efforts; but it stands on no hollow or deceitful | some experiences, of business done in the basis for his peace is not from blindness, but great deep of the spirit; a maxim, trivial to the from clear vision; not from uncertain hope careless eye, will rise with light and solution of alteration, but from sure insight into what over long perplexed periods of our own history. cannot alter. His world seems once to have It is thus that heart speaks to heart, that the been desolate and baleful as that of the dark-life of one man becomes a possession to all. est skeptic: hut he has covered it anew with beauty and solemnity, derived from deeper sources, over which Doubt can have no sway. He has acquired fearlessly, and fearlessly searched out and denied the False; but he has not forgotten, what is equally essential and infinitely harder, to search out and admit the True. His heart is still full of warmth, though his head is clear and cold; the world for him is still full of grandeur, though he clothes it with no false colours; his fellow-creatures are still objects of reverence and love, though their basenesses are plainer to no eye than to his. To reconcile these contradictions is the task of all good men, each for himself, in his own way and manner; a task which, in our age, is encompassed with difficulties peculiar to the time; and which Goethe seems to have accomplished with a success that few can rival. A mind so in unity with itself, even though it were a poor and small one, would arrest our attention, and win some kind regard from us; but when this mind ranks among the strongest and most complicated of the species, it becomes a sight full of interest, a study full of deep instruction. "Such a mind as Goethe's is the fruit not only of a royal endowment by nature, but also of a culture proportionate to her bounty. In Goethe's original form of spirit, we discern the highest gifts of manhood, without any deficiency of the lower: he has an eye and a heart equally for the sublime, the common, and the ridiculous; the elements at once of a poet, a thinker, and a wit. Of his culture we have often spoken already; and it deserves again to be held up to praise and imitation. This, as he himself unostentatiously confesses, has been the soul of all his conduct, the great enterprise of his life; and few that understand him will be apt to deny that he has prospered. As a writer, his resources have been accumulated from nearly all the provinces of human intellect and activity; and he has trained himself to use these complicated instruments, with a light expertness which we might have admired in the professor of a solitary department. Freedom, and grace, and smiling earnestness are the characteristics of his works: the matter of them flows along in chaste abundance, in the softest combination; and their style is referred to by native critics as the highest specimen of the German tongue. "But Goethe's culture as a writer is perhaps less remarkable than his culture as a man. He has learned not in head only, but also in heart; not from Art and Literature, but also by action and passion, in the rugged school of Experience. If asked what was the grand characteristic of his writings, we should not say knowledge, but wisdom. A mind that has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried and conquered. A gay delineation will give us notice of dark and toil Here is a mind of the most subtile and tumultuous elements; but it is governed in peaceful diligence, and its impetuous and ethereal faculties work softly together for good and noble ends. Goethe may be called a Philosopher; for he loves and has practised as a man the wisdom which, as & poet, he inculcates. Composure and cheerful seriousness seem to breathe over all his character. There is no whining over human woes: it is understood that we must simply all strive to alleviate or remove them. There is no noisy battling for opinions; but a persevering effort to make Truth lovely, and recommend her, by a thousand avenues, to the hearts of all men. Of his personal manners we can easily believe the universal report, as often given in the way of censure as of praise, that he is a man of consummate breeding and the stateliest presence: for an air of polished tolerance, of courtly, we might almost say, majestic repose, and serene humanity, is visible throughout his works. In no line of them does he speak with asperity of any man: scarcely ever even of a thing. He knows the good, and loves it; he knows the bad and hateful, and rejects it; but in neither case with violence: his love is calm and active; his rejection is implied, rather than pronounced; meek and gentle, though we see that it is thorough, and never to be revoked. The noblest and the basest he not only seems to comprehend, but to personate and body forth in their most secret lineaments: hence actions and opinions appear to him as they are, with all the circumstances which extenuate or endear them to the hearts where they originated and are entertained. This also is the spirit of our Shakspeare, and perhaps of every great dramatic poet. Shakspeare is no sectarian; to all he deals with equity and mercy; because he knows all, and his heart is wide enough for all. In his mind the world is a whole; he figures it as Providence governs it; and to him it is not strange that the sun should be caused to shine on the evil and the good, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust." Considered as a transient, far-off view of Goethe in his