individual greatness in Götz. Here was a man great not by privilege, but by Nature; his superiority given him by no tradition, by no court favour, but by favour only of his own strong arm and indomitable spirit. And was not the struggle of the whole eighteenth century a struggle for the recognition of individual worth, of Rights against Privileges, of Liberty against Tradition? Such also was the struggle of the sixteenth century. The Reformation was to Religion, what the Revolution was to Politics: a stand against the tyranny of Tradition—a battle for the rights of individual liberty of thought and action, against the absolute prescriptions of privileged classes.

In the Chronicle of Götz von Berlichingen his deeds are recorded by himself with unaffected dignity. There Goethe found materials, such as Shakspeare found in Holingshed and Saxo-Grammaticus; and used them in the same free spirit. He has dramatised the chronicle—made it live and move before us; but he has dramatised a chronicle, not written a drama. This distinction is drawn for a reason which will presently appear.

Viehoff has pointed out the use which has been made of the chronicle, and the various elements which have been added from the poet's own invention. The English reader cannot be expected to feel the same interest in such details as the German reader does; it is enough therefore to refer the curious to the passage,* and only cite the characters invented by Goethe; these are Adelheid, the voluptuous, fascinating demon; Elizabeth, the noble wife, in whom Goethe's mother saw herself; Maria, a reminiscence of Frederika ; Georg, Franz Lerse, Weislingen, and the Gypsies. The death of Götz is also new. The tower mentioned by Goethe is still extant at Heilbronn, under the name of Götzen's Thurm. The rest, including the garden, is the creation of the poet. Götz was confined for only one night in that tower. His death, which according to the play must have happened in 1525, did not occur till 1562, when the burly old knight, upwards of eighty, died at his castle of Horberg, at peace with all men, and in perfect freedom. His tomb may be seen at the monastery of Schönthal.*

Götz was a dramatic chronicle, not a drama. It should never have been called a drama, but left in its original shape with its original title. This would have prevented much confusion; especially with reference to Shakspeare, and his form of dramatic composition. While no one can mistake the influence of Shakspeare in

*Goethe's Leben, vol. ii, pp. 77, 79.

+ Count Joseph Berlichingen, the present representative of the family, has recently published a Life of Götz, but it has not reached me.

this work, there is great laxity of language in calling it Shakspearian; a laxity common enough, but not admissible. Critics are judges who rely on precedents with the rigour of judges on the bench. They pronounce according to precedent. That indeed is their office. No sooner has an original work made its appearance, than one of these two courses is invariably pursued: it is rejected by the critics because it does not range itself under any acknowledged class, and thus is branded because it is not an imitation; or it is quietly classified under some acknowledged head. The latter was the case with Götz von Berlichingen. Because it set the unities at defiance, and placed the people beside the nobles on the scene; because instead of declaiming, as in French tragedy, the persons spoke dramatically to the purpose; because, in short, it did not range under the acknowledged type of French tragedy, it was supposed to range under the Shakspearian type—the only accepted antagonist to the French.

Is it like Othello? Is it like Macbeth? Is it like Richard III, Henry IV, King John, Julius Cæsar, or any one unquestioned play by Shakspeare? Unless the words "Shakspearian style" are meaningless, people must mean that Götz resembles Shakspeare's plays in the structure and organisation of plot, in the delineation of character, and in the tone of dialogue; yet a cursory review of the play will convince any one that in all these respects it is singularly unlike Shakspeare's plays.

In construction it differs from Shakspeare, first, as intended to represent an epoch rather than a story; secondly, as taking the licenses of narrative art, instead of keeping the stage always in view, and submitting to the stern necessities of theatrical representation; thirdly, as wanting in that central unity round which all the persons and events are grouped, so as to form a work of art. It is a succession of scenes; a story of episodes.

In the presentation of character the work is no less un-Shakspearian. Our national bigotry, indeed, assumes that every masterly portraiture of character is Shakspearian; an assumption which can hardly maintain itself in the presence of Sophocles, Racine, and Goethe. Each poet has a manner of his own, and Shakspeare's manner is assuredly not visible in Götz von Berlichingen. The characters move before us with singular distinctness in their external characteristics, but they do not, as in Shakspeare, involuntarily betray the inmost secret of their being. We know them by their language and their acts; we do not know their thoughts, their selfsophistications, their involved and perplexed motives, partially ob

scured even to themselves, and seen by us in the cross lights which break athwart their passionate utterances. To take a decisive example: Weislingen is at once ambitious and irresolute, well-meaning and weak.* The voice of friendship awakens remorse in him, and forces him to accept the proffered hand of Götz. He swears never again to enter the bishop's palace. But, easily seduced by noble thoughts, he is afterwards seduced as easily by vanity: tempted he falls, turns once more against his noble friend, and dies betrayed and poisoned by the wife to whom he has sacrificed all—dies unpitied by others, despicable to himself. This vacillation is truthful, but not truthfully presented. We who only see the conduct cannot explain it. We stand before an enigma, as in real life; not before a character such as Art enables us to see, and see through. It is not the business of Art to present enigmas; and Shakspeare, in his strongest, happiest moods, contrives to let us see into the wavering depths of the souls, while we follow the actions of his characters. Contrast Weislingen with such vacillating characters as Richard II, King John, or Hamlet. The difference is not of degree, but of kind.

