His former writings had been coarse; but they were not coarser than the day, not so coarse as Shakespeare, not near so coarse as Fielding. Götter, Helden und Wieland and Götz are delicate to many parts of Tom Jones. But while most of his later writings are perhaps less coarse than his earlier, they are indefinitely more tainting. The fragment of the Letters from Switzerland at first intended to be pieced on to the beginning of Werther, several portions of Wilhelm Meister, not a few minor poems, and parts of the Elective Affinities, emulate Rousseau in their prurience. The "plague of microscopes" with which, as Emerson says, Goethe was pursued, follows about every where that aweless mind. Schiller (quoted by Mr. Lewes) says, that "whatever is permitted to innocent nature is permitted also" to the artist; but Goethe gazes away every shrinking reserve of "innocent nature" with bold curious eye. This he seems to have learned in Weimar society. Goethe was in his own life higher, we believe, than he was in his works-fuller in sympathy and generous self-denials for others' sake than he ever makes his heroes to be. But his works betray the moral standard by which he consciously moulded himself, the absolute prominence in his mind of the aim of self-cultivation-the infinite value he attached to unmoral self-mastery as an end and as in itself far higher than any duty for the sake of which he might master himself--the great deficiency of fidelity of nature, and of the purity with which fidelity is usually associated, and the general absence of moral reverence. They also reflect the geniality, the large charity, the intellectual wisdom, the complete independence of praise or blame, and the thorough truthfulness of mind which marked him throughout life. Goethe never deceived himself about himself.

During the ten years of Weimar life, before his Italian journey, Goethe's external life had but few recorded events. He was ennobled in 1782. He carried on a correspondence of billets with the Frau von Stein, which are extremely tiresome reading, and were never meant for publication. Mr. Lewes is very desirous to prove that all the trifling was on the lady's side, and that whenever she drew back from Goethe's advances, it was only in the spirit of a flirt. It is not a charitable view. In the complete absence of her letters, we know nothing about the matter. It does not seem so impossible that visitings of remorse and delicacy, and real doubt of the disinterested devotedness of a man who considered so little her other domestic and social relations, may have led, in the earlier years of this connection, to the vibrations of feeling which are reflected in Goethe's replies. There is no need to judge the matter at all. It is almost the only case in which Mr. Lewes paints another in dark colours, without justification, for his hero's sake.

During these years Goethe wrote Iphigenia and a part of Tasso, in their earliest shape; and worked hard at Egmont, besides the composition of the finest part of Wilhelm Meister. Nothing is more striking than the infinite distance between Goethe's success in imagining women and men. The feminine characters in Goethe's works are as living, we dare almost say more living than Shakespeare's, though there is much less variety and range in his conceptions of them. His men are often creditable sketches; sometimes faint, sometimes entirely shadowy and perfect failures: they are never so lifelike that we cannot imagine them more so. But his women are like most of his lyrical poems-perfect. My idea of women is not one drawn from external realities," said Goethe to Eckermann, "but it is inborn in me, or else sprang up, God knows how. My delineations of women are therefore all successful. They are all better than are to be met with in actual life." "The more incommensurable and incomprehensible for the understanding, a poetic production is, so much the better," he said on another occasion; and judged by this standard also, almost all his women (the dull Theresa and Natalia in the later part of Wilhelm Meister alone excepted) are better than almost any of his men. His men are conceptions badly outlined; his women spring up unconsciously out of his nature, exactly like his smaller poems. Mariana, Philina, and Mignon in Wilhelm Meister, Clärchen in Egmont, Gretchen in Faust, and Ottilie in the Elective Affinities, are characters any one of which would immortalise a poet. We think the reason of this lies deep in the nature of Goethe's genius. There is a tiresome dispute whether he is more objective or subjective. He is really as much one as the other; for you find in all his poems at once a vague indefinite self, reflecting a defined and clearly outlined influence which impresses that self. His own mind is the sheet of water which reflects the image, and you see only that it stretches vaguely away far beyond and beneath the image it is reflecting; but what catches the eye is the clear outline of the reflected object in the water. His imagination was passive, not active; it did not, like Shakespeare's, by its own inherent energy mould itself into living shapes, and pass into new forms of existence. It always waited to be acted on, to be determined, to receive an influence; and then, while under the spell or pressure of that influence, it pictured with perfect fidelity the impressing power. Goethe was so far dramatic that he was never absorbed in depicting the mere result on himself, but rather reflected back with faithful minuteness the influence which produced these results. Where (as in Werther, and perhaps Tasso) he was mainly occupied in painting the internal effect produced, he was far vaguer and less successful than where he

lent his imagination to reflect truly the external influence which had thus deeply affected it. But still it was a passive imagination-i.e. one which acted under the spell of external influences, and generally sensuous influences-not one which went voluntarily forth to throw itself into new forms and moulds. Hence, though far the best part of his poems is that in which external objects and social impulses are rendered again, you always find the vague mental reflecting surface by which they are thus given back; you always have both the deep dim Goetheish mirror and the fine outlined object which skims over it. The two never

coalesce, as is the case in Shakespeare. If you have a Gretchen living before your eyes, you must have with her, as the condition of her existence, the shadowy Faust whom she impresses. The point of sight of the picture requires the presence of Faust; not because she is delineated through the effect produced on Faust's nature, but because you really only see that portion of her nature which was turned to Faust, and no other side. It may be noticed that, perfect as Goethe's women are, they are never very finely drawn in their mutual influence on each other; it is only in the presence of the lover who is for the time Goethe's representative that they are so strikingly done. Even their lovely songs only express the same aspect of their character. Indeed it is of the essence of Goethe's feminine characters to express themselves in song. Each of them is a distinct fountain of song. But the current of all these songs sets straight towards the poet himself, who is always in love with these creations of his own genius. As an instance, take the lovely little song of Clärchen in Egmont, of which we attempt an English version for our nonGerman readers:

Freudvoll
Und leidvoll,
Gedankenvoll seyn;
Langen

Und bangen

In schwebender Pein;
Himmelhoch jauchzend,
Zum Tode betrübt:
Glücklich allein

Ist die Seele, die liebt.

