corum proper to such occasions which we hope the perfect Carlotta did not share. Her real portrait, however, is interesting. It is taken full-face, with the hair turned up over cushions. The eyes are sleepy, and rather Japanese in shape; the upper lip rather long, but delicately cut; and the whole face is sweet and refined in expression, but not heroic. Of "Lili" there is a portrait profile, which looks as if it might have been like. It is a pretty mignonne head, on a long, slender throat. There is a little pertness perhaps in the nez retroussé and the pose of the head, but it is bird-like and delicate, and, like Carlotta, refined, though not heroic. Both these and also Fredericka, from the description we hear of her, must have been "scharmante mädchen." Of the Frau von Stein, unfortunately, no real portrait was exhibited, only an engraving from a picture of the theatricals at the court of Weimar in which Goethe acted, and where Frau von Stein is represented holding out, with a gushing enthusiasm, a wreath of laurels toward him. Both are palpably conventional portraits. Schiller says, writing to his friend Körner about the Frau von Stein : Beautiful she can never have been, but her countenance has a soft earnestness, and a quite peculiar openness." Schiller may have taken a somewhat solemn view of the necessary requisitions for beauty, but it is evident from all the descriptions and from her portrait that the Frau von Stein possessed no beauty which, in itself, was overpowering; that she, together with Fredericka, Lili, and Carlotta, possessed a charm which fascinated Goethe independently of regularity of feature. Unfortunately there was no picture of Christiana, nor of the later loves, and, other visitors arriving, we were left at peace and required to look at nothing more, but to wander about the rooms and let them impress us with thoughts of Goethe. Surrounded by the walls of the house where he was born, and where he lived before he was a great intellectual power, surrounded by these portraits of himself and those who specially cared for him and whom he thought he cared for, by the evidences of the enthusiasm he still creates in the minds of his countrymen and women, and haunted by that interesting book, "Goethe's Life," written by our 46 as 66 own countryman, who, since the last Goethe birthday, has passed away, we feel more vividly the impression of what Goethe was as a man than what he was an author. A German near us exclaims enthusiastically, 'Wie ein Apollo !" as he looks at Goethe's portrait, and we smile-we do not quite know why, but feel there is something comical in the comparison. An Apollo with a double chin, and with strong materialistic indications about the lines of the mouth! A very German Apollo, in fact, was Goethe, very handsome, doubtless, but an Apollo whose sentiments were governed by his reason, and what he considered was due to his self-culture and development; whose romances were more or less play, to be begun and ended according as he willed them to begin or end, but whose lasting liaison, ending in marriage, sprang from feelings of the earth, earthy; an Apollo who could so little understand the vagaries of a jealous woman, the vagaries of a temperament that was not entirely governed by reason, that when Frau von Stein would not behave herself amiably when she felt herself replaced in his warmest affections by Christiana, he writes quite solemnly, and with no idea of insulting her, that he fears she has gone back to the bad habit of drinking too much coffee, which she had left off from love of him. Is it possible that a man should be so great a poet and have so little sense of humor, so little imagination of one kind? We feel it was possible, and only possible, because Goethe was a German, and of all Germans, the most typically German. We are constantly hearing and saying that Germans are so sentimental. Their sentimentality is obvious, at times obtrusive, but it is, nevertheless, we think, quite outside the strongest side of their nature. Perhaps it is because they are really thoroughgoing materialists that their ideal is to be romantic. On the same principle that we see those who lead the hardest intellectual lives turning to the simplest games for recreation, so the most reasonable, the most exact minds, will enjoy the most romantic games of sentiment as play. As we look at the relics of Goethe's games in this line, at the little silk jacket preserved under the glass case, because the heart over which age, it was worn beat so warmly for one who, stayed the night there, and departed at world; in short, she has every thing she needs. Supped with Lili, and went away in the moonlight. The sweet emotions which accompanied me I cannot describe." The story of "Lili," whom, in his autobiography, he says he loved more than any other woman- she was the first, and I can also add she is the last, I truly loved "-shows more than any other what he meant by loving. The moment the obstacles preventing his marriage with Lili were removed, from that moment he dreaded it! Why? Because he was perfectly true and real, he had far too great a mind to stand being bored by pretences, and knowing where the reality of his feelings stopped, he would not involve his life by any action which would have entailed an unwise strain upon his affections, which strain would have led to unhappiness to others, as well as to himself. He was right so far, and he was wise, but in this side of his nature he was small. Charming girls made vivid impressions on his very impressionable nature, but he always knew that his heart of hearts, the part of human nature which makes action imperative, was free. He was more in love with the feeling of being in love than with the objects that inspired the feeling. Possibly, according to his lights, he was not selfish, though his love episodes lead so much to this conclusion. At all events, his apparent selfishness in action was not an end in itself-it was the means toward an end he conscientiously thought desirable for others, as well as for himself. He was comfort-loving for others, as well as for himself. In one period of his life we find him trying daily to spend less upon himself, that he may have more to give to others. Early in life we find him