the not help going into utter captivity to that calm and somewhat limply-constituted mind. It is not even in itself independence or strength of will; for though Goethe had this in a remarkable degree, many others, as probably Schiller, had possessed it in as high a degree, who had been quite destitute of his fascinating talent. If it be expressible in one phrase at all (which it is not), it might be called presence of mind in combination with a deep knowledge of men;-we mean that absolute and complete adequacy to every emergency which gave Napoleon his sang froid at very turning-point of his great battles, which has descended in some measure on his nephew, and which in the literary world has secured for Johnson his Boswell, and for Goethe his Eckermann. Johnson, indeed, was immeasurably Goethe's inferior in the range of his experience, and, what is of more importance, in his knowledge of man; but he was perhaps his superior in mere presence of mind, and hence was greater in conversation, but less in fascination. The Duke of Wellington had nearly as much presence of mind as Napoleon himself; but he had immeasurably less of the other element of fascination-instinctive knowledge of men, and how to use them. Goethe is almost unrivalled in the literary world in the degree in which he combines these qualities. Shakespeare may have had them equally, but his dramas are too impersonal to tell us clearly what kind of individual influence he put forth. We should conjecture that his sympathy with men was too vivid to have enabled him to keep, as was the case with Goethe, a part of himself as a permanent reserve-force outside the actual field of action, and ready to turn the flank of any new emergency. Shakespeare can scarcely, we think, have been so uniformly able to detach himself, if he would, from the sympathies and passion of the moment as Goethe certainly was; for Goethe, like the little three-eyed girl (Drei-äuglein) in the German tale, had always an extra organ besides the eyes he slept and wept with, to take note of his own sleep and his own tears, and an extra will, subject to the command of the third eye, ready to rescue the ordinary will from the intricacies of human emotion. Shakespeare's knowledge of life was, we should think, less drawn from constant vigilance and presence of mind in the passing moment (to which we imagine him to have abandoned himself far more completely than Goethe), and more from the power of memory and imagination to reproduce those sympathies again. However this may be, Shakespeare has himself sketched, less perhaps this cool presence of mind itself than the effect which it produces on other men, in his picture of Octavius Cæsar in Antony and Cleopatra. Cæsar's cool self-possessed eye for every emergency, and for the right use of human instruments, and its paralysing effect on Antony's more attaching and passionate power of character, is a striking example of what Goethe would have called the 'dæmonic' element in human affairs-the element that fascinates men by at once standing out clear and quite independent of their support, and yet indicating the power to read them off and detect for them their own needs and uses. There is always in this kind of magnetic power something repulsive first; but if the repulsion be overcome, the attraction becomes stronger than ever; there is a resistance while the secondary mind is striving to keep its independence, and conscious of the spell,-an intense devotion after he has once relinquished it, and consented to be a disciple So the soothsayer tells Antony,— or a servant. 66 Thy demon, that's thy spirit which keeps thee, is Where Cæsar's is not; but near him, thy angel And Goethe, who had, as he says, himself experienced the force of this blind fascination in the Duke of Weimar's influence over him, as well as wielded it in no slight degree, tells Eckermann (himself a captive), "The higher a man stands, the more he is liable to this dæmonic influence; and he must take constant care that his guiding will be not diverted by it from the straight way. This is just the difficult point-for our better nature stoutly to sustain itself, and cede to the dæmonic no more than is reasonable." In Goethe himself this fascinating power existed as strongly as it is well possible to conceive in a man whose whole intellectual nature was of the sympathetic and contemplative, rather than of the practical cast,-who had no occasion to 'use' men except as literary material,-and who, while he stood out independent of them, and could at will shake off from his feet the dust of long association, yet felt with them as one who understood their nature and had entered into their experience. Goethe's sympathetic and genial insight into man would have been a pure embarrassment to a practical cold-tempered tool-seeker like Napoleon, who never deciphered men through sympathy, but always by an instinctive tact for detecting masterly and workmanlike results. And vice versû, the imperturbable self-possession and Napoleonic sang froid of judgment, that underlay in Goethe all storms of superficial emotion, was no little embarrassment to him in many of his literary moods. It prevented him, we think, from ever becoming a great dramatist. He could not ever lose himself in his creations: yet it was emphatically this which gave that peculiar and undefinable fascination to those minutelyaccurate observations on life with which all his later prose works at once. and his conversations are so thickly stocked. You can clearly see that men of strong nature did not submit to Goethe's magnetic influence without a struggle. Schiller, at first intensely repelled from him, was only gradually subdued, though thoroughly and strangely magnetised into idolatry by personal converse. Herder's keen and caustic nature vibrated to the end between the intense repulsion he felt for Goethe's completely unmoral genius, the poet's impartial sympathy for good and evil alike, and the irresistible attractions which his personal influence exerted. Only those could thoroughly cling to Goethe from the first who were not conscious of having any strong intellectual independence to maintain. Women, who love nothing so much as a completely independent self-sustained nature, especially if joined with thorough insight into themselves, were purely fascinated Wieland, who had no intellectual ground to fight for, surrendered without terms. But no man of eminent ability and a different school of thought seemed to approach him without some sense that, if exposed constantly to his immediate influence, he had to choose between fascination and repulsion. Hence his very few intimate male friends: scarcely any man at all able to enter into his mind and share his deeper interests, was likely to be found who could go so completely into captivity to his modes of thought; and, tolerant as he was, the centrifugal force of his mind threw off, to a certain respectful distance, all that the attractive force was not able to appropriate as part of itself. There has been a very similar effect