scarcely ever paints it save in the colours of metaphor and simile. Shakespeare's imagery bubbles up like a perpetual spring: to say that it repeatedly overflows, is only to say that his mind was lured by its own sirens away from the direct path. He did not master his Pegasus at all times, but let the wild careering creature take its winged way. Goethe, on the contrary, always masters his perhaps because his steed had less of restive life in its veins. Not only does he master it, and ride with calm assured grace, he seems so bent on reaching the goal, that he scarcely thinks of anything else. To quit metaphor, he may be said to use with the utmost sparingness all the extraneous aids of imagery; he tries to create images of the objects, rather than other images of what the objects are like.

Shakespeare, like Goethe, was a decided realist. He, too, was content to let his pictures of life carry their own moral with them. He uttered no moral verdict; he was no Chorus preaching on the text of what was pictured. Hence we cannot gather from his works what were his opinions. But there is this difference between him and Goethe, that his intense sympathy with the energetic passions and fierce volitions of our race made him delight in heroic characters, in men of robust frames and impassioned lives. Goethe, with an infusion of the best blood of Schiller, would have been a Shakespeare; but, such as Nature made him he wasGoethe, not Shakespeare.

Turning from these abstract considerations to the two earliest works which form our text, we observe how this youth is determined in the choice of his subject by the realistic tendency. Instead of ranging through the enchanted gardens of Armida - instead of throwing himself back into the distant Past, thus escaping from the trammels of a modern subject, which the confrontation of reality always makes more difficult this

boy fashions into verse his own experience, his own observation. He looks into his own heart -he peers into the byways of civilisation, walking with curious observation through squalid streets and dark fearful alleys. Singular, moreover, is the absence of any fierce indignation, any cry of pain at the sight of so much corruption underlying the surface of society. In youth the loss of illusions is generally followed by a cynical misanthropy, or a vehement protest. But Goethe is neither cynical nor indignant. He seems to accept the fact as a thing to be admitted, and quietly striven against, with a view to its amelioration. He seems to think with the younger Pliny, that indulgence is a part of justice, and would cite with approval the favourite maxim of the austere yet humane Thraseas, qui vitia odit homines odit, - he who hates vices hates mankind. For in the "Mitschuldigen " he presents us with a set of people whose consolation is to exclaim" Rogues all!"—and in after years he wrote of this piece, that it was dictated, though unconsciously, by "far-sighted tolerance in the appreciation of moral actions, as expressed in the eminently Christian sentence, Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.''

1 Pliny, Epist., lib. viii. 22. After I had written this sentence, Schöll published Goethe's Note-book kept at Strasburg, wherein I found this very aphorism transcribed.

CHAPTER III.

ART STUDIES.

FRAU BÖHME died. In her he lost a monitress and friend, who had kept some check on his waywardness, and drawn him into society. The Professor had long since cooled towards him, after giving up all hopes of making him another Heineccius. A youth with such remarkable dispositions, who would not be assiduous in attendance at lecture, and whose amusement during lecture was to sketch caricatures of various law dignitaries in his note-book: another ornament to jurisprudence irrecoverably lost! Indeed, the collegiate aspect of this Leipsic residence is not one promising to professors; but we instructed by the result-know how much better he was employed, than if he had filled a hundred volumes of note-books by diligent attendance at lecture. He studied much, in a desultory manner; he studied Molière and Corneille; he began to translate "Le Menteur." The theatre was a perpetual attraction; and even the uneasy, unsatisfied condition of his affections, was instructing him in directions whither no professor could lead him. But greater than all this was the influence of Shakespeare, whom he first learned a little of through Dodd's "Beauties of Shakespeare," a work not much prized in England, where the plays form part of our traditional education, but which must have been a revelation to the Germans, something analogous to what Charles Lamb's "Specimens of the Old English Drama" was to

us. The strength and beauty of language, the bold and natural imagery of these "Beauties," startled the young poets of that day, like the discovery of huge fossil remains of some antediluvian fauna; "and to gratify the curiosity thus awakened," he says, "there came Wieland's prose translation of several plays, which we studied with enthusiasm."1

There are no materials to fill up the gaps of his narrative here, so that I am forced to leave much indistinct. For instance, he has told us that Käthchen and he were no longer lovers; but we find him writing to her in a lover-like tone from Frankfort, and we know that friendly intercourse still subsisted between them. Of this, however, not a word occurs in the Autobiography. Nor are we accurately informed how he made the acquaintance of the Breitkopf family. Breitkopf was a bookseller in Leipsic, in whose house Literature and Music were highly prized. Bernhard, the eldest son, was an excellent performer, and composed music to Goethe's songs, which were published in 1769, under this title: "Neue Lieder in Melodieen gesetzt von Bernhard Theodor Breitkopf." The poet is not named. This Liederbuch contains twenty songs, the majority of which were subsequently reprinted in the poet's works. They are love songs, and contain a love-philosophy more like what is to be found in Catullus, Horace, and Wieland, than what one would expect from a boy, did we not remember how the braggadocio of youth delights in expressing roué sentiments, as if to give itself airs of profound experience. This youth sings with gusto of inconstancy:

"Da fühl ich die Freuden der wechselden Lust.”

1It is possible that Wieland's translation only then fell into Goethe's hands, but the publication was commenced before his arrival in Leipsic, namely, in 1761.

He gaily declares that if one mistress leaves you, another will love you, and the second is sweeter to kiss than the first:

"Es küsst sich so süsse der Busen der Zweiten,

Als kaum sich der Busen der Ersten geküsst." Through Breitkopf he learned to know Hiller; and among Hiller's pupils was the Corona Schröter, whom we shall meet hereafter in the Weimar circle. She was a year older than Goethe, and surrounded with admirers, both of her beauty and her talents. He is said, I know not on what evidence, to have lent his poetical talent to some of these admirers.

Another acquaintance, and one more directly influential, was that of Oeser, the director of the Drawing Academy. He had been the friend and teacher of Winckelmann, and his name stood high among connoisseurs. Goethe, who at home had learned a little drawing, joined Oeser's class, where, among other fellow students, was the Hardenberg who afterward made such a noise in the Prussian political world. He joined the class, and did his best to acquire by labour the skill which only talent can acquire. That he made little progress in drawing, we learn from his subsequent confession, no less than from his failure; but tuition had this effect at least it taught him to use his eyes. In a future chapter I shall have occasion to enter more fully on this subject. Enough if for the present a sentence or two from his letters tell us the enthusiasm Oeser inspired. "What do I not owe to you," he writes to him, "for having pointed out to me the way of the True and the Beautiful!" and concludes by saying, "the undersigned is your work!" Writing to a friend of Oeser's, he says that Oeser stands beside Shakespeare and Wieland in the influence exercised over him. "His instruction will influence my whole 1 See Book V., ch. v.