enjoying Spinoza with supreme satisfaction, and saying, "But what especially riveted me to him was the boundless disinterestedness which shone forth in every sentence. That wonderful sentiment, 'He who truly loves God must not require God to love him in return, filled my mind. To be disinterested in every thing, but most of all in love and friendship, was my highest desire, my maxim, my practice, so that that saucy speech of Philena's, If I love thee, what is that to thee?' was spoken right out of my heart." We find him in later years generously grateful, disinterested, and gently tolerant in his conduct toward Christiana. These cannot have been the feelings nor the actions of a mere egotist. As an artist, the picture of his life is a brilliant picture. There is a sustained power, an elasticity, an ever-spontaneous growth to the end, which made him virtually a younger man at eighty than most men are at forty, but there is a want in the picture-the want there is in the picture of the German nation. Nature seems to have said to Goethe, "I have given you so much, and such a faculty for self-development and self-government, you must now manage yourself. I cannot, in fairness to the rest of the world, help you any more. And nature did not give him the faculty of worshipping any man or woman, or any thing outside himself, with his whole strength; and without this faculty of worshipping, lives must always be incomplete, must always miss the highest greatness.. Goethe's mind was a grand, firstrate machine; the powers that put it into motion proceeded from the heart and brain, but very little soul went to the propelling of it. His own intellectual light was his hero, and what of clinching completeness is wanting in his actions and feelings was caused, we think, by the want of a light recognized as above himself toward which his soul could yearn. There were no ghosts about his life; there are no ghosts about the lives of the many Germans he has educated, and who are almost too reasonable to need a religion. And Goethe was too reasonable really to love. Mr. Lewes says: "He knew little of the exquisite companionship of two souls striving in emulous spirit of loving rivalry to be come better, to become wiser, teaching each other to soar. He knew little of this; and the kiss he feared to press upon the loving lips of Fredericka-the life of sympathy he refused to share with herare wanting to the greatness of his works," and, we may add, to the greatness of his life. But we cannot leave his old home with his shortcomings uppermost. Though his nature was incomplete on one side, it was never capable of any thing small, ignoble, or petty. When he loved and rode away," he was as kind and considerate, barring the riding away, as when he was delighting in the presence of those who fascinated him. This kindness, it is true, may have been enhanced by the gratitude he felt toward those who had afforded him situations for his poems and dramas, as an artist will feel grateful to the beauty that has given him the inspiration for his picture. Still, gratitude is. always something. We must conclude by a sentence from Mr. Lewes, which has. in it the characteristics of this kind of thoughtfulness, and also of the material-ism of the German Apollo: "The heart of the Frau von Stein had no memory but for its wounds. She spoke with petty malice of the low person who had usurped her place, rejected Goethe's friendship, affected to pity him, and circulated gossip about his beloved. They were forced to meet, but they met no longer as before. To the last, he thought and spoke of her tenderly, and I know, on unexceptionable authority, that when there was any thing appetizing brought to table, which he thought would please her, he often said, 'Send some of this to the Frau von Stein.'"-The Spectator. TEACHING GRANDMOTHER. BY ALFRED AUSTIN. GRANDMOTHER dear, you do not know; you have lived the old-world life, Daughter, wife, and mother in turn, and each with a blameless breast, 13 You must not think, Granny, I speak in scorn, for yours have been wellspent days, And none ever paced with more faithful feet the dutiful ancient ways. But the world has wondrously changed, Granny, since the days when you were young; It thinks quite different thoughts from then, and speaks with a different tongue. The fences are broken, the cords are snapped, that tethered man's heart to home; He ranges free as the wind or the wave, and changes his shore like the foam. He drives his furrows through fallow seas, he reaps what the breakers sow, And the flash of his iron flail is seen mid the barns of the barren snow. He has lassoed the lightning and led it home, he has yoked it unto his need, 'Tis not the same world you knew, Granny; its fetters have fallen off; And I mean to be rich and great, Granny; I mean it with heart and soul : Out on the thought that my copious life should trickle in trivial days, Scanning the year's monotonous change, or gaping at wind and rain, And growing old in a tedious round of worry, surfeit, and sleep. You dear old Granny, how sweet your smile, and how soft your silvery hair! What! marry Connie and set up house, and dwell where my fathers dwelt, What a notion! to figure at parish boards, and wrangle o'er cess and rate, I see that you do not understand. How should you? Your memory clings GRANDMOTHER'S TEACHING. AND so, my dear, you're come back at last? I always fancied you would. You'll find little altered, unless it be me, and that since my last attack; There, sit you down, and give me your hand, and tell me about it all, But the foot of the hill is quicker reached the easier seems the slope. And men thronged round you, and women too? Yes, that I can understand. When there's gold in the palm, the greedy world is eager to grasp the hand. I heard them tell of your smart town house, but I always shook my head. You say you were honest. I trust you were, nor do I judge you, my dear : But still the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," though a simple and ancient rule, Was not made for complex cunning to balk, nor for any new age to befool; And if my growing rich unto others brought but penury, chill, and grief, I should feel, though I never had filched with my hands, I was only a craftier thief. |