scanty mouthfuls; but Chodowiecki, the artisan, who with his wood-cuts illumines the most miserable daubs, he is paid.'

In a subsequent letter he says, Many thanks. By your attention to these things, and your care of Peter, you have performed true service for me, and richly repaid all that I may have been able to do for you. Be under no

anxiety about the future, there will certainly occur opportunities wherein you can be useful to me; meanwhile continue as heretofore.' This was written on the very day of his return to Weimar from the Swiss journey! If this tells us of his attention to his protégé, the next letter tells us of his anticipating even the casualty of death, for he had put Kraft on the list of those whom he left as legacies of benevolence to his friends. It should be remarked that Goethe seems to have preserved profound secrecy with respect to the good he was then doing; not even in his confidential letters to Frau von Stein is there one hint of Kraft's existence. In short, nothing is wanting to complete the circle of genuine benevolence.

The year 1781 began with an increase of Kraft's pension; or rather, instead of paying a hundred dollars for his board and lodging, and allowing him pocket-money, he made the sum two hundred dollars. I can spare as much as that; and you need not be anxious about every trifle, but can lay out your money as you please. Adieu ; and let me soon hear that all your sorrows have left you.' This advance seems to have elicited a demand for more money, which produced the following characteristic an

swer.

'You have done well to disclose the whole condition of your mind to me; I can make all allowances, little as I may be able to completely calm you. My own affairs will not permit me to promise you a farthing more than the

two hundred dollars, unless I were to get into debt, which in my place would be very unseemly. This sum you shall receive regularly. Try to make it do.

'I certainly do not suppose that you will change your place of residence without my knowledge and consent. Every man has his duty, make a duty of your love to me and you will find it light.

It would be very disagreeable to me if you were to borrow from any one. It is precisely this miserable unrest now troubling you which has been the misfortune of your whole life, and you have never been more contented with a thousand dollars than you now are with two hundred; because you always still desired something which you had. not, and have never accustomed your soul to accept the limits of necessity. I do not reproach you with it; I know, unhappily too well, how it pertains to you, and feel how painful must be the contrast between your present and your past. But enough! One word for a thousand at the end of every quarter you shall receive fifty dollars; for the present an advance shall be made. Limit your wants: the Must is hard, and yet solely by this Must can we show how it is with us in our inner man. To live according to caprice requires no peculiar pow

ers.' *

The following explains itself:

'If you once more read over my last letter, you will see plainly that you have misinterpreted it. You are neither fallen in my esteem, nor have I a bad opinion of you, neither have I suffered my good opinion to be led astray, nor has your mode of thinking become damaged in

* I will give the original of this fine saying, as I have rendered it but clumsily: Das Muss ist hart, aber beim Muss kann der Mensch allein zeigen wie's inwendig mit ihm steht. Willkürlich leben kann jeder.

my eyes all these are exaggerated expressions, such as a rational man should not permit himself. Because I also speak out my thoughts with freedom, because I wish certain traits in your conduct and views somewhat different, does that mean that I look on you as a bad man, and that I wish to discontinue our relations?

It is these hypochondriacal, weak and exaggerated notions, such as your last letter contains, which I blame and regret. Is it proper that you should say to me: I am to prescribe the tone in which all your future letters must be written. Does one command an honorable, rational man such things as that? Is it ingenuous in you on such an occasion to underline the words that you eat my bread? Is it becoming in a moral being, when one gently blames him, or names something in him as a malady, to fly out as if one had pulled the house about his ears?

'Do not misconstrue me, therefore, if I wish to see you contented and satisfied with the little I can do for

you.

So, if you will, things shall remain just as they were; at all events I shall not change my behavior towards you.'

The unhappy man seems to have been brought to a sense of his injustice by this, for although there is but one more letter, bearing the date 1783, that is, two years subsequent to the one just given, the connection lasted for six years. The dénouement is untold; and we know not whether death released Goethe from the responsibility, or whether Kraft's circumstances were bettered by any regular employment. When Goethe undertook to write the life of Duke Bernhard he employed Kraft to make extracts for him from the Archives; which extracts, Luden, when he came to look over them with a biographical purpose, found utterly worthless.* The last words we find of

* See Luden's Rückblicke in Mein Leben.

6

Goethe's addressed to Kraft are, You have already been of service to me, and other opportunities will offer. I have no grace to dispense, and my favor is not so fickle. Farewell, and enjoy your little in peace.'

I do not envy the philosophy of that man who can read these letters unmoved. To my apprehension they reveal a nature so exquisite in far-thoughted tenderness, so true and human in its sympathies with suffering, and so ready to alleviate suffering by sacrifices rarely made to friends, much less to strangers, that after reading them, the epithets of 'cold' and 'heartless,' so often applied to him, sound like blasphemies against the noblest feelings of humanity. Observe, this Kraft was no romantic object appealing to the sensibility; he had no thrilling story to stimulate sympathy; there was no subscription list' opened for him; there were no coteries weeping over his misfortunes. Unknown, unfriended, ill at ease with him. self and with the world, he revealed his wretchedness in secret to the great poet, and in secret that poet pressed his hand, dried his eyes and ministered to his wants. And he did this not as one act, not as one passing impulse, but as the sustained sympathy of six years.

Pitiful and pathetic to me is the thought that such a man can, for so many years, both in his own country and in ours, have been reproached, nay even vituperated as cold and heartless! A certain reserve and stiffness of manner, a certain soberness of old age, a want of political enthusiasm, and some sentences wrenched from their true meaning, are the evidences, whereon men build the strange hypothesis that he was an Olympian Jove sitting above Humanity, seeing life but not feeling it, his heart dead to all noble impulses, his career, a calculated egotism. How it was that one so heartless became the greatest poet

it;

of modern times - how it was that he whose works contained the widest compass of human life, should himself be a bloodless, pulseless Diplomatist- no one thought of explaining till Menzel arose, and with unparalleled effrontery maintained that Goethe had no genius, but only talent, and that the miracle of his works lies in their style a certain adroitness in representation! Menzel is a man so completely rejected by England - the translation. of his work met with such hopeless want of encouragement, that I am perhaps wrong to waste a line upon but the bold style in which his trenchant accusations are made, and the assumption of a certain manliness as the momentum to his sarcasms, have given his attacks on Goethe a circulation independent of his book. To me he appears radically incompetent to appreciate a poet. I should as soon think of asking the first stalwart Kentish farmer for his opinion on the Parthenon. The farmer would doubtless utter some energetic sentences expressive of his sense of its triviality; but the brutality of his language would not supply the place of knowledge, feeling and taste; nor does the brutality of Menzel's style supply those deficiencies of nature and education which incapacitate him for the perception of Art.

The paradox still remains then, in spite of Menzel : A great poet destitute of the feelings which poetry incarnates a man with a great soul, destitute of soul a man who wrote Werther, Egmont, Faust, Hermann und Dorothea, and Meister, yet knew not the joys and sorrows of his kind; will any one defend that paradox? * Not only

* I remember once, as we were walking along Piccadilly, talking about the infamous Buchlein von Goethe, Carlyle stopping suddenly and with his peculiar look and emphasis, saying, ' Yes it is the wild cry of amazement on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not