance of such a puppetshow is treated, and may guess how it would exercise the boy's imagination. There was also the grandfather Textor, whose house the children gladly visited, and whose grave personality produced an impression on the boy, all the deeper because a certain mysterious awe surrounded the monosyllabic dream-interpreting old gentleman. His portrait presents him in a perruque à huit étages, with the heavy golden chain round his neck, suspending a medal given him by the Empress Maria Theresa; but Goethe remembered him more vividly in his dressing-gown and slippers, moving amid the flowers of his garden, weeding, training, watering; or seated at the dinner-table where on Sundays he received his guests. The mother's admirable method of cultivating the inventive activity of the boy, finds its pendant in the father's method of cultivating his receptive faculties. He speaks with less approbation than it deserved of his father's idea of education; probably because late in life he felt keenly his deficiencies in systematic train ing. But the principle upon which the father proceeded was an excellent one, namely, that of exercising the intellect rather than the memory. An anecdote was dictated, generally something from every-day life, or perhaps a trait from the life of Frederick the Great; on this the boy wrote dialogues and moral reflections in Latin and German. Some of these have been preserved and published; a glance at them shows what a mastery over Latin was achieved in his eighth year. We can never be quite certain that the hand of the master is not mingled with that of the child; but the very method of independence which the master throughout pursued is contrary to a supposition of his improving the exercises, although the style is certainly above what even advanced pupils usually achieve. Doctor Wisemann, of Frankfort, to whom we are indebted for these exercises and compositions, written during Goethe's sixth, seventh, and eighth years, thinks there can be no doubt of their being the unassisted productions of the boy. In one of the dialogues there is a pun which proves that the dialogue was written in Latin first and then translated into German. It is this: the child is making wax figures, his father asks him why he does not relinquish such trivialities. The word used is nuces, which, meaning trivialities in a metaphorical sense, is by the boy wilfully interpreted in its ordinary sense, as nuts << Icera nunc ludo non nucibus" - I play with wax, not with nuts. The German word Nüsse means nuts simply, and has no metaphorical meaning. Here is one of his moral reflections. 'Horatius and Cicero were indeed Heathens, yet more sensible than many Christians; for the one says silver is baser than gold, gold than virtue; and the other says nothing is so beautiful as virtue. Moreover, many Heathens have surpassed Christians in virtue. Who was truer in friendship than Damon? more generous than Alexan der? more just than Aristides? more abstinent than Diogenes? more patient than Socrates? more humane than Vespasian? more industrious than Apelles and Demosthenes?" Platitudes these, doubtless; but they are platitudes which serve many as the ripe maxims of maturity. They give us a notion of the boy being somewhat "old-fashioned," and they show great progress in culture. His progress in Greek was remarkable, as may be seen from his published exercises. Italian he learned by listening to his father teaching Cornelia. He pretended to be occupied with his own lesson, and caught up all that was said. French, too, he learned, as the exercises testify; and thus before he is eight, we find him writing German, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. He was, in fact, a precocious child. This will probably startle many readers, especially if they have adopted the current notion that precocity is a sign of disease, and that marvellous children are necessarily evanescent fruits' which never ripen, early blossoms which wither early. Observatum fere est celerius occidere festinatam maturitatem, says Quintilian, in the mournful passage which records the loss of his darling son; and many a proud parent has seen his hopes frustrated by early death, or by matured mediocrity following the brilliant promise. It may help to do away with some confusion on this subject, if we bear in mind that men distinguish themselves by receptive capacity and by productive capacity; they learn, and they invent. In men of the highest class these two qualities are united. Shakespeare and Goethe are not less remarkable for the variety of their knowledge, than for the activity of their invention. But as we call the child clever who learns his lessons rapidly, and the child clever who shows wit, sagacity, and invention, this ambiguity of phrase has led to surprise when the child who was "so clever" at school, turns out a mediocre man; or, conversely, when the child who was a dunce at school, turns out a man of genius. Goethe's precocity was nothing abnormal. It was the activity of a native disposition at once greatly receptive and readily productive. Through life he manifested the same eager desire for knowledge, and was not in the least alarmed by that bugbear of " knowledge stifling originality," which alarms some men of questionable genius and unquestionable ignorance. He knew that if abundant fuel stifles miserable fires, it makes the great fire blaze. 6 "Ein Quidam sagt: Ich bin von keiner Schule; Auch bin ich weit davon entfernt Das heisst, wenn ich ihn recht verstand: In the summer of 1754 the old house was entirely rebuilt, Wolfgang officiating at the ceremony of laying the foundation, dressed as a little bricklayer. The quick, observant boy found much in this rebuilding of the paternal house to interest him; he chatted with the workmen, learning their domestic circumstances, and learning something of the builder's art, which in after years so often occupied him. This event, moreover, led to his being sent to a friend during the restoration of the upper part of the house for the family inhabited the house during its reconstruction, which was made story by story from the ground 1 An epigram, which may be rendered thus: An author boasting said: "I follow none; I owe my wisdom to myself alone; To neither ancient nor to modern sage To place this boasting in its proper light: upwards and the event also led to his being sent to school. Viehoff thinks that Germany would have had quite another Goethe had the child been kept at a public school till he went to the university; and quotes Gervinus to the effect that Goethe's home education prevented his ever thoroughly appreciating history, and the struggles of the masses. Not accepting the doctrine that character is formed by circumstances, I cannot accept the notion of school life affecting the poet to this extent. We have only to reflect how many men are educated at public schools without their developing a love of history or much sympathy with the masses, to see that Goethe's peculiarities must have had some other source than home education. That source lay in his character. Moreover, it is extremely questionable whether Goethe could have learned to sympathise with the masses in a school of one of the German imperial towns, where there could be no "masses," but only close corporations, ruled and ruling according to narrow and somewhat sordid ideas. From intercourse with the sons of Frankfort citizens, no patriotism, certainly no republicanism, was to be learned. Nor was the public teaching, especially the historical teaching, likely to counteract this influence, or to inspire the youth with great national sympathies. Those ideas had not penetrated schools and universities. History, as taught by Schiller and Heeren, was undreamed of. "When I entered at Tübingen in 1826," writes Mr. Demmler to me, "the university of Paulus, Schelling, Hegel and, in days of yore, of Melanchthon, Reuchlin, and Kepler, traditions were still surviving of the lectures of Rösler, professor of history. In one of them, as I was told by a fellow of the college who had heard it, the old cynical skeptic said, As regards the Maid of Orleans, I conclude she was a cow girl, and was, moreover, on a very friendly footing with the |