Or this small Couplet, which the reader, if I come in: for the ashes of the old fire will not he will, may substitute for whole horse-loads of Essays on the Origin of Evil; a spiritual manufacture, which in these enlightened times ought ere now to have gone out of fashion: "What shall I teach thee, the foremost thing?' Couldst teach me off my own Shadow to spring!" Or the pathetic picturesqueness of this:

"A rampart-breach is every Day,
Which many mortals are storming:
Fall in the gap who may,

Of the slain no heap is forming."
Eine Bresche ist jeder Tag.
Die viele Menschen erstürmen ;
Wer da auch fallen mag,

Die Todten sich niemals thürmen.

In such spirit, and with an eye that takes in all provinces of human Thought, Feeling, and Activity, does the Poet stand forth as the true prophet of his time: victorious over its contradiction, possessor of its wealth; embodying the nobleness of the past into a new whole, into a new vital nobleness for the present and the future. Antique nobleness in all kinds, yet worn with new clearness; the spirit of it is preserved and again revealed in shape, when the former shape and vesture had become old, (as vestures do,) and was dead and cast forth; and we mourned as if the spirit too were gone. This, we are aware, is a high saying; applicable to no other man living, or that has lived for some two centuries; ranks Goethe, not only as the highest man of his time, but as a man of universal Time, important for all generationsone of the landmarks in the History of Men.

warm men anew; the new generation is too desolate to indulge in mockery,-unless, perhaps, in bitter suicidal mockery of itself! Thus after Voltaires enough have laughed and sniffed at what is false, appear some Turgots to ask what is true. Wo to the land where, in these seasons, no prophet arises; but only censors, satirists, and embittered desperadoes to make the evil worse; at best but to accelerate a consummation, which, in accelerating, they have aggravated! Old Europe had its Tacitus and Juvenal; but these availed not. New Europe too has had its Mirabeaus, and Byrons, and Napoleons, and innumerable red-flaming meteors, shaking pestilence from their hair; and earthquakes and deluges, and Chaos come again; but the clear Star, day's harbinger, (Phosphorus, the bringer of light,) had not yet been recognised.

That in Goethe there lay Force to educe reconcilement out of such contradiction as man is now born into, marks him as the Strong One of his time; the true Earl, though now with quite other weapons than those old steel Jarls were used to! Such reconcilement of contradictions, indeed, is the task of every man: the weakest reconciles somewhat; reduces old chaotic elements into new higher order; ever, according to faculty and endeavour, brings good out of evil. Consider now what faculty and endeavour must belong to the highest of such tasks, which virtually includes all others whatsoever! The thing that was given this man to reconcile (to begin reconciling, and teach us how to reconcile) was the inward spiritual chaos; the centre of all other confusions, outward and inward: he was to close the Abyss out of which such manifold destruction, moral, intellectual, social, was proceeding.

Thus from our point of view does Goethe rise on us as the Uniter, and victorious Reconciler, of the distracted clashing elements of the most distracted and divided age, that the world has witnessed since the Introduction of the Christian Religion; to which old chaotic The greatness of his Endowment, manifestEra, of world-confusion and world-refusion, ed in such a work, has long been plain to all of blackest darkness, succeeded by a dawn of men. That it belongs to the highest class of light and nobler "dayspring from on high," human endowments, entitling the wearer therethis wondrous Era of ours is, indeed, often of, who so nobly used it to the appellation in likened. To the faithful heart let no era be a its strictest sense, of Great Man,-is also bedesperate one! It is ever the nature of Dark-coming plain. A giant strength of Character ness to be followed by a new nobler Light; nay, to produce such. The woes and contradictions of an Atheistic time; of a world sunk in wickedness and baseness and unbelief, wherein also physical wretchedness, the disorganization and broken-heartedness of whole classes struggling in ignorance and pain will not fail: all this, the view of all this, falls like a Sphinx-question on every new-born earnest heart, a life-and-death entanglement for every earnest heart to deliver itself from, and the world from. Of Wisdom cometh Strength: only when there is "no vision" do the people perish. But, by natural vicissitudes, the age of Persiflage goes out, and that of earnest unconquerable Endeavour must

