had been invited to make the journey never appeared, and his father treated the mistake as an intentional slight. His portmanteau was ready packed, his mind set upon change. His father proposed to give him money for an Italian journey. Goethe consented to go by Heidelberg and the Tyrol to Italy, if in Heidelberg he found no trace of the missing Weimar escort. There lived Fräulein Delf, the mediating lady who had secured the fruitless consent of the reluctant parents to his engagement with Lili. Her head was busy with mediating a substitute-scheme. She hoped to marry him to a lady at the Mannheim court, and connect him permanently with it after his return from Italy. A courier came from Frankfort in the middle of the night to announce the arrival of the Weimar friend and to recal Goethe immediately. Fräulein Delf gave vehement counsel, urging him to decline, and go on into Italy. Goethe was in favour of Weimar, and ordered the postchaise. Long he disputed by candlelight with this lady, while an impatient postillion fidgeted about. At length Goethe tore himself away, apostrophising his astonished friend in the words of Egmont: "Child, child no more. Lashed on as by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time travel on with the light car of our destiny; and for us it only remains in calm self-possession to hold fast the reins, and here to the right, there to the left,-here from a rock, there from a precipice, to direct the wheels. Whither we are going who can tell? Scarcely can we remember whence we came. The "sun-steeds of time," with the aid of the visible postillion, took him safely to Weimar. Goethe, reluctant to talk of Providence, intimates, however, that this epoch in his life was providential, and that the 'dæmonic' element to which a man ought to concede "no more than is fitting" was represented by his father, his own impatience, and good Fräulein Delf,-all eager to shatter his Weimar prospects. We are not at all sure that the reverse was not true-that the young Duke of Weimar may not have been the 'dæmonic' element at this crisis, while the elderly lady may have spoken the voice of higher warning, if not in her match-making views, at least so far as she resisted the attraction to Weimar. Goethe had now reached the maturity of his powers, and henceforth we shall find his character more distinctly written in his works than in the monotonous circumstances of his external life.

There is no part of Mr. Lewes's book which is more interesting and picturesque than the delineation of the Weimar localities and the new life the poet led. He has himself visited the place, and surveyed every thing with a quick and thoughtful eye. The garden-house on the banks of the Ilm-the larger house to which Goethe removed in the town-the open-air theatricals at

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Ettersburg-and the life of the court, are all gracefully and vividly sketched. Far from convincing us, however, that the new life had no injurious effect on Goethe's mind, even Mr. Lewes's apologetic narrative strengthens a strong impression in the other direction. That it made Goethe into a "servile courtier," no one with the faintest insight into the man could for a moment dream. Karl August, the young Duke of Weimar, was a lad of nineteen years-eight years younger than the poet; and though possessed of a strong will and a certain personal fascination, Goethe was far too conscious of his own superiority of mind to become a courtier, had even his temperament allowed it. But it did not. He was a very proud man, and one moreover whose life-long principle it was to resist every encroachment of external influence on his own individuality of character. He never endured interference with himself; but he frequently interfered with remonstrances in order to tranquillise the mad humours of his young master. When Goethe said of himself in his old age, that he had always been conscious of an innate aristocracy which made him feel perfectly on a level with princes, and this too in its fullest measure before as well as since receiving the diploma which ennobled him, he spoke no more than the truth. He could endure any criticism; but he could not endure any assumption of a right to influence and direct him. When the old poet Klopstock wrote to remonstrate with him-during his first year at Weimar-for the wild life he was encouraging at court, Goethe wrote back a polite reply as brief and haughty in its reserve as he could well have returned to a college companion. And it is as clear as day that the majestic mannerism of his later years was the stiffness of princeliness itself, not the petrified ceremony of a prince's satellite. But nevertheless it seems clear enough that some of the worst tendencies of his mind were fostered by his Weimar life. The man who replied to his dearest friends, Charlotte Kestner and her husband, when they expostulated on the public exposure of private relations, "Ye of little faith! Could you feel the thousandth part of what Werther is to a thousand hearts, you would not reckon the sacrifice you have made towards it,"-who surprised Fräulein Delf with the assurance that "the sun-steeds of time were whirling on the light car of his destiny,"-was not the man to be improved by living in a narrow circle of admirers where none of the humiliating and busy indifference of the great world could ever draw his keen eye away from himself to those many high qualities of practical minds in which he himself was comparatively deficient. It was good, even intellectually, for Goethe to have objects above himself; yet he left a social world, in which he must often have felt himself an insignificant learner, for a literary world in which

all the talent was of the same kind as his own, but far beneath it. But, what was far worse than this, the Weimar atmosphere was stagnant with moral evil. Laborious indolence and pleasureseeking was the great occupation of the greater part of the court. The women had no employment at once so fashionable and interesting as intrigues. "There is not one of them," says Schiller, "who has not had a liaison;" and women's influence was the only influence which completely reached Goethe. "The first years at Weimar were perplexed with love-affairs," as he told Eckermann; and what love-affairs! One of them at least with a married woman, whose children were growing up around her to learn that the family-bond had no sacredness in their mother's heart, and that fidelity and purity were far less noble than passion in the eyes of the great poet of their nation. We know well that this was the sin of the century, and may not be in any large measure attributed to the personal laxity of any one man's conscience. But all the more is it to be lamented that Goethe left a social atmosphere where domestic virtue was held comparatively sacred, for one where it was almost a thing unknown. There was indefinitely more difference between Frankfort morals and Weimar morals than between the social virtue of a wholesome busy city like Manchester and that of an idle watering-place cursed with barracks. It was a place, like all idle places, eager for self-conscious stimulants of enjoyment. And it acted upon Goethe accordingly. He became more devoted to that cultus of his own character, which would not, perhaps, have been his worst occupation in a court where there was very little so much worth attending to, if unfortunately it had not been the very worst influence for that character that he should thus affectionately nurse it. He never became, indeed, at all deeply infected either with the vulgar selfishness or with the frivolity of court-life. It did not act upon him in this way. He had not been a year at Weimar before he felt its genuine hollowness, and busied himself as much as in him lay with the regular discharge of official duty, and the busy earnestness of artistic creation. Always generous by nature, always deeply touched with the sight of suffering, it is pleasant, but not surprising, to find him giving away a sixth part of his income in charity, and still less surprising to find him doing it in secret, so that his left hand knoweth not what his right hand doeth. There never was a man less influenced by the love of approbation: he never through his whole life seems even to have felt the passion strongly agitating him, except perhaps in the flush of the first months of his Wertherfame. His pride alone would have raised him above it, even if he had not had so strong a feeling of contempt for the public judgment that he was scarcely shaken by disapprobation, and scarcely