personal character, all this, from the writer's peculiar point of vision, may have its true grounds, and wears at least the aspect of sincerity. We may also quote for.ething of what follows on Goethe's character as a poet and thinker, and the contrast he exhibits in this respect with another celebrated, and now altogether European author. Goethe," observes this critic, "has been called the 'German Voltaire,' but it is a name which does him wrong and describes him ill. Except in the corresponding variety of their pursuits and knowledge, in which, perhaps, it does Voltaire wrong, the two cannot be compared. Goethe is all, or the best of all, that Voltaire was, and he is much that Voltaire did not dream of. To say nothing of his dig nified and trutnful character as a man, he belongs, as a thinker and a writer, to a far higher class than this enfant gâté du monde qu'il gáta. He is not a questioner and a despiser, but a teacher and a reverencer; not a destroyer, but a builder up; not a wit only, but a wise man. Of him Montesquieu could not have said, with even epigrammatic truth: Il a plus que personne l'esprit que tout le monde a. Voltaire is the cleverest of all past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he surely was not." like baked bread, savoury and satisfying for a single day;" but, unhappily, “flour cannot be sown, and seed-corn ought not to be ground." We proceed with our Critic in his contrast of Goethe with Voltaire. "As poets," continues he," the two live not in the same hemisphere, not in the same world. Of Voltaire's poetry, it were blindness to deny the polished, intellectual vigour, the logical symmetry, the flashes that from time to time give it the colour, if not the warmth, of fire: but it is in a far other sense than this that Goethe Whether this epigram, which we have seen is a poet; in a sense of which the French in some Biographical Dictionary, really be- literature has never afforded any example. We longs to Montesquieu, we know not; but it may venture to say of him, that his province is does seem to us not wholly inapplicable to high and peculiar; higher than any poet but Voltaire, and at all events, highly expressive himself, for several generations, has so far of an important distinction among men of succeeded in, perhaps even has steadfastly attalent generally. In fact, the popular man, tempted. In reading Goethe's poetry, it perand the man of true, at least of great origin-petually strikes us that we are reading the ality, are seldom one and the same; we sus- poetry of our own day and generation. No pect that, till after a long struggle on the part demands are made on our credulity: the light, of the latter, they are never so. Reasons are the science, the skepticism of our age, is not obvious enough. The popular man stands on hid from us. He does not deal in antiquated our own level, or a hair's breadth higher; he mythologies, or ring changes on traditionary shows us a truth which we can see without poetic forms; there are no supernal, no infernal shifting our present intellectual position. This influences, for Faust is an apparent, rather is a highly convenient arrangement. The than a real exception; but there is the barren original man, again, stands above us; he prose of the nineteenth century, the vulgar life wishes to wrench us from our old fixtures, and which we are all leading, and it starts into elevate us to a higher and clearer level: but strange beauty in his hands, and we pause in to quit our old fixtures, especially if we have delighted wonder to behold the flowerage of sat in them with moderate comfort for some poesy blooming in that parched and rugged score or two of years, is no such easy business; soil. This is the end of his Mignons and accordingly we demur, we resist, we even give Harpers, of his Hermanns and Meisters. Poetry, battle; we still suspect that he is above us, as he views it, exists not in time or place, but but try to persuade ourselves (Laziness and in the spirit of man; and Art with Nature is Vanity earnestly assenting) that he is below. now to perform for the poet what Nature alone For is it not the very essence of such a man performed of old. The divinities and demons, that he be new? And who will warrant us the witches, spectres, and fairies, are vanished that, at the same time, he shall only be an in- from the world, never again to be recalled: but tensation and continuation of the old, which, in the Imagination, which created these, still lives, general, is what we long and look for? No and will for ever live, in man's soul; and can one can warrant us. And, granting him to be again pour its wizard light over the Universe, a man of real genius, real depth, and that and summon forth enchantments as lovely or speaks not till after earnest meditation, what impressive, and which its sister faculties will sort of a philosophy were his, could we esti- not contradict. To say that Goethe has acmate the length, breadth, and thickness of it at complished all this, would be to say that his a single glance? And when did Criticism genius is greater than was ever given to any give two glances? Criticism, therefore, opens man: for if it was a high and glorious mind, on such a man its greater and its lesser bat- or rather series of minds, that peopled the first teries, on every side: he has no security but ages with their peculiar forms of poetry, it must to go on disregarding it; and "in the end," be a series of minds much higher and more says Goethe, "Criticism