Cheerful
And tearful,

With quick busy brain;
Swayed hither
And thither

In fluttering pain;
Cast down unto death-
Soaring gaily above:
Oh, happy alone

Is the heart that doth love.

If Goethe paints two women in each other's company alone, the scene either fails, or they are both talking away to some imaginary masculine centre; and instead of being a telling dialogue, it becomes two monologues. Hence Goethe seldom attempts this at all. The scene between the two Leonoras is the worst in Tasso, and those between Ottilie and Charlotte the worst in the Elective Affinities; that between Clärchen and her mother in Egmont is really only a soliloquy of Clärchen's; that

between Elizabeth and Maria in Götz gives no mutual influence of the women-they are simply in juxtaposition.

And Goethe's imaginative power is not only passive,—not only waits to be influenced, but it is generally a sensuous influence that most easily and deeply impresses it. Hence, he not merely paints special women, but he can always give the very essence of a feminine atmosphere to characters not at all individually well-marked. He is so sensitive to the general social influence diffused by women, that he makes you feel a feminine power at work almost without copying the distinguishing peculiarities of any particular person; he can make a woman a very living woman without being what is called a character at all. This is what few can do. Mignon and Philina and Adelheid and Ottilie are women and something more-they are characters, and we should know them when we met them among a thousand. But all human beings are not thus marked characters; and when they are not, most authors in attempting to picture them become merely faint and vague. They depend on special peculiarities for the life of their pictures. Not so Goethe. Gretchen is little more than a simple peasant-girl. She has not a single striking characteristic; yet she is his finest creation. Clärchen and Mariana are a little more distinctively moulded, but very slightly; and yet they too live more in us than most of our own acquaintances. The little play Die Geschwister (The Brother and Sister) has a delightful heroine, who is nothing at all more than an ordinary affectionate girl; yet she has more life than would fill out a hundred "characteristic sketches" of modern novelists. It is Goethe's extreme sensitiveness to all feminine influence that gave him this power. Men exercised in general no such influence over him, hence his imagination is never impressed by them; he has to string up his powers of observation to draw them by sheer effort, and he seldom succeeds conspicuously even in delineating himself. Werther is scarcely so much a delineation of himself as of a series of emotions by which he had been agitated. Goethe needed to have some fascinating power taking hold of his imagination in order to call out its full powers. Nature would do it; women could do it; but he could not in this way fascinate the eye of his own imagination. He could picture the influences which touched him most deeply; but never, as a whole, the nature which they thus stirred. You do indeed get some notion of his men, who are all more or less quarried out of his own nature; but it is not by means of any unique influence which accompanies them every where, but only by a sort of secondary inference from the successive states of emotion in which we are accustomed to see them. Tasso, Werther, &c. are never personally known to us;

we have gathered up a very good notion of them, but the mark of organic unity which distinguishes living influence from the fullest description has not been set upon them. Edward, in the Elective Affinities is perhaps the most skilful portrait amongst Goethe's male figures. But Goethe could not outline any character-did not even know the outlines of his own. Where he succeeded, it was not by outline, like Scott, but by a single keynote, usually a feminine undertone running through every thing they say. When that is wanting, the character may be true, but does not hang together; it is a loosely-knit affair.

That Goethe should be called by Mr. Lewes more Greek than German" struck us with astonishment. But in the special criticisms on his works Mr. Lewes virtually retracts altogether this general verdict. Greek poetry is never the product of this passive imagination, that waits for a distinct impression and then reflects back the impressing power. And moreover its subjects are as different from Goethe's as its intellectual process. It does not occupy itself with character so much as events. The characters are there more for the sake of the circumstance than the circumstance for the characters. And so too with the gods themselves. There is no anxiety to display their personal characters; they are not explained as in later times; their caprices or their kindness is only a part of the machinery for enlisting human interest. But Goethe makes a study of his Greek gods and demigods, and takes his idea entirely from the most godlike element he could feel in his own character-his cool selfdependence, and his power of shaking himself free at will from the acute impressions of pain or pleasure. There was nothing Greek at all about the character of Goethe's intellect. What Mr. Lewes had in his mind was the heathen element (not specially Greek) in his character. The entire superseding of personal trust by self-reliance, the absence of all trace of humility, the calm superior glance which he cast into the mystery around but never into the holiness above him, gave often a heathen colouring to his works; but his cast of intellect is strikingly, distinctively German, far more so than Schiller's. For one whose mind yielded freely to any sensitive impression, he had a wonderful power of shaking himself voluntarily free from all adhering emotions, and raising his head high above the mists they stirred. This power of assuming at will a cruel moral indifference to that which he did not choose to have agitating him, is the feeling he has so finely embodied in the picture of the gods which he has drawn in the song of the Fates in Iphigenia, far the finest thing in a poem rich in small beauties, but without any successful delineation of human character. This last has been so finely translated by a recent