confirmed by approbation. He had a thorough contempt for ostentation. He did not care to hear other persons' approbation of his private conduct, just as he would not hear their disapprobation. When he was giving a poor man two hundred dollars a year, no one knew of it; and moreover he continued to give it, in spite of rather graceless and ungrateful acceptance of his charity. He pointed out calmly to his pensioner the unfitness of such conduct, and gave on. The way in which Weimar affected him so unfavourably was not by the contagion of selfishness, but rather by giving him such an inferior world with which to compare himself-by the easy victory it permitted him in active goodness on the one hand, and by the contagion of impurity on the other. Goethe had no active religious conviction, and of all men most needed to look up to his companions: he was in almost every direction, at this time, obliged to look down. "The mind," he said, "is driven back all the more into itself, the more one accommodates oneself to other men's modes of life, instead of seeking to adapt them to one's own: it is like the relation of the musician to his instrument"'—a remarkable indication that these "other men's" life was on a platform below rather than above the speaker. Goethe felt that his companions were in a sense his "instruments," from whom he could bring forth fine music,-which was, however, his own music after all, not theirs. But he would not have felt so amongst men and women who, even in mere practical power and domestic virtue and devotedness, called forth his reverence as standing higher than himself.

The thing that jars upon the mind throughout Goethe's life, in his letters, his books-every thing he said and did—is the absence of any thing like devotedness to any being, human or divine, morally above himself. God he regarded as inscrutable, and as best left to reveal Himself. The future life was not yet. From all men he maintained himself in a sort of kindly isolation -sympathising with them, aiding them, helping them against themselves, understanding them, but never making any of them the object of his life. The object of his life, so far as any man can consciously and permanently have one, was the completion of that ground-plan of character presented to the world in Johann Wolfgang Goethe. To perfect this he denied himself much both of enjoyment and real happiness; to keep this ground-plan intact, or to build upon it, he was always ready to sacrifice either himself or any body else. To this he sacrificed Frederika's love, Lili's love, and his own love for them-the friendship of any who attempted to interfere with his own modes of self-development; to this he would at any time have sacrificed, had it been needful, the favour of the duke and his posi

tion at court; to this, in fact, his life was one long offering. There was nothing Goethe would not have given up for others, except any iota of what he considered to be his own individuality. To tend that was his idolatry. And that this self-worship grew rapidly upon him at Weimar, no one can doubt. Only compare the tone of Wilhelm Meister with that of Götz von Berlichingen. Compare even his letters to the Frau von Stein with his letters to the Kestners. There is a real sense of humility and remorse gleaming out at times in the latter: with all his susceptibility to other persons' sufferings, there is nothing but at most a sense of error, regret at past mistakes, generally merged in satisfaction at his own steady progress towards "clearness and self-rule," pervading the former. Compare the picture of the cold, self-absorbed, remorseless Lothario, held up as it is to admiration as a kind of ideal, with the ideal of Goethe's earlier days. Compare even Wilhelm Meister himself, who is meant, we are told, to be a progressive character, with Werther, who is meant to be a deteriorating character. With all his hysterics, there is far more trace of humility and sense of the wrong he is doing, and even effort to undo it, in the latter than in the former. Mr. Lewes discovers a "healthy" moral in Wilhelm Meister-that he is raised from "mere impulse to the subordination of reason, from dreaming self-indulgence to practical duty, from self-culture to sympathy." This is a mere dream of Mr. Lewes's. Wilhelm seems to us to become, so far as he changes at all, more selfish as he goes on. He begins with a real deep affection, and ends with the most cold and insipid of “ preferences," which he is far from sure is a preference. He begins with resisting, and yet finally yields to, mere physical passion. He begins with an enthusiasm for at least one art, and ends with an enthusiasm for none. He begins with a passionate love of fidelity, and ends with worshipping Lothario, whose only distinction is calm superiority to such ideas. In short, he begins a kind-hearted enthusiastic milksop, and ends a kind-hearted milksop, with rather more experience and more judgment, but without any enthusiasm and with far laxer morality. If this be Goethe's notion of progress, it gives but a painful idea of Goethe. The only element in which Wilhelm is made to grow better is knowledge and coolness; in every thing else he degrades. You can see that even Werther, far more Götz, was written with a much distincter feeling of right and wrong, of the contrast between real strength and real weakness, between domestic purity and guilt, than Wilhelm Meister. And in purity of thought the change is more remarkable still. Goethe was not infected with the commonplace selfishness and frivolity of court life-he was only driven in upon himself. He was infected with its impurity.