itself comes to relish glorious that shall so people the present. The that method." But now let a speaker of the angels and demons, that can lay prostrate our other class come forward; one of those men hearts in the nineteenth century must be of anothat "have more than any one, the opinion ther, and more cunning fashion, than those that which all men have!" No sooner does he subdued us in the ninth. To have attempted, speak, than all and sundry of us feel as if we to have begun this enterprise, may be accounthad been wishing to speak that very thing, as ed the greatest praise. That Goethe ever meif we ourselves might have spoken it; and ditated it, in the form here set forth, we have no forthwith resounds from the united universe a direct evidence: but, indeed, such is the end and celebration of that surprising feat. What clear- aim of high poetry at all times and seasons; ness, brilliancy, justness, penetration! Who for the fiction of the poet is not falsehood, but can doubt that this man is right, when so the purest truth; and, if he would lead captive many thousand votes are ready to back him? our whole being, not rest satisfied with a part Doubtless, he is right; doubtless, he is a clever of it, he must address us on interests that are, man; and his praise will long be in all the not that were, ours; and in a dialect which finds Magazines. a response, and not a contradiction, within our bosoms."* Clever men are good, but they are not the dest. "The instruction they can give us is * German Romance, vol. iv. pp. 17-25. Here, however, we must terminate our pilferings, or open robberies, and bring these straggling lucubrations to a close. In the extracts we have given, in the remarks made on them, and on the subject of them, we are aware that we have held the attitude of admirers and pleaders: neither is it unknown to us that the critic is, in virtue of his office, a judge, and not an advocate; sits there, not to do favour, but to dispense justice, which in most cases will involve blame as well as praise. But we are firm believers in the maxim that, for all right judgment of any man or thing, it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad. This maxim is so clear to ourselves, that, in respect of poetry at least, we almost think we could make it clear to other men. In the first place, at all events, it is a much shallower and more ignoble occupation to detect faults than to discover beauties. The "critic fly," if it do but alight on any plinth or single cornice of a brave, stately building, shall be able to declare, with its half-inch vision, that here is a speck, and there an inequality; that, in fact, this and the other individual stone are Lowise as they should be; for all this the "critic fly" will be sufficient: but to take in the fair relations of the Whole, to see the building as one object, to estimate its purpose, the adjustment of its parts, and their harmonious co-operation towards that purpose, will require the eye and the mind of a Vitruvius, or a Palladio. But further, the faults of a poem, or other piece of art, as we view them at first, will by no means continue unaltered when we view them after due and final investigation. Let us consider what we mean by a fault. By the word fault, we designate something that displeases us, that contradicts us. But here the question might arise. Who are we? This fault displeases, contradicts us; so far is clear; and had we, had I, and my pleasure and confirmation, been the chief end of the poet, then doubtless he has failed in that end, and his fault remains a fault irremediably, and without defence. But who shall say whether such really was his object, whether such ought to have been his object? And if it was not, and ought not to have been, what becomes of the fault? It must hang altogether undecided; we as yet know nothing of it; perhaps it may not be the poet's but our own fault; perhaps it may be no fault whatever. To see rightly into this matter, to determine with any infallibility, whether what we call a fault is in very deed a fault, we must previously have settled two points, neither of which may be so readily settled. First, we must have made plain to ourselves what the poet's aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his own eye, and how far, with such means as it afforded him, he has fulfilled it. Secondly, we must have decided whether and how far this aim, this task of his, accorded, not with us, and our individual crotchets, and the crotchets of our little senate where we give or take the law,—but with human nature, and the nature of things at large; with the universal principles of poetic beauty, not as they stand written in our text-books, but in the hearts and imaginations of all men. Does the answer in either case come out unfavourable; was there an inconsistency between the means and the end; a discordance between the end and truth, there is a fault: was there not, there is no fault. Thus it would appear that the detection of faults, provided they be faults of any depth and consequence, leads us of itself into that region where also the higher beauties of the piece, if it have any true beauties, essentially reside. In fact, according to our view, no man can pronounce dogmatically, with even a chance of being right, on the faults of a poem, till he has seen its very last and highest beauty; the last in becoming visible to any one, which few ever look after, which indeed in most pieces it were very vain to look after; the beauty of the poem