is to be traced here; mild and kindly and calm, even as strength ever is. In the midst of so much spasmodic Byronism, bellowing till its windpipe is cracked, how very different looks this symptom of strength: "He appeared to aim at pushing away from him every thing that did hang upon his individual will." "In his own imperturbable firmness of character, he had grown into the habit of never contradicting any one. On the contrary, he listened with a friendly air to every one's opinion, and would himself elucidate and strengthen it by instances and reasons of his own. All who did not know him fancied that he thought as they did; for he was possessed of a preponderating intellect, and could transport himself into the mental state of any man and imitate his manner of conceiving." Beloved brethren, who wish to be strong! Had not the man, who could take this smooth method of it, more strength in him than any teeth-grinding, glass-eyed "lone Caloyer" you have yet fallen in with? Consider

Wilhelm Meister, book vi.

your ways; consider first, Whether you cannot | figures of the popular oratory kind, Goethe, do with being weak! If the answer still prove throughout his Writings at least, is nowise the negative, consider, secondly, what strength ac- most copious man known to us, though on a tually is, and where you are to try for it. A stricter scrutiny we may find him the richest. certain strong man, of former time, fought Of your ready-made, coloured-paper metastoutly at Lepanto; worked stoutly as Algerine phors, such as can be sewed or plastered on slave; stoutly delivered himself from such the surface, by way of giving an ornamental working, with stout cheerfulness endured finish to the rag-web already woven, we speak famine and nakedness and the world's ingra- not; there is not one such to be discovered in titude; and sitting in jail, with the one arm all his Works. But even in the use of genuine left him, wrote our joyfullest, and all but our metaphors, that are not haberdashery ornadeepest, modern book, and named it Don Quix- ment, but the genuine new vesture of new ote: this was a genuine strong man. A strong thoughts, he yields to lower men, (for example, man, of recent time, fights little for any good to Jean Paul;) that is to say, in fact, he is cause anywhere; works weakly as an English more master of the common language, and can lord; weakly delivers himself from such work- oftener make it serve him. Goethe's figuraing; with weak despondency endures the cack- tiveness lies in the very centre of his being; ling of plucked geese at St. James's, and, sitting manifests itself as the constructing of the inin sunny Italy, in his coach-and-four, at a dis- ward elements of a thought, as the vital imtance of two thousand miles from them, writes, bodyment of it: such figures as those of over many reams of paper, the following sen-Goethe you will look for through all modern tence, with variations: Saw ever the world one greater or unhappier? this was a sham strong

man.

Choose ye.

Of Goethe's spiritual Endowment, looked at on the Intellectual side, we have, (as indeed lies in the nature of things, for moral and intellectual are fundamentally one and the same,) to pronounce a similar opinion; that it is great among the very greatest. As the first gift of all, may be discerned here, utmost Clearness, all-piercing faculty of Vision; whereto, as we ever find it, all other gifts are superadded; nay, properly they are but other forms of the same gift. A nobler power of insight than this of Goethe, you in vain look for, since Shakspeare passed away. In fact, there is much every way, here in particular, that these two minds have in common. Shakspeare too does not look at a thing, but into it, through it; so that he constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder, and put it together again; the thing melts, as it were, into light under his eye, and anew creates itself before him. That is to say, he is a Thinker in the highest of all senses: he is a Poet. For Goethe, as for Shakspeare, the world lies all translucent, all fusible, (we might call it,) encircled with WONDER; the Natural in reality the Supernatural, for to the seer's eyes both become one. What are the Hamlets and Tempests, the Fausts and Mignons, but glimpses accorded us into this translucent, wonder-encircled world: revelations of the mystery of all mysteries, Man's Life as it actually is?