produced by his writings on those even who did not know the man. Novalis fluttered round them, repeatedly expressing his aversion, like a moth round a candle. They invariably repel, at first, English readers with English views of life and duty. As you read more and more, and the characteristic atmosphere of the man is breathed into your life, you find the magnetic force coming strongly over you;-you are as a man mesmerised;-you feel his calm independence of so much on which you helplessly lean, combined with his thorough insight into that desire of yours to lean, drawing you irresistibly towards the invisible intellectual centre at which such independent strength and such genial breadth of thought was possible. And yet you feel that you would be in many and various ways lowered in your own eyes if you could think completely as he thought and act as he acted. It becomes a difficult problem, in the presence of so much genius, and beneath so fascinating an eye, "for our better nature stoutly to sustain itself and yield to the dæmonic no more than is reasonable." *The most pleasant and characteristic sketch of Wieland in English literature is contained in a few pages contributed to the second volume of Mrs. Austin's Characteristics of Goethe, p. 227. Let us attempt to contribute to the solution of this difficulty by some account and criticism of Goethe's life and genius in connection with that personal character which so subtly penetrates all he has written. Carlyle mistook completely when he said that Goethe, like Shakespeare, leaves little trace of himself in his creations. To a fine eye this is not even true of Shakespeare, though Shakespeare leaves no immediate stamp of himself, and critical inference alone can discern him in his works; but far less is it true of Goethe. A rarefied self no doubt it is—a highly distilled gaseous essence; but every where, penetrating all he writes, there is the ethereal atmosphere which travelled about with Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Mr. Lewes's volumes give us a very able and deeply interesting biography,—a book, indeed, of permanent value; the incidents illustrating character, though not quite exhausting his materials, are disposed with skill, and the artistic criticism, while thoroughly appreciating Goethe's transcendent poetical genius, is independent, sensible, and English. From his moral criticism of Goethe, and sometimes, though not so frequently, from the poetical, we very widely dissent, and hope to give the grounds of our dissent. Something more too might have been done, we think, in the way of defining his individual position both as a poet and as a man. But it is impossible to deny Mr. Lewes high merit for the candour of his biography. Where Goethe has been most censured, he gives all the facts without reserve; and he does not go into any helpless captivity to the poet and artist. He gives his readers the elements for forming their own moral judgments, and he has shaken off from his feet the ponderous rubbish of the German scholiasts. Herr Düntzer and his colleagues are valuably used in Mr. Lewes's book; but they are also valuably spared. Mr. Lewes has not submitted himself to Carlyle's somewhat indiscriminating, strained, and lashed-up furor of adoration for every word that the German sage let drop. There is, by the way, nothing more remarkably illustrative of Goethe's 'dæmonic' influence than Carlyle's worship of him. Except his permanent unfailing self-possession, he lacked almost all the personal qualities which usually fascinate that great writer's eye. And accordingly there runs through the essays on Goethe a tone of arduous admiration, a helpless desire to fix on some characteristic which he could infinitely admire,-betraying that he was in subjection to the " eyes behind the book," not to the thing which is said in it. There was nothing of the rugged thrusting power of Johnson, of the imperious practical faith of Cromwell, of the picturesque passion of Danton, of the kingly fanaticism of Mahomet; nothing, in short, of the intensity of nature which Carlyle always needs behind the sagacity he wor ships. Mr. Lewes reports a rather affected piece of Carlylese, delivered by the Latter-day oracle in Piccadilly upon one of the injurious attacks that had been directed against Goethe. Carlyle stopped suddenly, and with his peculiar look and emphasis said, "Yes, it is the wild cry of amazement on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not a spooney too! Here is a godlike intellect, and yet you see he is not an idiot! not in the least a spooney!" This was true enough of Goethe, no doubt; but we suspect that Mr. Carlyle was resisting a secret feeling that there was a limpness and want of concentration in Goethe's whole nature intellectual and moral, from the results of which his imperturbable self-possessed presence of mind and great genius alone saved him; that he did in consequence go sometimes up to the brink of spooneyishness in early days, and even across the verge of unreal "high art" in later life. These are just the defects to which Mr. Carlyle is most sensitive. It is true Goethe never was in danger of permanently sinking into either abyss; for his head was always cool, and his third eye, at least, always vigilant. But it may perhaps account for the unusual failure of our great essayist in delineating Goethe, that the poet's wonderful writings were less the real object of his admiration than the strange fascination of the character behind. In the very brief sketch we must give of the poet's life, we shall, of course, so far as possible, select our illustrations from passages or incidents passed over in Mr. Lewes's volumes, wherever they seem to be equally characteristic. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at noon on the 28th August 1749, in Frankfort-on-the-Maine, seems to have inherited his genial, sensitive, sensuous, and joyous temperament from his mother; and from his father, the pride, self-dependence, and magnificent formality, the nervous orderliness, perseverance, and the microscopic minuteness of eye by which, at least after the first rush of youth was gone by, he was always distinguished. His mother was but eighteen when he was born. She was a lively girl, full of German sentiment, with warm impulses, by no means much troubled with a conscience, exceedingly afraid of her husband, who was near twenty years her senior, and seemingly both willing and skilful in the invention of occasional white lies adapted to screen her children from his minute, fidgety, and rather austere superintendence. She "spoiled" her children on principle, and made no pretension to conduct a systematic training, which she abhorred. She said of herself in afteryears, that she could "educate no child, was quite unfit for it, gave them every wish so long as they laughed and were good, and whipped them if they cried or made wry mouths, without ever looking for any reason why they laughed or cried."* Her * Letter to her granddaughter,-Düntzer's Frauenbilder, p. 544. |