as a Whole, in the strict sense; the clear view of it as an indivisible Unity; and whether it has grown up naturally from the general soil of Thought, and stands there like a thousandyears Oak, no leaf, no bough superfluous; or is nothing but a pasteboard Tree, cobbled together out of size and waste-paper and watercolours; altogether unconnected with the soil of Thought, except by mere juxtaposition, or at best united with it by some decayed stump and dead boughs, which the more cunning De corationist (as in your Historic Novel) may have selected for the basis and support of his agglutinations. It is true, most readers judge of a poem by pieces, they praise and blame by pieces: it is a common practice, and for most poems and most readers may be perfectly sufficient; yet we would advise no man to follow this practice, who traces in himself even the slightest capability of following a better one, and if possible, we would advise him to practise only on worthy subjects; to read few poems that will not bear being studied as well as read That Goethe has his faults cannot be doubt ful; for we believe it was ascertained long ago that there is no man free from them. Neither are we ourselves without some glimmering of certain actual limitations and inconsistencies by which he too, as he really lives, and writes, and is, may be hemmed in; which beset him too, as they do meaner men; which show us that he too is a son of Eve. But to exhibit these before our readers, in the present state of matters, we should reckon no easy labour, were it to be adequately, to be justly done; and done any how, no profitable one. Better is it we should first study him; better "to see the great man before attempting to oversee him." We are not ignorant that certain objections against Goethe already float vaguely in the English mind, and here and there, according to occasion, have even come to utterance: thest, as the study of him proceeds, we shall hold our. selves ready, in due season, to discuss; but for the present we must beg the reader to believe, on our word, that we do not reckon them unanswerable, nay, that we reckon them in general the most answerable things in the world; and things which even a little increase of knowledge will not fail to answer without other help. For furthering such increase of knowledge on this matter, may we beg the reader to ac cept two small pieces of advice, which we ourselves have found to be of use in studying Goethe. They seem applicable to the study of men in general; that at all moments of their existence they can look upon themselves as complete; and inquire neither after the True nor the False, nor the High nor the Deep; but simply after what is proportioned to themselves." Our second advice we shall state in a few words. It is to remember that a Foreigner is no Englishman; that in judging a foreign work, it is not enough to ask whether it is suitable to our modes, but whether it is suitable to foreign wants: above all, whether it is suit able to itself. The fairness, the necessity of this can need no demonstration: yet how often do we find it, in practice, altogether neglected! We could fancy we saw some Bond-street Tailor criticising the costume of an ancient Greek; censuring the highly improper cut of collar and lapel; lamenting, indeed, that collar and lapel were nowhere to be seen. He pronounces the costume, easily and decisively, to be a barbarous one; to know whether it is a barbarous one, and how barbarous, the judgment of a Winkelmann might be required, and he would find it hard to give a judgment. For the questions set before the two were radically different. The Fraction asked himself: How will this look in Almacks, and before Lord Mahogany? The Winklemann asked himself: How will this look in the Universe, and before the Creator of Man? of Foreign Literature generally; indeed to the | Terence otherwise than boys do. "Happy study of all Literature that deserves the name. contractedness of youth," adds Goethe, “nay, The first is, no wise to suppose that Poetry is a superficial, cursory business, which may be seen through to the very bottom, so soon as one inclines to cast his eye on it. We reckon it the falsest of all maxims that a true Poem can be adequately tasted; can be judged of " as men judge of a dinner," by some internal tongue, that shall decide on the matter at once and irrevocably. Of the poetry which supplies spouting-clubs, and circulates in circulating libraries, we speak not here. That is quite another species; which has circulated, and will circulate, and ought to circulate, in all times; but for the study of which no man is required to give rules, the rules being already given by the thing itself. We speak of that Poetry which Masters write, which aims not "at furnishing a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions," but at incorporating the everlasting Reason of man in forms visible to his Sense, and suitable to it: and of this we say that to know it is no slight task; but rather that being the essence of all science, it requires the purest of all study for knowing it. "What!” cries the reader, "are we to study Poetry? To pore over it as we do over Fluxions?" Reader, it depends upon your object: if you want only amusement, choose your book, and you get along, without study, excellently well. "But is not Shakspeare plain, visible to the very bottom, without study?" cries he. Alas, no, gentle Reader; we cannot think so; we do not find that he is "visible to the very bottom," even