Under other secondary aspects, the poetical faculty of the two will still be found cognate. Goethe is full of figurativeness; this grand light-giving Intellect, as all such are, is an imaginative one, and in a quite other sense than most of our unhappy Imaginatives will imagine. Gall the Craniologist declared him to be a born Volksredner, (popular orator,) both by the figure of his brow, and what was still more decisive, because "he could not speak but a figure came." Gall saw what was high as his own nose reached,

literature, and except here and there in Shakspeare, nowhere find a trace of. Again, it is the same faculty in higher exercise, that enables the poet to construct a Character. Here too Shakspeare and Goethe, unlike innumerable others, are vital; their construction begins at the heart and flows outward as the life-streams do: fashioning the surface, as it were, spontaneously. Those Macbeths and Falstaffs, accordingly, these Fausts and Philinas, have a verisimilitude and life that separates them from all other fictions of late ages. All others, in comparison, have more or less the nature of hollow vizards, constructed from without inwards, painted like, and deceptively put in motion. Many years ago on finishing our first perusal of Wilhelm Meister, with a very mixed sentiment in other respects, we could not but feel that here lay more insight into the elements of human nature, and a more poetically perfect combining of these than in all the other fictitious literature of our generation.

Neither, as an additional similarity, (for the great is ever like itself,) let the majestic Calmness of both be omitted; their perfect tolerance for all men and all things. This too proceeds from the same source, perfect clearness of vision: he who comprehends an object cannot hate it, has already begun to love it. In respect of style, no less than of character, this calmness and graceful smooth-flowing softness is again characteristic of both: though in Goethe the quality is more complete, having been matured by far more assiduous study. Goethe's style is perhaps to be reckoned the most excellent that our modern world, in any language, can exhibit. "Even to a foreigner," says one, "it is full of character and secondary meanings; polished, yet vernacular and cordial, it sounds like the dialect of wise, antiqueminded, true-hearted men in poetry, brief, sharp, simple, and expressive: in prose, perhaps, still more pleasing; for it is at once concise and full, rich, clear, unpretending, and melodious; and the sense, not presented in alternating flashes, piece after piece revealed and withdrawn, rises before us as in continuous dawning, and stands at last simultaneously complete, and bathed in the mellowest and ruddiest sunshine. It brings to mind what the

:

prose of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Browne, would | attained, we too in our degree have to aim at; have been, had they written under the good, let us mark well the road he fashioned for without the bad influences of that French pre- himself, and in the dim weltering chaos rejoice cision, which has polished and attenuated, to find a paved way. trimmed and impoverished all modern languages; made our meaning clear, and too often shallow as well as clear." *

Finally, as Shakspeare is to be considered as the greater nature of the two, on the other hand we must admit him to have been the less cultivated, and much the more careless. What Shakspeare could have done we nowhere discover. A careless mortal, open to the Universe and its influences, not caring strenuously to open himself; who, Prometheus-like, will scale Heaven, (if it so must be,) and is satisfied if he therewith pay the rent of his London Playhouse; who, had the Warwickshire Justice let him hunt deer unmolested, might, for many years more, have lived quiet on the green earth without such aerial journeys: an unparalleled mortal. In the great Goethe, again, we see a man through life at his utmost strain; a man that, as he says himself, "struggled toughly;" laid hold of all things, under all aspects, scientific or poetic: engaged passionately with the deepest interests of man's existence, in the most complex age of man's history. What Shakspeare's thoughts on "God, Nature, Art," would have been, especially had he lived to number fourscore years, were curious to know: Goethe's, delivered in many-toned melody, as the apocalypse of our era, are here, for us to know.

Here, moreover, another word of explanation is perhaps worth adding. We mean in regard to the controversy agitated (as about many things pertaining to Goethe) about his Political Creed and practice, whether he was Ministerial or in Opposition? Let the political admirer of Goethe be at ease: Goethe was both, and also neither! The "rotten whitewashed (gebrechliche übertünchte) condition of society" was plainer to few eyes than to his, sadder to few hearts than to his. Listen to the Epigrammatist at Venice:

"To this stithy I liken the land, the hammer its ruler, And the people that plate, beaten between them that Wo to the plate, when nothing but wilful bruises on

writhes:

bruises

Hit at random; and made, cometh no Kettle to view !"
But, alas, what is to be done?

