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his handling of character; and, thirdly, his style. Intimately con ́nected with this concreteness is that other characteristic of his genius, which determined his creative impulses only in alliance with emotions he himself had experienced. His imagination was not, like that of many others, incessantly at work in the combination and recombination of images, which could be accepted for their own sake, apart from the warrant of preliminary confrontation with fact. It demanded the confrontation; it moved with ease only on the secure ground of Reality. In like manner we see that in science there are men whose active imaginations carry them into hypothesis and speculation, all the more easily because they do not bring hypothesis to the stern test of fact. The mere delight in combining ideas suffices them; provided the deductions are logical, they seem almost indifferent to their truth. There are poets of this order; indeed most poets are of this order. Goethe was of a quite opposite tendency. In him, as in the man of science, an imperious desire for reality controlled the errant facility of imagination. "Tho first and last thing demanded of Genius," he says, "is love of truth."

Hence we see why he was led to pourtray men and women instead of demigods and angels: no Posas and Theklas, but Egmonts and Clärcheus. Hence also his portraitures carry their moral with them, in them, but have no moral superposed—no accompanying verdict as from some outstanding judge. Further, and this is a point to be insisted on,—his style, both in poetry and prose, is subject to the same law. It is vivid with pictures, but it has scarcely any imagery. Most poets describe objects by metaphors or comparisons; Goethe seldom tells you what an object is like, he tells you what it is. Shakspeare is very unlike Goethe in this respect. The prodigal luxuriance of his imagery often entangles, in its overgrowth, the movement of his verse. It is true, he also is eminently concrete: he sees the real object vividly, and he makes us see it vividly; but he scarcely ever paints it save in the colours of metaphor and simile. Shakspeare'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 ho scarcely thinks of anything else. To quit metaphor, he may be said to use with the utmost sparingness all the aids of imagery, and to create images of the objects, rather than images of what the objects are like.

results. The Objective and Subjective, or, as they are also called, the Real and Ideal, are thus contrasted as the termini of two opposite lines of thought. In Philosophy, in Morals, and in Art, we see a constant antagonism between these two principles. Thus in Morals the Platonists are those who seek the highest morality out of human nature, instead of in the healthy development of all human tendencies, and their due co-ordination; they hope, in the suppression of integral faculties, to attain some superhuman standard. They call that Ideal which no Reality can reach, but for which we should strive. They superpose ab extra, instead of trying to develope ab intra. They draw from their own minds, or from the dogmas handed to them by tradition, an arbitrary mould, into which they attempt to fuse the organic activity of Nature.

If this school had not in its favour the imperious instinct of progress, and aspirations after a better, it would not hold its ground. But it satisfies that craving, and thus deludes many minds into acquiescence. The poetical and enthusiastic disposition most readily acquiesces: preferring to overlook what man is, in its delight of contemplating what the poet makes him. To such a mind all conceptions of man must have a halo round them,-half mist, half sunshine; the hero must be a Demigod, in whom no valet de chambre can find a failing the villain must be a Demon, for whom no charity can find

:

an excuse.

Not to extend this to a dissertation, let me at once say that Goethe belonged to the objective class. "Everywhere in Goethe," said Franz Horn, "you are on firm land or island; nowhere the infinite sea." A better characterization was never written in one sentence. In every page of his works may be read a strong feeling for the real, the concrete, the living; and a repugnance as strong for the vague, the abstract, or the supersensuous. His constant striving was to study Nature, so as to see her directly, and not through the mists of fancy, or through the distortions of prejudice,-to look at men, and into them, to apprehend things as they were. In his conception of he universe he could not separate God from it, placing Him beyond it, as the philosophers did who represented God universe round His finger, "seeing it go." Such

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Shakspeare, 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 he 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 Shakspeare; but, such as Nature made him he was—not Shakspeare.

Turning from these abstract considerations to the two earliest works which form our text, we observe how the 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 civilization, 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. "

*Pliny, Epist., lib. viii, 22. After the text was written, Schöll published Goethe's note-book kept at Strasburg, wherein may be read this very aphorism transcribed. It was just the sort of passage to captivate him.

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. It was pitiful. 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 was the influence of Shakspeare, whom he first learned a little of through Dodd's Beauties of Shakspeare, 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 marvellous 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 he studied with enthusiasm.*

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.

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

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