Nor is the language Shakspearian. It is powerful, picturesque, clear, dramatic; but it is not pregnant with thought, obscured in utterance, and heavy with that superfœtation of ideas, which is a characteristic and often a fault in Shakspeare. It has not his redundancy, and prodigal imagery. Indeed it is very singular, and as the production of a boy especially so, in the absence of all rhetorical amplification, and of all delight in imagery for its own sake.

It was the first-born of the Romantic School, or rather of the tendency from which that school issued; and its influence has been wide-spread. It gave the impulse and direction to Scott's historical genius, which has altered our conceptions of the past, and given new life to history. It made the Feudal Ages a subject of eager and almost universal interest. It decided the fate of French tragedy in German literature. But its influence on dramatic art has been, I think, more injurious than beneficial, and mainly because the distinction between a dramatized chronicle and a drama has been lost sight of.

This injurious influence is traceable in the excessive importance it has given to local colour, and the intermingling of the historic with the dramatic element. Any one at all acquainted with the productions of the Romantic School in Germany or France will understand this. Goethe's object not being to write a drama, but to dramatise * In his vacillation, Goethe meant to stigmatize his own weakness with regard to Frederika, as he tells us in the Wahrheit und Dichtung.

a picture of the times, local colour was of primary importance; and because he made it so attractive, others have imitated him in departments where it is needless. Nay, critics are so persuaded of its importance, that they strain every phrase to show us that Shakspeare was also a great painter of times; forgetting that local colouring is an appeal to a critical and learned audience, not an appeal to the heart and imagination. It is history, not drama. Macbeth in a bag-wig, with a small sword at his side, made audiences tremble at the appalling ruin of a mind entangled in crime. The corrected costume would not make that tragedy more appalling, had we not now grown so critical that we demand historical "accuracy", where, in the true dramatic age, they only demanded passion. The merest glance at our own dramatic literature will suffice to show the preponderating (and misplaced) influence of History, in the treatment, no less than in the subjects chosen.

Götz, as a picture of the times, is an animated and successful work; but the eighteenth century is on more than one occasion rudely thrust into the sixteenth; and on this ground Hegel denies its claim to the highest originality. "An original work appears as the creation of one mind, which, admitting of no external influence, fuses the whole work in one mould, as the events therein exhibited were fused. If it contains scenes and motives which do not naturally evolve themselves from the original materials, but are brought together from far and wide, then the internal unity becomes necessarily destroyed, and these scenes betray the author's subjectivity. For example, Goethe's Götz has been greatly lauded for originality, nor can we deny that he has therein boldly trampled under foot all the rules and theories which were then accepted: but the execution is notwithstanding not thoroughly original. One may detect in it the poverty of youth. Several traits, and even scenes, instead of being evolved from the real subject, are taken from the current topics of the day. The scene, for example, between Götz and Brother Martin, which is an allusion to Luther, contains notions gathered from the controversies of Goethe's own day, when—especially in Germany— people were pitying the monks because they drank no wine, and because they had passed the vows of chastity and obedience. Martin, on the other hand, is enthusiastic in his admiration of Götz, and his knightly career: When you return back laden with spoils, and say, such a one I struck from his horse ere he could discharge his piece; such another I overthrew, horse and man; and then, returning to your castle, you find your wife.' . . . Here Martin wipes his eye and pledges the wife of Götz. Not so—not with such thoughts did Luther begin, but with quite another religious conviction!"

"In a similar style," Hegel continues, "Basedow's pedagogy is introduced. Children, it was said, learn much that is foolish and unintelligible to them; and the real method was to make them learn objects, not names. Karl thus speaks to his father just as he would have spoken in Goethe's time from parrot-memory: 'Jaxt-hausen is a village and castle upon the Jaxt, which has been the property and heritage for two hundred years of the Lords of Berlichingen.' Do you know the Lord of Berlichingen?' asks Götz; the child stares at him, and, from pure erudition, knows not his own father. Götz declares that he knew every pass, pathway, and ford about the place, before he knew the name of village, castle, or river."*

Considered with reference to the age in which it was produced, Götz von Berlichingen is a marvellous work: a work of daring power, of vigour, of originality; a work to form an epoch in the annals of letters. Those who now read it as the work of the great Goethe may be somewhat disappointed; but at the time of its appearance no such magnificent monster' had startled the pedantries and proprieties of the schools ;—" a piece," said the critic in the Teutsche Mercur of the day, "wherein the three unities are shamefully outraged, and which is neither a tragedy nor a comedy, and is, notwithstanding, the most beautiful, the most captivating monstrosity."

The breathless rapidity of movement renders a first reading too hurried for proper enjoyment; but on recurring to the briefly indicated scenes, we are amazed at their fulness of life. How marvellous, for example, is that opening scene of the fifth act (removed from the second version), where Adelheid is in the gipsies' tent! Amid the falling snow shines the lurid gleam of the gipsy fire, around which move dusky figures; and this magnificent creature stands shuddering as she finds herself in the company of an old crone who tells her fortune, while a wild-eyed boy gazes ardently on her and alarms her with his terrible admiration; the whole scene lives, yet the touches which call it into life are briefer than in any other work I can remember.

* Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Æsthetik, i, p. 382.