"No Apostle-of-Liberty much to my heart ever found 1:
Liberator of many! first dare to be Servant of many :

License, each for himself, this was at bottom their want.
What a business is that, wouldst thou know it, go try!"
Let the following also be recommended to all
inordinate worshippers of Septennials, Trien-
nials, Elective Franchise, and the Shameful
parts of the Constitution; and let each be a little
tolerant of his neighbour's" festoon," and re-
joice that he has himself found out Freedom,-
a thing much wanted:

"Walls I can see tumbled down, walls I see also a-build-
ing;
Here sit prisoners, there likewise do prisoners sit:
Is the world then itself a huge prison? Free only the
madman,

His chains knitting still up into some graceful festoon ?"

Such was the noble talent intrusted to this man; such the noble employment he made thereof. We can call him, once more, "a clear and universal man ;" we can say that, in his universality, as thinker, as singer, as worker, he lived a life of antique nobleness under these new conditions; and, in so living, So that for the Poet what remains but to is alone in all Europe; the foremost, whom others are to learn from and follow. In which leave Conservative and Destructive pulling great act, or rather great sum total of many one another's locks and ears off, as they will acts, who shall compute what treasure of new and can, (the ulterior issue being long since strengthening, of faith become hope and vision, indubitable enough;) and, for his own part, lies secured for all! The question, Can man strive day and night to forward the small suf still live in devoutness, yet without blindness fering remnant of Productives, of those who, in or contraction; in unconquerable steadfast- true manful endeavour, were it under desness for the right, yet without tumultuous ex-potism or under sansculottism, create some asperation against the wrong; as an antique what, with whom, alone, in the end, does the worthy, yet with the expansion and increased hope of the world lie. Go thou and do likeendowment of a modern? is no longer a ques-wise! Art thou called to politics, work therein, tion, but has become a certainty, and ocularly.

visible fact.

We have looked at Goethe, as we engaged to do, "on this side," and with the eyes of "this generation;" that is to say, chiefly as a world-changer, and benignant spiritual revolutionist: for in our present so astonishing condition of "progress of the species," such is the category under which we must try all things, wisdom itself. And, indeed, under this aspect too, Goethe's Life and Works are doubtless of incalculable value, and worthy our most earnest study; for his Spiritual History is, as it were, the ideal emblem of all true men's in these days; the goal of Manhood, which he

• German Romance, iv.

as this man would have done, like a real and not an imaginary workman. Understand well, meanwhile, that to no man is his political constitution "a life, but only a house wherein his life is led:" and hast thou a nobler task than such house-pargeting and smoke-doctoring, and pulling down of ancient rotten rat-inhabited walls, leave such to the proper craftsman; honour the higher Artist, and good-humouredly say with him:

"All this is neither my coat nor my cake,

Why fill my hand with other men's charges? The fishes swim at ease in the lake,

And take no thought of the barges."

Goethe's political practice, or rather no-practice, except that of self-defence, is a part of his conduct quite inseparably coherent with the

Colite

rest; a thing we could recommend to univer- To us, meanwhile, to all that wander in sal study, that the spirit of it might be under-darkness and seek light, as the one thing needstood by all men, and by all men imitated. ful, be this possession reckoned among our Nevertheless it is nowise alone on this revo- choicest blessings and distinctions. lutionary or "progress-of-the-species" side talem virum; learn of him, imitate, emulate that Goethe has significance; his Life and him! So did he catch the Music of the UniWork is no painted show but a solid reality, verse, and unfold it into clearness, and in and may be looked at with profit on all sides, authentic celestial tones bring it home to the from all imaginable points of view. Perennial, hearts of men, from amid that soul-confusing as a possession for ever, Goethe's History and Babylonish hubbub of this our new Tower-ofWritings abide there; a thousand-voiced Babel era! For now, too, as in that old time, "Melody of Wisdom," which he that has ears had men said to themselves: Come, let us may hear. What the experience of the most build a tower which shall reach to heaven; complexly-situated, deep-searching, every way and by our steam-engines, and logic-engines, far-experienced man has yielded him of insight, and skilful mechanism and manipulation, vanlies written for all men here. He who was of quish not only Physical Nature, but the divine compass to know and feel more than any other Spirit of Nature, and scale the empyrean itself. man, this is the record of his knowledge and Wherefore they must needs again be stricken feeling. "The deepest heart, the highest head with confusion of tongues (or of printingto scan" was not beyond his faculty; thus, presses,) and dispersed,―to other work; wherethen, did he scan and interpret: let many in also let us hope, their hammers and trowels generations listen, according to their want; let shall better avail them.the generation which has no need of listening, and nothing new to learn there, esteem itself a happy one.