to those that profess the study of him. It has been our lot to read some criticisms on Shakspeare, and to hear a great many; but for most part they amounted to no such "visibility." Volumes we have seen that were simply one huge Interjection printed over three hundred pages. Nine tenths of our critics have told us little more of Shakspeare, than what honest Franz Horn says our neighbours used to tell of him, "that he was a great spirit, and stept majestically along." Johnson's Preface, a sound and solid piece for its purpose, is a complete exception to this rule; and, so far as we remember, the only complete one. Students of Doetry admire Shakspeare in their tenth year; but go on admiring him more and more, understanding him more and more, till their hreescore-and-tenth. Grotius said, he read Whether these remarks of ours may do any thing to forward a right appreciation of Goethe in this country, we know not; neither do we reckon this last result to be of any vital importance. Yet must we believe that, in recommending Goethe, we are doing our part to recommend a truer study of Poetry itself: and happy were we to fancy that any efforts of ours could promote such an object. Promoted, attained it will be, as we believe, by one means and another. A deeper feeling for Art is abroad over Europe; a purer, more earnest purpose in the study, in the practice of it. In this influence we too must participate: the time will come when our own ancient noble Literature will be studied and felt, as well as talked of; when Dilettantism will give place to Criticism in respect of it; and vague wonder end in clear knowledge, in sincere reve rence, and, what were best of all, in hearty emulation. BURNS.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1828.] In the modern arrangements of society, it is Do uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like Butler, "ask for bread and receive a stone" for, in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the highest excellence that men are most forward to recognise. The inventor of a spinningjenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not know whether it is not an aggravation of the injustice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of nature, might yet have been living; but his short life was spent in toil and penury; and he died, in the prime of his manhood, miserable and neglected; and yet already a brave mausoleum shines over his dust, and more than one splendid monument has been reared in other places to his fame: the street where he languished in poverty is called by his name; the highest personages in our literature have been proud to appear as his commentators and admirers, and here is the sixth narrative of his Life, that has been given to the world! Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this new attempt on such a subject: but his readers, we believe, will readily acquit him; or, at worst, will censure only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot easily become either trite or exhausted; and will probably gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to which it is removed by Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet: and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's: For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay, perhaps, painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbour of John a Combe's, had snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life of Shakspeare! What dissertations should we not have had,-not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws! and how the Poacher became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities! In like manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions of his pilgrimage, the honourable Excise Commissioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, and the Dumfries Aris tocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for his country and the world. It will be difficult, we say; but still a fair problem for literary historians; and repeated attempts will give us repeated approximations. His former biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important thing:Their own and the world's true relation to their author, and the style in which it became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain patronizing, apologetic air; as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar, and gentleman, should do such honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's biogra phers should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the same kind: and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, virtues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity. This, however, is not painting a portrait; but ganging the length and breadth of the several features, and jotting down their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as this: for we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind could be so measured and ganged. 1 Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him to be: and in delineating him, he has avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the true character of Burns, than any prior biography: though, being written on the very popular and condensed scheme of an article for Constable's Miscellany, it has less depth than we could have wished and expected The Life of Robert Burns. By J. G. Lockhart, LL. B. from a writer of such power; and contains Edinburgh, 1828. rather more, and more multifarious, quotations, |