Of Goethe, with a feeling such as can be due to no other man, we now take farewell: vixit, vivit.

CORN-LAW RHYMES."

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1832.]

this epoch, perhaps transcends the human faculties; to hire out the reading of it, by estimate, at a remunerative rate per page, would, in few Quarters, reduce the cash-box of any extant Review to the verge of insolvency."

What our distinguished contemporary has said remains said. Far be it from us to censure or counsel any able Editor; to draw aside the Editorial veil, and, officiously prying into his interior mysteries, impugn the laws he walks by! For Editors, as for others, there are times of perplexity, wherein the cunning of the wisest will scantily suffice his own wants, say nothing of his neighbour's.

SMELFUNGUS REDIVIVUS, throwing down his | taken note of: the survey of English Metre, at critical assaying-balance, some years ago, and taking leave of the Belles-Lettres function, expressed himself in this abrupt way: "The end having come, it is fit that we end. Poetry having ceased to be read, or published, or written, how can it continue to be reviewed? With your Lake Schools, and Border-Thief Schools, and Cockney and Satanic Schools, there has been enough to do; and now, all these Schools having burnt or smouldered themselves out, and left nothing but a widespread wreck of ashes, dust, and cinders, or perhaps dying embers, kicked to and fro under the feet of innumerable women and children in the Magazines, and at best blown here and there into transient sputters, with vapour enough, so as to form what you might name a boundless Green-sick, or New-Sentimental, or Sleep-Awake School,-what remains but to adjust ourselves to circumstances? Urge me not," continues the able Editor, suddenly changing his figure, "with considerations that Poetry, as the inward voice of Life, must be perennial, only dead in one form to become alive in another; that this still abundant deluge of Metre, seeing there must needs be fractions of Poetry floating scattered in it, ought still to be net-fished, at all events, surveyed and

To us, on our side, meanwhile, it remains clear that Poetry, or were it but Metre, should nowise be altogether neglected. Surely it is the Reviewer's trade to sit watching, not only the tillage, crop-rotation, marketings, and good or evil husbandry of the Economic Earth, but also the weather-symptoms of the Literary Heaven, on which those former so much depend: if any promising or threatening meteoric phenomenon make its appearance, and he proclaim not tidings thereof, it is at his peril. Farther, be it considered how, in this singular poetic epoch, a small matter constitutes a novelty. If the whole welkin hang overcast in drizzly dinginess, the feeblest lightgleam, or speck of blue, cannot pass un

heeded.

The Works of this Corn-Law Rhymer we might liken rather to some little fraction of a rainbow: hues of joy and harmony, painted

out of troublous tears. No round full bow, indeed; gloriously spanning the heavens; shone on by the full sun; and, with sevenstriped, gold-crimson border (as is in some sort the office of Poetry) dividing Black from Brilliant: not such; alas, still far from it! Yet, in very truth, a little prismatic blush, glowing genuine among the wet clouds; which proceeds, if you will, from a sun cloud-hidden, yet indicates that a sun does shine, and above those vapours, a whole azure vault and celestial firmament stretch serene.

Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that here we have once more got sight of a Book calling itself Poetry, yet which actually is a kind of Book, and no empty paste-board Case, and simulacrum or "ghost-defunct" of a Book, such as is too often palmed on the world, and handed over Booksellers' counters, with a demand of real money for it, as if it too were a reality. The speaker here is of that singular class, who have something to say; whereby, though delivering himself in verse, and in these days, he does not deliver himself wholly in jargon, but articulately, and with a certain degree of meaning, that has been believed, and therefore is again believable.

To some the wonder and interest will be heightened by another circumstance: that the speaker in question is not school-learned, or even furnished with pecuniary capital; is, indeed, a quite ur moneyed, russet-coated speaker; nothing or little other than a Sheffield worker in brass and iron, who describes himself as "one of the lower, little removed above the lowest class." Be of what class he may, the man is provided, as we can perceive, with a rational god-created soul; which too has fashioned itself into some clearness, some self-subsistence, and can actually see and know with its own organs; and in rugged stantial English, nay, with tones of poetic melody, utter forth what it has seen.

that this same aristocratic recognition, which looks down with an obliging smile from its throne, of bound Volumes and gold Ingots, and admits that it is wonderfully well for one of the uneducated classes, may be getting out of place. There are unhappy times in the world's history, when he that is the least educated will chiefly have to say that he is the least perverted; and with the multitude of false eye-glasses, convex, concave, green, even yellow, has not lost the natural use of his eyes. For a generation that reads Cobbett's Prose, and Burns's Poetry, it need be no miracle that here also is a man who can handle | both pen and hammer like a man.

Nevertheless, this serene-highness attitude and temper is so frequent, perhaps it were good to turn the tables for a moment, and see what look it has under that reverse aspect. How were it if we surmised, that for a man gifted with natural vigour, with a man's character to be developed in him, more especially if in the way of Literature, as Thinker and Writer, it is actually, in these strange days, no special misfortune to be trained up among the Uneducated classes, and not among the Educated; but rather of two misfortunes the smaller?

For all men doubtless obstructions abound; spiritual growth must be hampered and stunted, and has to struggle through with difficulty, if it do not wholly stop. We may grant too that, for a mediocre character, the continual training and tutoring, from languagemasters, dancing-masters, posture-masters of all sorts, hired and volunteer, which a high rank in any time and country assures, there will be produced a certain superiority, or at worst, air of superiority, over the corresponding mediocre character of low rank: thus we sub-perceive the vulgar Do-nothing, as contrasted with the vulgar Drudge, is in general a much prettier man; with a wider, perhaps clearer, outlook into the distance; in innumerable su

It used to be said that lions do not paint, that poor men do not write; but the case is alter-perficial matters, however it may be when we ing now. Here is a voice coming from the deep Cyclopean forges, where Labour, in real soot and sweat, beats with his thousand hammers "the red son of the furnace;" doing personal battle with Necessity, and her dark brute Powers, to make them reasonable and serviceable; an intelligible voice from the hitherto Mute and Irrational, to tell us at first hand how it is with him, what in very deed is the theorem of the world and of himself, which he, in those dim depths of his, in that wearied head of his, has put together. To which voice, in several respects significant enough, let good ear be given.

Here too, be it premised, that nowise under the category of "Uneducated Poets," or in any fashion of dilettante patronage, can our Sheffield friend be produced. His position is unsuitable for that: so is ours. Genius, which the French lady declared to be of no sex, is much more certainly of no rank; neither when "the spark of Nature's fire" has been imparted, should Education take high airs in her artificial light,-which is too often but phosphorescence and putrescence. In fact, it now begins to be suspected here and there,

we go deeper, he has a manifest advantage. But with the man of uncommon character, again, in whom a germ of irrepressible Force has been implanted, and will unfold itself into some sort of freedom,-altogether the reverse may hold. For such germs, too, there is undoubtedly enough, a proper soil where they will grow best, and an improper one where they will grow worst. True also, where there is a will, there is a way; where a genius has been given, a possibility, a certainty of its growing is also given. Yet often it seems as if the injudicious gardening and manuring were worse than none at all; and killed what the inclemencies of blind chance would have spared. We find accordingly that few Frederics or Napoleons, indeed none since the great Alexander, who unfortunately drank himself to death too soon for proving what lay in him, were nursed up with an eye to their vocation: mostly with an eye quite the other way, in the midst of isolation and pain, destitution and contradiction. Nay, in our own times, have we not seen two men of genius, a Byron and a Burns; they both, by mandate of Nature, struggle and must strug